News and Discussions about Reddit
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Best thing to ever happen on reddit is the guy that posted on askreddit how to set the site language back to English because he accidentally set it to Spanish... and everyone posted their replies only in Spanish.
That was peak reddit.
"Test Post, Please Ignore," and that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera were high points for me.
They banned bots from WholesomeMemes and there were no posts for 2 days. Dead Internet is now, and it's at Reddit.
I think that this article is accurate and sensible.
There's a point that I'd like to add, that the author doesn't mention: user trust.
The main value of an online platform is the user trust, as it dictates the users' willingness to help building it instead of vandalising it. In Reddit's case it means people writing well-thought posts, moderating communities, reporting content, using the voting system, etc.
And user trust is violated every time that a platform takes user-hostile decisions. Like Reddit has been taking for almost a decade; with 2023's APIcalypse being a big example of that, but only one among many.
And when user trust is violated, it's almost impossible to come back. John Bull explains this well, with the Trust Thermocline; but the basic idea is that those violations pile up invisibly upon a certain point, when they suddenly become a big deal and the platform bleeds users like there's no tomorrow. And once it reaches that point it's practically impossible to come back.
So perhaps we aren't watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we're watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.
So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.
Well put
I can’t pinpoint when Reddit died in my eyes. But I can say the long road to where it is today started with Reddit Gold.
Reddit Gold was a minor change that didn’t do much of anything besides offer a way to collect money directly from the user base. But it was the start of monetizing the site and every decision by Reddit management after that point furthered that monetization at the expense of everything else.
I didn't mind Reddit gold as a method of paying for upkeep on an ostensibly free site. If well-off Redditors wanted to chip in to help with maintenance resulting in fewer or less intrusive ads then that's grand.
The point when they started losing me was when the Reddit front page modernised into the Instagram feed looking abomination it is today and when they shifted from Reddit gold to the silver diamond thing they have now. No I don't want to make an avatar. No I don't want to follow users or have them follow me.
It started as the last example of old social media like forums and got metric'd into this half-formed freak of a site that seems to actively resent the users that build and maintain their entire platform.
I can pinpoint the exact moment: When the admins actively gave t_d a full pass on anything they wanted to do in 2016.
That single act drove away more users than any previous exodus.
Very well said, and it was the trust violation which finally pushed me off of Facebook and Reddit. Reddit as we know it is dead, it's obvious to anyone who used to use it. But AI is here, and it's going to continue pumping semi-believable posts and replies for years, making it look as if the site is still booming. But the posts are vapid, devoid of soul, and almost always written with an ulterior motive to sell something or some idea. The Dead Internet is here.
My favorite of the protests was DnDmemes becoming a goblin porn subreddit, and the final reply of the main mod "I shitposted me way in here, I'll shitpost my way out". That and demanding a d20 roll for persuasion(?) from the admins
I liked pics becoming nothing but sexy pictures of John Oliver, with the notice that all pictures of John Oliver are sexy pictures of John Oliver.
And Spez's response?
"OMG! STOP GOING DARK OR I AND MY LEGION OF SLIME ADMINS WILL REMOVE YOU FROM POWAH!"
And so he did which is why some subreddits came back from being dark. Some subreddits submitted to their own fates. Other subreddits reluctantly came back, proving the protest was just a mere farce that amounted to a nothingburger.
And what did Spez do after the whole fiasco? Why, he punched Reddit into now being Public. Completing what people had long speculated that he'd do.
And what did Spez do after that? He's now rolling out the concept that Subreddits will be monetized.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing from these incidents and expects it to get better, with that stupid shit eating grin on his face because he huffs and breathes in all of Musk's farts.
he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts
This is comedic gold. But the bad part? I envisioned it. Thanks a lot.
And he's getting rich off of it too. I mean, that's his whole gain, right? Money! He's given his soul for money. The whole community hates him, but at least he's gotten rich now. I'm sure reddit's annual founders parties must be a hoot.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing
He’s learned he can do this shit and make money. It may not be a perpetual money machine. But he now has enough and will milk it for all that’s left. That’s what he’s learned.
I’m trying to upvote as many Lemmy posts as I can find on the Reddit search function to hasten the demise of the pet project of Spez since the third party apps are up to snuff now!
I'm not sure if there is any way you can promote links to my account, but feel free:
https://www.reddit.com/user/FlyingSquid/
Let’s hope more people will join the fediverse so we can all stop feeding our data to these greedy companies.
I'm calling bullshit on any user count they release. The site was filled with bots even when I still used it. People kept complaining about "karma farmers" as if there were users who repost popular content. It has always been largely Reddit's own bots too keep new users entertained and recycle popular content so that it reaches as many users as possible. They turned this up to 11 before going public.
Now that they no longer provide an API, they are free to make up any fake metric they want to try to pump up their worthless stock.
Fuck reddit ...fuck the mods who abuse their power. Fuck the bots. Fuck the corporate greed bs. The admins have always been cool to me until I was perma ban. But kind of seem like nice folks.
they'll be fine. as evidenced by twitter, there is absolutely no amount of enshittification that will make some people leave
Hasn't Twitter lost ~30 million active users, about 10%, since Musk bought it? Plus there's probably going to be a couple million more gone from the Brazil ban.
i guess you dont remember digg https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/the-demise-of-digg-how-an-online-giant-lost-control-of-the-digital-crowd/
Fuck, I remember Yahoo.
It was never cool but in the stone age it was hip for about 30 minutes.
Reddit's strength has always been its community
There's something nobody talks about much when it comes to reddit. It's that the internet has moved past community. It now revolves around monetized "influencers". Nobody fosters community for the sake of it anymore.
Reddit has outlived its time. It's apparent they've been trying to evolve with the times but the platform isn't fundamentally geared towards this coporatized era of the internet. They've been trying to pivot the platform into social media style. Users now have profiles with avatars, bio text, followers/subscribers. There's now a social graph. The big picture with these things is they're trying to make it into a corporatized social platform like all the rest.
The problem isn't reddit itself. It's the internet that isn't geared towards community anymore.
And now they're teeming with bots* and drove away the power users. Look how many posts and comments they've lost in the last year just from me alone.
Edit:
The beauty of Reddit was its decentralized structure.
Users created and moderated their own communities with freedom and autonomy, and it led to an explosion of niche interests and discussions. Want to debate the finer points of medieval weaponry? There's a subreddit for that. Obsessed with pictures of birds with human arms photoshopped onto them? Yep, there's a subreddit for that too.
Took a bit but I'm glad we found the actual decentralized structure we needed
I remember when they kicked mods off their platform when the subreddits went private on the API retaliation. Now quite a few are on here. Meanwhile, some of those subreddits are still having issues moderating.
Personally I think mods should be rotated once in a while by the community instead of giving power to them indefinitely on communities. But reddit really messed up there. Some mods are mods of hundreds of subreddits which is silly and unsustainable.
It gives me great joy to be reading this via Boost.
Will Reddit seize this opportunity? Or will it continue down its current path of self-destruction?
HAHAhahahaha
ngl i feel like reddit starting falling off after the api thing it became mainstream
Reddit was cool. Reddit management had Head Up Ass Syndrome, though. Reminds me of some other social sites too lol.
Reddit certainly had issues prior to the 2023 API change, but that really was a pivotal moment for sure. Overnight we lost apps we loved and people who made the platform what it is abandoned it or worse - were forced out. Good content creators fled, resulting in a lot less quality content.
And we all know how the mods Reddit appointed handled things. Now, I’m not saying they’re ALL nazi’s, but there’s folks running the show who would fit in perfectly with the ‘just following orders’ mindset…
The platform needs to die, the stock needs to tank and the people involved need to be drummed out of the business entirely.
Corpos gonna corpo, there is a lesson here folks but people reading this right now, already know this.
I'm still running Sync for Reddit using a patch from Vanced. I don't know why I even bother. That site has gone so far downhill from 10-15 years ago. People used to get flamed for not reading an article or using improper grammar. Comments were, more often than note, well thought out and articulate. Now, the site is a cesspool or memes and idiocracy.
How can the demise of reddit be hastened ? Its bloated corpse clogs up the pipes of the internet still.