The final nail in Reddit's coffin dropped today:
Dear User,
We will soon begin rolling out changes to Reddit's User settings. It is getting a refresh that includes changes to ad personalization, privacy preferences, and location settings.
As part of these changes, we are retiring a setting that you have previously turned on that limited how we used your activity from the Reddit platform to personalize ads. We have replaced the setting with a new option to select categories of ads that you may not wish to see.
More details are available in our announcement and help center.
These changes are rolling out starting today and you may see the changes over the next few days.
Users will be tracked with no opt out. Posts may be monetized, which will make content even worse No refund or any type of usable credit for users that spent hundreds on Reddit coins The entire vibe has done a 180° since all these new "positive changes" are rolled out.
I’m not spending much time on Reddit these days but in no way is this the end for Reddit. The VAST majority of the user base just doesn’t care. We may see more users trickling in and Lemmy is sure more ready now than ever but people are so used to being advertised to, that this won’t be a big issue long term. People are dumb.
Idk man, literally asked a bunch (3) of friends how reddit is lately who had no idea what was going on this summer with the API changes and didn't care when I told them. Here are there responses:
"They've gotten really bad at putting relevant shit in front of me"
"Been a ton more ads lately"
And
"dude thank you for telling me reddit had porn lol"
There's what now?!
Lemmynsfw.com
Jesus
Jesus had abandoned us. To go watch porn.
I always wondered if there were people oblivious to porn on reddit. It always seemed like common knowledge those days.
It's not the usual manufactured porn by companies, it's usually people showcasing a video of themselves.
A lot of people's approach to social media is
login an absolute total of times equal to one, on an app, and never again, that session better last
do zero content curation, what comes is what you eat
mostly scroll past shit, don't interact, don't produce
maybe click on a navigation link once or twice per month
So of course they don't know there's porn. They're basically only seeing their feed (which is a clone of /r/popular, so a bunch of clones of /r/funny and ragebait) and the default subs, which doesn't have porn by default ever since reddit removed its ability to show up on default feeds.
I meant more around "reddit is known for having porn channels" and less "reddit pushes porn in your default feeds".
You're right though, the casual dead-minded scroller wouldn't know about it.
It used to be moreso, but before i left reddit it turned into people spamming promoting their onlyfans accounts, some subs felt like scrolling through a gallery of ads.
The amount of porn on reddit is astonishing.
Just go to r/randnsfw a few times.
Aww man it's banned...
Nah it works fine.
You might have to use old reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/randnsfw (WARNING the link might be extremely NSFW)
It should redirect you to a random nsfw sub, just like /r/random
Redirected me to r/welding, wtf
hot sexy welders in your area
Only if you have an account, can't view NSFW subreddits or posts without one
The hope is that the non-dumb people will leave for here, and that they're the ones who make quality content.
Reddit users will be reposting Lemmy content for real money gold by 2025. Fucking spez...
One thing I hadn't thought much about until recently-- the quality of comments is so much higher here, and I don't have to typically scroll through a wasteland of dudebro jokes to get to relevant replies.
So, comments are also 'content,' and from what I'm seeing, Lemmy already has a distinctly smarter / more mature userbase.
This is for sure the final nail, it's going to collapse just like Facebook and Google did after all that ad stuff. Profiting off a user data is clearly a failed business model and we see that time and time again.
That infographic with the most profitable companies in the world…both of them are still on it. And Reddit wants to be.
Facebook, the site with 3B MAU?
The weird thing about the internet is it's hard to make money. Information is free in.both senses of the term
Yeah no one who's still there cares at all.
2016: All I need, to have hope for the future, is a large majority of people willing to slightly inconvenience themselves to produce positive changes.
2023: Human intelligence has peaked, idiocracy is here, I for one welcome our AI overlords, earthonfire.jxl, etc.
I'm sure they care at least a little bit but not enough to move on
I completely agree with this!
Also, it's an unfortunate rule of thumb that, when you see a sensationalized headline, most likely it won't have the effect it claims to have...
Well, let's hope there's a steady migration to Lemmy (though numbers are small here)
Edit: added last line