I'm still pissed off that I've never had a facebook. I never gave them any info about me. I gave them no reason to have a profile on me.
Yet because OTHER people have facebook, they know my name, my address, my phone number. I don't know if they can identify me in pictures that other people post, but it wouldn't surprise me.
That shouldn't be allowed. I did not consent.
Correct. And the same is true for the mobile phones, carriers, and a slew of apps that all look at contacts. They know who you are and who your friends and family are.
There's a guy in the world of pro wrestling named Jim Cornette that said a quote this reminds me of.
Cornette is known for holding grudges, and being hateful. He keeps a shitlist of people he hates.
Well in the 1980s he was working for a wrestling company, and hated one of his coworkers for a year. Then a new guy came in and was so much worse.
Then one day he says to the first guy "You know, you used to be at the top of my shit list, but with all these new fuckheads coming in, you managed to move down a few spots simply by not doing anything!"
They're doing a Bradbury, in a way, kind of like Tumblr and Steam. Everyone else is shooting themselves in the foot.
Meta is a little hard because they acquired a lot of existing social networks in their prime and have kept things subtle. Think about how long it took EA to finally strip Maxis of everything but The Sims. The only way you would know something is owned by Meta is from the splash screen.
The problem is that FB is the "core forum" for tons of niche hobbies. Irts the only reason I still have a account. They successfully killed off the old php forums.
If you live in rural America sone information is only posted to Facebook, from private businesses to small county or town governments
Additionally FB Marketplace killed Craigslist, at least in my area (also US). Nextdoor somewhat is a counter but that has its own problems.
Meta probably is the hardest one given that in many influencal countries WhatsApp is the app everyone uses for communication
It's also the main organization tool for "groups". I have tried to migrate mine to other platforms with no success.
And also the biggest online classifieds marketplace for trading goods. Even though it's a fucking awful experience and simply ignores any filters you give it. If you want to actually sell your stuff, or sell it for market value, without shipping, you just have to use it.
Yep, agreed. The biggest problem there is that Meta is generally not making life worse for its users than they're used to. Facebook and Instagram are giving you almost the same shitty experience you got a decade ago.
Using Reddit as a platform to protest Reddit is even more idiotic than staging a sit in at Disneyworld to protest against Disney.
"Hey we're getting revenue and media is gonna give us a bajillion clickthroughs from rubbernecking, please, if you can still protest in any capacity on our site please do, make it a huge spectacle"
Like what the hell are they even protesting about now? What is left to protest about? And why? Just go.
I left Reddit 6 months ago when I was permabanned for asking a question about what is forbidden. They can kiss my ass. And I hope they go broke.
Aw man. I left Reddit on my own terms as soon as the writing was on the wall re: 3rd party apps.
To have access ripped away without notice must have bred some deep hatred for the platform.
I left Twitter for much the same reasons. All the replies are basically unusable now, because bots just pay to get put at the top of the sorting algorithm, and it's now full of bait and spam, since the website formerly known as Twitter now pays for engagement, since that apparently worked out well for Quora (!).
I genuinely tried to leave but lots of communities didn’t leave Reddit and therefore had to stick to Reddit. I did with RRSS-feed and avoided their app.
Recently figured out we can Sideload Apollo app with almost all functions available. So did that.
Thankfully never used twitter! I read valuation dropped from 44B to 9,4B recently.
You can create the community and begin the migration
I’m not the right person to start a community, that’s the main problem. I’m not fit to be a Moderator and such.
It's super easy, the main problem is no one will move. I still moderate a couple on reddit, but it was hard enough getting people even there, certainly no one will come here.
I feel like internet users have become so lazy, stubborn, and resistant to change. I'm pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo, IRC, ICQ, AIM... people used to try new things
Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their "ecosystem" of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you're "invested."
I’m pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo
In some respects it was somewhat easier to get them to be on multiple platforms instead of moving. Think of the original messenger proliferation, where sometimes people would be on IRC, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, or etc. so much so that you had software like Pidgin and Trillian to help consolidate server/chat rooms and friends lists to more easily chat with all your contacts.
Even with Ventrilo, I remember being open to also switching to Mumble or vice versa if there was some hiccup with either.
What's the deal with having a .world user complain about ml and hexbear in every single thread lately?
It's crazy. Almost like we all have the freedom to say whatever the fuck we want, including complaining, because we fucking can.
I'm not from .world and also complain about it sometimes. In my opinion, it's a legitimate reason that makes Lemmy less attractive, as a consequence, you have to set up blockers to keep your sanity which is a hassle for the average user.
I honestly believe that Lemmy is cool, but it either needs more content or I need to perform a magic trick to make my feed "better". At least it's not that addicting, and the "small community, small town" vibes gives charm to it.
I've been here since August 2024 or so.
I agree, so I've been posting photos and things. What we don't need is a bunch of autoposting bots.
If you want to find the busy threads though, sort of Active and All. And just see what is going on across the lemmyverse
If you want to find the busy threads though, sort of Active and All. And just see what is going on across the lemmyverse
Yeah, this helps, but it's not always topics that really interest me. We kind of need more diversity of content around here.
I prefer scaled to active sort for that reason.
I agree though, more content and more content diversity would be great.
The small percentage that contribute content regularity in social media platforms instead of just consuming are great.
I'm too boring to have much content that would be good for anything other than microblogging myself though.
On Reddit, everyone is trying to get a million votes and just brutally murder with words everyone. It either gets really hostile, or just lots of bots posting bot shit.
On Lemmy: Even the posters I disagree with, I have a lot of fun with them. We say stupid shit all the time and accept the upvotes/downvotes with our shitposts.
That's been my experience as well. I'm using a Lemmy client that allows me to tag users, and I've been tagging people who have posted comments that annoyed me. A few are obvious trolls, but the rest have posted many comments that I liked or agree with since I've tagged them. It's been refreshing to see, actually
Lemmy is nice, but the content on it is quite niche. If you want something less tech-oriented, you're generally out of luck, for example.
Reddit startled the same way. It's aways first the tech weirdos, early adopters and Foss enthusiasts that start it.
This place feels like old reddit. When we could have actual discussions and not just be downvoted by bots. It’s so much better here
And you can still tailor it to yourself. Instances have different mindsets to different topics and things they allow or don't and there's tons of people to agree with or disagree with but everyone is cordial.
I just don't have a reason to go back
It's so much better. Personally I don't hope it grows much either. Satisfies my content itch, have still had some good quality convos here, seen some great comments threads. Absolutely none of the bullshit that Reddit purposely encourages. Plus most of the zeebs and the chronically offended seemed to have stayed with reddit, and I'm super OK with that.
I'd argue Lemmy is turning into its own echo chamber. I've seen some mods power tripping just like good old Reddit. I erroneously thought people would learn from past mistakes, but sadly this is not what happened.
You know what's not impossible?
Leaving that shit hole and never coming back.
It's possible but reddit isn't the only one looking for engagement, so are individual users. If a site has more users, it has more engagement and content. It is also not impossible to drop the lemmy name when you do go back there to make people aware of the alternative.
Someone dropped the name lemmy over there, so now I'm here checking it out. Screw reddit, man.
My thought exactly. They can always do like me and nope the fuck out of there.
True but how do you get the message out when they control the media?
That's not a good method though on it's own, there needs to be effort to undermine them. And since they don't want to do peaceful protests, the only option left are the more violent and less legal ones. The ones that compromise their platform and its data.
It's sad how many docile idiots remained on Reddit and Twitter after last year.
People still use AOL internet. I expect Reddit and twitter to die sometime in the 2050s.
Digg still exists. Death of websites is rarely a complete shutter, but usually more of a steady decline into obscurity
Wow!! It's the Divide By Zero admin!!
I'm not a celebrity :D
I missed the part where Aol. was promoting toxicity and hate while attempting a short-term grift on its users like Reddit and X have.
That fact that Aol. is still alive is amazing by itself. It’s just another sleazy, beleaguered company that used to be meaningful. You leave because other companies have better products, not because they offend your sense of morality.
(Or maybe they do.)
I think you underestimate how ignorant people can be. The reason Aol still exists is because they are grifters too. My Aol example was to show that people are docile idiots and won't change their habits. Aol is grifting just as much as reddit does. They're just grifting different groups in different ways.
That's why i think reddit and twitter will continue on for a long time. Maybe not as powerhouses but they won't implode or go away any time soon.
My mom was still paying for dial-up AOL in 2016. She had been paying them $20 a month for over a decade while having high-speed internet that she was also paying for.
When I asked her why she didn't cancel it, she said she would lose her email.
So I canceled it because AOL provides free email because they make money off of the ads.
Not just AOL Internet, but also the email service. Same for Hotmail. I used to work at iHeart, and the number of those email services (from prize winners) was not insignificant.
Hotmail was owned by Microsoft when I signed up in the late 90s. It's no surprise it's still around. It hasn't been my primary email for a long time, but I still use it as my MS account. So really it's just my Minecraft account.
I have a few accounts floating around for different services Microsoft has bought out or since integrated logins for. I genuinely don't know how many Microsoft accounts I have, and it's always a pain trying to guess which one a given service is on
There are a lot of subreddits for which there is no real replacement. Sometimes the strength in a community is the people. Doesn't matter if reddit sucks if the people are there.
I don't know, I feel during that exodus we got the best of the best. I miss some of the niche communities, But there's so many fewer assholes over here.
I believe you missed the point. There's people there because they know that their content won't be found elsewhere.
A lot of it is just propaganda bots at this point.
The best protest is to stop moderating. Lie flat. Let the subreddit go to shit.
That's when I knew we lost. When power hungry moderators felt threatened and, instead of standing in solidarity with its users, caved to corporate demands.
"But we'll be able to still protest. Every Tuesday."
Hell are those protests still going on? I highly doubt it.
reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.
Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless "We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power" idiocy.
At least you're not the sucker doing it for free for the shareholders anymore.
I mean... everyone contributing all those super useful posts that everyone thinks are the only authoritative sources of information on the internet are doing exactly that.
Every time you provide some tech support or a bit of advice? You are providing reddit shareholders' money.
Scabbing for reddit mod clout is utterly wild.
Many subs did that, so reddit substituted the mods for others that do as they are told.
The dndmemes protests were a pretty incredible thing while they lasted. The mods changed the subreddit to "nsfw" because that disabled most of the monetization. Then Reddit admins told them the subreddit obviously wasn't really nsfw and to change it to accurately reflect the subreddit content.
...so the mods changed the subreddit rules to allow actual nsfw content and people went nuts. In multiple senses of the term.
Of course "accurately reflecting the subreddit" wasn't what Reddit really cared about. They wanted to preserve the advertising stream for a popular subreddit, and this did the opposite of that. Reddit admins soon after basically said "remove nsfw content, restore the subreddit to what it used to be, do what we say or we'll replace you with a mod team of our own choosing".
Thanks for sharing this I guess I left before all of this happened and I haven't heard any of it.
The problem is that this opens the door to far right bootlickers who a salivating at the idea of turning reddit into an even farther right shithole.
A friend and I were recently discussing how spineless modern boycotts are.
We set a goddamn deadline for when the Reddit boycott ended. No wonder Spez just waited. Most people then just continued using the website. What a disgrace.
Imagine if after one week of the genocide in Gaza, the BDS efforts just stopped. A boycott must be indefinite. It should go on until demands are met.
so many leaders are forgetting what the point of protests is. yes, protests are annoying if you're a leader. but they're better than the alternative. that's the whole point.
They're better than the OLD alternative, which was total boycotting at best, and torches and pitchforks at worst. The NEW alternative is complaining about it for a week or two, then continuing on without making any changes at all. They don't mind the new alternative.
The new alternative is becoming obsolete
I sure hope so, but I don't see much changing. I guess we'll see by looking at where Reddit is at business-wise by next year. People were saying it was doomed last summer after the 3rd party app fiasco, and their daily traffic has only gone up since then. I've long since lost all faith in the masses making the best choices for themselves.
Although the quality has noticeably decreased. The number of bots has shot up a ridiculous amount.
The quality on Reddit has really gone down with content creators disillusioned or gone, fake content everywhere (I've seen almost an entire scrollable thread copied comment-for-comment), and so many users wiping their comments.
The owners are acting like everything is fine, but I think there's a good chance it keeps hollowing out until the appeal isn't there even for casual users.
They can't really turn back at this point, they burned the bridge.
i'm not yet sold on this "old vs new" thing. while i do agree that it would be better if people were more engaged/active about boycotting things and pulling out the pitchforks, my understanding is that hasn't been the historical precedent in situations like this. the pitchfork stuff certainly did happen quite a lot in the past, but my understanding is that it was for more extreme problems than a social media company shutting down third party apps (which many people didn't even know about). but then again, it might be hard to compare this to the company transgressions of the past.
my understanding is that frustration is building, and if things continue in this direction, they will reach a tipping point where people do actually stop using the website all together and switch to alternatives. and, this ban on protests will give the reddit executives much less information on how close things are to that tipping point. (not to mention that the ban itself will probably accelerate things.)
but i could be mistaken about this, and i'm open to changing my mind on it.
You can't even make an allusion to torches and pitchforks on Reddit. Legit, they'll ban ya.
People haven't been using the alternative, and that's the problem. Reddit and tech giants have grown complicit. They do not believe people would do it to them, or they think they could survive thousands of people trying to do it to them, if one can then many can.
Protests: a pressure valve to release steam. You gotta let them get out there and march around for a little bit. Let them walk it off. Then proceed to implement the next new tyranny a little bit at a time.
More hilarity: as of about a week ago, it appears the reddit algorithm has also started boosting posts with negative karma on their horrible mobile app. Guessing it's a move towards 'negative engagement'. I have not seen it myself (I don't use the reddit app) but I see users complaining about it.
I have to imagine that when some c-level suit saw that term in his moth-eaten copy of "Social Media for Dummies," I don't think it was intended to be taken quite so flagrantly visibly literally...
This isn't limited to the Reddit app. You can see it on the desktop and mobile website too.
So that's what happened?! I rarely come here, but last weekend was so bad that I started updating my subscribed communities here.
I thought I interacted with too many downvoted posts, and screwed up what reddit thought were my main interests. Guess I was expecting too much from reddit...
In favor of what is the problem. In Lemmy half the instances have defederated from half the others.
People use Reddit because there's only one Reddit. Coming to such a center is human nature, while Fediverse architecture is someone's strategy. Changing your strategy is simpler than changing human nature.
If we drop the tech religion part of the subject, NOSTR moderated communities are a very good thing as a global, not per-instance, Reddit alternative. You can clearly see that its core idea is chosen by people who are more confident with human psychology than with tech. And it's good for that very reason. It's an ugly real solution.
Except all clients suck balls and there's nothing to see there yet.
True, the fediverse is poor. But Reddit is the bottom of the barrel in its current state.
Best to waste time watching paint dry to be honest
What? and lose THE MOST EFFECTIVE PROTEST PLATFORM EVER MADE? I couldn't imagine what else we would use to teach corporations and politicians a harsh lesson (insert giant eye rolling emoji)
I lieu of that, I'd say the mods should just go limp. Stop moderating content and let posters run wild. The company needs to realize just how much their business model depends on all that unpaid labor.
I think they realize it but know these mods are addicted to the fake power so they won't go anywhere no matter what
I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit's platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.
The consensus I've seen on Lemmy has been largely "we don't need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there". So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can't rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.
Thanks for sharing this perspective. Complacency won’t grow the userbase here.
To be fair, a lot of users don't seem to want the user base here to grow at all. I don't feel that way but I've had enough discussions here to know that this is literally not the case for everyone and it kind of sucks because stagnation is how social networks die.
There is a point where more users may bring more downsides than upsides - but we haven't reached that point yet. There are still many many niche communities that have no equivalent here and starting them would never take off with the current number of people.
I get not wanting to grow the userbase of lemmy.world which is already kinda bloated but there is basically infinite space for new instances to be added.
It just occurred to me that convincing someone of leaving a social media site is a lot like convincing someone to leave a big city.
They have friends there and have grown accustomed to the vibrant and diverse activities, but realistically nothing they do or have there can't be replicated in a smaller town, a smaller media site.
They're liable to put up with a lot of shit to stay with their community, but eventually people get pushed out and find greener pastures and a quiet space for themselves elsewhere. At least, that's what I attribute to what I perceive to be a higher average age on the fediverse.
I'm too old to find the constant stimulation and activity attractive anymore, and I much prefer the freedom to move around and be choosy about my media choices.
Man I just turned 20. I’m sick of everything I do online being dictated by commercial interests. I feel like an old man. I just want my applesauce and my bingo, and to not be bothered and lumped into the white middle class 20 year-old advertising demographic.
( please stop bombarding me with scare tactic election ads google )
Go_JasonWaterfalls on the platform, writes in a post on r/modnews. “We have a responsibility to protect Reddit and ensure its long-term health, and we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm.”
You mean like killing all third-party apps and selling user-data to AI companies? That kind of harm? Oh no, you meant "harm" to your personal finance.
Harm? That is what would happen to their company if they explained what they meant by "harm"
...we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm
Seems like that's about the only actions Reddit execs have taken over the last several years. Glad I left when I did.
My account was banned because I kept reporting people and it was easier to get rid of the complainer than it was all the bigots she was complaining about... but... now I feel very "You can't fire me, I quit" about it
But the protests made it clear that letting moderators make their communities private at their discretion “could be used to harm Reddit at scale” and that work on this feature was “accelerated” because of the protests.
Because Reddit admins deserved that harm. We've handed them all this free data and resource and they decided it was theirs.
“Those who make community protest impossible will make hacks inevitable."
― John F. Kennedy, pretty much
Is that the site we all left cuz it’s a turd? Yeah? Don’t care. It’s called principle.
Reddit vacillates between operating as a clearing house for the most ugly, racist, reactionary propaganda currently in circulation and doing pogroms against the six subreddits that got popular posting current events about a new kind of genocide we invented.
I'm glad I left, but it's hard not to look over my shoulder and notice they're doing the same fascist bucket carrying from 2020 and 2016 and 2012 and 2008 and...
Reddit is one of the most infiltrated and astroturfed site. I have absolutely no confidence that the leadership are interested in addressing that. When there were suspicions it was anti-US actors, they had to take action because the government would get involved. But we all know that such pressure doesn't exist for other astroturfing actors, state and private.
The Lebanon subreddit might as well be a zionist propaganda reddit.
When something grows to that size it becomes recognized as a useful tool with which to conduct social engineering. Reddit has been a weapon of information warfare for well over a decade.
I'm out of the loop on Reddit, but I was beyond a power user on there two years ago. Back then, if every human user on the site stopped using the site, the admins would not have noticed any difference because nearly every post was bot networks reposting old top posts and filling the comments with the exact comments from the last time it got upvoted.
Garbage website. I miss it for what it was capable of for a while there.
I feel like Lemmy also has a problem with corporate troll farms.
Reddit is far worse though with bots and establishment troll farm shill accounts.
My oldest Reddit account is 15 years old. That site is a shell of what it used to be. It's lost almost everything that made it special in the first place. The community is also too large in my opinion. We went from well-thought-out posts, comments and questions to memes and one-liners. It's toxic, hive minded and full of bots.
The internet always moves on; the most popular bulletin boards and usenet groups and web forums eventually fell and people moved away. Even Digg had a powerful following and heavy user traffic and due to Reddit style changes everyone left too. Reddit just as likely.
I'm not surprised. I'm on this site because I'm sick of being banned on reddit for thinking wrong.
Bruh, at least you just got banned "for" something. I got shadowbanned, and for seemingly no reason at all! I made some very neutral comments in fandom subreddits, and only when I looked at the pages logged out, I realized the comments were not showing up. I can only guess it was either my location, my custom domain email, or a combination of both.
There are many valid reasons outside of a sitewide protest for a subreddit to go from public to private, so Reddit doing this is a scummy move on more than just one level. Just one more reason why free alternatives like lemmy are superior.
“While we are making this change to ensure users’ expectations regarding a community’s access do not suddenly change, protest is allowed on Reddit,” writes Nestler. “We want to hear from you when you think Reddit is making decisions that are not in your communities’ best interests. But if a protest crosses the line into harming redditors and Reddit, we’ll step in.”
Yall have very clearly demonstrated that you do not care about the communities best interest, and you have no interest in hearing what we think. Fuck Spez and good riddance to reddit
They've made it incredibly clear that anything you post on their platform is theirs, and if they do something you don't like you can go fuck yourself.
Fuck Reddit.
Oh absolutely, my account has been overwritten (as if that does anything ) and deleted for over a year now.
It does. I was looking something up and ran face first into a redacted account that once had the answer I needed. I was very conflicted about it.
Calling making a subreddit private "harming redditors and Reddit" is insane
"We're hurting our users? No YOU are harming our users."
uno reversed
"we won't let moderators harm their communities by not letting them eg. protect their communities from brigades and similar harassment"
Sure you thought that through, reddit admins?
At this point I'm more or less done with Reddit. My latest ban was because I posted a screenshot of an ad with a wacky old person comment to r/oldpeoplefacebook. I carefully smudged out the person's name and profile pic...and got a three-day site-wide ban for sharing personal information. I protested, they said, nope, you shared personal information. All I can figure is they decided the advertiser's name is personal info, which would make it even more bizarre because I'd say about half the posts have group or advertiser names unedited.
People they let mod, can end up getting this really bizarre God complex not dissimilar to what you see in university settings, their word goes, questioning their word is a sin and they'll just double down.
Indeed, fuck reddit and their Russian shills. I was permanently banned for commenting about the Russians receiving a dose of their own medicine and I did not use a single swear word.
I protested, they said, nope
Protesting on a site that's fully automated their administration just means getting told "fuck you" twice.
There's no real bureaucracy under the hood. It's just "friend computer says you're guilty" followed by "friend computer says you're still guilty plus you had the gall to doubt friend computer's immaculate wisdom".
I've had almost all my posts on Reddit go up in smoke for one pedantic reason or another. I haven't posted here much out of that fear but I think it's much better here.
May I be blunt? I don't think that anyone still moderating Reddit has a shred of dignity, decency, or concern about their userbase. As such this shit will pass and nobody there will care.
That was clear from the article as well, where they said they took the opinion of 150 bootlickers moderators
The guy who admin my lemmy instance is also the mod of r/Brasil and he and the Brazilian mod team worked a lot to avoid the subreddit to become an alt-right shithole like the rest of country subreddits (the losers from the alt-right national subreddit even had to pay for reddit ads to try to funnel user there).
The other option is for all the mods to quit. AI can probably do a lot of basic tasks, but without mods they wouldn't have a site pretty quickly.
What would these busybodies do with their free time then and how would they obtain a sense of self worth ? They can't quit, deleting other people from the internet is their whole life.
That's easy - they'd come to Lemmy and become Lemmy mods to achieve the same thing.
...On their own instances because nobody else will have them, hopefully.
Quite a few of the mods are severing alternative interests. The partisan subs are run by literal party staffers and think tanks. Lots of the big brand subs are run by marketing agencies. Reddit's financial model is to sell these spaces. You don't just have some random mega-fan running /r/Marvel. That's a Disney staffer.
None of these guys are going anywhere.
Nobody is going to quit, all mod roles can be replaced in minutes with people excited to do it. If they have to, they can pay them even and make them official employees and never have to worry about protests again.
Also, who cares, the site has a clock over it, in a few years most users will be bots and children and all content will be farmed slop akin to youtube.
Furthermore, if anyone thinks that "protests" on reddit accomplish ANYTHING that person is a literal child, or someone else who shouldn't be trusted to operate heavy machinery.
Whatever high ideals we had for reddit a decade ago are long-since dead and buried and that's fine, instead of whinging about what we lost we should be trying to figure out what to build next to maintain some semblance of an internet in an age of AI slop.
Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience "fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we'll remove everything that's not about X"?
...In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don't do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely
/r/trees will only accept tree related posts
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?
No that just isn't allowed. I'm not joking, the admins have removed entire mod teams and installed new ones because the mod teams decided to change the topic of the sub.
Is that why the animetitties sub now has actual anime titties again instead of being a more serious version of world news like it was for a while?
I've been off Reddit for a couple of years, but that's still sad news. That was a legitimately good community, and the name flip was good, and I think they were partnered with worldpolitics which was the flipside community.
I soft quit Reddit last year and deleted all my profile’s comments and posts. I only kept it around because I had heard Reddit was restoring deleted posts and I wanted to make sure mine were gone for good. After several months I stopped checking.
This article made me finally pull the trigger and go in to delete my account. Surprise surprise, two pages of old comments had been restored.
It seems like the new account deleter scripts replace all comments with random text rather than actually delete them, which I'm sure makes it harder for reddit to undelete.
Reddit is already dead, the corporate AI shell is all that remains amongst some folk who dont realize everyone is a bot or an idiot.
/r/android used to be one of the hottest subs - it's literally just posts from the same 2 OPs linking to their professional news articles.
Before the API change I was looking into making an extension for RES that would automatically block any user account above a configurable ratio of posts to comments. It was BANANAS how much content was from bots on the front page even on smaller subs, and that was before the protests.
Just like digg back then after they switched the format.
Reddit keeps forgetting they depend on the users, including the mods.
Reddit sold whatever soul it may have had to the devil, as does every company that goes public.
It's literally taking our words and our conversations and using them to train an inhuman computer system to sound more human.
And we are not allowed to say no.
It doesn't get more devilish than that on the internet.
And of course, I deleted my account when this whole debacle happened, but I'm sure they're still taking all of my old comments and selling them to any person with a dollar.
Here's the VP of Reddit's community cited in the article, Laura Nestler, preaching super engagement from a platforms most fanatical users to power content for the 90%.
She suggests, intrinsic motivators such as "autonomy".
This is not a smart choice, they do know that the alternative to peaceful protests like this is violent protest right? They want to challenge that or do they think it won't be done because it's "illegal", that didn't stop these guys now did it?
It happens in the real world too.
In the positive cases the local police force and / or military manages to convince the government that it is a non-supportable act and nothing happens. In the bad cases it results in government officials getting lynched in the end.
Some people point blank refuse to learn from history, no matter how many times it is repeated.
@KingThrillgore The second the reddit started fucking around I deleted my account. I no longer care what they do or if they even exist.
That is due to the fact that Reddit - and I can’t stress this next part enough - sucks.
There's an irony seeing Redditors creating threads and complaining about it as if they did anything during the API-gate saga
Mods could just make a filter to remove everything new anyway. The concept of mods being unpaid volunteers means they get to fuck with reddit if they really want. They already had that issue with some subs just starting to allow porn during the first api protest. Sure reddit can just churn through to newer friendlier mods like the first time but they're not going to be able to crush all the dissent and drama from moves like that.
But actually I think reddit has a bigger problem than protests. They tweaked their algorithm recently and it is going the way of facebook now, I've been getting 0 upvote day-old posts shown to me. They're probably getting more engagement but I don't think redditors are going to put up with that level of enshittification as easily as other social media where people are locked in by friends and followers.
If you can't meaningfully curate your feed then Reddit has lost all value.
They're about to make another wildly unpopular move. Get your popcorn ready.
And unlike last time there won't be an easy way for mods to point users towards Lemmy.
The same day Nestler and I talked, for example, she said that she had spoken about the changes with Reddit’s mod council, which has about 160 moderators.
Wow. So many power-hungry people in one room.
Reddit mods are the blue sludge in the porta potty tank, not a "council".
Mods can still dump 10k trash messages in a sub making it unusable. (Or smart messages in the case of most subreddit who are trash anyway).
Set-up automoderator with rules reventing anyone below 5 billions karma to participate.
Ban everyone.
I'm sure there are a lot of other options.
If your subreddit is big enough and you do anything disruptive they’ll just take your mod powers away and give them to someone else who won’t disrupt it.
The best thing to do is either over or under moderate the subreddit in a way that seems legitimate but leads to the usefulness of the community dying off while also migrating the most useful content off the subreddit.
Mod-to-rule
Banning everyone takes a bot, which is rate limited. Same with a trash flood.
Automod though, you can easily set to do things like remove all new comments and submissions, remove stuff on one report (which lets you use the argument no one really believes that you're letting the users have more control.), allow new submissions but lock every comment section, or allow only select users to post, whether based on karma, username, flair, etc.
I ran a subreddit for my discord server that we would sometimes post pictures to and find new members and after we stopped using reddit about 7 months later bots started reposting my own pictures and random bot accounts were reposting old comments. It was really weird for my ~2000 people sub that was under the radar and never reall popular.
Bots building post history in an abandoned looking sub. Usually done to get access to some other sub.
With the right looking post history you can scam your way onto a surprising large number of moderation teams.
I'm thinking the API protests would have been more effective if y'all just stopped moderating entirely instead of locking down subreddits.
Let the site turn into an absolute cesspool.
Subs which did that had their mods replaced by reddit admins
They could just not moderate it tho. Reddit is a toxic workplace (for free) for mods.
I wonder how much longer it will be before Reddit has to start paying people to moderate the subreddits since no one will want to do it for free anymore.
Who am I kidding, there are so many people that are already taking their payment in the HOA like authority being a mod gives them that will never happen.
Basically, "you can do whatever you want as long as it benefits us." I hate for-profit social networks.
At least here you don't see a single ad.
Yet
Instance owners could potentially insert ads to help cover server costs. Users would likely just migrate to a different instance, but I could definitely imagine one of the bigger instances doing that eventually.
I just checked and theyve banned my private subreddit for lack of moderation
I loved that the VP of Content added that mods will still be able to protest when Reddit is literally is getting rid of major tools for mods to do an effective protest. Like, I get that Reddit is a company, and that it's a platform they own, and that they lose profit whenever a big subreddits get privated, but they keep giving mods middle finger after middle finger.
writes Nestler. “We want to hear from you when you think Reddit is making decisions that are not in your communities’ best interests. But if a protest crosses the line into harming redditors and Reddit, we’ll step in.”
Translation: We don't really give a shit what you think. Now shut up and generate that content for us to sell to AI companies.
if i post or comment on reddit, anything at all, my account will be suspended instantly. i think they have black listed my ISP or maybe my entire country. i can appeal the suspension every day but nobody will read it. i literally can't use reddit.
I recently wanted to ask something on reddit after 2 years away, because a certain mod dev is there. Got a message it got deleted because i don't have the karma to post in that sub. Thanks for the effort, never again. That's why i don't write on Stack Overflow, too.
Lmao now even the moderators get cancelled by Reddit.
The platform can't die quick enough, it turned into such a fucking cesspool of powertripping mods and circlejerks. And it's impossible to ever get in contact with admins because they replaced them all by bots. There are also so many bot posters that at some point it'll just be bots moderating bots, moderated by admin bots.
My protest over a year ago was effortless. I just deleted my account and stopped going there.
More than a year after the protests, Reddit is essentially back to normal.
[citation needed]
For a casual observer, who was never engaged with that platform, it might actually look like Reddit is back to normal, based on a casual glance at the activity.
You only notice the cracks leaking water when you actually look closer, and you remember that the stone dam didn't have so many of them. The surge on bot activity, the lower level of discourse in the comments, the further concentration of activity into larger subs, the content feeling more and more repetitive...
Heil piss baby Spez
So rather than allow subs to remain preserved while the replace the mods in place they will push subs to shit on themselves in this latest bout of enshittification.
I fear Reddit might be going the way of Twitter and Facebook, too many users which makes them too big to fail or their failure is sooo slow that by the time they do fail they will have cemented their footholds in our politics they will puppet our politicians more than now.
I mean it's safe to say it was probably the last opportunity to do a protest on that scale even before these changes. Maybe they can still do "remove any post on wellthatsucks that isn’t a vacuum" type of change.
Probably old Reddit imploding will bring a few more this way, but safe to say that most people who left Reddit because it's changed for the worse since 5-15 years ago have already left. Still, I have seen a few new users join Lemmy after TechLinked mentioned the site and a continuous trickle would be welcome.
On another note, hearing the "council of Reddit moderators" makes me imagine a cringeworthy meetup in someone's basement.
Reddit worked with mods ahead of announcing this change, Nestler tells me in an interview. The same day Nestler and I talked, for example, she said that she had spoken about the changes with Reddit’s mod council, which has about 160 moderators.
Didn't they boot out everyone that wasn't a suck up?
160 mods representing all subreddits? Yeah that's entirely power mods who would tow the line
I came here to banish reddit but this thing wont leave my feed. I guess I'm going to have to take the time to filter the word.
Ugh reddit mod community makes me so angry.... Glad I left that shithole
I’m also glad too. I just sign up and I’m currently looking for the alternative reddit communities here on lemmy.
just ask for them on !lemmy411@lemmy.ca they will find those subs for you
I think this will cause as many problems as it solves (from Reddit's POV), going private has always been a panic button for mods when shit hits the fan. Now those controversies will have much longer to build and have news stories written about it first. Short sighted.
You'd think this would drive away what mods are left, i imagine they are mostly there for the illusion of power they get at this point and this will be a step towards removing that.
But then, the entire corporatization should be enough to drive people away on it's own but it doesn't seem to be.
They can't have anyone but themselves breaking the site. 😂 People should figure out a good way to protest Reddit. Ddos attacks can't be fixed. 😁
30 terabyte of Rick Astley per second should do nicely.
Fuck spez
I'm sure there will be ways around it. Mods can automod-delete every comment, change the rules of the sub to only allow posts of nonsense, or nit moderate at all.
The main problem is that protests don't succeed at reddit because people like moderating for free for some reason. Strangely Reddit has more leverage over mods than mods have over reddit.
like 10 seconds in automod to get right around that shit lmao.
Oh No, anyway.
Bots and locked down curated content vs. hive-minded rhetoric that circumvents anything resembling nuance at all.
Gotta admit, there aren’t many good choices here.
dont worry r/worldnews allwasy ready for the mission.
There's still one protest possible.
LEAVE REDDIT!!! GET THE FUCK OFF OF IT! LET IT DIE. MAKE IT DIE!
Same with twitter.
And all things Meta.
Twitter and Reddit went so much to shit and lowered the bar so much that Meta actually became almost not bad in my eyes, almost.
Meta is still on a whole other level when it comes to data privacy.
Gee are you implying that storing passwords in plaintext is a bad thing? /s
That's security, not privacy.
helenslunch - the slayer of untruths
I'm still pissed off that I've never had a facebook. I never gave them any info about me. I gave them no reason to have a profile on me.
Yet because OTHER people have facebook, they know my name, my address, my phone number. I don't know if they can identify me in pictures that other people post, but it wouldn't surprise me.
That shouldn't be allowed. I did not consent.
Correct. And the same is true for the mobile phones, carriers, and a slew of apps that all look at contacts. They know who you are and who your friends and family are.
There's a guy in the world of pro wrestling named Jim Cornette that said a quote this reminds me of.
Cornette is known for holding grudges, and being hateful. He keeps a shitlist of people he hates.
Well in the 1980s he was working for a wrestling company, and hated one of his coworkers for a year. Then a new guy came in and was so much worse.
Then one day he says to the first guy "You know, you used to be at the top of my shit list, but with all these new fuckheads coming in, you managed to move down a few spots simply by not doing anything!"
They're doing a Bradbury, in a way, kind of like Tumblr and Steam. Everyone else is shooting themselves in the foot.
Meta is a little hard because they acquired a lot of existing social networks in their prime and have kept things subtle. Think about how long it took EA to finally strip Maxis of everything but The Sims. The only way you would know something is owned by Meta is from the splash screen.
The problem is that FB is the "core forum" for tons of niche hobbies. Irts the only reason I still have a account. They successfully killed off the old php forums.
If you live in rural America sone information is only posted to Facebook, from private businesses to small county or town governments
Additionally FB Marketplace killed Craigslist, at least in my area (also US). Nextdoor somewhat is a counter but that has its own problems.
Meta probably is the hardest one given that in many influencal countries WhatsApp is the app everyone uses for communication
It's also the main organization tool for "groups". I have tried to migrate mine to other platforms with no success.
And also the biggest online classifieds marketplace for trading goods. Even though it's a fucking awful experience and simply ignores any filters you give it. If you want to actually sell your stuff, or sell it for market value, without shipping, you just have to use it.
Yep, agreed. The biggest problem there is that Meta is generally not making life worse for its users than they're used to. Facebook and Instagram are giving you almost the same shitty experience you got a decade ago.
Using Reddit as a platform to protest Reddit is even more idiotic than staging a sit in at Disneyworld to protest against Disney.
"Hey we're getting revenue and media is gonna give us a bajillion clickthroughs from rubbernecking, please, if you can still protest in any capacity on our site please do, make it a huge spectacle"
Like what the hell are they even protesting about now? What is left to protest about? And why? Just go.
I left Reddit 6 months ago when I was permabanned for asking a question about what is forbidden. They can kiss my ass. And I hope they go broke.
Aw man. I left Reddit on my own terms as soon as the writing was on the wall re: 3rd party apps.
To have access ripped away without notice must have bred some deep hatred for the platform.
I left Twitter for much the same reasons. All the replies are basically unusable now, because bots just pay to get put at the top of the sorting algorithm, and it's now full of bait and spam, since the website formerly known as Twitter now pays for engagement, since that apparently worked out well for Quora (!).
I genuinely tried to leave but lots of communities didn’t leave Reddit and therefore had to stick to Reddit. I did with RRSS-feed and avoided their app.
Recently figured out we can Sideload Apollo app with almost all functions available. So did that.
Thankfully never used twitter! I read valuation dropped from 44B to 9,4B recently.
You can create the community and begin the migration
I’m not the right person to start a community, that’s the main problem. I’m not fit to be a Moderator and such.
It's super easy, the main problem is no one will move. I still moderate a couple on reddit, but it was hard enough getting people even there, certainly no one will come here.
I feel like internet users have become so lazy, stubborn, and resistant to change. I'm pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo, IRC, ICQ, AIM... people used to try new things
Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their "ecosystem" of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you're "invested."
In some respects it was somewhat easier to get them to be on multiple platforms instead of moving. Think of the original messenger proliferation, where sometimes people would be on IRC, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, or etc. so much so that you had software like Pidgin and Trillian to help consolidate server/chat rooms and friends lists to more easily chat with all your contacts.
Even with Ventrilo, I remember being open to also switching to Mumble or vice versa if there was some hiccup with either.
Gee, I sure wonder why…
....I'm gonna go ahead and say it.
I like it better here.
Same. This place is great, even with the tankies from lemmy.ml and the fascists from hexbear, at least we somehow still get along.
Not all of us are tankies fwiw, I just wanted to be on the largest and most well-supported instance with generally the least amount of downtime.
Fair 🤷♂️
Isn't it lemmy.world?
What's the deal with having a .world user complain about ml and hexbear in every single thread lately?
It's crazy. Almost like we all have the freedom to say whatever the fuck we want, including complaining, because we fucking can.
I'm not from .world and also complain about it sometimes. In my opinion, it's a legitimate reason that makes Lemmy less attractive, as a consequence, you have to set up blockers to keep your sanity which is a hassle for the average user.
I honestly believe that Lemmy is cool, but it either needs more content or I need to perform a magic trick to make my feed "better". At least it's not that addicting, and the "small community, small town" vibes gives charm to it.
I've been here since August 2024 or so.
I agree, so I've been posting photos and things. What we don't need is a bunch of autoposting bots.
If you want to find the busy threads though, sort of Active and All. And just see what is going on across the lemmyverse
Yeah, this helps, but it's not always topics that really interest me. We kind of need more diversity of content around here.
I prefer scaled to active sort for that reason.
I agree though, more content and more content diversity would be great.
The small percentage that contribute content regularity in social media platforms instead of just consuming are great.
I'm too boring to have much content that would be good for anything other than microblogging myself though.
On Reddit, everyone is trying to get a million votes and just brutally murder with words everyone. It either gets really hostile, or just lots of bots posting bot shit.
On Lemmy: Even the posters I disagree with, I have a lot of fun with them. We say stupid shit all the time and accept the upvotes/downvotes with our shitposts.
That's been my experience as well. I'm using a Lemmy client that allows me to tag users, and I've been tagging people who have posted comments that annoyed me. A few are obvious trolls, but the rest have posted many comments that I liked or agree with since I've tagged them. It's been refreshing to see, actually
Lemmy is nice, but the content on it is quite niche. If you want something less tech-oriented, you're generally out of luck, for example.
Reddit startled the same way. It's aways first the tech weirdos, early adopters and Foss enthusiasts that start it.
Where my bass fishing homies at?
So, two months? Lol
It's a lot better than August 2023!
This place feels like old reddit. When we could have actual discussions and not just be downvoted by bots. It’s so much better here
And you can still tailor it to yourself. Instances have different mindsets to different topics and things they allow or don't and there's tons of people to agree with or disagree with but everyone is cordial.
I just don't have a reason to go back
It's so much better. Personally I don't hope it grows much either. Satisfies my content itch, have still had some good quality convos here, seen some great comments threads. Absolutely none of the bullshit that Reddit purposely encourages. Plus most of the zeebs and the chronically offended seemed to have stayed with reddit, and I'm super OK with that.
I'd argue Lemmy is turning into its own echo chamber. I've seen some mods power tripping just like good old Reddit. I erroneously thought people would learn from past mistakes, but sadly this is not what happened.
The only way to win the reddit game is to not play.
How about a nice game of Chess?
Launches entire US nuclear arsenal against Russia
Can we launch it against Spez?
Very good Joshua
I just lost The Game
LOL!
You know what's not impossible? Leaving that shit hole and never coming back.
It's possible but reddit isn't the only one looking for engagement, so are individual users. If a site has more users, it has more engagement and content. It is also not impossible to drop the lemmy name when you do go back there to make people aware of the alternative.
Someone dropped the name lemmy over there, so now I'm here checking it out. Screw reddit, man.
My thought exactly. They can always do like me and nope the fuck out of there.
True but how do you get the message out when they control the media?
That's not a good method though on it's own, there needs to be effort to undermine them. And since they don't want to do peaceful protests, the only option left are the more violent and less legal ones. The ones that compromise their platform and its data.
It's sad how many docile idiots remained on Reddit and Twitter after last year.
People still use AOL internet. I expect Reddit and twitter to die sometime in the 2050s.
Digg still exists. Death of websites is rarely a complete shutter, but usually more of a steady decline into obscurity
Wow!! It's the Divide By Zero admin!!
I'm not a celebrity :D
I missed the part where Aol. was promoting toxicity and hate while attempting a short-term grift on its users like Reddit and X have.
That fact that Aol. is still alive is amazing by itself. It’s just another sleazy, beleaguered company that used to be meaningful. You leave because other companies have better products, not because they offend your sense of morality.
(Or maybe they do.)
I think you underestimate how ignorant people can be. The reason Aol still exists is because they are grifters too. My Aol example was to show that people are docile idiots and won't change their habits. Aol is grifting just as much as reddit does. They're just grifting different groups in different ways.
That's why i think reddit and twitter will continue on for a long time. Maybe not as powerhouses but they won't implode or go away any time soon.
My mom was still paying for dial-up AOL in 2016. She had been paying them $20 a month for over a decade while having high-speed internet that she was also paying for.
When I asked her why she didn't cancel it, she said she would lose her email.
So I canceled it because AOL provides free email because they make money off of the ads.
Not just AOL Internet, but also the email service. Same for Hotmail. I used to work at iHeart, and the number of those email services (from prize winners) was not insignificant.
Hotmail was owned by Microsoft when I signed up in the late 90s. It's no surprise it's still around. It hasn't been my primary email for a long time, but I still use it as my MS account. So really it's just my Minecraft account.
I have a few accounts floating around for different services Microsoft has bought out or since integrated logins for. I genuinely don't know how many Microsoft accounts I have, and it's always a pain trying to guess which one a given service is on
There are a lot of subreddits for which there is no real replacement. Sometimes the strength in a community is the people. Doesn't matter if reddit sucks if the people are there.
I don't know, I feel during that exodus we got the best of the best. I miss some of the niche communities, But there's so many fewer assholes over here.
I believe you missed the point. There's people there because they know that their content won't be found elsewhere.
A lot of it is just propaganda bots at this point.
It's amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit's investors can make more money.
There was this one post for a call for mods about "doing a social good for the community".
Like bro, this is a video game subreddit. And you're doing it for free, to help another dude get really rich.
Ideally, it would be because they care for the community they moderate, which I believe is the reason most mods do it.
Then you have creatures like awkwardtheturtle, who knows what motivates them.
I would assume Awkward is motivated by narcissism and/or because they're a power-hungry freakazoid, but who knows? 🤷
I learned if you Google "fertility doctors who used own sperm", there isn't one or two incidents. It's A LOT.
I don't understand why anybody would do such a disgusting thing. but it helps me understand narcissism and power hungry behavior.
it’s power. power motivates and corrupts.
The best protest is to stop moderating. Lie flat. Let the subreddit go to shit.
That's when I knew we lost. When power hungry moderators felt threatened and, instead of standing in solidarity with its users, caved to corporate demands.
"But we'll be able to still protest. Every Tuesday."
Hell are those protests still going on? I highly doubt it.
People tried that.
reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.
Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless "We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power" idiocy.
At least you're not the sucker doing it for free for the shareholders anymore.
I mean... everyone contributing all those super useful posts that everyone thinks are the only authoritative sources of information on the internet are doing exactly that.
Every time you provide some tech support or a bit of advice? You are providing reddit shareholders' money.
Scabbing for reddit mod clout is utterly wild.
Many subs did that, so reddit substituted the mods for others that do as they are told.
The dndmemes protests were a pretty incredible thing while they lasted. The mods changed the subreddit to "nsfw" because that disabled most of the monetization. Then Reddit admins told them the subreddit obviously wasn't really nsfw and to change it to accurately reflect the subreddit content.
...so the mods changed the subreddit rules to allow actual nsfw content and people went nuts. In multiple senses of the term.
Of course "accurately reflecting the subreddit" wasn't what Reddit really cared about. They wanted to preserve the advertising stream for a popular subreddit, and this did the opposite of that. Reddit admins soon after basically said "remove nsfw content, restore the subreddit to what it used to be, do what we say or we'll replace you with a mod team of our own choosing".
Thanks for sharing this I guess I left before all of this happened and I haven't heard any of it.
The problem is that this opens the door to far right bootlickers who a salivating at the idea of turning reddit into an even farther right shithole.
Reddit would close the sub for being unmoderated until someone asks to be the new mod
mission accomplished? That has the same effect as making it private, doesn't it?
Well, the power hungry mod that lost their power wouldn’t be very happy with it and larger communities wouldn’t stay closed very long
Reddit mods are such cucks for power that they cave when it's threatened to be removed
A lot of subreddits have done that. The problem is nobody notices...
A friend and I were recently discussing how spineless modern boycotts are.
We set a goddamn deadline for when the Reddit boycott ended. No wonder Spez just waited. Most people then just continued using the website. What a disgrace.
Imagine if after one week of the genocide in Gaza, the BDS efforts just stopped. A boycott must be indefinite. It should go on until demands are met.
A boycott that doesn’t hurt has no leverage.
so many leaders are forgetting what the point of protests is. yes, protests are annoying if you're a leader. but they're better than the alternative. that's the whole point.
They're better than the OLD alternative, which was total boycotting at best, and torches and pitchforks at worst. The NEW alternative is complaining about it for a week or two, then continuing on without making any changes at all. They don't mind the new alternative.
The new alternative is becoming obsolete
I sure hope so, but I don't see much changing. I guess we'll see by looking at where Reddit is at business-wise by next year. People were saying it was doomed last summer after the 3rd party app fiasco, and their daily traffic has only gone up since then. I've long since lost all faith in the masses making the best choices for themselves.
well the number of bots has certainly surged....
Although the quality has noticeably decreased. The number of bots has shot up a ridiculous amount.
The quality on Reddit has really gone down with content creators disillusioned or gone, fake content everywhere (I've seen almost an entire scrollable thread copied comment-for-comment), and so many users wiping their comments.
The owners are acting like everything is fine, but I think there's a good chance it keeps hollowing out until the appeal isn't there even for casual users. They can't really turn back at this point, they burned the bridge.
i'm not yet sold on this "old vs new" thing. while i do agree that it would be better if people were more engaged/active about boycotting things and pulling out the pitchforks, my understanding is that hasn't been the historical precedent in situations like this. the pitchfork stuff certainly did happen quite a lot in the past, but my understanding is that it was for more extreme problems than a social media company shutting down third party apps (which many people didn't even know about). but then again, it might be hard to compare this to the company transgressions of the past.
my understanding is that frustration is building, and if things continue in this direction, they will reach a tipping point where people do actually stop using the website all together and switch to alternatives. and, this ban on protests will give the reddit executives much less information on how close things are to that tipping point. (not to mention that the ban itself will probably accelerate things.)
but i could be mistaken about this, and i'm open to changing my mind on it.
You can't even make an allusion to torches and pitchforks on Reddit. Legit, they'll ban ya.
People haven't been using the alternative, and that's the problem. Reddit and tech giants have grown complicit. They do not believe people would do it to them, or they think they could survive thousands of people trying to do it to them, if one can then many can.
Protests: a pressure valve to release steam. You gotta let them get out there and march around for a little bit. Let them walk it off. Then proceed to implement the next new tyranny a little bit at a time.
More hilarity: as of about a week ago, it appears the reddit algorithm has also started boosting posts with negative karma on their horrible mobile app. Guessing it's a move towards 'negative engagement'. I have not seen it myself (I don't use the reddit app) but I see users complaining about it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1frcdxs/it_looks_like_reddit_is_currently_trying_new_ways/
I have to imagine that when some c-level suit saw that term in his moth-eaten copy of "Social Media for Dummies," I don't think it was intended to be taken quite so flagrantly visibly literally...
This isn't limited to the Reddit app. You can see it on the desktop and mobile website too.
So that's what happened?! I rarely come here, but last weekend was so bad that I started updating my subscribed communities here.
I thought I interacted with too many downvoted posts, and screwed up what reddit thought were my main interests. Guess I was expecting too much from reddit...
Stop using Reddit, problem solved
In favor of what is the problem. In Lemmy half the instances have defederated from half the others.
People use Reddit because there's only one Reddit. Coming to such a center is human nature, while Fediverse architecture is someone's strategy. Changing your strategy is simpler than changing human nature.
If we drop the tech religion part of the subject, NOSTR moderated communities are a very good thing as a global, not per-instance, Reddit alternative. You can clearly see that its core idea is chosen by people who are more confident with human psychology than with tech. And it's good for that very reason. It's an ugly real solution.
Except all clients suck balls and there's nothing to see there yet.
True, the fediverse is poor. But Reddit is the bottom of the barrel in its current state.
Best to waste time watching paint dry to be honest
What? and lose THE MOST EFFECTIVE PROTEST PLATFORM EVER MADE? I couldn't imagine what else we would use to teach corporations and politicians a harsh lesson (insert giant eye rolling emoji)
I lieu of that, I'd say the mods should just go limp. Stop moderating content and let posters run wild. The company needs to realize just how much their business model depends on all that unpaid labor.
I think they realize it but know these mods are addicted to the fake power so they won't go anywhere no matter what
(Copied from the thread on /c/Quark's)
I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit's platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.
The consensus I've seen on Lemmy has been largely "we don't need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there". So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can't rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.
Thanks for sharing this perspective. Complacency won’t grow the userbase here.
To be fair, a lot of users don't seem to want the user base here to grow at all. I don't feel that way but I've had enough discussions here to know that this is literally not the case for everyone and it kind of sucks because stagnation is how social networks die.
There is a point where more users may bring more downsides than upsides - but we haven't reached that point yet. There are still many many niche communities that have no equivalent here and starting them would never take off with the current number of people.
I get not wanting to grow the userbase of lemmy.world which is already kinda bloated but there is basically infinite space for new instances to be added.
It just occurred to me that convincing someone of leaving a social media site is a lot like convincing someone to leave a big city.
They have friends there and have grown accustomed to the vibrant and diverse activities, but realistically nothing they do or have there can't be replicated in a smaller town, a smaller media site.
They're liable to put up with a lot of shit to stay with their community, but eventually people get pushed out and find greener pastures and a quiet space for themselves elsewhere. At least, that's what I attribute to what I perceive to be a higher average age on the fediverse.
I'm too old to find the constant stimulation and activity attractive anymore, and I much prefer the freedom to move around and be choosy about my media choices.
Man I just turned 20. I’m sick of everything I do online being dictated by commercial interests. I feel like an old man. I just want my applesauce and my bingo, and to not be bothered and lumped into the white middle class 20 year-old advertising demographic.
( please stop bombarding me with scare tactic election ads google )
You mean like killing all third-party apps and selling user-data to AI companies? That kind of harm? Oh no, you meant "harm" to your personal finance.
Harm? That is what would happen to their company if they explained what they meant by "harm"
Seems like that's about the only actions Reddit execs have taken over the last several years. Glad I left when I did.
My account was banned because I kept reporting people and it was easier to get rid of the complainer than it was all the bigots she was complaining about... but... now I feel very "You can't fire me, I quit" about it
Because Reddit admins deserved that harm. We've handed them all this free data and resource and they decided it was theirs.
“Those who make community protest impossible will make hacks inevitable."
― John F. Kennedy, pretty much
Is that the site we all left cuz it’s a turd? Yeah? Don’t care. It’s called principle.
Reddit vacillates between operating as a clearing house for the most ugly, racist, reactionary propaganda currently in circulation and doing pogroms against the six subreddits that got popular posting current events about a new kind of genocide we invented.
I'm glad I left, but it's hard not to look over my shoulder and notice they're doing the same fascist bucket carrying from 2020 and 2016 and 2012 and 2008 and...
Reddit is one of the most infiltrated and astroturfed site. I have absolutely no confidence that the leadership are interested in addressing that. When there were suspicions it was anti-US actors, they had to take action because the government would get involved. But we all know that such pressure doesn't exist for other astroturfing actors, state and private.
The Lebanon subreddit might as well be a zionist propaganda reddit.
When something grows to that size it becomes recognized as a useful tool with which to conduct social engineering. Reddit has been a weapon of information warfare for well over a decade.
I'm out of the loop on Reddit, but I was beyond a power user on there two years ago. Back then, if every human user on the site stopped using the site, the admins would not have noticed any difference because nearly every post was bot networks reposting old top posts and filling the comments with the exact comments from the last time it got upvoted.
Garbage website. I miss it for what it was capable of for a while there.
I feel like Lemmy also has a problem with corporate troll farms.
Reddit is far worse though with bots and establishment troll farm shill accounts.
My oldest Reddit account is 15 years old. That site is a shell of what it used to be. It's lost almost everything that made it special in the first place. The community is also too large in my opinion. We went from well-thought-out posts, comments and questions to memes and one-liners. It's toxic, hive minded and full of bots.
The internet always moves on; the most popular bulletin boards and usenet groups and web forums eventually fell and people moved away. Even Digg had a powerful following and heavy user traffic and due to Reddit style changes everyone left too. Reddit just as likely.
I'm not surprised. I'm on this site because I'm sick of being banned on reddit for thinking wrong.
Bruh, at least you just got banned "for" something. I got shadowbanned, and for seemingly no reason at all! I made some very neutral comments in fandom subreddits, and only when I looked at the pages logged out, I realized the comments were not showing up. I can only guess it was either my location, my custom domain email, or a combination of both.
fuck u/spez
There are many valid reasons outside of a sitewide protest for a subreddit to go from public to private, so Reddit doing this is a scummy move on more than just one level. Just one more reason why free alternatives like lemmy are superior.
Yall have very clearly demonstrated that you do not care about the communities best interest, and you have no interest in hearing what we think. Fuck Spez and good riddance to reddit
They've made it incredibly clear that anything you post on their platform is theirs, and if they do something you don't like you can go fuck yourself.
Fuck Reddit.
Oh absolutely, my account has been overwritten (as if that does anything ) and deleted for over a year now.
It does. I was looking something up and ran face first into a redacted account that once had the answer I needed. I was very conflicted about it.
Calling making a subreddit private "harming redditors and Reddit" is insane
"We're hurting our users? No YOU are harming our users."
uno reversed
"we won't let moderators harm their communities by not letting them eg. protect their communities from brigades and similar harassment"
Sure you thought that through, reddit admins?
At this point I'm more or less done with Reddit. My latest ban was because I posted a screenshot of an ad with a wacky old person comment to r/oldpeoplefacebook. I carefully smudged out the person's name and profile pic...and got a three-day site-wide ban for sharing personal information. I protested, they said, nope, you shared personal information. All I can figure is they decided the advertiser's name is personal info, which would make it even more bizarre because I'd say about half the posts have group or advertiser names unedited.
People they let mod, can end up getting this really bizarre God complex not dissimilar to what you see in university settings, their word goes, questioning their word is a sin and they'll just double down.
Indeed, fuck reddit and their Russian shills. I was permanently banned for commenting about the Russians receiving a dose of their own medicine and I did not use a single swear word.
Protesting on a site that's fully automated their administration just means getting told "fuck you" twice.
There's no real bureaucracy under the hood. It's just "friend computer says you're guilty" followed by "friend computer says you're still guilty plus you had the gall to doubt friend computer's immaculate wisdom".
I've had almost all my posts on Reddit go up in smoke for one pedantic reason or another. I haven't posted here much out of that fear but I think it's much better here.
FUCK SPEZ
May I be blunt? I don't think that anyone still moderating Reddit has a shred of dignity, decency, or concern about their userbase. As such this shit will pass and nobody there will care.
That was clear from the article as well, where they said they took the opinion of 150
bootlickersmoderatorsThe guy who admin my lemmy instance is also the mod of r/Brasil and he and the Brazilian mod team worked a lot to avoid the subreddit to become an alt-right shithole like the rest of country subreddits (the losers from the alt-right national subreddit even had to pay for reddit ads to try to funnel user there).
I agree. Especially with how some moderators talk down to users, they sure licked those boots stomping on them to not lose their reddit powers.
Looking at you, r/de who's "protest" was to "allow memes" for a week.
There is no chance in hell any of these cowards would stand up for their community. The ones that did are already here.
Roll it up
The other option is for all the mods to quit. AI can probably do a lot of basic tasks, but without mods they wouldn't have a site pretty quickly.
What would these busybodies do with their free time then and how would they obtain a sense of self worth ? They can't quit, deleting other people from the internet is their whole life.
That's easy - they'd come to Lemmy and become Lemmy mods to achieve the same thing.
...On their own instances because nobody else will have them, hopefully.
Quite a few of the mods are severing alternative interests. The partisan subs are run by literal party staffers and think tanks. Lots of the big brand subs are run by marketing agencies. Reddit's financial model is to sell these spaces. You don't just have some random mega-fan running /r/Marvel. That's a Disney staffer.
None of these guys are going anywhere.
Nobody is going to quit, all mod roles can be replaced in minutes with people excited to do it. If they have to, they can pay them even and make them official employees and never have to worry about protests again.
Also, who cares, the site has a clock over it, in a few years most users will be bots and children and all content will be farmed slop akin to youtube.
Furthermore, if anyone thinks that "protests" on reddit accomplish ANYTHING that person is a literal child, or someone else who shouldn't be trusted to operate heavy machinery.
Whatever high ideals we had for reddit a decade ago are long-since dead and buried and that's fine, instead of whinging about what we lost we should be trying to figure out what to build next to maintain some semblance of an internet in an age of AI slop.
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience "fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we'll remove everything that's not about X"?
...In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don't do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely
/r/trees will only accept tree related posts
No that just isn't allowed. I'm not joking, the admins have removed entire mod teams and installed new ones because the mod teams decided to change the topic of the sub.
Is that why the animetitties sub now has actual anime titties again instead of being a more serious version of world news like it was for a while?
I've been off Reddit for a couple of years, but that's still sad news. That was a legitimately good community, and the name flip was good, and I think they were partnered with worldpolitics which was the flipside community.
I soft quit Reddit last year and deleted all my profile’s comments and posts. I only kept it around because I had heard Reddit was restoring deleted posts and I wanted to make sure mine were gone for good. After several months I stopped checking.
This article made me finally pull the trigger and go in to delete my account. Surprise surprise, two pages of old comments had been restored.
It seems like the new account deleter scripts replace all comments with random text rather than actually delete them, which I'm sure makes it harder for reddit to undelete.
Reddit is already dead, the corporate AI shell is all that remains amongst some folk who dont realize everyone is a bot or an idiot.
/r/android used to be one of the hottest subs - it's literally just posts from the same 2 OPs linking to their professional news articles.
Before the API change I was looking into making an extension for RES that would automatically block any user account above a configurable ratio of posts to comments. It was BANANAS how much content was from bots on the front page even on smaller subs, and that was before the protests.
Just like digg back then after they switched the format.
Reddit keeps forgetting they depend on the users, including the mods.
Reddit sold whatever soul it may have had to the devil, as does every company that goes public.
It's literally taking our words and our conversations and using them to train an inhuman computer system to sound more human.
And we are not allowed to say no.
It doesn't get more devilish than that on the internet.
And of course, I deleted my account when this whole debacle happened, but I'm sure they're still taking all of my old comments and selling them to any person with a dollar.
Here's the VP of Reddit's community cited in the article, Laura Nestler, preaching super engagement from a platforms most fanatical users to power content for the 90%.
She suggests, intrinsic motivators such as "autonomy".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vWUMW6Ovf6o
She was at Yelp prior, which if you want to look at a steaming pile of a wasted company, man give reddit 5-10 years.
Good. Can’t wait for these shit MBA clowns to destroy something else with their vast “knowledge”. Only this time will cheer them on.
This is not a smart choice, they do know that the alternative to peaceful protests like this is violent protest right? They want to challenge that or do they think it won't be done because it's "illegal", that didn't stop these guys now did it?
It happens in the real world too.
In the positive cases the local police force and / or military manages to convince the government that it is a non-supportable act and nothing happens. In the bad cases it results in government officials getting lynched in the end.
Some people point blank refuse to learn from history, no matter how many times it is repeated.
@KingThrillgore The second the reddit started fucking around I deleted my account. I no longer care what they do or if they even exist.
That is due to the fact that Reddit - and I can’t stress this next part enough - sucks.
There's an irony seeing Redditors creating threads and complaining about it as if they did anything during the API-gate saga
I'll bet $50 this is because they plan on pulling the plug on old reddit soon, and don't want to allow the inevitable protests.
Mods could just make a filter to remove everything new anyway. The concept of mods being unpaid volunteers means they get to fuck with reddit if they really want. They already had that issue with some subs just starting to allow porn during the first api protest. Sure reddit can just churn through to newer friendlier mods like the first time but they're not going to be able to crush all the dissent and drama from moves like that.
But actually I think reddit has a bigger problem than protests. They tweaked their algorithm recently and it is going the way of facebook now, I've been getting 0 upvote day-old posts shown to me. They're probably getting more engagement but I don't think redditors are going to put up with that level of enshittification as easily as other social media where people are locked in by friends and followers.
If you can't meaningfully curate your feed then Reddit has lost all value.
They're about to make another wildly unpopular move. Get your popcorn ready.
And unlike last time there won't be an easy way for mods to point users towards Lemmy.
Glad I'm not the only one pessimating that.
Wow. So many power-hungry people in one room.
Reddit mods are the blue sludge in the porta potty tank, not a "council".
Great username 😂
In the next protest mods should allow content like porn as another way of protest.
I believe mods tried this and reddit purged the mods when subreddits only allowed John Oliver images.
"This sub is now entirely dedicated to discussing u/Spez's involvement in moderating jailbait subreddits"
Lack of imagination.
Mods can still dump 10k trash messages in a sub making it unusable. (Or smart messages in the case of most subreddit who are trash anyway).
Set-up automoderator with rules reventing anyone below 5 billions karma to participate.
Ban everyone.
I'm sure there are a lot of other options.
If your subreddit is big enough and you do anything disruptive they’ll just take your mod powers away and give them to someone else who won’t disrupt it.
The best thing to do is either over or under moderate the subreddit in a way that seems legitimate but leads to the usefulness of the community dying off while also migrating the most useful content off the subreddit.
Mod-to-rule
Banning everyone takes a bot, which is rate limited. Same with a trash flood.
Automod though, you can easily set to do things like remove all new comments and submissions, remove stuff on one report (which lets you use the argument no one really believes that you're letting the users have more control.), allow new submissions but lock every comment section, or allow only select users to post, whether based on karma, username, flair, etc.
Possibilities are endless really.
I ran a subreddit for my discord server that we would sometimes post pictures to and find new members and after we stopped using reddit about 7 months later bots started reposting my own pictures and random bot accounts were reposting old comments. It was really weird for my ~2000 people sub that was under the radar and never reall popular.
Bots building post history in an abandoned looking sub. Usually done to get access to some other sub.
With the right looking post history you can scam your way onto a surprising large number of moderation teams.
I'm thinking the API protests would have been more effective if y'all just stopped moderating entirely instead of locking down subreddits.
Let the site turn into an absolute cesspool.
Subs which did that had their mods replaced by reddit admins
I don't get why people don't just leave
because other people haven't left yet
Fuck Spez, & long live Lemmy.
They could just not moderate it tho. Reddit is a toxic workplace (for free) for mods.
I wonder how much longer it will be before Reddit has to start paying people to moderate the subreddits since no one will want to do it for free anymore.
Who am I kidding, there are so many people that are already taking their payment in the HOA like authority being a mod gives them that will never happen.
Basically, "you can do whatever you want as long as it benefits us." I hate for-profit social networks.
At least here you don't see a single ad.
Yet
Instance owners could potentially insert ads to help cover server costs. Users would likely just migrate to a different instance, but I could definitely imagine one of the bigger instances doing that eventually.
I just checked and theyve banned my private subreddit for lack of moderation
I loved that the VP of Content added that mods will still be able to protest when Reddit is literally is getting rid of major tools for mods to do an effective protest. Like, I get that Reddit is a company, and that it's a platform they own, and that they lose profit whenever a big subreddits get privated, but they keep giving mods middle finger after middle finger.
Translation: We don't really give a shit what you think. Now shut up and generate that content for us to sell to AI companies.
if i post or comment on reddit, anything at all, my account will be suspended instantly. i think they have black listed my ISP or maybe my entire country. i can appeal the suspension every day but nobody will read it. i literally can't use reddit.
I recently wanted to ask something on reddit after 2 years away, because a certain mod dev is there. Got a message it got deleted because i don't have the karma to post in that sub. Thanks for the effort, never again. That's why i don't write on Stack Overflow, too.
Lmao now even the moderators get cancelled by Reddit.
The platform can't die quick enough, it turned into such a fucking cesspool of powertripping mods and circlejerks. And it's impossible to ever get in contact with admins because they replaced them all by bots. There are also so many bot posters that at some point it'll just be bots moderating bots, moderated by admin bots.
who cares what that shit show, bad example, internet stain is doing at any given moment. fuck spez.
My protest over a year ago was effortless. I just deleted my account and stopped going there.
[citation needed]
For a casual observer, who was never engaged with that platform, it might actually look like Reddit is back to normal, based on a casual glance at the activity.
You only notice the cracks leaking water when you actually look closer, and you remember that the stone dam didn't have so many of them. The surge on bot activity, the lower level of discourse in the comments, the further concentration of activity into larger subs, the content feeling more and more repetitive...
Heil piss baby Spez
So rather than allow subs to remain preserved while the replace the mods in place they will push subs to shit on themselves in this latest bout of enshittification.
I fear Reddit might be going the way of Twitter and Facebook, too many users which makes them too big to fail or their failure is sooo slow that by the time they do fail they will have cemented their footholds in our politics they will puppet our politicians more than now.
I mean it's safe to say it was probably the last opportunity to do a protest on that scale even before these changes. Maybe they can still do "remove any post on wellthatsucks that isn’t a vacuum" type of change.
Probably old Reddit imploding will bring a few more this way, but safe to say that most people who left Reddit because it's changed for the worse since 5-15 years ago have already left. Still, I have seen a few new users join Lemmy after TechLinked mentioned the site and a continuous trickle would be welcome.
On another note, hearing the "council of Reddit moderators" makes me imagine a cringeworthy meetup in someone's basement.
Didn't they boot out everyone that wasn't a suck up?
160 mods representing all subreddits? Yeah that's entirely power mods who would tow the line
I came here to banish reddit but this thing wont leave my feed. I guess I'm going to have to take the time to filter the word.
Ugh reddit mod community makes me so angry.... Glad I left that shithole
I’m also glad too. I just sign up and I’m currently looking for the alternative reddit communities here on lemmy.
just ask for them on !lemmy411@lemmy.ca they will find those subs for you
I think this will cause as many problems as it solves (from Reddit's POV), going private has always been a panic button for mods when shit hits the fan. Now those controversies will have much longer to build and have news stories written about it first. Short sighted.
You'd think this would drive away what mods are left, i imagine they are mostly there for the illusion of power they get at this point and this will be a step towards removing that.
But then, the entire corporatization should be enough to drive people away on it's own but it doesn't seem to be.
Most mods are corporate stooges anyways
They can't have anyone but themselves breaking the site. 😂 People should figure out a good way to protest Reddit. Ddos attacks can't be fixed. 😁
30 terabyte of Rick Astley per second should do nicely.
Fuck spez
I'm sure there will be ways around it. Mods can automod-delete every comment, change the rules of the sub to only allow posts of nonsense, or nit moderate at all.
The main problem is that protests don't succeed at reddit because people like moderating for free for some reason. Strangely Reddit has more leverage over mods than mods have over reddit.
like 10 seconds in automod to get right around that shit lmao.
Oh No, anyway.
Bots and locked down curated content vs. hive-minded rhetoric that circumvents anything resembling nuance at all.
Gotta admit, there aren’t many good choices here.
dont worry r/worldnews allwasy ready for the mission.