Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 1559 points –
Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge
arstechnica.com
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In response to concerns that the new r/homeautomation mod team could overlook posts with dangerous misinformation, the anonymous Redditor pointed me to the subreddit's sidebar, which has a disclaimer about the dangers of electricity. However, the disclaimer is only visible on old Reddit. The mod doesn't know why.

Oh Lord

Thank God I wasn't the only one who went WTF. That's like one of the simplest things I learned as a mod in my first 2 days. You gotta update the sidebar twice for both versions of it. It's been over a month since they probably took over and they still don't know this.

I love this article but it also makes me sad like with the old r/canning mods pointing out the unsafe material the new mods left up.

Sadly, even before the mod purge many subs couldn't get that right. I don't know how many discussions I had over the years about things that appeared in the sidebar, only to find the other person was looking at a completely different version of it. New.reddit.com was a problem from the start.

That's so true lol. Long story below but it deals with a fuck up some mods did with the old/new rules & automod.

I once had to deal with a major fuck up that the previous mods left me as they all fucked off to mod the next version of the console the subreddit was for. On the day they added me and two others, they practically said bye and good luck but didn't give us any control of the sub. They never touched the sub & the two other new mods quit or didn't touch the sub too. Was fun to be the sole mod with a subreddit of 5 million people for like 5 months....

The issue was that on the day before the old team fucked off, one of them changed the automod to automatically remove any post that dealt with support. It was set up that so the "support help" flair that any user could pick, would trigger the automod to remove it and then warn the user they would be banned if they didn't post it in the correct support thread.

Buuuuut the automod stated the rule wrong compared to the New Reddit version and mobile app people were flocking to modmail freaking out that they were about to be banned for trying to ask help to fix their console. AND it never stated what support thread or gave a link to it which made everyone ask on modmail for that too.

I had to deal with hundreds of modmails alone while learning how to code automod since the old mod refused to fix it even though I stated how people were freaking out. Thankfully I got help from somebody else that gave me tips on automod and how to correctly code it.

It turned out the automod was only stating the old.reddit rules and nobody had changed the new.reddit rules to match it. I used RIF to mod so I only saw the old sidebar lol.

I wanted to say all that because i realized that experience I had with basically being left to hang is how all these new mods probably have been for the last two months. All these features with no help or support from past mods would suck so much. I eventually snapped and called out all the old mods for how shitty they were for leaving one of the biggest subreddits on Reddit to a single person before leaving the team.

End of the long story lol. Sorry for making you read all that 😆 I just really hate how the new.reddit format can fuck up sooooo much shit.

No, I enjoyed reading all that. I was never a mod but was on reddit enough to pick up some things. Thank you for the window behind the scenes.

Function and design parity between versions? I don't even know what that means. Would that require teams to talk to each other? Because we nixed that to prevent unionization.

Would that require teams to talk to each other?

There probably isn't an old.reddit.com team in the first place, so no talking is needed.

To be fair, the amount of people automating their HVAC system with "a raspberry pi and a bit of python" in there with nobody batty an eye has been high long before the purge. Some people mess with everything they can without understanding any of what they're doing.

How can I use a sonoff to control my fireplace guys?

Remember the Kickstarter candle light which could be lit remotely but not put out remotely?

we talking about gas or electric? The Internet goes out and you suddenly can't turn off the gas...

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Dromio05 showed me several posts he deemed questionable since Reddit took away his own mod badge. For example, this post shares a link to an article about "rebel canners," which Dromio05 argues "gives a public platform to people who openly encourage methods and recipes that are known to be unsafe, like canning milk and open kettle canning." The post is labeled unsafe, but Dromio05 would have removed the link to the article.

Another cited example is this recipe for canned sauce. It includes already-canned tomatoes, which experts like the National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP) recommend against, as there's no safe tested process for this. The recipe also includes nuts, though the USDA doesn't have any recommendations for canning nuts, and NCHFP and other experts advise against canning any nuts besides green peanuts.

No comment. Moderators are the key to Reddit's success, and they have been treated like shit and will continue to be treated like shit.

Jesus. I can from time to time, I used to be a regular on /r/canning. The attention to detail re food safety was one of the best things about the sub, as you really can kill yourself and others if you piss about.

Botulism is nothing to fuck around with. I'd rather play with something safe like burning thermite than that stinky crap ever again.

Botulism has no smell, taste or colour change though.

Then that can of food was contaminated with something else as well. It definitely had botulism in there though with that bulge.

Won't someone think of the poor landed gentry!?

How did volunteers who run reddit's for-profit business for them for free end up equated with landed gentry?

I think you're responding to a half-assed attempt at sarcasm. It was spez who originally called mods landed gentry.

Maybe so! Always hard to say with the range of opinions I see on the internet these days

Hey now, I'll have you know I only ever whole-ass my sarcasm!

“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”

-Steve "spez" Huffman, days before he democratically forced protesting subs to reopen and removed mods.

That's a really good question to ask Reddit's CEO as he is the one who said that.

Landed gentry is when someone works for no pay in service of a lord, right?

I'm certainly not defending spez and I wholeheartedly agree that this business model is daft, but with all that said... for every responsible dedicated knowledgeable reddit mod, there's a dozen who find fulfilment in being fief lords.

It was all fun and games until reddit threatened to de-mod them, then suddenly "for the good of the community" they decided that bending over was the only option.

Wow! Who knew when you kick your volunteer mods who curate content for you for free to the curb that overall quality would decrease?

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the anonymous Redditor pointed me to the subreddit's sidebar, which has a disclaimer about the dangers of electricity. However, the disclaimer is only visible on old Reddit. The mod doesn't know why.

Wow this is the part that made me laugh the most. One of the first things I learned when as a mod was that you had to change the side bar in both old.reddit and the newer version since they both have different sidebars.

I never even realized that the loss of whole mod teams could make this simple feature unknown by the new team.

There are a huge amount of redditors these days who have no idea old reddit ever existed and the first time they heard of 3rd party apps was when Reddit announced they were pricing them out of existence. Naturally, a lot of those people are going to become mods now and their ignorance about fundamental aspects of the site is glaring.

This is only tangentially related but I started using reddit 13 years ago and the userbase has become increasingly unrecognizable in recent years. But what makes me truly feel like a dinosaur is seeing six month old accounts refer to reddit as "an app"... It's bizarre to me that so many people's exposure to reddit is limited to the worst way to possibly use the platform (the official app).

I remember Reddit 13 years ago and it really was a different place. The whole calling it an app was something that annoyed me too lol.

I also still remember my first reddit experience was BaconReader on the Windows 7 phone lmfao. I'm old.

what makes me truly feel like a dinosaur is seeing six month old accounts refer to reddit as "an app"

At least you haven't met people referring to the internet as "wifi" and didn't have a 16 year old say they "needed at least 8GB of memory on a laptop to store music" (this was about 6 or so years ago). They thought that the RAM specs (aka memory) was the same thing as storage on phones. I saw his brain melting when I tried explaining it to him and was confused by my saying "phones have both memory and storage, the same as a laptop or desktop".

Everything has been an app first for years now. Not sure when it switched.

Well yeah, when reddit just picks up whatever volunteers yell loudest, they don't exactly get experienced mods. Those people all left reddit already.

Tons of mods don't know, as all of the sidebars on old.reddit of many newer subs are blank

And that's the problem right there.

Reddit shat away the experienced people and gave the reigns to brown-nosers

Meh, that's their problem. I'm sure the subreddit I used to mod has been shut down. It was dead anyway. CTCD, but few remember the stupid dog

One of the mods on a sub I moderated got compromised, and the css of the sub got turned to cancer as part of a site wide attack.

I got a few PMs bringing it to my anttention and fixed it/demodded the culprit. A day later, I remembered new Reddit and saw that it was changed in the attack as well. Not a single one of the 1M+ subs brought it to my attention. Either they weren’t using new Reddit, or they didn’t care.

Does CSS carry over to the official reddit app?

I think the new Reddit settings carry over which is joust text and a few color options.

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I also have the feeling that the comments started to suck a lot more. It's starting to feel like comments on Youtube or Instagram, not like real people having a somewhat reasonable discussion about the topic.

Yep, interactions are definitely becoming more toxic. Indeed it starts to feel like youtube. I adopted Reddit at fisrt because of how friendly the community felt. That was 8-9 years ago and that time is clearly gone. Lemmy is nice, I hope it will keep growing.

I've noticed YouTube comments have actually become more positive (though still mostly useless). It seems YouTube has implemented some algorithm where it prioritizes "positive" sentiment comments above all. That's why all the top comments on popular videos are generic platitudes.

For example, go on any MrBeast video and read the top comments. They are all praising MrBeast for his videos and hard work. Finding any negative comment is difficult. On the other hand, if you go on a Reddit discussion about MrBeast, you'll find plenty of people complaining about him.

MrBeast is just an example, I'm sure we all have our own opinions about him but that's not the point I'm trying to make. In fact, the same is true for any popular YouTube channel. Even political channels, where you'd expect to see heated debates in the comments, mostly showcase top comments agreeing with the video.

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Anecdotal, but I’ve personally noticed a lot more open hostility in comment sections. I’m noticing that it’s starting to make me feel like I felt when I still had Instagram and FB: Lousy.

So I’m now making a conscious effort to use it less and hopefully stop it all together, one day.

If it can be a front of the culture war, it will become one. Society has polarized, and so, in turn, has public discourse.

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The last thing I read before quitting Reddit for good was someone calling me a prick in a pinned post on my profile telling people to go to Lemmy. Needless to say, I'm not sorry I left.

Yep. I was casually talking about which country to move to for getting a master's in a computer science-related field and I got lambasted just because I mentioned that I graduated from fine arts, despite that I've explicitly mentioned that I was going to move away from that field anyway and that the programs I plan to move to allow undergraduates from any background.

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because it's just made to make you upset somehow. the cynical nature of reddit is x100 now

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I can't put my finger on it, but I think there's been an uptick also in posts purely in the form of increasing engagement. Safe 'bets' on getting responses (i.e. ++ to AskReddit), remarkably bland headlines, and just shit that reminds me of controversy of the "jumpstart" of automated bots they used in the earlier days.

A lot of suspicious "wholesome" posts on all, too. Seems like an astroterf to make the whole thing more digestible.

I've been half turn between blaming spez for that, trying to keep "engagement" numbers up so he can IPO and walk, vs blaming karma bots. And then I thought, "Why not both?"

Pretty sure one of the new (announced?) changes is that people will be able to get money from being popular enough. Encouraging "engagement" and karma farming over actually using the site as a human.

My understanding is that that's an expansion of reddit's earlier cryptocurrency effort, where users in like 3 subreddits could earn reddit moon tokens. Which is nice and all, but it's about as reliable as any other cryptocurrency; it follows reddit's usual policy of never giving out anything of real value and making other people do the work; and since they're "awarding" it themselves, that means they have the main stash of moons in hand and they're the ones who will "win big" if moons ever takes off.

Mods weren't ever supposed to anybody but janitors. That isn't in a derogatory tone. The anonymous userbase was the original value proposition of reddit. The expertise came from random nobodies. Usernames didn't matter on reddit because nobody looked at it. It seems this is long forgotten history from a time when the internet was primarily IT nerds.

By the time mods were becoming somebodies, reddit was past its prime. Once the power structures started forming it was over. As we're seeing now reddit is hinges on single point of failure. The expertise among the userbase has gradually left the platform long before this API stuff. A long slow process years in the making.

Internet janitors are a dirty but necessary job not unlike the real world. Somebody has to scrub toilets and pick produce. People are a-holes on the internet who need to be put in their place. Reddit has long since become too hoity-toity for that. Now mods are supposed to be experts in their field. Too high to be digital toilet scrubbers. Too scared of "muh free speech" to janitor the Greater Fuckwads anymore. So reddit is an asylum run by the inmates. Expertise can't be assed to contribute to a dumpster.

On another note. The imgur purge has also contributed to the barren wasteland of reddit content history. So many dead posts.

But you can't be a 'janitor' on a sub like r/canning without understanding canning. You can't know who is posting unsafe information unless you know what is unsafe. That's the problem.

Thank you for using canning as an example. This is a excellent choice because it is a situation where people think they know what they're doing and they are just basically posting recipes for botulism. On Facebook there are the rebel canner groups and in those groups you're not even allowed to mention the word of botulism or the mods will ban you. Because even warning somebody that something is unsafe goes against those communities standards. Canning is a prime example of where the admins have to have actual knowledge to pull off the job.

To be fair, the linked article used r/canning as an example, not me.

I run a cryptography subreddit and we have the same problem. You don't necessarily need to be an expert in everything, but you absolutely MUST be able to tell who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't

Isn't that similar in real life? Taking care of the elderly and sick, firefighting etc. are or have very specialised 'janitor'-like tasks that need specific knowledge.

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It is more that Reddit wanted its moderators to not be anyone important, especially under the current CEO. Ditching the default subs, firing Victoria, heavily maiming r/all, and other actions were geared to prevent mods from gaining power over Reddit. On the flipside, Reddit maintained the mod ranking based on when a mod joined specifically to keep communities from forming more legitimate methods of mod selection.

Mods were supposed to be weak while being scapegoats for Reddit in case something went wrong.

They became the equivalent to automated customer service lines. Nothing but bots with no humans available to address concerns. Any attempt to contact a mod generally resulted in an arrogant reply.

the free speech argument doesnt really make sense as reddit was founded on being "the last bastion of free speech"

Free speech versus civility. Say what you want but don't think you won't get punched in the face for being an asshole. On the internet you should absolutely be able to get punched in the face. The virtual version of that is being modded. Which is apparently tantamount to human rights violations these days so mods have had to walk on eggshells. It's no wonder the old guard have been leaving in droves.

There was never a time in the past when you wouldn't receive a digital face punching for being an ass. As time went on people started giving up on reddit. Especially mods who cared to foster communities people wanted to use. Mods became glorified bot operators. "Automated customer service lines" as someone else said. And so the trolls have completely run amok on that platform. Usually there is no getting hold of a real human moderator. Other times they're so checked out they themselves get trolled into banning anyone but the griefers.

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Every couple of weeks I come back and check lemmy to see if the top post isn't about reddit. Not yet.

I'm fine with this - many of us were on Reddit for over a decade and had to cut cold turkey when they killed the site. We're here hoping Lemmy will replace it, so feels natural to speak of the old "shell" site.

Yeah, it always feels like asking about an ex girlfriend. I want to not care, but it's difficult not to.

Also, whether or not one uses reddit/twitter/Facebook, the state of social media is worth discussing, its important.

There are certain redditors who always appeared in comments from several subs I was following, and I’m very happy to see some of the same names popping up regularly here, too.

Hello, it’s me, theangryseal. You might recognize me from nowhere. But I’m everywhere now. I’m the shirt on your back buddy. I’m the wheels on your track buddy.

Now that’s an obscure reference. Enjoy it.

Sir this is !reddit@lemmy.world

That, plus articles from Ars Technica discussing Reddit generally get a fair bit of traction on this community because it's a semi-big name publication discussing Reddit in a negative light, which further confirms the stance most users on Lemmy already have about Reddit

Do note, though, that the parent company that owns Reddit also owns Ars Technica.

It's one of the biggest trash fires of the century, watching petulant fuckwits tear down functionally competent institutions and replacing them with nazis, spam and sockpuppets. certainly deserves the attention it's getting.

great job musko and spez, you idiots

Hey, one man's narcissism is another man's testing the effect of accelerated decay in Fortune 100 companies. Maybe their grandfathers left them a Brewster's clause in their wills. You never know!

lol thanks for the chrotle, this was worth reading.

I've been off Facebook for >5 years now but I still comment on news about fb

Subscribe to different communities. Most posts I see are politics, racecars (until I blocked it) and non English communities (until I block them)

Scrolling through all posts is fine. Communities are not (outside of memes).

I did a bit to try to keep up !league@lemmy.ml but it felt like I was posting to no one. Got basically no engagement. I stuck with it for a few months, because I understand the Catch 22, but it didn't seem like it was going anywhere anytime soon.

For league, at least, Reddit is the only option. I doubt it's the only community in that position.

This is my struggle too. Lemmy is great for the current events and entertainment stuff. Doesn’t have enough volume to replace the local or niche subreddits for me.

I personally am not into League but still wanna branch out, if you got any other communities thats niche but interesting, reply to me

It's almost like we all used to use reddit like 2 months ago so are interested what's happening with it, crazy

Hang on, sometimes a Linux sub will post something about how they hate Windows.

On your Subscribed feeds? Because this is literally the fuck Reddit community you're looking at and if you don't want that filter it.

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Look at the quality of mods they're getting.

The r/diving subreddit got a mod who claim to be an avid diver with 21 dives across 7 oceans. And the subreddit drama link

That mod is hardcore powertripping, lol. Why do people get so puffed up for being essentially forum janitors? At least 4chan mods could take it on the chin when the community made fun of them. Reddit mods have the thinnest skin and the arbitration skills of Judge Dredd.

I got irritated with the asshole mods on AITH and gave myself a new alt aita_mods_are_all_incels. They really really didn't like that, some incel girl mod actually sent a message saying she's not and deleted it.

Fucking tools the lot of them.

One day, I had to tell someone that they should research pet safety before giving other people pet safety advice. This person was recommending people to feed their dogs things that are well known to seriously poison and harm them. Apparently, according to that person, all dogs can eat anything because their grandma's one dog was fine.

I responded with links showing that the food was in fact harmful, and a lovely mod banned me for "arguing". It filled me with rage. Not because I was banned, but because the OG misinformation was still up, but all of the corrections were removed. Other people's comments correcting it were removed, too. Fuck accurate information intended to keep pets safe, I guess.

I hope that the random people who saw the post looked it up before trusting that person.

Reddit went from "I append site:reddit.com when querying google for well-founded and nuanced info" to the opposite.

That user is the alt of a well-known troll. They know exactly what they're doing.

I'm still not convinced that the /r/diving mod wasn't trolling the admins with that post.

To be fair, the content quality on Lemmy has been about the same from what I've seen.

Bots all over the place, low-effort quips instead of discussions bubbling up, lots and LOTS of low-quality armchairing, personal attacks and flaming instead of actual discussion....etc

It was good for a month or so during the reddit 3rd party app purge, but quickly went downhill.

My experience has been almost nothing but positive. A few snarky replies, but 99% positivity and good discourse otherwise.

I think it's a bit of both. Content itself is pretty lacking tbh - and I say this as someone who hasn't exactly contributed any quality content, but I have definitely enjoyed the overall community, it reminds me a lot of reddit 10 years ago tbh.

Yea but like Lemmy is a bunch of hobbyists running on donations. That’s not saying much for Reddit.

Did you try some of the smaller instances? Big instances will inevitably face the same problems that Reddit has/had. A platform is as good as it's users, and you can only moderate up to a certain point untill it becomes straight up censorship. Sadly more people also means more trolls and shitposters.

But yeah it's still annoying and I fully agree with what you said.

I haven't had anything remotely like this when sticking to my subscribed communities.

God the quips became so popular and incessant it was really annoying. The comment used to be a good source of relevant information and there were some really funny people in there but now it seems to be drowned out by the same one liners or bots.

I'm on lemmy.ca on a bunch of Canadian communities and it's not like that at all.

Yes some communities have been under attack by bots and people posting CSAM but otherwise it's been pretty civil.

I very specifically don't experience this but maybe that's because I'm using sync and have deliberately blocked bots from showing up in my feed.

How do you block bots using Sync?

This is actually a feature of Lemmy. If you open Lemmy and sign into your account in the browser you can go to content settings and there's a box you can uncheck for show bot accounts. Be aware this is all bot accounts even helpful ones line automods and such and it will affect the bota that autopost from Reddit as well. You'll see a downturn in traffic. But I thought it was worth the trouble.

I agree with this. There's some problems that need to be addressed. Hopefully sooner rather than later

Truthfully hexbear has a lot to do with it. Could use a fediverse purge of that level of shitposting

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Probably the best written article I’ve read on this subject. All concerning things in the article that Reddit absolutely doesn’t care about. Canning milk? What the fuck.

Edit: I forgot that condensed milk is a thing…wondering if people can make it at home?

Mmm. Nothing I like more than a 5-year-old can of milk.

Ah yes, the 2018. That's a good vintage. Aromas of pestilence and disease overwhelm the nose. An enticing menagerie of dumpster and botulism coats the palette with a subtle finish of garlic sharts lingering between sips. A pronounced effervescence from years of fermentation leaves a most pleasant mouthfeel. 95/100

I think you can make sweetened condensed milk at home but not safely preserve it. Have you noticed there's no shelf stable normal milk? There's no dairy products on the shelf on the Welch's aisle. Even given industrial equipment, the best you can do is evaporated milk.

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I think I've seen this effect. Felt a bit smug when I saw a post of r/linux talking about how the quality of the posts was so poor after the "reddit migration".

I've noticed it too that the quality of posts in certain subreddits I cared about just felt a lot more 'empty'. Which is both good and bad. Good cause Reddit got what they deserved and people stuck to their morals by dispersing to more federated communities across the web; but I also feel a tad sad that the subreddit championing a vision I want to see that took a long time to get there is now gonna leave a way pooer impression on anyone looking to join.

But eh, I'm not sure many if any people's mind on trying out Linux were decided due to a reddit post before. ( Feel free to tell me otherwise if I am wrong on feeling. )

It's a real shame that communities like that couldn't more easily uproot and move en masse to a new instance on Lemmy or similar.

Any users that cared probably moved on too quickly for something like that to take shape.

I think my bigtest issue with Lemmy is that I waited a bit from the huge migration because it just felt so incomplete and it was such a mess to jump into but now that I finally joined it feels dead with lots of subs basically dead with only some posts from months ago like the overzealous people decided this was dead and disappeared.

I'm kind of glad that the subreddits/communities that I follow hear are slow; At least the news ones.

Really the only pages I would like to see super "lively" would be the funny memes ones.

Which ones do you wish were more active?

it's ok.

spez said revenue isn't affected, so he got what he wanted. he doesn't give that much of a shit let me tell you

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The purpose of reddit is to keep people engaged while seeing ads. That's it.

it's odd because I find lemmy more engaging, but perhaps its because of clickbait discussions that come up on the first page.

100% correct. It's a powerful illusion because back in the day it was a real site with real people on it. It's taking some folks a long time to pick up on this.

There is almost no real content on there. If it's not a bot / AI, it's some shill with an agenda. It's all about the ads and clicks.

Replace "reddit" with any free service. Welcome to the Internet.

And before you "ackshually Lemmy" me, someone is paying for it. Perhaps even you, if you've donated to your home instance.

The Fediverse - being "free as in beer" rather than "free because you're the product being sold" is different.

It's different because it costs somebody money. If you're being an asshole on commercial social media, the company has financial incentives to keep you around. You're bringing in more eyeballs.

If you're being an asshole on a Fediverse server, it costs an admin something. They have to deal with complaints. They have potential reputational loss or defederation for their server. The server that they pay for!

Admins are paying for the server, so they must decide: is all this bullshit worth it? Is it something they really believe in and stand by with their real money and energy?

I think that changes the calculus of assholes, bots, and Onlyfans on social media.

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I've noticed a huge increase of ragebait AITA posts every time I check the front page. They're all pretty similar - disowning a child or deciding not to attend a wedding. And people fall for it every time. It's kind of sad to see one of the smartest places on the internet turn into social media junk food.

Umm, reddit readers, most never even acknolaging the exodus situation publically, began to really bug me. Knowing this, your words now stronger than ever throw into question their nature because:

people fall for it every time

That likely means both audences and creators. AITA is almost completely hyperreal now. Few non fictional interactions exist anymore. Was it always like this?

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What's reddit?

I think it's a website for people to ask celebrities whether they will fight horse sized ducks or duck sized horses.

Let's talk about Rampart instead, shall we?

By the way, have you seen the banner of this community yet?

What do you mean by the banner? The barbie image? It's very colourful

Omg you guys are amazing, thank you for the laugh. I was a reddit user since 2011. So many good memories, but I haven't been back since the day of the app collapse.....

WhEn dOeS tHe NaWaLl BaCoN?????

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Is that why 90% of everything is the same unfunny reposts from 80 years ago now?

Due to the lack of visible karma, people repost way less on Lemmy than on reddit.

It's less about visible karma and more about how high karma can push you to r/all faster, meaning people can sell those accounts.

You just have bots that auto post to lemmy from reddit instead, and flood the feed with no intervention.

Which may actually be worse.

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I've seen not only reposts, but also comments that I swear I've seen before with thousands of upvotes. The repost swarm is working in overdrive.

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WELL I FOR ONE AM SHOCKED!

absolutely shocked! who could seen that coming?

shocked! who could seen that coming?

Someone using old.reddit who can still see the sidebar warning?

I’ve been a redditor for ~14 years and knew reddit was dead ever since they scapegoated ellen pao to make a bunch of shitty changes. And the only reason I’ve been able to use reddit this long was old.reddit. They are so insistent on change for the sake of change, and change for the sake of satisfying investors and advertisers. They don’t give an iota of a fuck about their actual users.

You know how spez was bitching that reddit never turned a profit? I've said before it's his fault for never understanding reddit. Reddit's treasures are it's community and it's commentary. Instead of focusing on those, he's spent tens, maybe hundreds of millions, trying to force reddit into the latest techbro fad - reddit crypto or reddit NFTs or whatever. And then he absolutely fucking panicked once he realized that he'd paid for multiple AI companies to make off with multiple entire copies of one of reddit's treasures (which probably cost tens of millions in itself), and then alienated it's other treasure when he kept doubling down in his panic.

Yeah. Putting all the effort into useless stuff like NFTs, crypto, or really even the whole terrible New Reddit into first making the actual experience better would have been much better. Make people pay for your awesome features after you actually have awesome features.

Instead, they made the user experience worse and worse, and repeatedly broke the tools people used to make it convenient. Not to mention all the bots and bribing mods to promote Subreddits…

Perhaps New Reddit was supposed to be their big break. Too bad it sucks so badly.

I still can't believe they paid they much for Alien Blue, just to deliberately go out of their way to make it so much worse.

"I'm shocked, SHOCKED! Well not that shocked."

Accounts I don't regret deleting:

Facebook

Twitter

Reddit

Add Instagram to the list.

Pixelfed is already better than Instagram, anyway!

My weed dealer uses insta so I have an account

I know we all are in rage about reddit’s fuckery, but this says nothing about the state of the website.

we already knew reddit was not the objective truth or wikipedia, but mostly an echo chamber. incrementing the check on the information objectivity will NOT hamper reddit’s growth. we’ve already seen other social media thrive without the weight of fact-checking or their intended purpose (facebook, instagram, I’d dare to say the new twitter as well).

I as all of you would love to see reddit bomb so badly that they’ll all end unemployed and spez under a bridge sleeping with cardboard sheets, but that’s not going to happen soon.

we should stop looking at how badly is reddit doing, and start watching at how to make Lemmy a better reddit instead.

I don't even think about Reddit anymore. Let it fade into obscurity.

Yeah I haven't been back once since they blocked Sync. Hopefully it rots and dies, just like Digg before it.

Yea. I felt like the article was just nitpicking about not much change at all. Just past mods reminiscing? The nut graph of the write up was not great to begin with and the body wasn't really news...

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I had gotten banned over some stupid bullshit near the end of the drama, after i had already been posting here too, and was like 'yeah fuck it.'

Just a few days ago I couldn't resist making a new account simply because of how slow this place is and how often it goes down. Reddit is, absolutely, 500% worse then it ever has been. I'll go with much less content and random outages.

You know don't have to use lemmy.world right? There are other instances that have much better uptime. sh.itjust.works, for example, has a 99.97% uptime compared to lemmy.world's 97.07%. Lemmy.one is 99.98%!

Isn't this the most active tho?

You can make an account in a different instance and still access the lemmy.world content.

My post history and everything? i swear i must have heard wrong

You won't maintain your post history personally but your posts will still be visible

As long as your new instance is federated with lemmy.world, you can access all of their content. Additionally, there are a lot of instances lemmy.world is not federated with for various reasons whose content you will be able to access as well from a different instance

Oh dude you're missing out.

Join .today or something, then use a tool to copy your subscriptions from ediblefriend@world to the new instance. You don't get to see the Local feed from world, but All and Subscribed are the same. That's it.

https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

and how often it goes down

You can choose instane that doesn't go down often. That's entire point of fedi.

Doesn't Reddit automatically ban any new accounts you make after any of your accounts are banned?

It depends on how angry you made them when they banned you. But you used to be able to use other 3rd party apps to get around the ban. Idk how it works now that most apps don't work, maybe I should try making a new account to find out.

I got "don't talk to me or my kids ever again" banned by Reddit. Making a new account in a FireFox multi-account container was fine. Adding an email that is closely related to my previous ones (gmail dot tricks) got it banned. So it seems easy to work around, just don't do the obvious things.

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They want to kill the site and license the data. Same with Twitter. It’s the only explanation that makes sense based on what they’re doing.

Nah I think twitter's hit job is more to benefit the people musk owes money.

We find that our deeply engaged users are quick to challenge and downvote harmful or misleading content across the platform.

Yeah, right.

All 7 of them. The other 993 will upboat it for having a meme in the comment

reddit is rage fuel. i'm so glad to be done with it. it seems everything written there is driven to make you upset or your day worse somehow.

Hate to say it, but Feddy verse is no different.

Nowhere is safe from the shrill endless war of shitty middle class Americans with nothing better to do than stink up every available channel with whatever you dumb shit politics they refuse to shut up about.

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NGL it totally depends. For general news/politics etc yeah.

Some of the more niche subreddits....Its definately much less of that and some of the folks that have been around, arent using default subs. My "home page" looks severely different from the default.

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Dunno if this is related but for the first time in my life I've been receiving spam PMs on Reddit in the last few weeks... Very annoying

I've gotten some too, which is funny because all my accounts were "deleted"..

after I got banned from Reddit Admins for single reporting racist comment I decided its best time to leave. i am not going to bow to that racist scum. https://imgur.com/a/8B2dlSQ https://imgur.com/a/ctET6Rb

As per your screenshot & the contained link, you reported this comment as racist?

There them privileged white folk at it again, causing atrocities left and right. Love them that lack of culture.

It sounds to me like you got banned for a good reason, because that was an abuse of the reporting tool.

Reporting a racist comment isn't "abuse".

Even if you think racism is OK if it happens to be against a group you hate, it's still not justifiable to ban someone for bringing it to the the attention of the administrators.

That would achieve nothing except make people afraid to alert the mods.

Thats a bad outcome no matter what.

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privileged white folk

Probably saying privileged yellow/black folk is not a racism too. /s

On the other hand if you agree, I will appreciate your consistency.

Personally, "privlaged ritch folk stuck in their infantile fantacy" works as a really punchy drop-in replacement.

Indeed, rich is not a race. Good replacement.

Imagine if you were to replace "white" with "black" or "asian" or "gay" in the text you quoted. Is it now a racist comment?

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Hi @raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world , would you be so kind and elaborate about, how comment that is aimed on group of people based purely on their skin color is not racist and therefore reporting of it should be punished as it was? I say, it is misusing admin, or mod privileges for sake of spreading hatred against that specific group of people. All people should treat each other equally and nobody should banning people that fight racism by only option they have (had) on that platform, ergo reporting that.

Racism: attributing certain attributes (positive or negative) to a group of people based on perceived ethnicity. Also, to think that something like "race" even exists.

Comment in question:

  1. addressing how society treats a group of people based on perceived ethnicity - being privileged is not an attribute of your person, it's how your environment treats you
  2. trolling about actions of said group - committing atrocities - and while this is arguably on the edge, the key difference to racism is that it's describing actions that individuals and those in power commit, because no one with half a brain cell would read that comment as "all people of said group commit atrocities left and right"

That being said, for this particular comment, both parts of the statement are based in truth. On average, "white" people are still very much privileged in many parts of the world, and most world-wide atrocities committed post renaissance era were committed by the same group.

I am about as white as it gets, and I can definitely recognize this simple truth and certainly do not feel the need to get butt-hurt over someone saying it out loud.

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Second one here, the top comments are completely empty! Its odd really

Safety does not matter as much as money and being able to turn a profit. $50 over 5 lives.