Reddit is like the restaurant you've been going to for several years that was a mom & pop operation with awesome food and atmosphere. It got popular, and the owners made it a chain, so you could get the same food in a lot of different areas. The quality started to go down as they expanded, but it was already very popular. Then the owners started raising the prices, and the atmosphere started to get way less awesome. At some point, you realized that it's not the restaurant you fell in love with, and it wasn't a good value anymore, so you started looking for a similar kind of restaurant that was more like that one was early on. But the chain is still really popular, and a lot of people just keep going because it's what they're familiar with and they know the menu - they don't want to go to the work of finding a new place and they're content with what they're getting there. The people who have left are a drop in the bucket so far, and the chain restaurant is likely to continue operating for the foreseeable future.
I remember almost everyone use facebook at a time, even chinese use facebook before it was walled off in china. But then everyone got angry because facebook got worse and anti-user and some deleted account. Yet, facebook is still kicking
In a nutshell, the communities move on to a more culturally and technologically suitable perform
Life is short, it is wise fast track to Acceptance for five stages of grief. The best punishment for Reddit admins is to be forgotten
Facebook is still kicking but they had to buy Instagram because they were bleeding users to it like crazy. They're not declining in usage because the Internet (number of connected people) is still growing, but their user growth has slowed down significantly, to the point where they had a quarter with a decline in daily active users. That's bad for a platform like that, and their stock price has reflected that.
There’s people who even think Reddit is right.
Because they think Reddit is Facebook.
It’s crazy how many people are so eager to lick boots
This is just digg.com evac to reddit.com 13? years ago.
Step 1: Site thinks it owns content users created and made site what it is.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
13 is the age of the account I deleted and I was in the Digg exodus, so yeah.
Same here. Went from Digg to Reddit, now to the Fediverse.
It will take time for the muscle memory to go away. I still type in "reddit" in the address bar, and probably will for some time to come.
Beat you by a bit, but I have no loyalty to corporations who have no loyalty to me.
The overwhelming majority of Redditors probably don't really know what the actual issue is, and on the surface, Reddit charging for an API that they've allowed free access to for years probably seems logical. Plus, people are creatures of habit, they'd rather go back to the same website they've been visiting, with the community that they already know, than try to figure out what the heck a Lemmy is.
Do you think there would be use in having a site like upstract.com (the new popurls) that would aggregate the RSS feeds from all Lemmys and people could just browse through popular somewhat curated posts of the day?
I feel like there would definitely be people who would enjoy something similar for Lemmy. I think with the federated nature of Lemmy, 3rd party tools are going to be crucial when it comes to widespread adoption, as I feel like they're going to play a huge role in abstracting the confusing, nerdy parts of federation away from the general public.
I wouldn't be so sure. In multiple subreddits the communities voted to destroy the sub in response of the admins trying to break the blackout (e.g. pics only allowing pics of John Oliver looking sexy, and several subs pulling similar moves).
I would mildly argue that might be a good thing. The Masses [TM] are what changed reddit from interesting discourse to shitposting trolls. If everybody came here, it would just be more of the same.
So there aren't a lot of people here. But the people who are here make the atmosphere we love. We want more lemmy, with all the open talking. Not beehaw, where apparently they want to remain in a vacuum. They can't exactly, since that's evidently not how defederation works, but they want to. They might as well just go back to reddit.
Keep in mind, this is all my take on what's happening. I'm not completely sure I understand federation and how it works.
I guess because there are a lot of people who just don't care. Look at Twitter, Musk could do what he wants Twitter still has a big number of users.
Also reddit has a huge and very active community. This is very hard to replace.
I disagree with twitter, I wanted to continue using it despite the issues but the tweets and replies I was seeing was such a drop in quality that it naturally phased out of my routine, which I've from others in person that felt the same.
Reddit is a sharper change for us, twitter kind of just declined out of being worthwile.
Sadly that is true. Most people "just want it to work".
Honestly, apathy. It is not like people have to start paying for the app or website explicitly
Facebook/ Meta stole and continues to steal millions of users' data, the vast majority of the users do not care
Twitter hacked most third-party apps, but people still use it because it doesn't affect them personally. They still use it for free, so why not?
Reddit killed third party APIs? People will grumble, but they will recalibrate their mind and continue using the official app.
I completely agree, and I think another major factor is a function of when you started using Reddit.
I've noticed a trend that many of the people who've moved on from Reddit (or at least the ones who are posting here and in places like Hacker News) joined Reddit 8+ years ago.
I started using Reddit about 14 years ago, and I've definitely noticed a change in the overall vibe of Reddit over those years. There were obvious changes (like cracking down/banning specific subreddits) and there were more subtle changes (like communities growing so large that the comments turned to shit) and there was a departure from a text-heavy, original-content focused haven for like-minded people to a feed full of gifs and inflammatory comment (not to mention ads-that-are-pretending-to-be-posts).
People who have been using it for so many years notice this change, but it was so gradual and over so long a time that they were used to it -- essentially the change was slow enough that we were lulled into accepting the new reality of Reddit.
But then this whole kerfuffle has shaken us out of it and made us realize that it's only going to get worse. So here we are, onto greener pastures.
Now, on the other hand, we have the (many, many) people who started using Reddit more recently. They only know the "new" Reddit. And so they don't get what the big deal is. They think the mods are throwing a fit and the power users are just whiny and "why the hell can't I see my memes?".
They don't understand what we miss about Reddit.
As a fairly 'new' user of Reddit, I think you're pretty spot on.
I've been using Reddit for around 5 years or so now (and their mobile app, I know, burn me right now) and as you said, for users like me, it's not that obvious how much Reddit has changed for the worst. Sure, a few things were changed for the worst, but compared to other social medias, Reddit still seemed like the better option to me.
The think is, this protest has shed light on a lot of issues I ignored, and the way Reddit Corp. has handled it just straight up made me sick and wanting to dissosiate myself from Reddit as a whole. But I've a strong political background, strong beliefs and I am french so.. I'm clearly not the 'common user'.
Those, I get why they see the protest as an inconveniance at best, and just want to keep using the website conveniantly as they usually do. They don't know about 3rd Party Apps, they don't care about useful bots, they don't understand forums and old internet culture. They just want their daily dose of content.
EDIT: Also my very first comment on Lemmy, as I'm trying to fly away from Reddit.
Reddit is unsalvageable and had been for a long time, but again, you are not going to be able to take the redditor out of people even if they move somewhere else for a long time.
None of us should be trying to build a better reddit here, we should be aiming to build something new, knowing what works and what doesn't from our time as redditors.
Something more sincere, I guess.
The arrow of enshitification flys in one direction only. the people that are still there will migrate out eventually. spez was right when he said the majority of users don’t care about the api, but fails to realize that the majority of users don’t generate content. The users that do generate content are jumping ship.
Yeah, the majority of users don't care about the API because they don't know what it means - that it's the interface that enables not just third party apps, but also moderation tools.
The same users that will tell you that they don't care about the API will start whining when the moderation of their favorite subs turn to shit, when they get overrun by trolls and spammers and bots and advertising.
People just fail to connect the dots.
Do you have any statistics though? Or it's just something you want to believe in?
Because of what is WAS. While it still remains a bastion of information and data, for me Reddit has went WAY beyond a social media that I'll use. I was already done when they decided not to reconsider their API decision - I could have been swayed, too. Companies deserve to get paid for their data and service; but not price-gouging rates like Reddit is attempting.
It really sucks, too - I loved what Reddit, and its USERS, provided to the userbase... when I heard about mgmt planning to forcefully take back BLACKOUT sub-reddits, tho; that was it. NO ONE should remain there - I don't understand how anyone could - federation is the only way forward, aside from going back to a website for every 'sub-reddit'... Lemmy and LemmyNet should, as they are, really take hold right now.
The devs need to find more help; I hate to say this, but theres money there.
NO REDDIT, NO MORE.
MORE Social, less Media.
I have zero hope for Reddit. I had no idea there were much better 3rd party apps available for Reddit on phones, so the API changes don't impact me. But I've noticed over the years more and more, astro turfing by bots, bots reposting popular things to karma farm, as to sell the bot to entities looking to influence reddit via the aforementioned astro turfing.
It's all very gross, I started to feel like a duck sitting in a pond surrounded by ducks, but not really, they're all decoys, fakes, mean to give the impression of a big crowd. I don't like that trend, and on top of that, the idea of Reddit going public, and trying to push our content as their value makes me sick. The owners of reddit haven't done the heavy lifting, we the users, the mods all did the work and built up content. The idea that some chucklefuck was going to profit big from our effort isn't something I want to be part of any more. So here I am, and I gotta say, Lemmy feels like a 2000's forum by comparison, and I hope its very nature makes it harder to fall into the same pit falls as reddit and digg did.
Decentralization's pretty hard to kill so as long as people stick around, I have high hopes for places like these.
The wierd thing was the bots selling t shirts of art they steal off of reddit. But what's stopping those bots from coming here?
I had hope until yesterday. I was a mod and all my users turned on me and said some really hurtful things. I'm gonna give a mod position to someone else on a smaller sub I'm a part of or two and step down from the rest. I'm guessing I'll still lurk, but I'm done with it.
I don't think people understand how important moderation is. I'm sorry you had that experience. I appreciate all the work you've put in.
Thank you. Working to let it go.
One of my favorite subs went aggressively pro-shill. Not just "you did your best". But nothing except contempt and endless mockery.
I would say it's astroturfing. But previously a gaming sub had gone dark for a mere 24 hours as a statement about toxicity and the response was similar.
There's definitely some hardcore shilling and astroturfing in a lot of subs where blackouts and John Oliver memes have become the norm. People with no posting history, brand new accounts and low karma accounts have flooded in to insult the mods and attack the protest.
Why don't you just step down without assigning a new mod? Let Reddit self destruct itself.
You're on the Fediverse where the more "extreme" people moving away from Reddit are. Hence, there is a strong bias toward experiencing the Reddit fiasco in a way that makes one think, that it's already a sinking ship. For many, Lemmy isn't as easily useable and mature as Reddit is.
The echo chamber will continue. Too easy to surround ourselves with the same opinions all of the time
That's kinda true in both cases, right? Like the ones who remain attached to reddit and new transplants to Lemmy will both be like "good riddance"
They are used to going to Reddit and have no interest in finding an alternative, when their community is there.
Too be fair, the fediverse is not easy to grasp for the average user.
That is absolutely right too!
You are right, and the fact federation is perhaps overplayed or emphasized when talking about something like Lemmy doesn't help.
The regular users don't care, as long as the content is available. Which unfortunately isn't quite the case yet (with no disrespect to developers, I think Lemmy is something I'll stick to for a good while)
The landing page at join-lemmy.org should lead straight into active content, and then let users choose an instance once they're ready.
I am particularly motivated to ditch Reddit and yet the first time I saw that page I figured I was going to need to configure a bunch of shit to get started.
So that's one major issue that needs to be addressed. I'm sure it will be in time.
It’s really not that difficult to understand. Half the battle is getting people to realize it’s easy to sign up for an instance
Denial, at least for me. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that anyone could be that stupid and eager to destroy it’s most active part of the user base…
And the fact that it’s Reddit, a Site I always preceived as community driven and kinda above those corporate shenanigans, I still have hopes some saner heads might prevail. Although that seems increasingly unlikely by the minute…
Reddit is a VC backed startup so this was always going to happen. I am surprised it took so long, to be honest.
VC
I swear the only acronym I can think of is Vietcong. What do you mean by that?
It stands for "venture capital".
Investors invest money in a company in hopes they'll make lots of money on the deal in the future. Often high risk and high reward.
Thank you. The context makes sense now.
They don't see their niche interest groups migrating to a different platform.
Smaller subs may have had just enough critical mass when accessing the entire reddit user graf, but new platforms are not there yet.
It is much easier to gain traction in a unified user base than in a federation of disparate user bases.
Yeah, that was it for me, I deleted my old 10+ year old user, who was a moderator, I might come back with a smaller account, but rewrote and deleted all my old stuff, the thing is there is really hard to find something for some of my really niche interests :/
Denial
Anger
Bargaining <-- they are here
Depression
Acceptance
Reddit Is Fun is one of the apps being killed off next week. Their subreddit was marking each post with which stage of grief it was. A lot of anger and Bargaining.
I still can't believe it will actually happen...RIF was Reddit on mobile phone for me. Killing it is like killing reddit itself. Well, yeah, good luck
I kind of agree but I have to reply because this is one of my pet peeves:
The five stages were never meant to strictly appear in that order and were never intended for anything other than death.
Oh, that makes me feel good. Looks like I'm at acceptance. Just not sure how long I was depressed :-\
I was at depression when they announced the nsfw change. I knew they were coming for the 3rd party apps next. Fucking Elon you cuck.
I thought the nsfw change was in tandem with the API change. They were not? They are changing nsfw on desktop too?
Its the sane reason people still play old mmos. Theyve already sunk so much time into it and they are used to it, its were their community is and something new is uncomfortabke and scary.
Nah, we still play because we like them. I play oldschool Runescape because I can't stand Runescape 3. It has nothing to do with 3 being scary, I just prefer the mechanics of the old school version.
I don't have any hope for reddit, but unfortunately, it is stil a very good source of information. Plus some previously established communities cannot be easily replaced, so reddit still has a use for me.
I hope that with time, my old communities will find their way here. Until then, sometimes I need to use reddit to talk to some people and access information.
And this is what makes the whole situation so shitty. All of the popular social media sites suck, but it's not easy to replace them with something new when the majority of the content and community stays there.
Kind of the way (at least for me), I still have a FB account since there are still old friends or relatives that would be impossible to reach otherwise. So it just sits there, on life-support, unless I need it.
Twitter has been slowly turning that way, and now Reddit will work the same for me, but it'll take a while.
The vast majority of reddits userbase are consumers. They are already using the official app and don't care about the politics of the platform. These people are only there to get their content fix.
I realised this when I saw a post on a subreddit where someone shared on how to turn off some kind of notification in the official app. So many other people thanked this person... Reddit has become another mainstream social media site like FB, Instagram and so on.
Here's one way to realize why Reddit should not be taken seriously: Suppose that the head moderator position for r/politics was put up for open auction. How much would it sell for? It would be purchased by someone who was interested in controlling what information people see.
Subreddits are moderated on a first-come first-serve basis. If you were the first one to squat a name 10 years ago, you get to be the head moderator, even if someone else might do a better job. This is the "landed gentry" comment Reddit's CEO was referring to.
The irony that u/spez and others keep using landed gentry in the wrong way is hilarious.
Landed gentry bought their "title" (it's not really a title, more a socio-political category). The first scenario you described, with someone buying the position of moderator... that's 100% landed gentry. Commoners with wealth would buy a big house and property and then be considered landed gentry. It's not something that was given to them like peerage (aka nobility).
The reality is that content producers and moderators are closer to cotters--somewhere in between serfs and husbandmen. They don't own the land (e.g.: subs), but they work it. The only difference is that serfs and husbandmen could derive a profit from their labour, whereas most mods and content producers don't (as far as I'm aware).
If we keep going with the middle-age titles, u/spez is much closer to a "lord of the manor" than he would care to realise. He owns the land, can choose who works it and who is able to make a profit and how much. He can withdraw that permission at any time, and he amasses vast amounts of wealth based on the work of the people who, effectively, work for him for free.
I'm of the opinion that Reddit will become incrementally worse going forward, most users are not bothered right now because the whole API fiasco affects mods and not them, but as usual they miss the forest for the tree. The site will go for the users and creators next, but it won't be like this, it'll be one tiny annoying feature at a time to avoid mass abandonment. I'm already looking for alternatives, such as this one, in preparation, but most will put up with anything just to keep consuming the same old content.
I don't even think it needs to go for users and creators next; making moderation harder will have plenty of impact on its own. Many people seem to think mods randomly remove crap in some weird power trip. The reality is most are busy removing spam, abuse, shitposts, and the 5th submission of the same news link that's still on the front page. Once unpaid mods start leaving they'll have to implement automods that'll just suck as they always do. The quality of every sub is going to go to hell pretty quickly.
There are more potentially interesting websites than I have time to spend. I'm taking the same attitude to Reddit that I take for StackOverflow and Wikipedia. I'll read their content, especially if it comes up in search, but I'm not wading through the cesspool to try and contribute anything.
because the majority of people doesn't really care sadly
yikes, he’s one of the least professional CEO’s. It’s embarrassing to see how he speaks about his decision making.
Because the content that people dump into it for years and communities are valuable. May be if some of those communities migrated to lemmy and I just keep accessing contents from way back machine, then I may not want Reddit anymore, but at the moment. I wish for it's redemption
Like it or not. The internet is evolving.
Most of the subreddits I used to frequent (particularly/r/manga) haven't made the move to anywhere, nor they blacked out in protest. While I see some parallels here, there's still very few active users.
I would love to be able to post more content myself, but I objectively do not have enough time in my hands.
I follow some pretty niche topics, and have had to make an executive decision regarding indifferent behavior from those who moderate discussions in those areas: Talking about a specific crypto, or a style of painting takes a backseat to my politics.
This was the final straw for me, and I feel that a collective lack of participation is the only recourse to assist those who are indifferent in generating an opinion.
Not only that, but I extracted (and continuously delete when they reappear) my contributions to those discussions, reposting them elsewhere.
some people still poop in holes in the ground.
Because Reddit is familiar and people like to stick with what they're used to and comfortable with.
People like being comfortable, new places can be uncomfortable.
It's this simple. So just let them have their porn-filled garbage can of a place.
Reddit is now in the ilk of MySpace and facebook.. Corpo-wasteland devoid of anything but ad revenue and cheers from shareholders.
They can keep it.
I have no hope, but there are a few subs that I still love and it's sad that he is destroying that so he can make reddit like every other soul-sucking social network.
reddit is unfortunately the only place I can go to discuss random things I love like the EPL, or WNBA, or the japanese show Gaki No Tsukai as no one around me in real live is into them. Hopefully some of that can transfer to lemmy or other places...but who knows...
Hahaha people are stupid bro
Honestly, it's a information goldmine. You'll get answers to most obscure questions and in detail. All others sources on the internet are either fluff or endorsements. It it also inconvenient to have to visit two websites that does same thing. So people don't want to abandon what they are habituated to.
We are losing a lot, this new ActivityPup fediverse is exciting but it is like going back a decade for long-term reddit users.
Reddit obviously sucks now and has been like this for years, IMO it was newReddit and its focus on Facebook users that was the biggest event declining quality. What we had slowly eroded and its no longer there, but there were still enough smaller active communities that it could still be a good experience.
We are rebuilding and it is fun and exciting, but we are losing a big part of our lives in the process, we wont have something equal to what we lost for a couple years to come.
I agree, as someone who saw reddit evolve from r/reddit.com to what it is today, it took about 4 years for them to really get to peak old reddit with the introduction of multireddits. Other than that most of the development has been in the third party apps, and really much of that development has been updating the apps to match the evolving OS design language rather than new reddit API endpoints. But we now have the advantage of having a minimum viable product and people with years of experience building and moderating communities.
I used to mainly use niche subs. The default subs are fucked. Same old one liners over and over, getting upvoted to oblivion.
Some people like my bf just browse for a little bit of their communities and don‘t care about anything else.
However, if we make this place interesting enough they will come naturally, those sorts of people are like moths who are attracted to interesting content.
I get the reddit c suite just wants to go public and finally get their payout, which is understandable but if they're out then we're out too. There's better platforms now anyway that need a reason to be used and developed. They could have so easily handled this differently by just making the reddit app experience better than any third party apps today. But here we are and honestly I wouldn't bet my retirement that teenagers will still be posting to reddit in 40 years.
I'm guessing, at least partially, sunk cost fallacy.
And not knowing about alternative places.
And let's be honest, there a majority of people out there that don't want to take the time to figure out something new, and something that has some slight learning curve up front.
The fediverse as a concept is very different than the internet as it is now. The last 15 years feels like a slow slow consolidation of all the sites that rely on user generated content. Now that federated user content sites exist, people will need learn how it all works.
There's another aspect I haven't really considered until now. A lot of the sites that have user generated content spoon feed their users content they think they will be interested in. Reddit at least had a subscription model where you hand pick the communities you want, and the community curates the content you see.
There's a lot of stuff at play here, and I am very excited to see how it all unfolds for Kbin and Lemmy. Great tools will be adopted by great communities, even if they don't reach massive popularity.
Eh, I know about the alternatives and they're all clunky messes that will probably never have anywhere near the same userbase as reddit. Even if they do, they won't function the same way.
I don't mind Lemmy, and if Reddit continues to shit the bed I'll probably switch over fully, but I would much much prefer that Spez backtrack on all the recent garbage and just have stuff go back to business as usual.
I like having all my content aggregated to one space. A big selling point of lemmy and other federated systems is that they're "more free", but until a month ago everything was fine. I don't need or want to shake the foundations of how people consume media, I just need one guy to stop being a dickhead for 30 seconds.
It's been my community since like 2007. It's hard to move on from all of those conversations and inside jokes because suddenly the landlord says he gets to be a part of our conversations because he owns the property despite never participating in anything besides maybe suggesting a few holiday events that the community had to make happen and execute on their own. It has nothing to do with the site. It has to do with what we created there, a lot like the street corner that used to be a thing. It's been made clear we're no longer welcome there and we'll find a new corner to hang out on. And as soon as it's user friendly enough the masses will follow. That's a mixed blessing because the same tired replies and memes will follow but the content will be there.
I'm a little drunk right now so I'm being overly sentimental, but the point remains. We miss the experiences we had, and fuck that greedy, spineless motherfucker for making us go elsewhere. But we'll do it and laugh about it the same way we used to about Digg. "Fuck Kevin Rose" was a thing the same way "Fuck u/spez" is.
Actually when you realize he did contribute it's worse than if he didn't. u/spez used to be a moderator. On r/jailbait. You can guess what that was for yourself
They are just following the reactionary social media norms these days. The lack of proper passing of information and just humoured by the subreddit protests such as in r/pics. Some people are not actually on Reddit for information.
I get a "sunk-cost fallacy" feel from it. Like Bill Hicks' bit went- This HAS to be real. Look at my furrows of worry- look at all this Karma. This has to be real!"
.. it's just a ride.
I can only repeat what I just commented somewhere else:
I built Swift apps and Mastodon or Discord are NOT a proper format to get help, Discord being crappy for archiving, too.
I have a hard time getting help by people that really know this stuff because Swift is made by Apple, and the Apple bubble tends to stick to Twitter and the likes. If enough migrate, I can finally say frick off, Reddit
Don’t underestimate how much resistance to change stops people from looking beyond the status quo. Moving away from Reddit is a clear example. I suspect a lot of lurkers from Reddit are actually from the category of Late Majority or Laggards
Personally, I just feel bad for Apollo's creator and mods (the good ones) who spent so much time carefully taking care of a community they love, so in a sense I wish Reddit would come to their senses and axe that fucker CEO and revert to reasonable API changes. But it's mostly wishful thinking. Besides, now I would feel bad if Reddit managed to go back to being good because that would mean that this aswesome Lemmy thinghy would go back into the shadows, while it deserves so much attention imho.
I hear what youre saying, and I do agree, but keep in mind that the developer of Apollo has definitely come out well in all of this.
He has made millions from Apollo. Yes plural. Yes in USD.
I'm not saying he isn't deserving of his success, I just want you to be aware that he is definitely well off.
I'm not saying that they don't love the community, but it was probably also a lucrative opportunity for the developers too. I bought paid versions of a few, and found Boost to be my favorite. I wish they would head over here because people would definitely support them.
I had hope until the infamous AMA posted by spez, and him doubling down on accusing people of blackmail. I've purged my account history immediately after that.
How did you do that?
I have fixed and modified a userscript I found on greasyfork. Use Violentmonkey extension to install it.
Shreddit, power delete suite, or any other methods you can find by googling "erase reddit history".
Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they're there to stay.
All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:
Bugs (I love lemmy, but gosh, have you seen how buggy and sometimes unresponsive it is?)
The complexity of "servers" (don't get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
Lack of content
Lack of users
Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn't happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.
The complexity of “servers” (don’t get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
I'll admit the technical stuff is probably the most off-putting. Most major social media got where it is by being idiot proof. The whole set-up will need to be much more streamlined if they want to really dip into Reddits user base.
For example, join-lemmy.org should do this, IMHO, without any technicality. Just transparently register to random server, with a curated cross-servers pre-selected list of subscriptions. Once users are distributed across servers, people will just recommend friends/family to join their own server, then the centralization of join-lemmy.org won't become an issue. But I might be utopian.
I don't think a lot of people who are in the know have any expectation of this turning around and going well, but I don't blame anyone for hoping it will. The existing communities that are uprooted from all this, not to mention the headaches of signing up for new platforms and all that entails, aren't exactly ideal. Avoiding them from being necessary would be fantastic... alas, that hope is indeed slim.
I think a lot of the general reddit user base is still out of the loop on it or just doesn't care about the drama enough to make any kind of change.
Many users don't log in every day, and might just sign in to look up answers to specific questions or to read individual subs. Those folks are a lot less likely to have been following all the updates through last month and before since so much was announced across a variety of subs.
I don't care about what happens to Reddit, but hopefully at least some of the content gets saved. It was already annoying when I was trying to find some answers to a tech support question and the subs that had answers were private.
Because no matter how bad it gets, like all successful social platforms, it will stay successful. People will continue to use it no matter how much they complain or criticize it. I regularly complain about Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc. But I still use all of them. It doesn't matter how unsatisfied people are with how things are being handled, if most people still see a reason to use it, they will until it's gone.
Why? Because the whole reason reddit is even worth visiting is the posters.
Sure, the people in charge of the whole infrastructure that supports the act of posting and reading posts are making destructive "business decisions", but until now they've largely been basically a bunch of invisible, nameless, inconsequential people as long as the proverbial lights stayed on for my ten years on reddit. They were technically in charge of stuff, but any time there was drama around reddit employees themselves, I had to go to places like /r/outoftheloop or /r/ELI5 in order to figure out what in the actual heck the inexplicable hubub was all about.
To me, that means they're NOT what reddit is, they're just the people who make it possible.
The folks who do lights and sound at a stage play are necessary for the play to function at that particular theater, but if they were the only ones doing anything there, noone would show up and stick around.
Inertia is a horrible thing. It took a LONG time for most of the niche communities on reddit to get "established" enough to have semi-regular content. Inertia being what it is, it will likely take quite a while for the same to happen here and it won't be exactly the same thing. It may be better and worse in some ways, but it WILL be different and some of us were quite comfortable with what we had. So, yeah, hope, because losing something you like and care about, watching it get gutted, wrecked, hobbled, and ruined is not inspiring or fun.
That being said, I'm seeing very encouraging things happening here so far, so this might become my new home.
Bots are still on reddit, so all the people they always interact with are still there.
The average redditor couldn't care less about what is going on.
There are about 5 years of my life on there, for some users 15+. Now, if you dropped your laptop with 15 years worth of memories on it, you damn sure would have hope you could still save the data, even if it's obviously done for.
I also still have hope for Twitter (less tho). Both concepts are good, they're just run by fucking idiots making them unusable.
For people who were more than just the causal browser/lurker, Reddit was an amazing place to not only obtain information about very specific things, but also to connect with other people. I have type 1 diabetes and the ability to connect with other type 1 diabetics to commiserate, share information, and seek help on Reddit was like nothing else anywhere else on the internet. I have a few other niche interests that also only had communities on Reddit.
Years ago, these things (health conditions, niche interests, etc) all had their own separate forums scattered throughout the internet. One forum might have a few dozen people, one might have a hundred or so. But Reddit quickly became the central place where we could connect. Whereas forums could maybe attract a few hundred people, subreddits could connect with THOUSANDS. There’s not yet been anything else like it.
Unfortunately, we made the BIG mistake of relying on a for-profit, centrally owned company to function as a town square. Same with Twitter. We found value in sharing information and connecting through these platforms, only to get screwed over by billionaire CEOs.
Hopefully we have learned our lesson. Hopefully something comparable will take Reddit’s place. It’s not going to happen over time. I never expected Mastodon to replace Twitter overnight. But slowly, very slowly, at least some people are seeing the downfall of corporate social media and will hopefully slowly switch over to federated alternatives. I don’t think it will happen quickly, nor will it happen for everything. But I do think it’s already happening. And it will happen faster if we get some good mobile apps.
I've being feeling that lately reddit had become full of repost bots and fake ads. Was there just because there was nowhere else to go
I feel a similar way. The quality just kept going down and down to the point where I couldn't tell what was real or not. Most just weren't worth reading either way. Lemmy seems the same way now too. People are focusing on making "content" instead of trying to make higher quality posts.
You both make such great points here. I've definitely had those times I felt like a post that's upvoted to the front page is really an advertisement. And within thread comments it has become almost impossible to know who is genuine, a troll, or a literal bot - along with being pretty toxic for a long time.
At the same time, there are some extraordinary communities and knowledge repositories that might be difficult to replicate in the fediverse. For example, I can't yet envisage how a highly factual community like Ask Science, or such, might work. But I love the retro feeling I'm getting here - of discovering a new, blossoming internet community - and the fact that there are seemingly real people behind the posts. lol.
When i was just lurking here at the start of rexit, i kept getting the feeling of finally being around real humans again. It was amazing! unfortunately it seemed to go back to reddit style copy paste link spam to generate content. One step forwards and one step backwards.
Honestly: for my social media consumption Reddit works pretty well. I always used to webinterface so for nothing really changed.
I am here because I felt like changing things up more than anything. Well: the fediverse is a super interesting idea and looking at something fresh is always fun.
Still; it seems pretty likely that this place will be a good deal smaller than Reddit for the foreseeable future and that’s both a strength and a weakness.
The main strength of Reddit is it’s nichier subs. There is one for just about anything. You need a massive volume of users to do such a thing and I don’t think Lemmy will reach that size anytime soon.
I expect Lemmy to be a place where people value Openness and Freedom. Generally there are less people that care about Freedom AND Pu’er tea than there are people who care about just Pu’er tea.
I wonder what will happen to Lemmy in a couple of years🤔
The silver lining is that hopefully we can get a few people off Reddit and onto here and eventually grow these spaces. I do miss the thousands of upvotes and comments though, but that'll come in time
I just hope there's no power trippin edgelords - toxic sweaty mods here. And whoever is in charge(like a CEO) I hope is also a normal human being. All I ask from you is to work with the community not against it.
Whoever is in charge (like a CEO)
That's the fun of the Fediverse; there isn't a CEO. You're in charge if you want to be. Go setup your own instance if you find you don't like the one you're on, or find one whose admins you like. Don't like Lemmy? Go write your own activitypub software to do the same stuff!
That is easily solvable within the fediverse, contrary to reddit. In reddit you had to kinda deal with it. Here, people can simply fuck off to another instance.
Because there is not yet a full alternative to reddit.
The only thing I can say is, I don’t.
Look at the twitter. Whatever they can do people stay there. Maybe the hardcore users or geeks will leave, but the crowd will stay.
Nah Twitter is a shell of its former self. Try searching up a niche subject and 99% of the tweets are ads.
Yeah, the entire niche industry community I was on twitter for absolutely ate it during the early days of Elon and the majority have moved on - mainly to social media spaces like Insta or TikTok.
We got some of them on Reddit, even - though that sure was a brief and shallow victory, all told.
Yeah I'm software educator in a few small niches. I used to just go and search the topic and make friends, help people out but now 99% of the posts are automated shilling for some business or some SEO spam.
I still try to pop in but it seems like Twitter is a lost cause especially since they put search behind login now. Just like Reddit they have alienated content creators and it shows.
I think "hope" is a tricky word for it. A lot of people don't really care about the issues and a lot of people who use it sparingly for a quick "haha" won't really be affected (at least not yet). So those people may not really hope for more.
I still use reddit for my niche gaming communities and while the possibility of making federated alternatives for those communities exists, it's far simpler to stay.
I watched his recent interview (only for 10mins) but he described Reddit quite accurately. Namely, reddit(or platforms like ours) is a city, a city is living only if people are living. Also, he knew that very minimal and subtle moderation is the right way.
It sounds like a CEO who knows its stuff, but facts have been shown his actions and attitudes are outrageous. The moderation was good enough to reach success for 18 years, only bc people do it for Reddit for free. He only took the free ride on it.
The biggest problem I have with this guy is that the API charges is really selling people knowledges and memories as a product. It is supposed to be free and open. He is taking all the profits as business with no promises or giving back to the community. This model simply doesn't work well with us, I would rather stick to decentralised model as long as it is reasonably efficient.
There is nothing inherently problematic about charging for API access, it's the fact that the price they've set is ludicrous, something like 25 cents per thousand calls when you'd expect it to be more along the lines of 4-5 dollars per million calls.
It's like someone buying a free parking garage, letting mopeds park for free, and charging cars five hundred dollars a day for parking, and then, instead of just being honest and saying "Fuck people with cars no cars allowed," saying that the car drivers are at fault for wanting to use a more full-featured vehicle that takes more space
Indeed, if the prices were reasonable this would not be a problem. I believe that the Apollo developer even said as much (or maybe it was rif's developer - or neither and I'm just imagining it) - and I have no objection to it either, the servers aren't free to run after all. But the rate the used? It's just absolutely fucking incomprehensible.
The shitty treatment of third party developers is just the unmentionable icing on this already disgusting cake.
Sunk cost fallacy is my assumption, but take that with a grain of salt. I'm one of those low tech savvy old farts people talk about. I left because making it harder for moderators to do their jobs means communities that I love will be less safe and welcoming. Maybe the rest have to experience that discomfort for themselves before they too are driven away. Or they think they can ride this out and continue as before when things settle down.
This is good to see, it seems a lot of the people that were for the blackout left, now there is so much vitriol against moderators on reddit, I'm so tired, I just don't want to anymore, deleted my 10+ year old account today after telling my mod team I can't anymore, so now at least the chances are smaller that I will go back.
Just know that I for one appreciate the hell out of you. I don't have the technical skills to do what you do, and to be perfectly honest, I don't have the patience either. It amazes me that people with the skills volunteer their time to do this mostly thankless work which makes communities more enjoyable. From the bottom of my heart, thank you!
The thing is I really enjoyed the community that I modded, and still do, so I wanted to make it the best place it could be, I didn't have the skills either to do it in the beginning, started out just helping out the main moderator of our community, then after a couple of years they just disappeared, and I was driving myself rather insane for a year before I started fighting with the admins for 3-4 weeks to get the rights to get more moderators to join me, since I didn't have the right to before that, only the main mod had those rights.
I invited some people that I trusted from the community, and it at least made the work more tolerateable, having it spread out between 3 people in different timezones, and keep in mind we were a really small niche sub (~8k members) I don't even want to know how much worse it is for people moderating the gigantic ones, more people usually brings a lot more problems.
It became more or less a routine, just checking in, seeing if there was any spats to break up, people who were being dicks or spamming us with their books etc without interacting with the community, you get into this groove where you just get used to it. The most annoying thing was the few times where we gave people temporary bans and they started being aggressive about it in the mod chat, but since we were a really nice small community it was all worth it.
Come this whole thing, they take away the tools I used to deal with my routine, which would force me to be on the PC a lot more to deal with the community, then the blackout, we had a vote, and people were mostly for it, we did it, and people were decently for having done it, but nothing more when we were done. I don't know why mods have a bad rep, might be a bigger sub problem like so often, I don't know, we at least tried to do as much as possible just to keep our little community being friendly, accepting of beginners and not getting spammed with extremely repetetive content.
With this whole thing, I tried being a part after the blackout as well, but I keep seeing people just being really vitriolic, the place doesn't seem the same anymore, the whole keeping the community happy thing gets to tiring when you know the site does it's best to make it harder to deal with. I tried contacting admins again, but got some argueably toxic answers from the german admin, which is the only one I was getting a hold of. And I can't justify doing free work for a company that really doesn't appreciate it at all.
In the end I hope I at least left the community in a better shape that I entered it, I don't know if I did, but I hope so. At least this way I can stay true to myself and not being a spineless person not ready to give up on things, not because I think I would be the only one doing the work, but because I was already doing it and kind of knew what I was doing, and how our community ticked.
Reddit is like the restaurant you've been going to for several years that was a mom & pop operation with awesome food and atmosphere. It got popular, and the owners made it a chain, so you could get the same food in a lot of different areas. The quality started to go down as they expanded, but it was already very popular. Then the owners started raising the prices, and the atmosphere started to get way less awesome. At some point, you realized that it's not the restaurant you fell in love with, and it wasn't a good value anymore, so you started looking for a similar kind of restaurant that was more like that one was early on. But the chain is still really popular, and a lot of people just keep going because it's what they're familiar with and they know the menu - they don't want to go to the work of finding a new place and they're content with what they're getting there. The people who have left are a drop in the bucket so far, and the chain restaurant is likely to continue operating for the foreseeable future.
I remember almost everyone use facebook at a time, even chinese use facebook before it was walled off in china. But then everyone got angry because facebook got worse and anti-user and some deleted account. Yet, facebook is still kicking
In a nutshell, the communities move on to a more culturally and technologically suitable perform
Life is short, it is wise fast track to
Acceptanceforfive stages of grief. The best punishment for Reddit admins is to be forgottenFacebook is still kicking but they had to buy Instagram because they were bleeding users to it like crazy. They're not declining in usage because the Internet (number of connected people) is still growing, but their user growth has slowed down significantly, to the point where they had a quarter with a decline in daily active users. That's bad for a platform like that, and their stock price has reflected that.
There’s people who even think Reddit is right.
Because they think Reddit is Facebook.
It’s crazy how many people are so eager to lick boots
This is just digg.com evac to reddit.com 13? years ago.
Step 1: Site thinks it owns content users created and made site what it is.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
13 is the age of the account I deleted and I was in the Digg exodus, so yeah.
Same here. Went from Digg to Reddit, now to the Fediverse.
It will take time for the muscle memory to go away. I still type in "reddit" in the address bar, and probably will for some time to come.
Me too bro ; _(
It always comes back around...
Beat you by a bit, but I have no loyalty to corporations who have no loyalty to me.
The overwhelming majority of Redditors probably don't really know what the actual issue is, and on the surface, Reddit charging for an API that they've allowed free access to for years probably seems logical. Plus, people are creatures of habit, they'd rather go back to the same website they've been visiting, with the community that they already know, than try to figure out what the heck a Lemmy is.
Do you think there would be use in having a site like upstract.com (the new popurls) that would aggregate the RSS feeds from all Lemmys and people could just browse through popular somewhat curated posts of the day?
I feel like there would definitely be people who would enjoy something similar for Lemmy. I think with the federated nature of Lemmy, 3rd party tools are going to be crucial when it comes to widespread adoption, as I feel like they're going to play a huge role in abstracting the confusing, nerdy parts of federation away from the general public.
I wouldn't be so sure. In multiple subreddits the communities voted to destroy the sub in response of the admins trying to break the blackout (e.g. pics only allowing pics of John Oliver looking sexy, and several subs pulling similar moves).
I would mildly argue that might be a good thing. The Masses [TM] are what changed reddit from interesting discourse to shitposting trolls. If everybody came here, it would just be more of the same.
So there aren't a lot of people here. But the people who are here make the atmosphere we love. We want more lemmy, with all the open talking. Not beehaw, where apparently they want to remain in a vacuum. They can't exactly, since that's evidently not how defederation works, but they want to. They might as well just go back to reddit.
Keep in mind, this is all my take on what's happening. I'm not completely sure I understand federation and how it works.
I guess because there are a lot of people who just don't care. Look at Twitter, Musk could do what he wants Twitter still has a big number of users.
Also reddit has a huge and very active community. This is very hard to replace.
I disagree with twitter, I wanted to continue using it despite the issues but the tweets and replies I was seeing was such a drop in quality that it naturally phased out of my routine, which I've from others in person that felt the same.
Reddit is a sharper change for us, twitter kind of just declined out of being worthwile.
Sadly that is true. Most people "just want it to work".
Honestly, apathy. It is not like people have to start paying for the app or website explicitly
I completely agree, and I think another major factor is a function of when you started using Reddit.
I've noticed a trend that many of the people who've moved on from Reddit (or at least the ones who are posting here and in places like Hacker News) joined Reddit 8+ years ago.
I started using Reddit about 14 years ago, and I've definitely noticed a change in the overall vibe of Reddit over those years. There were obvious changes (like cracking down/banning specific subreddits) and there were more subtle changes (like communities growing so large that the comments turned to shit) and there was a departure from a text-heavy, original-content focused haven for like-minded people to a feed full of gifs and inflammatory comment (not to mention ads-that-are-pretending-to-be-posts).
People who have been using it for so many years notice this change, but it was so gradual and over so long a time that they were used to it -- essentially the change was slow enough that we were lulled into accepting the new reality of Reddit.
But then this whole kerfuffle has shaken us out of it and made us realize that it's only going to get worse. So here we are, onto greener pastures.
Now, on the other hand, we have the (many, many) people who started using Reddit more recently. They only know the "new" Reddit. And so they don't get what the big deal is. They think the mods are throwing a fit and the power users are just whiny and "why the hell can't I see my memes?".
They don't understand what we miss about Reddit.
As a fairly 'new' user of Reddit, I think you're pretty spot on. I've been using Reddit for around 5 years or so now (and their mobile app, I know, burn me right now) and as you said, for users like me, it's not that obvious how much Reddit has changed for the worst. Sure, a few things were changed for the worst, but compared to other social medias, Reddit still seemed like the better option to me.
The think is, this protest has shed light on a lot of issues I ignored, and the way Reddit Corp. has handled it just straight up made me sick and wanting to dissosiate myself from Reddit as a whole. But I've a strong political background, strong beliefs and I am french so.. I'm clearly not the 'common user'. Those, I get why they see the protest as an inconveniance at best, and just want to keep using the website conveniantly as they usually do. They don't know about 3rd Party Apps, they don't care about useful bots, they don't understand forums and old internet culture. They just want their daily dose of content.
EDIT: Also my very first comment on Lemmy, as I'm trying to fly away from Reddit.
Reddit is unsalvageable and had been for a long time, but again, you are not going to be able to take the redditor out of people even if they move somewhere else for a long time.
None of us should be trying to build a better reddit here, we should be aiming to build something new, knowing what works and what doesn't from our time as redditors.
Something more sincere, I guess.
The arrow of enshitification flys in one direction only. the people that are still there will migrate out eventually. spez was right when he said the majority of users don’t care about the api, but fails to realize that the majority of users don’t generate content. The users that do generate content are jumping ship.
Yeah, the majority of users don't care about the API because they don't know what it means - that it's the interface that enables not just third party apps, but also moderation tools.
The same users that will tell you that they don't care about the API will start whining when the moderation of their favorite subs turn to shit, when they get overrun by trolls and spammers and bots and advertising.
People just fail to connect the dots.
Do you have any statistics though? Or it's just something you want to believe in?
Because of what is WAS. While it still remains a bastion of information and data, for me Reddit has went WAY beyond a social media that I'll use. I was already done when they decided not to reconsider their API decision - I could have been swayed, too. Companies deserve to get paid for their data and service; but not price-gouging rates like Reddit is attempting. It really sucks, too - I loved what Reddit, and its USERS, provided to the userbase... when I heard about mgmt planning to forcefully take back BLACKOUT sub-reddits, tho; that was it. NO ONE should remain there - I don't understand how anyone could - federation is the only way forward, aside from going back to a website for every 'sub-reddit'... Lemmy and LemmyNet should, as they are, really take hold right now. The devs need to find more help; I hate to say this, but theres money there. NO REDDIT, NO MORE. MORE Social, less Media.
I have zero hope for Reddit. I had no idea there were much better 3rd party apps available for Reddit on phones, so the API changes don't impact me. But I've noticed over the years more and more, astro turfing by bots, bots reposting popular things to karma farm, as to sell the bot to entities looking to influence reddit via the aforementioned astro turfing.
It's all very gross, I started to feel like a duck sitting in a pond surrounded by ducks, but not really, they're all decoys, fakes, mean to give the impression of a big crowd. I don't like that trend, and on top of that, the idea of Reddit going public, and trying to push our content as their value makes me sick. The owners of reddit haven't done the heavy lifting, we the users, the mods all did the work and built up content. The idea that some chucklefuck was going to profit big from our effort isn't something I want to be part of any more. So here I am, and I gotta say, Lemmy feels like a 2000's forum by comparison, and I hope its very nature makes it harder to fall into the same pit falls as reddit and digg did.
Decentralization's pretty hard to kill so as long as people stick around, I have high hopes for places like these.
The wierd thing was the bots selling t shirts of art they steal off of reddit. But what's stopping those bots from coming here?
I had hope until yesterday. I was a mod and all my users turned on me and said some really hurtful things. I'm gonna give a mod position to someone else on a smaller sub I'm a part of or two and step down from the rest. I'm guessing I'll still lurk, but I'm done with it.
I don't think people understand how important moderation is. I'm sorry you had that experience. I appreciate all the work you've put in.
Thank you. Working to let it go.
One of my favorite subs went aggressively pro-shill. Not just "you did your best". But nothing except contempt and endless mockery.
I would say it's astroturfing. But previously a gaming sub had gone dark for a mere 24 hours as a statement about toxicity and the response was similar.
There's definitely some hardcore shilling and astroturfing in a lot of subs where blackouts and John Oliver memes have become the norm. People with no posting history, brand new accounts and low karma accounts have flooded in to insult the mods and attack the protest.
Why don't you just step down without assigning a new mod? Let Reddit self destruct itself.
You're on the Fediverse where the more "extreme" people moving away from Reddit are. Hence, there is a strong bias toward experiencing the Reddit fiasco in a way that makes one think, that it's already a sinking ship. For many, Lemmy isn't as easily useable and mature as Reddit is.
The echo chamber will continue. Too easy to surround ourselves with the same opinions all of the time
That's kinda true in both cases, right? Like the ones who remain attached to reddit and new transplants to Lemmy will both be like "good riddance"
They are used to going to Reddit and have no interest in finding an alternative, when their community is there.
Too be fair, the fediverse is not easy to grasp for the average user.
That is absolutely right too!
You are right, and the fact federation is perhaps overplayed or emphasized when talking about something like Lemmy doesn't help.
The regular users don't care, as long as the content is available. Which unfortunately isn't quite the case yet (with no disrespect to developers, I think Lemmy is something I'll stick to for a good while)
The landing page at join-lemmy.org should lead straight into active content, and then let users choose an instance once they're ready.
I am particularly motivated to ditch Reddit and yet the first time I saw that page I figured I was going to need to configure a bunch of shit to get started.
So that's one major issue that needs to be addressed. I'm sure it will be in time.
It’s really not that difficult to understand. Half the battle is getting people to realize it’s easy to sign up for an instance
Denial, at least for me. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that anyone could be that stupid and eager to destroy it’s most active part of the user base…
And the fact that it’s Reddit, a Site I always preceived as community driven and kinda above those corporate shenanigans, I still have hopes some saner heads might prevail. Although that seems increasingly unlikely by the minute…
Reddit is a VC backed startup so this was always going to happen. I am surprised it took so long, to be honest.
I swear the only acronym I can think of is Vietcong. What do you mean by that?
It stands for "venture capital".
Investors invest money in a company in hopes they'll make lots of money on the deal in the future. Often high risk and high reward.
Thank you. The context makes sense now.
They don't see their niche interest groups migrating to a different platform.
Smaller subs may have had just enough critical mass when accessing the entire reddit user graf, but new platforms are not there yet. It is much easier to gain traction in a unified user base than in a federation of disparate user bases.
Yeah, that was it for me, I deleted my old 10+ year old user, who was a moderator, I might come back with a smaller account, but rewrote and deleted all my old stuff, the thing is there is really hard to find something for some of my really niche interests :/
Denial
Anger
Bargaining <-- they are here
Depression
Acceptance
Reddit Is Fun is one of the apps being killed off next week. Their subreddit was marking each post with which stage of grief it was. A lot of anger and Bargaining.
I still can't believe it will actually happen...RIF was Reddit on mobile phone for me. Killing it is like killing reddit itself. Well, yeah, good luck
I kind of agree but I have to reply because this is one of my pet peeves:
The five stages were never meant to strictly appear in that order and were never intended for anything other than death.
Oh, that makes me feel good. Looks like I'm at acceptance. Just not sure how long I was depressed :-\
I was at depression when they announced the nsfw change. I knew they were coming for the 3rd party apps next. Fucking Elon you cuck.
I thought the nsfw change was in tandem with the API change. They were not? They are changing nsfw on desktop too?
Its the sane reason people still play old mmos. Theyve already sunk so much time into it and they are used to it, its were their community is and something new is uncomfortabke and scary.
Nah, we still play because we like them. I play oldschool Runescape because I can't stand Runescape 3. It has nothing to do with 3 being scary, I just prefer the mechanics of the old school version.
The sunk cost fallacy
Nothing to do with that. It's all preference.
I don't have any hope for reddit, but unfortunately, it is stil a very good source of information. Plus some previously established communities cannot be easily replaced, so reddit still has a use for me.
I hope that with time, my old communities will find their way here. Until then, sometimes I need to use reddit to talk to some people and access information.
And this is what makes the whole situation so shitty. All of the popular social media sites suck, but it's not easy to replace them with something new when the majority of the content and community stays there.
Kind of the way (at least for me), I still have a FB account since there are still old friends or relatives that would be impossible to reach otherwise. So it just sits there, on life-support, unless I need it.
Twitter has been slowly turning that way, and now Reddit will work the same for me, but it'll take a while.
The vast majority of reddits userbase are consumers. They are already using the official app and don't care about the politics of the platform. These people are only there to get their content fix.
I realised this when I saw a post on a subreddit where someone shared on how to turn off some kind of notification in the official app. So many other people thanked this person... Reddit has become another mainstream social media site like FB, Instagram and so on.
Here's one way to realize why Reddit should not be taken seriously: Suppose that the head moderator position for r/politics was put up for open auction. How much would it sell for? It would be purchased by someone who was interested in controlling what information people see.
Subreddits are moderated on a first-come first-serve basis. If you were the first one to squat a name 10 years ago, you get to be the head moderator, even if someone else might do a better job. This is the "landed gentry" comment Reddit's CEO was referring to.
The irony that u/spez and others keep using landed gentry in the wrong way is hilarious.
Landed gentry bought their "title" (it's not really a title, more a socio-political category). The first scenario you described, with someone buying the position of moderator... that's 100% landed gentry. Commoners with wealth would buy a big house and property and then be considered landed gentry. It's not something that was given to them like peerage (aka nobility).
The reality is that content producers and moderators are closer to cotters--somewhere in between serfs and husbandmen. They don't own the land (e.g.: subs), but they work it. The only difference is that serfs and husbandmen could derive a profit from their labour, whereas most mods and content producers don't (as far as I'm aware).
If we keep going with the middle-age titles, u/spez is much closer to a "lord of the manor" than he would care to realise. He owns the land, can choose who works it and who is able to make a profit and how much. He can withdraw that permission at any time, and he amasses vast amounts of wealth based on the work of the people who, effectively, work for him for free.
I'm of the opinion that Reddit will become incrementally worse going forward, most users are not bothered right now because the whole API fiasco affects mods and not them, but as usual they miss the forest for the tree. The site will go for the users and creators next, but it won't be like this, it'll be one tiny annoying feature at a time to avoid mass abandonment. I'm already looking for alternatives, such as this one, in preparation, but most will put up with anything just to keep consuming the same old content.
I don't even think it needs to go for users and creators next; making moderation harder will have plenty of impact on its own. Many people seem to think mods randomly remove crap in some weird power trip. The reality is most are busy removing spam, abuse, shitposts, and the 5th submission of the same news link that's still on the front page. Once unpaid mods start leaving they'll have to implement automods that'll just suck as they always do. The quality of every sub is going to go to hell pretty quickly.
There are more potentially interesting websites than I have time to spend. I'm taking the same attitude to Reddit that I take for StackOverflow and Wikipedia. I'll read their content, especially if it comes up in search, but I'm not wading through the cesspool to try and contribute anything.
because the majority of people doesn't really care sadly
Here is some more BS:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/16/reddit-ceo-triples-down-insults-protesters-whines-about-not-making-enough-money-from-reddit-users/
yikes, he’s one of the least professional CEO’s. It’s embarrassing to see how he speaks about his decision making.
Because the content that people dump into it for years and communities are valuable. May be if some of those communities migrated to lemmy and I just keep accessing contents from way back machine, then I may not want Reddit anymore, but at the moment. I wish for it's redemption
Like it or not. The internet is evolving.
Most of the subreddits I used to frequent (particularly/r/manga) haven't made the move to anywhere, nor they blacked out in protest. While I see some parallels here, there's still very few active users. I would love to be able to post more content myself, but I objectively do not have enough time in my hands.
I follow some pretty niche topics, and have had to make an executive decision regarding indifferent behavior from those who moderate discussions in those areas: Talking about a specific crypto, or a style of painting takes a backseat to my politics.
This was the final straw for me, and I feel that a collective lack of participation is the only recourse to assist those who are indifferent in generating an opinion.
Not only that, but I extracted (and continuously delete when they reappear) my contributions to those discussions, reposting them elsewhere.
some people still poop in holes in the ground.
Because Reddit is familiar and people like to stick with what they're used to and comfortable with.
People like being comfortable, new places can be uncomfortable.
It's this simple. So just let them have their porn-filled garbage can of a place.
Reddit is now in the ilk of MySpace and facebook.. Corpo-wasteland devoid of anything but ad revenue and cheers from shareholders.
They can keep it.
I have no hope, but there are a few subs that I still love and it's sad that he is destroying that so he can make reddit like every other soul-sucking social network. reddit is unfortunately the only place I can go to discuss random things I love like the EPL, or WNBA, or the japanese show Gaki No Tsukai as no one around me in real live is into them. Hopefully some of that can transfer to lemmy or other places...but who knows...
Hahaha people are stupid bro
Honestly, it's a information goldmine. You'll get answers to most obscure questions and in detail. All others sources on the internet are either fluff or endorsements. It it also inconvenient to have to visit two websites that does same thing. So people don't want to abandon what they are habituated to.
We are losing a lot, this new ActivityPup fediverse is exciting but it is like going back a decade for long-term reddit users.
Reddit obviously sucks now and has been like this for years, IMO it was newReddit and its focus on Facebook users that was the biggest event declining quality. What we had slowly eroded and its no longer there, but there were still enough smaller active communities that it could still be a good experience.
We are rebuilding and it is fun and exciting, but we are losing a big part of our lives in the process, we wont have something equal to what we lost for a couple years to come.
I agree, as someone who saw reddit evolve from r/reddit.com to what it is today, it took about 4 years for them to really get to peak old reddit with the introduction of multireddits. Other than that most of the development has been in the third party apps, and really much of that development has been updating the apps to match the evolving OS design language rather than new reddit API endpoints. But we now have the advantage of having a minimum viable product and people with years of experience building and moderating communities.
I used to mainly use niche subs. The default subs are fucked. Same old one liners over and over, getting upvoted to oblivion.
Some people like my bf just browse for a little bit of their communities and don‘t care about anything else.
However, if we make this place interesting enough they will come naturally, those sorts of people are like moths who are attracted to interesting content.
I get the reddit c suite just wants to go public and finally get their payout, which is understandable but if they're out then we're out too. There's better platforms now anyway that need a reason to be used and developed. They could have so easily handled this differently by just making the reddit app experience better than any third party apps today. But here we are and honestly I wouldn't bet my retirement that teenagers will still be posting to reddit in 40 years.
I'm guessing, at least partially, sunk cost fallacy.
And not knowing about alternative places.
And let's be honest, there a majority of people out there that don't want to take the time to figure out something new, and something that has some slight learning curve up front.
The fediverse as a concept is very different than the internet as it is now. The last 15 years feels like a slow slow consolidation of all the sites that rely on user generated content. Now that federated user content sites exist, people will need learn how it all works.
There's another aspect I haven't really considered until now. A lot of the sites that have user generated content spoon feed their users content they think they will be interested in. Reddit at least had a subscription model where you hand pick the communities you want, and the community curates the content you see.
There's a lot of stuff at play here, and I am very excited to see how it all unfolds for Kbin and Lemmy. Great tools will be adopted by great communities, even if they don't reach massive popularity.
Is there a federated "Instagram"?
@puck2 @buzzbald https://pixelfed.org/
Eh, I know about the alternatives and they're all clunky messes that will probably never have anywhere near the same userbase as reddit. Even if they do, they won't function the same way.
I don't mind Lemmy, and if Reddit continues to shit the bed I'll probably switch over fully, but I would much much prefer that Spez backtrack on all the recent garbage and just have stuff go back to business as usual.
I like having all my content aggregated to one space. A big selling point of lemmy and other federated systems is that they're "more free", but until a month ago everything was fine. I don't need or want to shake the foundations of how people consume media, I just need one guy to stop being a dickhead for 30 seconds.
At this point I just want the place to burn.
It's been my community since like 2007. It's hard to move on from all of those conversations and inside jokes because suddenly the landlord says he gets to be a part of our conversations because he owns the property despite never participating in anything besides maybe suggesting a few holiday events that the community had to make happen and execute on their own. It has nothing to do with the site. It has to do with what we created there, a lot like the street corner that used to be a thing. It's been made clear we're no longer welcome there and we'll find a new corner to hang out on. And as soon as it's user friendly enough the masses will follow. That's a mixed blessing because the same tired replies and memes will follow but the content will be there.
I'm a little drunk right now so I'm being overly sentimental, but the point remains. We miss the experiences we had, and fuck that greedy, spineless motherfucker for making us go elsewhere. But we'll do it and laugh about it the same way we used to about Digg. "Fuck Kevin Rose" was a thing the same way "Fuck u/spez" is.
Actually when you realize he did contribute it's worse than if he didn't. u/spez used to be a moderator. On r/jailbait. You can guess what that was for yourself
They are just following the reactionary social media norms these days. The lack of proper passing of information and just humoured by the subreddit protests such as in r/pics. Some people are not actually on Reddit for information.
I get a "sunk-cost fallacy" feel from it. Like Bill Hicks' bit went- This HAS to be real. Look at my furrows of worry- look at all this Karma. This has to be real!"
.. it's just a ride.
I can only repeat what I just commented somewhere else:
I built Swift apps and Mastodon or Discord are NOT a proper format to get help, Discord being crappy for archiving, too.
I have a hard time getting help by people that really know this stuff because Swift is made by Apple, and the Apple bubble tends to stick to Twitter and the likes. If enough migrate, I can finally say frick off, Reddit
Don’t underestimate how much resistance to change stops people from looking beyond the status quo. Moving away from Reddit is a clear example. I suspect a lot of lurkers from Reddit are actually from the category of Late Majority or Laggards
https://www.betterup.com/blog/resistance-to-change
https://www.liveabout.com/what-is-resistance-to-change-1918240
https://ondigitalmarketing.com/learn/odm/foundations/5-customer-segments-technology-adoption/
Personally, I just feel bad for Apollo's creator and mods (the good ones) who spent so much time carefully taking care of a community they love, so in a sense I wish Reddit would come to their senses and axe that fucker CEO and revert to reasonable API changes. But it's mostly wishful thinking. Besides, now I would feel bad if Reddit managed to go back to being good because that would mean that this aswesome Lemmy thinghy would go back into the shadows, while it deserves so much attention imho.
I hear what youre saying, and I do agree, but keep in mind that the developer of Apollo has definitely come out well in all of this.
He has made millions from Apollo. Yes plural. Yes in USD.
I'm not saying he isn't deserving of his success, I just want you to be aware that he is definitely well off.
I'm not saying that they don't love the community, but it was probably also a lucrative opportunity for the developers too. I bought paid versions of a few, and found Boost to be my favorite. I wish they would head over here because people would definitely support them.
I had hope until the infamous AMA posted by spez, and him doubling down on accusing people of blackmail. I've purged my account history immediately after that.
How did you do that?
I have fixed and modified a userscript I found on greasyfork. Use Violentmonkey extension to install it.
https://privatebin.net/?188e13e8eb4b1230#EibjFyxrfk7VWLhtNjMCnR7iHXAfNBY1yiNSrsrq3Hmx
Shreddit, power delete suite, or any other methods you can find by googling "erase reddit history".
Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they're there to stay.
All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:
Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn't happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.
I'll admit the technical stuff is probably the most off-putting. Most major social media got where it is by being idiot proof. The whole set-up will need to be much more streamlined if they want to really dip into Reddits user base.
I think the solution is a central registration which selects a random server from https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
For example, join-lemmy.org should do this, IMHO, without any technicality. Just transparently register to random server, with a curated cross-servers pre-selected list of subscriptions. Once users are distributed across servers, people will just recommend friends/family to join their own server, then the centralization of join-lemmy.org won't become an issue. But I might be utopian.
I don't think a lot of people who are in the know have any expectation of this turning around and going well, but I don't blame anyone for hoping it will. The existing communities that are uprooted from all this, not to mention the headaches of signing up for new platforms and all that entails, aren't exactly ideal. Avoiding them from being necessary would be fantastic... alas, that hope is indeed slim.
I think a lot of the general reddit user base is still out of the loop on it or just doesn't care about the drama enough to make any kind of change.
Many users don't log in every day, and might just sign in to look up answers to specific questions or to read individual subs. Those folks are a lot less likely to have been following all the updates through last month and before since so much was announced across a variety of subs.
I don't care about what happens to Reddit, but hopefully at least some of the content gets saved. It was already annoying when I was trying to find some answers to a tech support question and the subs that had answers were private.
Because no matter how bad it gets, like all successful social platforms, it will stay successful. People will continue to use it no matter how much they complain or criticize it. I regularly complain about Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc. But I still use all of them. It doesn't matter how unsatisfied people are with how things are being handled, if most people still see a reason to use it, they will until it's gone.
Why? Because the whole reason reddit is even worth visiting is the posters.
Sure, the people in charge of the whole infrastructure that supports the act of posting and reading posts are making destructive "business decisions", but until now they've largely been basically a bunch of invisible, nameless, inconsequential people as long as the proverbial lights stayed on for my ten years on reddit. They were technically in charge of stuff, but any time there was drama around reddit employees themselves, I had to go to places like /r/outoftheloop or /r/ELI5 in order to figure out what in the actual heck the inexplicable hubub was all about.
To me, that means they're NOT what reddit is, they're just the people who make it possible.
The folks who do lights and sound at a stage play are necessary for the play to function at that particular theater, but if they were the only ones doing anything there, noone would show up and stick around.
Inertia is a horrible thing. It took a LONG time for most of the niche communities on reddit to get "established" enough to have semi-regular content. Inertia being what it is, it will likely take quite a while for the same to happen here and it won't be exactly the same thing. It may be better and worse in some ways, but it WILL be different and some of us were quite comfortable with what we had. So, yeah, hope, because losing something you like and care about, watching it get gutted, wrecked, hobbled, and ruined is not inspiring or fun.
That being said, I'm seeing very encouraging things happening here so far, so this might become my new home.
Bots are still on reddit, so all the people they always interact with are still there.
The average redditor couldn't care less about what is going on.
There are about 5 years of my life on there, for some users 15+. Now, if you dropped your laptop with 15 years worth of memories on it, you damn sure would have hope you could still save the data, even if it's obviously done for.
I also still have hope for Twitter (less tho). Both concepts are good, they're just run by fucking idiots making them unusable.
For people who were more than just the causal browser/lurker, Reddit was an amazing place to not only obtain information about very specific things, but also to connect with other people. I have type 1 diabetes and the ability to connect with other type 1 diabetics to commiserate, share information, and seek help on Reddit was like nothing else anywhere else on the internet. I have a few other niche interests that also only had communities on Reddit.
Years ago, these things (health conditions, niche interests, etc) all had their own separate forums scattered throughout the internet. One forum might have a few dozen people, one might have a hundred or so. But Reddit quickly became the central place where we could connect. Whereas forums could maybe attract a few hundred people, subreddits could connect with THOUSANDS. There’s not yet been anything else like it.
Unfortunately, we made the BIG mistake of relying on a for-profit, centrally owned company to function as a town square. Same with Twitter. We found value in sharing information and connecting through these platforms, only to get screwed over by billionaire CEOs.
Hopefully we have learned our lesson. Hopefully something comparable will take Reddit’s place. It’s not going to happen over time. I never expected Mastodon to replace Twitter overnight. But slowly, very slowly, at least some people are seeing the downfall of corporate social media and will hopefully slowly switch over to federated alternatives. I don’t think it will happen quickly, nor will it happen for everything. But I do think it’s already happening. And it will happen faster if we get some good mobile apps.
Could it be Lemmy?
I think it’s certainly possible.
Because of reddits size
I've being feeling that lately reddit had become full of repost bots and fake ads. Was there just because there was nowhere else to go
I feel a similar way. The quality just kept going down and down to the point where I couldn't tell what was real or not. Most just weren't worth reading either way. Lemmy seems the same way now too. People are focusing on making "content" instead of trying to make higher quality posts.
You both make such great points here. I've definitely had those times I felt like a post that's upvoted to the front page is really an advertisement. And within thread comments it has become almost impossible to know who is genuine, a troll, or a literal bot - along with being pretty toxic for a long time.
At the same time, there are some extraordinary communities and knowledge repositories that might be difficult to replicate in the fediverse. For example, I can't yet envisage how a highly factual community like Ask Science, or such, might work. But I love the retro feeling I'm getting here - of discovering a new, blossoming internet community - and the fact that there are seemingly real people behind the posts. lol.
When i was just lurking here at the start of rexit, i kept getting the feeling of finally being around real humans again. It was amazing! unfortunately it seemed to go back to reddit style copy paste link spam to generate content. One step forwards and one step backwards.
Honestly: for my social media consumption Reddit works pretty well. I always used to webinterface so for nothing really changed.
I am here because I felt like changing things up more than anything. Well: the fediverse is a super interesting idea and looking at something fresh is always fun.
Still; it seems pretty likely that this place will be a good deal smaller than Reddit for the foreseeable future and that’s both a strength and a weakness.
The main strength of Reddit is it’s nichier subs. There is one for just about anything. You need a massive volume of users to do such a thing and I don’t think Lemmy will reach that size anytime soon.
I expect Lemmy to be a place where people value Openness and Freedom. Generally there are less people that care about Freedom AND Pu’er tea than there are people who care about just Pu’er tea.
I wonder what will happen to Lemmy in a couple of years🤔
The silver lining is that hopefully we can get a few people off Reddit and onto here and eventually grow these spaces. I do miss the thousands of upvotes and comments though, but that'll come in time
I just hope there's no power trippin edgelords - toxic sweaty mods here. And whoever is in charge(like a CEO) I hope is also a normal human being. All I ask from you is to work with the community not against it.
That's the fun of the Fediverse; there isn't a CEO. You're in charge if you want to be. Go setup your own instance if you find you don't like the one you're on, or find one whose admins you like. Don't like Lemmy? Go write your own activitypub software to do the same stuff!
That is easily solvable within the fediverse, contrary to reddit. In reddit you had to kinda deal with it. Here, people can simply fuck off to another instance.
Because there is not yet a full alternative to reddit.
The only thing I can say is, I don’t.
Look at the twitter. Whatever they can do people stay there. Maybe the hardcore users or geeks will leave, but the crowd will stay.
Nah Twitter is a shell of its former self. Try searching up a niche subject and 99% of the tweets are ads.
Yeah, the entire niche industry community I was on twitter for absolutely ate it during the early days of Elon and the majority have moved on - mainly to social media spaces like Insta or TikTok.
We got some of them on Reddit, even - though that sure was a brief and shallow victory, all told.
Yeah I'm software educator in a few small niches. I used to just go and search the topic and make friends, help people out but now 99% of the posts are automated shilling for some business or some SEO spam.
I still try to pop in but it seems like Twitter is a lost cause especially since they put search behind login now. Just like Reddit they have alienated content creators and it shows.
I think "hope" is a tricky word for it. A lot of people don't really care about the issues and a lot of people who use it sparingly for a quick "haha" won't really be affected (at least not yet). So those people may not really hope for more.
I still use reddit for my niche gaming communities and while the possibility of making federated alternatives for those communities exists, it's far simpler to stay.
I watched his recent interview (only for 10mins) but he described Reddit quite accurately. Namely, reddit(or platforms like ours) is a city, a city is living only if people are living. Also, he knew that very minimal and subtle moderation is the right way.
It sounds like a CEO who knows its stuff, but facts have been shown his actions and attitudes are outrageous. The moderation was good enough to reach success for 18 years, only bc people do it for Reddit for free. He only took the free ride on it.
The biggest problem I have with this guy is that the API charges is really selling people knowledges and memories as a product. It is supposed to be free and open. He is taking all the profits as business with no promises or giving back to the community. This model simply doesn't work well with us, I would rather stick to decentralised model as long as it is reasonably efficient.
There is nothing inherently problematic about charging for API access, it's the fact that the price they've set is ludicrous, something like 25 cents per thousand calls when you'd expect it to be more along the lines of 4-5 dollars per million calls.
It's like someone buying a free parking garage, letting mopeds park for free, and charging cars five hundred dollars a day for parking, and then, instead of just being honest and saying "Fuck people with cars no cars allowed," saying that the car drivers are at fault for wanting to use a more full-featured vehicle that takes more space
Indeed, if the prices were reasonable this would not be a problem. I believe that the Apollo developer even said as much (or maybe it was rif's developer - or neither and I'm just imagining it) - and I have no objection to it either, the servers aren't free to run after all. But the rate the used? It's just absolutely fucking incomprehensible.
The shitty treatment of third party developers is just the unmentionable icing on this already disgusting cake.
Sunk cost fallacy is my assumption, but take that with a grain of salt. I'm one of those low tech savvy old farts people talk about. I left because making it harder for moderators to do their jobs means communities that I love will be less safe and welcoming. Maybe the rest have to experience that discomfort for themselves before they too are driven away. Or they think they can ride this out and continue as before when things settle down.
This is good to see, it seems a lot of the people that were for the blackout left, now there is so much vitriol against moderators on reddit, I'm so tired, I just don't want to anymore, deleted my 10+ year old account today after telling my mod team I can't anymore, so now at least the chances are smaller that I will go back.
Just know that I for one appreciate the hell out of you. I don't have the technical skills to do what you do, and to be perfectly honest, I don't have the patience either. It amazes me that people with the skills volunteer their time to do this mostly thankless work which makes communities more enjoyable. From the bottom of my heart, thank you!
The thing is I really enjoyed the community that I modded, and still do, so I wanted to make it the best place it could be, I didn't have the skills either to do it in the beginning, started out just helping out the main moderator of our community, then after a couple of years they just disappeared, and I was driving myself rather insane for a year before I started fighting with the admins for 3-4 weeks to get the rights to get more moderators to join me, since I didn't have the right to before that, only the main mod had those rights.
I invited some people that I trusted from the community, and it at least made the work more tolerateable, having it spread out between 3 people in different timezones, and keep in mind we were a really small niche sub (~8k members) I don't even want to know how much worse it is for people moderating the gigantic ones, more people usually brings a lot more problems.
It became more or less a routine, just checking in, seeing if there was any spats to break up, people who were being dicks or spamming us with their books etc without interacting with the community, you get into this groove where you just get used to it. The most annoying thing was the few times where we gave people temporary bans and they started being aggressive about it in the mod chat, but since we were a really nice small community it was all worth it.
Come this whole thing, they take away the tools I used to deal with my routine, which would force me to be on the PC a lot more to deal with the community, then the blackout, we had a vote, and people were mostly for it, we did it, and people were decently for having done it, but nothing more when we were done. I don't know why mods have a bad rep, might be a bigger sub problem like so often, I don't know, we at least tried to do as much as possible just to keep our little community being friendly, accepting of beginners and not getting spammed with extremely repetetive content.
With this whole thing, I tried being a part after the blackout as well, but I keep seeing people just being really vitriolic, the place doesn't seem the same anymore, the whole keeping the community happy thing gets to tiring when you know the site does it's best to make it harder to deal with. I tried contacting admins again, but got some argueably toxic answers from the german admin, which is the only one I was getting a hold of. And I can't justify doing free work for a company that really doesn't appreciate it at all.
In the end I hope I at least left the community in a better shape that I entered it, I don't know if I did, but I hope so. At least this way I can stay true to myself and not being a spineless person not ready to give up on things, not because I think I would be the only one doing the work, but because I was already doing it and kind of knew what I was doing, and how our community ticked.
sunk cost fallacy and/or laziness
That’s really not it.