Reddit updates look after rough 6 months and ahead of reported IPO

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 397 points –
Reddit updates look after rough 6 months and ahead of reported IPO
arstechnica.com

Reddit updates look after rough 6 months and ahead of reported IPO::"Edit: Obligatory 'F--- Spez' for karma."

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reposting one of the worst things i've ever heard someone say:

“There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

eat my ass spez

I hope you aren’t allergic to cats, because spez is a cat lover. https://i.imgur.com/NUl0BwX.png

I have no idea why this exists, but I had to upvote it.

You upvote it because you’re a good person. But, it exists due to spez’ perverse desire to always do the wrong thing.

Wtf??? Cringe! Downvote army, assemble!

Yay explicit exploitation of the most vulnerable in a community. Lots of this is cartoonishly evil.

Yeah... I don't know if the person you're mentioning meant productive stuff or not, but I was in a pretty niche community there. One where parents were dealing with their kids on operating tables, but not often. It was as exactly the kind of thing internet forums were made for: medical advice from doctors, venting and whatnot from strangers who'd been there. I said a lot of practical helpful things and a lot of meaningless nice platitudes at the right time.

And I was happy to do it the same way I swapped guitar tabs as a kid.

There's honest money in making a community space.

There's no honest money in monetizing a community.

I dont have any direct experience with reddit any longer.

What I can say, is that I think a verrrrrrry significant portion of comments and commenters are actually reddit run bots. My source for this is my experience in the daily thread of a certain degenerate gambling forum. There were maybe like 12-30 posters who would reply, engage, etc... in the daily and day after threads. However, there was a yyyyyuuuuugggge number of accounts that would just comment with no real further engagement. Like you would respond to them, but they wouldnt respond back.

I truly believe that reddits internal business model is predicted on the use of reddit run bots to create synthetic engagement in certain audiences around marketing targets that a selective group of advertisers (read, not buying reddit ads) are given access to. The basics is that reddit astroturfs synthetic engagement until organic engagement takes over. I have no way of proving this and its pure speculation.

This is why I don't even worry about considering the user numbers on lemmy. Relying on my anectdotal experience, we've got about the usership/ engagement numbers from around the 2009-2011 time period, which is actually pretty amazing. Also, the overall lemmy experience is far superior, for example, just the ability to sort by a couple of different 'hot' options is a major improvement. I really think if the devs just keep vibing on their plan, lemmy will be more than strong enough to survive and continue for decades to come.

The fact is that reddit stole from us our faith in a 'good internet'. The users of reddit built reddit, not the company that owns it (they suck). The users of reddit paid for the server time and made the system work. That good faith was utterly exploited by the leadership of reddit and we should never forget how they stole from and exploited their community.

They also started handing out usernames to companies over "trademark infringement." Someone with the username "FoodNetwork" is losing the username to the real Food Network.

I was on reddit long enough to remember how people used to run corporate stooges out with pitchforks.

"These are fan run forums," they would say. The idea that you could have your username taken by a corporation was unheard of, because originally, it was considered really bad form to have anyone from the business running the subreddit, because then it wouldn't be a neutral source of information.

Nope, now they can steal usernames and it's totes okay for subreddits to be completely controlled by their corporate namesake.

Pretty sure corporations running their own subreddits has been.a thing for awhile now. Fairly certain Costco's subreddit is fully modded by their advertising department. Threads written by employees during COVID were getting nuked constantly.

Reading what happened to the german subs, that also happened with newly created spanish subs, many got thousands of subscribers but no engagement, only one or two comments per thread and little content but a lot of subscribers.

You're absolutely right about most of it. My only criticism is the first paragraph as I am notorious for just commenting and not responding. Literally if you reply I won't respond lol but I can't imagine I'm the only one. A better way to sniff them out would be profiling them and finding things like hobby subs where they would be significantly more likely to comment vs addiction subs where they may feel some shame in interacting or engaging in their addiction.

I'm pretty stupid so I could be talking out my ass but I figured input for data collection and such.

That's what caught my eye too. I rarely, if ever, respond to someone who's responded to a comment I've made, especially if they're arguing or trying to correct me. And that's if I've even bothered to go back and check it.

Not that you'll ever see my reply to your comment...

I am not saying you are wrong, but when I was active on Reddit I rarely checked my mail. I still have like 12k unread messages.

That's quite a weird way to use...any account.

You'd be surprised. Lots of people live like this, with all their devices and accounts. Ever piling up never read messages, whether emails, texts, or DMs. I don't know if they're just fine with it or if its something psychological making that many messages seem to big to approach, or because they don't want to hear everyone's cruel responses to what they said or I don't know. But people do use accounts like that, for sure.

It makes more sense if it's something like email, where you likely know most of it is junk mail advertisements.

But how can people not be curious why they have several unread messages where it's very likely they are responses from humans who specifically responded to things they said?

It's pretty simple:

Because a lot of those comments will be filled with abuse, and some will be garbage not worth reading.

After a certain point, you get tired of opening the inbox and sorting through it.

It makes more sense if it's something like email, where you likely know most of it is junk mail advertisements.

What makes you think there isn't just as much junk in your comment replies inbox? Not advertising, but just overall junk.

You'd stop checking your email, too, if there wasn't a spam filter. Well, comment replies don't have a filter for quality or tone or politeness. People get tired of reading trash.

I don't read my inbox. Instead I use the same strategy I developed long ago on the forums of old: I check in later to see the responses to certain comments. After the karma system has hopefully moved the shitty or worthless ones down, and I only check the comments where I genuinely care what the responses will be.

But how can people not be curious why they have several unread messages where it's very likely they are responses from humans who specifically responded to things they said?

I've been around the Internet for a long time, just over 30 years now. That curiosity is long dead. I've seen enough and participated in enough discussions to have a fair idea what the replies to most things will be like on the whole. Some of them I'm interested, some of them, meh

You're saying all this like I haven't been on the Internet long. I'm over the two decade mark myself. I base my question on this fact actually.

What makes you think there isn't just as much junk in your comment replies inbox?

My experience with the Internet all these years...

Yo you might've dropped this, King 👑. This post is the best way of putting into words my thoughts on the matter that I'm too smoothbrained to formulate into creation. Especially the last paragraph, the theft of "good Internet". Fuckin A, m8

Oh oh... can we look forward to another wave of reddit leavers after inevitable changes to the site to please investors?

I mean ... that's almost certainly what's going to happen to some degree

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See, we made the holes in the d's look like little talking bubbles. We're not evil. We're cuuuuuute. Money please!

Reddit: I've done nothing wrong, ever, in my life.

At least Spez said racism and hate speech are allowed on the platform

Which Spez claimed Reddit used to be against so character growth I guess

New look, same Reddit

I mean, yes and no. It's the same reddit from six months ago yeah, the vultures hungry for an IPO and who don't give a fuck about users.

The change in font actually speaks massively to a huge change in how reddit functions, and this has been a slow, gradual change.

Reddit was originally an all text site. The name fucking implies it.

"Oh did you see that link?"

"Yeah, I already read it."

The pivot to sound and video has been going on for a few years. The logo still referenced the text-heavy nature of the site by being stylized as text you might read on a website. Now it is clearly a logo that has dropped that pretense entirely, as they have said "fuck people who like to read," we're here for eyeballs on screens, and video is what makes that happen!

So yeah, it screams a huge change in direction that's been happening for years now. They're just updating the branding to match the site direction.

Exactly. I remember going to Reddit as a minimalist alternative to Digg even before 2.0 pushed everyone out.

It was only a matter of time.

Yes, reddit has been for a while 2 distinct websites:

  • old reddit, centered around text, links and discussion
  • new reddit, a pinterest/instagram/tiktok mashup

deleted

Up until day one past IPO.

And that’s the day I completely stop using the site.

I’ve still been using it for technical stuff, because there’s a absolute shitload of extremely valuable and informative content on a bunch of engineering- and tech-oriented subs, but a lot of the users who were involved with that seem to be switching here, and a lot of THOSE users have applied scripts to nuke all comments on their account, so it’s steadily becoming less valuable and more out of date. That said, it’s a bummer that that the knowledge base contained in those communities are largely going to seed.

What if we, "the users", contributed to a decentralized platform and built that knowledge base up instead?

This allows us to place the R word as basically an archive of the time period as it shouldn't have much more intellectual growth.

That’s exactly what I was alluding to when I said a lot of the users in those Reddit subs were migrating here

I looked at reddit today, it looks like ass. Not nice ass either.

Fuck spez I used that reddit for years. However you can only be fucked over so much.

Everyone here is on copium, not gonna lie.

Reddit isn't going to die. Honestly it has 1000x more content than lemmy.

Lemmy has a place and so does reddit.

I still browse reddit, simply because the size of the communities I want to visit is much larger there. My browsing is however confined to the mobile page in Firefox, which is slow, clunky, and breaks frequently, which means my reddit usage is down by something like 99%. Lemmy has the sync app, and without the app I wouldn't be here. Browsing Lemmy before it was awful.

Also, I kinda like that Lemmy is smaller. There's much less noise, less of an algorithm feel to browsing. It feels slightly more like the internet I grew up with in the 90s and 00s, and I kinda missed that.

The throwback feel really is an intangible value add that means it might not catch on for younger folks but damn it does feel good.

honestly I think the opposite. from what a younger sibling has told me, old is new and the current trends in TikTok and stuff seem to be younger people wanting physical media, non flat design back, the old internet and etc. gives me hope at least.

I go back for sports communities because they're still active enough on reddit for back and forth during live games, but literally yesterday on the hockey sub people were talking about how there's less content. API changes meant less autoposted game highlights and it even seems there's less back and forth on the game day threads. Now it depends a lot on the team these days.

Size has some pretty big advantages.

In particular, it feels like lemmy is mostly memes and news.

While on reddit, you can have productive discussions about the internals of the Haskell compiler, or ask questions to actual historians. Niche subreddits having a quorum of experts to actually have discussions about stuff was always the best part about reddit. And that part has always been sadly lacking from lemmy because of size.

TIL not supporting businesses you don't agree with = being on copium.

Guess I better go buy Nestle products again.

No I think that's fine, it's just I see people thinking that reddit is literally dying, which is just not the case.

Honestly it has 1000x more content than lemmy.

So steal the content and post it here. At least the good stuff.

There aren't any laws preventing you from doing that.

It's kinda how these sites function at all nowadays lol. Wasn't reddit text posts only a long time ago?

Send us the text posts to replace all the people posting fuckin YouTube videos instead of articles here!

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The good content on reddit isn't the shitty-ass memes, it's the discussion by experts on niche subreddits. Kinda hard to steal that...

What if you told you you can take a screenshot of those and share that here...

What if I told you that you could copy and paste text instead of taking a photo?

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Everyone? Those people who say these companies are sinking ship are probably so addicted to them they have to mention it anytime anything vaguely relates to it. Normal people use both and don't give a shit where their meme comes from.

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It looks like one of those soulless Apple animoji things.

Mouth open, shadow on chin - they turned their logo into a soyjak

Seems fitting tbh

Has he tried publicly spouting fringe fascist conspiracy theories yet? No? Give it time.....

Good riddance to reddit. Haven't been on it since the API pricing kicked in.

Since the API pricing thing happened, I've spent a grand total of about 10 minutes on their site.

Same, I posted something about one of my game jams a few months ago, and that was it. And that's only bcz I realized I had my game dev account logged in on my pc.

As soon as copious amounts of money are involved, you see the change. I never even used the 3rd party Reddit apps, but when money made OG Reddit act like a dick towards them, I peaced out. Sorry Reddit, but I think you’ll eventually be Digg. And I have no interest in sticking around for that.

i still use reddit a lot of comunities havent left and my god the amout of bots now is insane entire threads are coppied with 1 year 6 month old acounts with zero history and what i think is ai spam from simualr acounts its a mess over there now what brainless idiot is letting this happen

A friend of mine was talking about how they had blatant homophobia sent their way on an LGBT subreddit, which was upvoted. Went to check r/ApolloApp and someone critical of the dev (because he was selling merch) was being blatantly and casually homophobic with similar upvote behaviour.

I'm not an easily offended guy but, honestly, I'm glad I left that shithole.

They did kick out a lot of mods during the protests and moderation has gone to utter shit since the api change

Yeah new moderation didn’t stand a chance because the good mod tools were all 3rd party.

Yeah. I read an article (also on Ars Technica funnily enough) about how some moderators aren't equipped to deal with things. I believe they singled out r/canning because of the potential for food poisoning, but r/ender3 had a sympathetic "mod" who only joined that subreddit as a moderator just to fuck with Reddit corporate when they were replacing the mods.

Reddit, predictably, did not respond, so whoever wrote that article did their job right.

Oh god canning I heard about the new mods haveing less than a clue about it christ that's a massive fuck up

Had a brief look at r/WorldNews yesterday. Every comment was blatantly disgusting Islamaphobia that I couldn't believe hadn't been deleted yet. I don't ever remember it being that bad over there

Same, I remember r/worldnews not swinging that way whatsoever.

"Edit: Obligatory 'Fuck Spez' for karma."

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it any more!"

Maybe they should have spent some of the money they used on this questionable design update on improving their app or working with third party app developers.

"we cant afford the API costs for 3P clients! we need that money for making our own open source font that no one asked for!"

Well you can put lipstick on a pig ...but its still a pig. And that 3D snoo head looked creepy.

Honestly the past two iterations of Snoo before this logo were pretty good. Wish it wasn't attached to an awful website but, eh.

Anyone wanna place a bet on how long it will be before the porn on there gets banned for good?

I know what Spez said about keeping it but he has lied before.

My bet is once they nail down the investors for the IPO, Reddit users are going to see a sharp shift in moderating - including what is allowed regarding NSFW/NSFL content.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Reddit also said the font has "large x-height for readability and disambiguated letterforms for rapid identification" and improved accessibility.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Reddit is "holding talks with potential investors" for a 2024 IPO filing.

The top comment on Acidtwist's post announcing the branding refresh reads: "My love of old.reddit.com continues to grow."

Another reply pokes fun at the Reddit marketing video shared that encourages people to "think of something you like or enjoy."

And after Huffman reportedly warned employees to "be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public," due to potential backlash in June, maybe a new look was necessary.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.


The original article contains 797 words, the summary contains 117 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

do the germans have a word for super schadenfreude? or is that dumb 'cuz if i new german i could just stitch it on to the front or something?

Überschadenfreude...if that isn't it, then the Germans are wrong.

Der überfreuteste Schaden den ich je die Freude hatte live mitzuerleben. Der Kapitalismus frisst sich selbst, danke!