Does anybody feel like the quality of reddit has already dropped massively?

yunggwailo@kbin.social to Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 326 points –

I see a lot of comments from bootlickers on how the protests are dumb and stupid and dont work and engagement metrics are still holding but the quality of posts and comments has noticeably depreciated imo. So much so that whenever I visit the site Im actually shocked at how bad it is.

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I’ve stayed off it since the blackout started, but I did visit a sub yesterday that I used to read regularly about a topic I haven’t seen covered here. I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say, but maybe I’ve forgotten just how much crap I used to scroll through before landing on something decent. Either way, I’m OK with not going back.

I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say

Reddit has always been that way to an extent. Half of the time it's just people making bad jokes and quirky references that border on derailing the thread to get that sweet karma dopamine boost.

I stayed off of it for a bit after the first 48, because I needed one of the support subs there. Then the Titan news was going on and the wealth of shitty remarks about the people in the sub was too much for me. I get the whole ‘eat the rich’ mentality, but the sheer vitriol people had against someone they didn’t know didn’t exactly paint the commenters in a favourable light.

Hoping that such opinion is tempered somewhat over here.

What's goes around, comes around... That sentiment is not coming from a no where. Note how people didn't say similar staff about refugee boat sinking and actually calling media out for lopsided coverage.

These views only get more extreme as social fabric and economic conditions of the working people degrade.

These people spent more than most people will ever save up in their lifetime for a one time ride in a tube. Money that could go to feeding people, planting trees, etc. They had the US Coast Guard and Navy looking for them with helicopters and sonar buoys. One of them was a billionaire who could have done it right like Victor Vascovo, but instead chose to pinch pennies and ride in the Home Depot special.

They cost society massively, they won't pay shit for inheritance tax, their families will remain wealthier than I can ever dream of being. I make decent money and I drive past houses with river views and hot tubs and pools and boats and all sorts of rich people stuff I know I'll never have, those people can't dream of the amount of money these people have. I feel bad for the kid, that's about it.

Not to mention the fact that they are thrill-seeking at a mass grave where a horrific tragedy occurred. Similar circumstances, too. The first class survivor ratio compared to the "steerage" survivors... Kind of like how we pulled out all the stops for these rich fucks but can't be bothered by a boat full of refugees. It's a sign of the times and people have a right to be livid about it.

Silver lining: if not for these guys creating an actual need for search and rescue, the USCG would have to perform search-and-rescue drills at similar cost anyway.

Or so I've heard. 🤷‍♂️

damn dawg... i guess after all, these clowns are the JoB cReAtOrZ that we peasants don't deserve

I get the whole ‘eat the rich’ mentality

these are the same morons who like to send everyone under the guillotine... don't ever try to direct them to history book to find out how the guillotine proponents actually ended in real life. trying to have discussion with someone who is 12 yo (mentally at least) is just a waste of time.

It's taking some time to get over the withdrawal, but despite the fact I really liked some subreddits, staying off has become the best internet habit-related choice I've ever made. The low signal-to-noise ratio you mention is one big factor. The other is I needed some obstacles to ease of use to make my choices more deliberate. I have found alternatives, sure. But now I spend maybe a tenth of the time on social media that I used to when I was redditing every day.

I think its more likely that the posts on reddit are the same, and we are simply starting to become accustomed to the posts\quality of comments on the fediverse.

Our eyes are finally starting to open.

I think this is really what it is. I've spent a lot of my time here enamored with the quality of conversation, and when I joined it reminded me of the sort of discussion I used to scroll through on forums when I was a kid.

I hadn't seen it since, and I'd gotten so used to the bullshit that I barely remembered the difference. I'd really just chalked up the civility to the forum in question being several dozen regulars who knew each other too well to be dicks.

We need more content, but it's making me kind of averse to pushing so hard to get the rest over here, lest they just bring the shit behavior with them

shit behaviour is one thing the mods are another. I've seen plenty of communities on reddit where the users hated the mods and eventually left and formed their own sub. the fediverse already encourages multiple parallel communities for the same topic. so i hope we can get around the worst of reddit by seeking out and creating healthier communities. Leave the power mods behind.

Yeah. You no longer get first mover's advantage by just taking the obvious forum name, so you no longer get remain the owner of a massive community by default. If people don't like the environment, they'll just find another space with the same name and use that instead.

There will be consternation over the overlapping names, especially by people who fear missing out on something someone is saying (even though they most certainly were not refreshing "New" on forums with 20M subscribers to see what wasn't getting up voted), but for many that'll go away once they realize they can pick "the good version" of a space.

Whatever that means to them.

the fediverse already encourages multiple parallel communities

this is first thing fediverse has to fix if it wants to get somewhere. for a community to be useful, you need people interested in the topic concentrated at one place, so you can profit from that crowd wisdom. 100 people spread over 80 communities is not going to be much useful.

100 people spread across 80 communities isn't useful, but neither is 100,000 in 1. It just creates an overwhelming amount of noise. Comments get filled with jackasses jockeying for attention, and niche posts get buried in floods of other posts.

Just because people have become used to it doesn't mean it's been good. It just means people have been blind to what they've lost, all because we have biases toward big numbers.

Niche interests won't be spread out. That's not how they worked before Reddit, and it's not how they'll work after it. Big popular groups will splinter, and it'll be a good thing.

I remember once, on a world building forum for a group of sci-fi nerds... I dropped a meme to troll trek nerds. (okay so it was a screen grab of the TOS episode where kirk and spoc crashland on that planet where Cochrain was staying with the energy-creature-hottie. You know the scene where spock is building a universal translator...)

Yeah, so the gist of the joke was that Star Wars was better than Star Trek because even Spock wanted a lightsaber.

After their outrage subsided the freaking nerds started trying to figure out a way to build an actual lightsaber. They got everything down 'cept the power source. It was glorious. And not something that would happen on today's reddit.

We need more content, but it's making me kind of averse to pushing so hard to get the rest over here, lest they just bring the shit behavior with them

All places eventually trend towards their Eternal September. In the meantime just push back against it as much you can and enjoy what you got.

People are going to wring their hands over admin-level, permiable serve blocks forever, but one of the things you can do with them as an admin is disconnect from Eternal September.

Obviously, general interest servers aren't going to want to do that, but more niche ones should be able to get away with it. And with some careful consideration for how blocks work, we can probably have environments where the good stuff reaches smaller, disconnected sites through intermediaries via cross-posting.

With some careful planning, we could have it all.

We need more content

I spun up an instance because I dislike what Reddit is doing and I want to support this community and help it grow.

Regarding the content you are talking about: https://fediverse.boo/magazines

I've set up automatic news feeds from the BBC, NPR, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and CNN so far to their own magazines. That way you can subscribe to a specific magazine to get articles from the publishers you like. (I'm also still tweaking how much content gets pulled in so its not too much or too little). I also have a catch-all news magazine that I manually curate news article links for.

I plan on adding additional magazines that aggregate links from other websites (not just news) but I am waiting to hear from the community on what content they would like to see.

Ok, thats my like 30 second elevator spiel about my instance and my magazines. Definitely drop me some feedback if there is any additional content I should automatically add to dedicated magazines. Hope to see some new people jumping into discussions on posts over there!

Our eyes are finally starting to open.

Do not ever believe this. This is an intellectual trap that once you dig in to it it's hard to dig out. People like Elon Musk are the type of people who think they see the world for what it really is, and look how stupid they are. Some truths are clearer than others, but you will always be chained down by your own perspective, unconscious biases, and way of thinking. Always keep your mind partially open to new perspectives and do your best to practice intellectual humility.

Always keep your mind partially open to new perspectives and do your best to practice intellectual humility.

This is the basis of true intelligence/wisdom.

Our eyes were never closed. We just didn't have a Reddit alternative with critical mass, until spez created the critical mass for us. Helpful fellow.

The quality has been declining for years now. This last thing has only made it worse, but you're likely now noticing how bad it is because you spend less time on it.

The protest won't work. It's failed in crippling reddit. Reddit will keep going, but as a shadow of its former self, with increasingly shallow discussions and increasingly crappy/old/unoriginal comment.

I'd say the protest did work. A lot of good users and mods left Reddit, the admins massively overplayed their hand and showed their true colors, probably hurting their IPO, the fediverse got enough of an influx of users to get a good kickstart and the next migration wave is just around the corner.

Personally, I haven’t really spent much time at all on Reddit since the Blackout. I went from it swiftly becoming my replacement for timewasting on Twitter, and was spending more and more time on it. Now, I’m on Mastodon more and using kbin. I even moved the Reddit app off the main home page on my phone. I only go to Reddit now if I’m linked to it, and the times I’ve gone from whatever page I was linked to to my home page, there hasn’t been anything I’ve seen that have made me want to spend any time there. It feels stale.

And I hate to say it but it made the perfect opener for the thing that Zuckerberg is talking about. I mean the Zucc himself is literally talking about federated communities right after the other giant social media companies started running theirs terribly.

At the very least, people will hear about the tech elsewhere now and maybe that will drive traffic to actual federated communities.

I'm kind of tired of people farming human interactions and profiting off of making our communities miserable. I'd donate a lot to lemmy if I had money just to not have to be the product anymore.

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Exactly. Even reddit didn't spring up overnight, and the great digg migration everyone talks about wasn't a one-time en masse thing. It was a slow bleed for 2~3 years, and those that stayed on digg turned it into one huge circlejerk about how digg was so much better, reddit's UI sucked and was confusing to use, and people would end up back on digg eventually ... EXACTLY like what is happening on reddit now.

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The quality has dropped noticeably after the blackout. This is trajectory for terminal decline, similar to what happened to Digg. Eventually, it will become so stale and uninteresting, they'll just give trying to make Reddit a community and make it entirely a curated content platform.

The protest didn't succeed, but that just means a lot of people who were already disillusioned with Reddit and basically just trying to ignore most of the bad decisions by the admins decided that there was no point in sticking around because it clearly won't get better.

I was a mod of a moderately sized subreddit under a different username, and a lot of the other mods I talked to said that they're done after the 30th. Some of them, like me, already left. And while I know a lot of people like to hate on mods, in most subreddits the mods are doing a ton of work behind the scenes that keeps things on track. Without them, you're completely correct- Reddit will get worse and worse.

I think the protest crippled reddit considerably. It robbed reddit of a significant number of quality users and moderators, caused an extreme amount of media attention, and created enough of a problem for Google that they had to change course in order to compensate for all the broken links and noticeably poorer search results.

The main reason it looks like it had a much smaller effect is because a lot of missing users have been replaced by bots. And given how hostile those bots are with respect to moderators and the protest, it seems clear that they were put in place by reddit themselves. So don't be fooled by "traffic is normal" announcements and metrics. They mean nothing by themselves.

The protest caused a lot of users to start looking for alternatives and it shed a lot of light on the fediverse, giving it an incredible amount of exposure. People now know that it exists and know that there are alternatives to reddit.

Remember, the worst is yet to come after June 30th when those API changes take effect.

The main reason it looks like it had a much smaller effect is because a lot of missing users ... just aren't there anymore and threads have been taken over by the admin-bootlickers that remained.

I read an article comparing Reddit to a dying mall and honestly it's kinda getting that vibe since the protest

The migration is not gonna happen overnight, but it is happening.

The quality and the traffic. At least in terms of engagement. I knew another mod there that I used to do spamhunting with and we both modded a couple big subs, we were talking about it one day and we were talking about sub traffic, and I noted about 2 years ago there was actually a big decline in traffic in /r/videos, which he modded he said he hadn't noticed it, but when you went to archive.org and compared random front pages to engagement at the time, you noticed that all posts overall had fewer comments and fewer upvotes, we started checking a few more large subs and noticed it was quite similar.

Quality is, to some extent, a mod failing. Mods can't be expected to go out there and produce top quality posts all the time, but they can be expected to keep out the low quality content, and a lot of them don't do that. By ignoring frequently reposted topics, to not bothering to properly apply the rules to keep the posts fully on topic, the subs just declined and declined.

The protest may not have crippled Reddit, but funding may yet do so. Word is, spez did what he did because interest rates went up, the venture capitalists demand an actual return on their investment for once, they want it now, and this is spez's desperate attempt to make that happen.

This is almost certain to fail. Lurkers, bots, and trolls aren't going to pay for flashy avatars or whatever silly gimmick he comes up with next. Advertisers aren't going to want their advertisements to appear next to trolls (see Twitter for evidence). Reddit will run out of money and collapse.

Spez may yet have the last laugh, if he manages to IPO and sell out before the music stops. Time will tell. But every non-shareholder who works for Reddit would be well advised to GTFO ASAP.

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We'd need an objective way to measure lameness and then review a large set of posts (on a particular sub?) from a couple of months ago vs now. Criteria have to be pre-determined to avoid the post hoc fallacy.

Average words or characters per comment? Number of insults directed at other commenters (measured by someone blinded to which group they came from)? Number of "controversial" comments judged by large numbers of up and downvoted?

I dunno. I'm not doing it. Not a social scientist. Just suggesting an interesting experiment.

how about a number of crying laughing emoji per thread?

😅😂 OMG this is so accurate 😅😂

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A lot of small, shitty subs are popping up on r/all lately, I've noticed. I used to doomscroll and only notice I'd been too far when I started seeing stuff from subs I'd never seen before, like r/artefactporn, r/justguysbeingdudes, or that weird Talylor Swift circlejerk sub. That was usually around pages 7-9, somewhere in there. That was the sign that I'd been scrolling for too long, and probably ought to either touch grass, or at least refresh the page.

Right now, for me, all three of those subs are on the first page of r/all, along with other subs I've never seen (or rarely seen) before the bottom of the barrel, like r/newsofthestupid and r/rabbits. The one from r/rabbits is on the bottom of the front page with less than 1500 upvotes.

r/all is a bit like 9gag now. Even sort by controversial is boring.

This is something I noticed as well, glad to see it's not just me.

Havnt checked so honestly wouldn’t know. Now that I think of it, it’s kind of crazy that Kbin replaced it so easily for me and I am on it far less (which is a good thing tbh).

It’s also testament to how good the experience here has been so far. And how crap reddits response as been.

Yeah I just joined like literally 15 seconds ago and I can already tell this is the place for me, still getting acclimated but it’s great so far

Bro I swear I have been going through a lightweight meltdown after quitting Reddit cold turkey. I’m glad I found this place.

It really wasn’t giving me anything other than a few cool random factoids a day and a lot of distraction. Those were really the only positives any more.

I can already tell that my overall mental health is getting better (you know with some rough patches of course). I’m reading and working on projects again. I accidentally beat the new Zelda game halfway through the game.

On another hand I’m actually sleeping properly… I’m reading real news during lunch, learning Spanish.

Reddit was fucking sucking my soul up or something. I guess it was just such an easy time sink to turn to that I never really got anything done anymore. It feels kinda creepy reflecting back. You’re giving them subscriptions and all that so that they can dark pattern you into sticking around.

Thats what makes this place special. For now it’s just social and people talking with people. Until the advertisers figure this out I’m gonna really enjoy it.

anyone with a brain is protesting. ask yourself who is even left posting. do you know anyone IRL that posts on reddit by the way? I'm telling you it's the age of fake content, shills, influencers, karma bots, scammers, culture war mongers. makes >90% of the content on reddit now

I want to focus on how I can contribute fediverse rather than worrying about Reddit.

I know this has always been an issue for the nearly 12 years I’ve used reddit, but I’ve seen a lot more of the smug redditor comments than normal that remind me of this guy’s skits. Usually I’d only see larger instances of smug know-it-alls when someone brings up religion (since some reddit atheists can’t help themselves), but I’ve personally been seeing more smartass remarks on the weirdest of things.

Has anyone else noticed that as well?

Wouldn't know, I don't even check it anymore.

Don’t know don’t care, I haven’t been back since the bullshit started.

I was checking for my GDPR request but considering it's all backed up in a public site dump anyway I think I'm totally done with the site now.

I ended up checking a few times via teddit and I noticed the exact same thing. It seems a lot of the non-mod quality contributors have already left.

Those who stayed are probably power users using 3rd party apps. So expect another big drop in quality on July 1st.

I noticed the same thing. I was on Reddit for a good 12 years and the quality was getting worse for years, but it's really dropped off since May 30. There are noticeably fewer big posts on r/all and there's hardly any new or interesting stuff. It's reposts, Twitter screenshots, stuff from Tiktok and Discord, complaints (think mildlyinfuriating, AITA, Doordash), and rate me requests. And Facebook type things, like "here's what my kids did today." The bright spots in the sea of trash are gone.

Kbin, Lemmy, and Tildes have been filling up with the good stuff I missed from Reddit. A month ago, it was a little slow here, but not anymore.

I'm only still keeping my reddit account for one private sub and an ongoing commission, but I realized a couple hours ago that I'm so used to Boost and it's so convenient that I could not even find my messages to this guy.

They weren't in the chat window with everyone else. There was no other button that I could see. After some fruitless fumbling, I literally had to Google how to check my damn inbox on a site I've been using for nigh on six years and I'm very grumpy about that. So I have that to look forward to if they don't turn out to have a discord or something

Yeah, ive visited a couple times out of morbid curiousity and its all just lowquality posts, nsfw/jon oliver, and people aggressively licking spez's boots while saying "but uhh fuck spez tho" with his boot in their mouth. Gonna use power delete suite here tonight just in case the api changes disable it, and use fdroids stealth reddit scraper to view the few small subs i actually care about still

FYI, I used power delete on my account to replace everything with junk. It missed about 1~2 comments per page, so you may need to run it a few times to get everything

I see the drop in quality over there as the more technical (the best?) people migrate to the Fediverse. As others have noted, I'm not looking forward to all Redditors coming here and dropping the quality.

Old timers like me remember the quality of Usenet prior to ISPs making it available during the Eternal September. Before then, people on Usenet were largely college students or higher. Quality on Usenet really declined when it opened up to the masses, especially after AOL made Usenet available to its subscribers.

Could be that the posts were always that bad, but now your perception is being colored by the current events. It's certainly possible that a lot of the better contributors have left, though, or at least are less active.

I've found that the quality of Reddit comments has degraded over the past few years, with lame jokes and low-effort regurtitated talking points getting upvoted to the top of most threads. Which is fine. I'm full of lame jokes. But it's just not what I'm (mostly) interested in.

KBin, Lemmy, et al. seem to be better but also suffer from a lack of any commentary, interesting or otherwise. I expect that'll get better as more people engage over here.

On the other hand, I haven't been back to Reddit much since the great unleavening.

It sort of feels that way. I honestly can't tell whether I'm just filled with whatever the internet site equivelent is for "New Relationship Energy" or whether this place is better. It seems better.

I think part of it is the fediverse has so much potential to get better while reddit seems to have been gradually introducing more and more things I don't like.

You’re right either way. It seems better because it is better.

It does feel that way. I feel more engaged, anyway.

Was just about to type a comment until I saw this. Exactly how I feel. The posts I find on here feel more meaningful.

Yes! I agree! I feel like we are people talking to each other, not just performing or bloviating.

I came to Reddit in 2019, it felt nice then (avoided anything but tech discussions, though). Since 2020 it has been consistently getting worse, maybe before that too.

Anyway, centralization is bad. I'm not coming back.

I'd have to look there to know 🤷

TBH, the only times I've visited since this whole thing began have been from Google searches. I miss a couple of subs, but I think Lemmy/Kbin will fill that void in due time.

I started to slowly realize this with the blackout. I tried using twitter and Deviant Art more, and found them to be a lot better since I could see more cool fan art.

While I still like my reddit home feed, popular and all just suck. Its mostly all rage posts made to generate outrage. I see so much negative stuff from /r/Antiwork or /r/Politics. I signed up for cat photos. I’m not here to listen to how our world is so garbage for the 100th time.

Whatever blackout/boycott/migration happens with Reddit, this should go double for Twitter, that's another place I silently dropped like a rock and have never visited again.

When something happens with Ukraine and I feel compelled to dive into it, I've used Nitter, which mirrors the Twitter content but Musk and his right-wing idiocy gets no goddamned clicks and traffic from me anymore.

I guess thats what happens when the quality userbase migrates.

I'm sure Spez has the stupid asshole audience he wants, though! Just like Twitter, which he idolizes.

I think Reddit quality has been declining for some time.

There are two factors at work I believe. One, once something goes mainstream, you get a much broader set of the population on the platform, and much like real life, the idiots seem to be louder. More importantly though, updates to the platform deprioritized serious conversation in favor of mindless scrolling. Look at the new website, or at the official app. They are not conducive to in-depth conversation. They keep trying to distract you with posts from other communities that you don't even subscribe to, the goal is obviously to get you to keep clicking clicking clicking rather than spending a bunch of time on one page composing a well thought out reply.

And that shows. Really high quality in-depth conversations on issues of importance used to be far more common for me on Reddit. Today they are much less frequent, fewer people seem interested in real discussion or debate. And there's much more of the attitude of 'you disagree with me there for you're wrong fuck you'.

I think the recent protest and beginning of migration are going to make that even more prevalent. I think many of the smarter people who enjoy in-depth discussion and post quality comments are going to migrate to Lemmy or Kbin leaving Reddit full of idiots. I think that will actually be good for Reddit as a company, at least in the short-term, because idiots don't use ad blockers and they install the official app without thinking. It is of course killing their golden goose, but their actions suggest they have decided they prefer to do without that goose's continued services.

The quality of discussion here reminds me of when I joined Reddit like 12-13 years ago. The massive user base and tendency toward hivemind/dogpile responses, canned inside jokes, and repetitive content definitely made the experience stale and uninteresting the last few years. If you use the new website design and/or the first party app, you can see how the content delivery has become the same as every other social media, a nonstop torrent of visual candy you can flip through, with the comments becoming an afterthought. The only thing that kept me coming back to Reddit were the comment sections, and I feel a rebirth of that draw occurring in this open-source social universe.

Yes exactly! I've always be in Reddit for the comments sections. 12-13 years ago, back when forums and IRC were what there was (aka, DISCUSSION based communities where low effort posts didn't blow up, and platforms were run by hobbyists and webmasters catering to communities rather than social media corps desperate for clicks). It was a better time to be online IMHO. I think part of it was that joining web communities was slightly unapproachable, which meant you had to be at least a little smart to realize that you wanted to join that community and figure out how to join it. But I think the format of the sites had a bigger effect in selecting the quality of content that got popular.
As you say, nonstop torrent of visual candy you can scroll through and click click click getting another ad impression or 12 each time.

As long as the people there now are able to cash out, they don't care about a sustainable future. They'll squeeze until out dies and then move on.

Honestly I think that's probably part of it. Spez and Kn0thing cashed out when they sold Reddit to Conde Nast for like 10 million. Now of course it's worth billions. So I think Spez really wants his due, and is only interested in a payday.
Before this controversy, the account /u/spez was last active like 10 months ago. That speaks volumes- if you supposedly love the community but won't interact with them on a direct level for almost a year, that suggests maybe you don't actually love the community.

And when you come out of your hidey hole, you do an AMA, answer like 6 questions with non-answers (after starting late) and then return to your hidey hole.

Or I guess with his prepper ways, its more of a bunker

Quality was dropping a ton anyway, but god damn I miss the sports subs.

Even /r/baseball can garner 75-125 comments on some minor post.

Sports always seem like the hardest categories to get content/comments with when it comes to places like these. I remember reddit a decade+ ago and how it seemed like those NFL and NBA subs took a long time to get traction.

It's the toughest part about adopting kbin and Lemmy for me. But fuck it, I like new shit so I might as well try

yeah I'm missing sports subs a lot, I loved the live discussion threads for games/matches

r/MMA mods did create m/MMA on kbin, but once r/MMA opened back up it seems most people ran back to reddit...

also smaller communities like r/iRacing or even the wider simracing community will take some time to build up a userbase on the fediverse

I haven't been able to find a replacement for r/hiphopheads either

EDIT: just searched again and apparently !hiphopheads@sopuli.xyz does exist, so that's cool!

Depends on the community. Many of the subreddits I've been in are going strong - or have gotten better since the blackout.

I've cut back almost all my content generation for reddit, so no more posting, adding comments or even upvoting / downvoting.

Reddit has effectively said we're a bunch of leaches so that's how I'm treating them now, give me your content, I'm giving you nothing in return.

I'm definitely feeling a shift in the quality of content getting produced.

I popped over there after my suspension expired, and... yeah? A little bit. I don't know if that boils down to my resentment for Lemur Boy or if it just started to suck after we all left. The whole thing feels insincere, corporate. The heart's not there.

@yunggwailo IMO it’s bad on big subs but for niche subs that can’t/won’t move to the Fediverse it’s the same. It’s incredibly frustrating because there’s almost nowhere else to have a decent conversation about these topics in a non-discord, forum-like fashion.

I frequently lurk on r/worldbuilding and it is still pretty active, though I've yet to find a solid equivalent of that sub on kbin/lemmy

I thought I saw an anouncement somewhere that some people from that sub moved to lemmy... Maybe search for it again.

Like 75% of the subs I actually go to (and not just see on the frontpage or all) are still dark. So I have very very little reason to go back.

I've been observing the creation, expansion, and slow heat death of Reddit for a long time now (had accounts there since it opened). I think that Reddit's decisions here accelerated a decline in content quantity and quality, but the trend had been happening for a while.

I think that the biggest issue behind this decline is infrastructure based. Reddit was designed around the basic concept that the desire to post and contribute to the discussion would be reward enough to drive participation. Karma is the point system for this participation, a number that only speaks to popularity, not the quality of a post or a contributor. When the community was small, this non-specific variable served the purpose of identifying content trends, but karma is very poor at describing WHY a post or comment is popular. Eventually, instead of karma being an indicator that someone had contributed to conversation, it's only meaningful metric became one of popularity or notoriety.

This meant that where once Reddit had been a haven for enabling discussion on any topic, it became a shouting match between who could get the most upvotes. This cultural shift became very apparent after the Digg exodus, and the trend accelerated as other social media copied Reddit's voting and karma system. Of course, Reddit began feeding off of their content, which was also popularity driven, and once the content algorithms started coming into play in the mid-2010s, it created a feedback loop of popularity driven schlock that drove most real discussion to fringes of the site.

We've recently seen this dynamic start to even affect Google, whose search results are getting hammered due to Reddit's blackouts, and whose search results have been significantly dropping in quality over the last few years.

As for myself, I still browse certain reddits that I haven't found equivalents for in the Fediverse, but it's pretty clear to me that Reddit's not really a positive place for contributors - whether they be moderators or posters. To some extent, I'll miss the reach of Reddit's audience, but lets face it, most of that audience is just shitposters and bots.

Will the same trend happen in the Fediverse? Possibly, but I think there's more potential here for positive change than there ever will be in a company led by the likes of Huffman, or for that matter any company or centralized authority. Besides, it took about 15 years for Reddit to condense from being a cool place full of new ideas to the condensed black hole of regurgitated shitposting it's become. I think the Fediverse has a bit more potential longevity than that.

It's been like that for a while, I think we just got used to it.

It has been said from the very beginning: First the quality will drop, then the user numbers.

Those who are talking shit right now didn’t listen then, they won’t now. It’s a lost cause.

I just checked. They are pushing more ads from what I've seen and now there's ad for every several posts. At least for myself this has never happened before, not sure if it is different for people in other regions with higher traffic to Reddit. It's obnoxious.

The occasional time I get on there, yes. It's a bunch of reposts. There's no substance what so ever and there seems to be a lot of arguing in the comments.

It has been going downhill for years, but right now its like it jumped of a cliff at the bottom of the hill. Into hell reddit goes, where it belongs!

I'm having this feeling way before the whole API story came out. At least the bigger subreddits were getting repetitive and boring, take AskReddit for example, in the past years you had the same 3 questions about dating, celebrities and what to do with with $ 1 million and every combination of that.

Some subreddits staid engaging and diverse, but most are just repetitive echo chambers.

Yes, big time. It feels almost as if half of the comments are bots, propping up spez and crapping on the mods who supported the blackout. Unfortunately, there are still a few subreddits that have no equivalent here just yet and I end up having to revisit reddit to get the info I need on an ongoing basis. I started two communities (Signal Messenger and Amex) here myself in an effort to help with transition but so far there hasn't been much happening on that front. I even went as far as messaging the mods on the /r/ equivalents but none of them wanted to move over, or even give it a shot as a subscriber. Nevertheless, I am not giving up and still feel there is growth to be had. Perhaps once the apps die off on reddit, we will see additional users transitioning.

I stopped using reddit.. so I have no idea!

I still use it and all I see is useless memes. All the helpful stuff is private.

I felt Reddit's quality started going downhill around 2021, which is not long after they introduced the official app and started allowing Google logins.

EDIT: Looks like the official app's been around longer than I thought. :O

Is the official app really that new??? I thought it was around since way before.

reddit has been going down hill for over a decade at this point. if something better was a available it would have died a long time ago

I don't know, because I'm normally here rather than there, but you could test and find out. Take some screenshots before and after and do a double-blind test to see if you can tell.

Who checks reddit anymore? I don't check the site at all. even if they did let third party apps back u/spez could always go back on his word. lemmy and the #fediverse where here to catch us when we became stranded!

I still enjoy /r/cfb and /r/collegebaseball

Otherwise, it seems the entire site has devolved into nothing but new bot accounts posting from the big book of repetitive karma gaining questions on /r/AskReddit. Seems everything else is a ghost town.