I'm sure it's nothing and everything is fine. Now, who wants to buy some of this Reddit stock? I'll cut you a special deal so you don't miss out! ... Anyone?
I was interested in buying a share just to be in for the ride, but then they asked for my real name to be associated with my handle. It's like they never understood what reddit was about at all.
I got a Message offering me to buy too. In the Message it says i need to be a permanent Resident of the US.
Buddy, you had me enter my Country when i created the Account. You know full-well I'm from the EU. Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
Because that would cost their time instead of yours
Perhaps you moved from Europe to the States in the interim like I did.
Edit to add: sorry if this came off as snarky, was not my intention. Just wanted to point out that it's not always so clear-cut. I created my Reddit account in 2008 when I lived in the Netherlands. Then I moved to the US in 2016 and became a citizen in 2019.
"We have never made a profit and may never make a profit. Please buy our stock."
A special deal? Doesnโt the message basically say โgive us your data so you maybe have a chance at buying stock at full price, and be thankful weโre not marking it upโ?
Well, at IPO price. A couple of decades ago, that used to mean it was discounted. Nowadays, it doesn't, but not everybody knows that.
Probably part of some side grift to sell more information to data brokers
The whole idea is a grift. They are directly appealing to people who largely should not be buying shares due to their financial situation and are a lot less critical of the pretty poor numbers they published than professional exploiters investors will be.
Obviously this is done in hopes of selling more shares and binding users long term, though that will probably just accelerate the enshittification because suddenly the last remaining power users are turned into shareholders instead
Right but the whole "give us all your info and MAYBE you can buy stock" is the part that sounds like a secondary grift. If they wanted to pump they could just have some set amount and do a first come first serve right off the bat.
Free shorts?
Can I borrow some stock?
that would be called "shorting" and it totally is a thing.
Look, Iโm not trying to short okay? Iโm sure Reddit will do great. Just let me borrow your stock and Iโll make sure you have it back in like 6 months or so
Yeah, the big short is even a movie! One positive i got from hanging around stonks, amc and gme subs was how much i learned about how fucked the stock market is.
Waaaaay more fucked, gamified, and straight up broken than even the most cynical citizen thinks.
They actually tweaked the upbote/down vote stuff back then to stop actually showing the true amount of upvotes and down votes, directly. They started fuzzing votes to supposedly help prevent manipulation.
Reddit isn't dead. There's plenty of posts and traffic, way more than here. The problem is that that quality has plummeted. Bots posting divisive political shit, bad memes, and toxic commenters. Angry people spurred on by bots and no valuable discussion
As anything with Reddit, it depends on what you subscribe.
It's perfectly possible that this person sees the site completely dead. Personally, every time I go there it's full of interesting comics raised by some bots that keep reposting old things, and really really bad comments, but still plentiful.
They made some algorithm changes a bunch of years ago (2015?), and migrated away from the concept of "default subs". The front page drew from every sub with an algorithm.
TheDonald was very good at understanding and abusing that algorithm, resulting in it overrunning the front page for everyone. They had to tweak it a bunch as a result.
IMO, this resulted in a great homogenization of communities. People participate in communities without really understanding the communities. Why should they? The "community" is just "the Reddit front page".
As soon as any community gets popular enough to hit the front page, it becomes hive-minded, predictable, and bland.
Lemmy actually has this same structural problem... Evidenced by the fact that as I write this comment, I actually have no clue what community this post is in.
I think Lemmy just hasn't been overrun w/ bots (yet), isn't being as heavily invested in by bad faith foreign state actors (yet), and is mostly composed of people who moved from Reddit who want to actively participate in a way to keep it from having that same Reddit "flavour".
Just my take.
Omg a little anecdote to add on to your point. I made a post on a news article about how people blindly follow name brands. It was only after a few blindly ehh and some other comments along those lines I realized I was on a blind community thread. Real foot in mouth moment lol. It was taken well enough when I explained my mistake and apologized. Got some good info too about the community.
LMAO, thank you for sharing that story. Must have been painful, but the story gave me a good laugh!
I definitely felt like an ass, but everyone was a good sport about it. We all used it as good learning opportunity because the thought had never crossed my mind about a blind lemmy community/instance. They even invited and insisted I followed some communities. All in all it was a good experience from a dumb mistake.
As soon as any community gets popular enough to hit the front page, it becomes hive-minded, predictable, and bland.
People participate in communities without really understanding the communities.
Not against you specifically but this is why I don't tell people about communities anymore. The quality declines the more people participate.
I just went there, I also noticed that most of the posts on top of r/all are sub 10K upvotes, most sub 5K. However, when I sorted by Top/Today then I saw there were a lot of posts that were over 30K upvotes. Maybe it's change in algorithm and how they show posts.
BUT, i went to Top All Time, and all of the posts there were at the earliest from 3 years ago, a lot from 5-7years ago too so it rules out the pandemic effect. Looks like reddit may have indeed passed its prime.
Edit: actually it's weirder, i can't access Top This Year. It looks like they scrubbed all the top posts from 2 years ago, so I might be wrong about the activity. But that is still Hella sus.
Yup, top posts last 2 years definitely scrubbed or just excluded from top all time display. Probably to hide all of the protest posts from last year.
You forgot about the automated dms and emails begging users to buy stock at their IPO to inflate it's value
foreal?
elll oh el
I just got it on an old throwaway account that I forgot to delete. But not as a DM as others, but as an email.
You are receiving this email because a Reddit account, [redacted], is registered to this email address.
And you can be sure that I checked off every box that you let me, so that I wouldnt receive unsolicited mails... By the way, I'm not even eligible for the IPO and you shpuld know it, reddit.
That was literally always the case, and frankly it was not nearly as big a problem as people made it out to be.
They are weird superficial sensationalized feel-good posts. It's was a thing before, but now it feels more contrived. Front page feels hollow.
Yeah Reddit is awesome like that, but have you ever tried posting something on lemmygrad by accident?
Bots posting divisive political shit, bad memes, and toxic commenters. Angry people spurred on by bots and no valuable discussion
To be fair, that happens here as well.
There's a meta problem, of all the public squares being polluted by what you described, to the point where they're not usable anymore for discussion. Something that screams for legislation, but it's hardly spoken of.
Also, the front page is basically broken, so the traffic on the site isn't being directed to content in the same way it used to be.
Basically, the site was very different when "Hot" was the way most people experienced the front page.
Now it's... whatever fucking curated bullshit and "Best" which is all just terrible.
I was initially drawn to Reddit as a place that offered nuanced conversation. I even used to engage with toxic takes if nothing less than to discredit their take. It's a complete dumpster fire of toxic ass hats now - not worth commenting within as it's becoming more and more of a conservative echo chamber.
I feel like Lemmy is getting more argumentative, especially when anything related to the Isreal/Palestine conflict (in that particular case it seems to be consistently people making bad faith arguments on both sides going back and forth)
Yes, everything that could possibly be posted and discussed has been done. Humanity has officially run it's course, that is the only explanation for a reduction in the amount of content on Reddit.
Suddenly I understand how non-americans feel when Americans discuss world issues.
That would be better than the extremely "interesting" future that awaits us
Yeah i feel like chicken little sometimes just watching other folks going about their business like shits not actually going down right in front of us.
Tbf our future technologically is pretty wild too, so if you're in a developed country and rampant inflation hasnt made you homeless, there likely cool extreme changes to go alongside the horrifying ones!
*its
Monty Python's Flying Circus!
Wow, I even hear the music playing in my head when I read that.
I almost added *Liberty Bell March starts playing*. Happy to see it wasn't necessary.
I like how the user claims 2016-2019 as good years. From what I remember, the 2016 election was when reddit started turning to trash with the political astroturfing and right wing trolls making bad faith arguments. When was the crazy with the totally-not-staged crazy doorbell camera videos?
2016'ish was when the The_Donald started its come up, which absolutely was a negative for the site. 2015 had FatPeopleHate, Even in 2011 they had the jailbait subreddit.
So saying it was ever particularly good is kind of... lmao
I don't think shithead communities are an indication of quality. Lemmy has quite a few despite otherwise having early reddit feelings.
I think the quality of comments is a bigger indicator. Reddit started to feel shit when thought out comments got drowned out by the sea of low effort memes, one liners and other overused references. Lemmy also has those comments but the ratio of quality to shit is much higher.
I donโt think shithead communities are an indication of quality.
Places like The_Donald and FatPeopleHate didn't just stay within their little communities. They shat up the rest of reddit, and because their communities were allowed to flourish, they had a base of operations to recruit more shitters from. Once those communities got banned/quarantined, the behavior diminished noticeably, as the community found they weren't welcome and often simply left.
I remember a large influx of 4chan users around 2012 or something that seriously diluted the quality of the comments
Dear lord 2015/2016 was like the sharp decline after a long slope downward in my opinion. Might be showing my age but peak reddit to me was prior to reddit gold and vote fuzzing.
For me, the downfall was when Unidan got himself banned. Reddit has never fully recovered .
I eventually signed up to Reddit in 2011 when it started to become less of the "wild west." I mean anything could pop up on the front page. 2015 I really got sick of US politics in everything, and I think after the 2016 election, I found out just how many subreddits were controlled and modded by like 4 people. Reddit had a plethora of issues well before most current users even arrived.
Before I quit, I was using RES to block the power users and their subs. Got back a lot of mental health blocking off all the ragebait/clickbait shit. Politics is unavoidable, but at least I could filter out the grifters only looking to profit from it.
The most active posts are now bot-created open-ended conversation starters on r/askreddit to stir up activity and give the illusion of a thriving community. The questions are usually very redditer patronizing, and some of them are thinly veiled marketing analysis to create value for future shareholders. they're often saturated with butt created responses.
As to why the post in question may not still exist? I suspect substantial posts about bot saturation are probably filtered out.
The true halcyon days were before the Digg migration. Sorry, I know most folks on the site and very likely here too were part of that diaspora but itโs fair to say that Reddit was very different and yes: better before that.
It started going down hill when Conde Nast bought it.
Wait what. Right wing presence was gradually purged from 2016 onwards. The main change that period is the site having become a hyper American left-wing echo chamber. And the American part is important since leftism in other traditions tend to turn eyes at American progressives
We did it guys. We've posted everything there is to post and now we can finally rest.
Dead? Maybe not. Dead inside? Definitely.
Kinda feel post API killing, frontpage post comments have jumped dramatically.
Unfortunately, it's extremely bot-like. Like AI talking to AI and chains and chains of memes/jokes. No real discussion.
Repost bots (and repost top comment bots) are pretty rampant. A lot of subs have changed pretty significantly because their entire mod team left. In general I get the sense it's a lot more people now who consider reddit "social media" compared to before. Site isn't dead for sure but it's gone down in quality significantly.
Unfortunately I think this is exactly what Reddit wants. They want to be social media like Instagram or TikTok style. A lot more ad money from that crowd.
I know Reddit (and Lemmy) was always technically social media but I consider it more like Internet forums than the Facebook/Insta/TikTok style social media.
Here's a theory....
After the API implosion, so many active and posting users quit that the gap was filled with mainly bots.
Whether intentional or not, this gave the impression that Reddit was still active on paper.... The numbers said there was no significant change after the exedous.
When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots, they decided to chase the money before the site tanked completely.
This led to Reddit trying to cash in on the remaining users with more ads than ever, cash in on their advertisers, and cash in on the platforms (until recent) good image. Most people have at least heard of Reddit at this point, so going for an IPO now, when almost everyone knows that it exists, and only regular Reddit users are really aware of the enshittification happening. So they can demand a high price for the IPO, and collect a bunch of money before the enshittification is more well known, and the company tanks.
IDK, but that seems to be the way of things.
They've been chasing an IPO for years, it's not a quick process.
Facebook has been enshitifying for years and the stock has gone to the moon.
A lot of what enshitification is, is fucking the users to increase shareholder value.
Well, with a mostly anonymous platform like Reddit, there isn't the same user lock-in, so alternatives, like Lemmy can be shifted to more easily.
With Facebook, you're dealing with IRL friends and loved ones. Those connections lock you to Facebook. Since you're locked in, advertisers are locked to you through Facebook's ad systems, and they can enshittify the whole platform without losing much engagement.
I don't know of anyone who uses Reddit to stay in touch with friends. Sure, we're almost all on there in some way or another, but not for that reason.
So abandoning the sinking ship that is Reddit, can be easily done, unlike Facebook where you, and your friends, and their friends, and your family, and your families friends, and your families family, all pretty much have to unanimously agreed to leave Facebook for another platform all at once. That way everyone can stay in touch.
Organizing an exedous of that scale and magnitude is essentially impossible.
With Reddit, users can kind of trickle over individually or in groups as they see fit. Not tied to Reddit for their social interactions among their friends. Most creators, even those with subreddits, can easily post on different platforms and for the most part, they do. So users can enjoy their favorite creators away from the Reddit shitstorm, if they want. So there's a lot less user lock in on Reddit compared to other platforms, making enshittification a good reason for many to leave.
Bots can't keep the site running and popular. That's just not how this works. So, as people figure out that competing services (again, like Lemmy) exist and migrate away, Reddit will eventually tank and go under.
At least, that's what I'm seeing.
Depending on how that money is (mis)managed, the death spiral could take years or longer. If there's enough mismanagement, it may be much less. We'll see.
Unfortunately a lot of smaller subs havent fully transitioned yet, so I'm stuck on reddit for Rimworld content like I occasionally have to log in to Facebook to keep up communication with family. I think at this point though its literally just Rimworld for me. I dont play enough Terraria anymore for the Terraria reddits to keep me there, and tbh I havent looked into Kenshi, but that might be another occasional pull based on what I fine. Sorry for the ramble, I guess the tldr is that there are a FEW pulls reddit still has even though anonymity eliminates most of them
I don't mean to imply there's no user lock in, it's just significantly less than a platform like Facebook. For many it's not a problem to migrate to another site.
Obviously it's a thing each community will have to deal with, and honestly, that's fair. Bluntly, once the community creates a consensus on what the next platform of choice will be, there won't be much holding those users to Reddit.
Regardless, I'm just speculating. Who knows what will actually happen.
"When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots"
In foreign languages like in French, there was a trend, launched by the admins themselves. It was to replicate English communities by translating the posts. It was obvious that it was dumb automated translations since there were cultural references that could not be translated. I know it because I was the owner of such a community and it was sad. My small community had a spirit. After the bots, the community was bland.
When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots
Just fyi, bots use API calls. Thus, Reddit has ALWAYS known exactly what percentage of users and posts are bots, and which bots are Reddit's own.
And it's not the first time. You could almost say it's what Reddit is built on. When Reddit was first launched, the founders used alts to build numbers; now it's bots.
My own personal view is that they've used bots all along. More recently, they made up for drastically reduced numbers last summer with bots, and that's when the writing was really on the wall for Reddit because at some point it becomes a serious legal liability to continue to sell ad space and accept ad money based on numbers of users and posts that simply do not exist in reality.
So the IPO has to happen sooner rather than later, and RDDT will tank as soon as it goes public, which is why they're trying to sell the rubes as many shares as they can at a guaranteed pre-IPO price: that's free money for them, which they will take and go while Reddit implodes.
Who would have thought that driving away the power users that posted and interacted with the content the most would ruin Reddit ? ๐
Because, they don't care about reddit, they just want to cash out and make it someone else's problem to fix.
Smaller subreddits usually supported by a few power users are dying off. I remember it taking me a couple hours to read through the top posts at end of day. Now youโre lucky to see a weekโs worth of genuine top posts.
Posts getting roasted in the comments for being too boomery, capitalist bootlicking or hive-mindish happens less and less.
Reddit changed their upvote algorithm which is why it looks so much lower than it really is.
They covered this years ago..
They changed to to massively inflate the displayed vote totals though. Old reddit was showing actual vote totals with some fuzzing. The algorithm change in 2016 or whatever was to reflect engagement and engagement velocity in the displayed post scores, which is how we got the huge 100k+ top posts. If they have changed away from that I haven't seen anything about it.
to reflect engagement and engagement velocity in the displayed post scores
Ah, a bullshit artist! Did you bullshit last week? Did you try to bullshit last week?
Yes ๐๐ฎโ๐จ
Comicus! Comicus!
Just another reason why free software is the way to go.
We could literally look at their source code and put any speculation to rest if it were free.
That explains only the first part of their post, and inadequately. If reddit made (and explained) the algorithm years ago, what accounts for the recent drop M(eta)OP is seeing.
The second half isn't about votes at all. There, they complain that there's far less content on the site, so the algorithm theory doesn't appy.
What was the algorithm and why?
It was too "easy" for regular users to get upvotes and too hard for bots to get upvotes probably. Certain comments and posts now have downvote caps of 0 points so depending on what agenda a comment supports, it may not be possible to downvote into negative numbers.
As a rule of thumb, anything you say is getting downvoted but if someone else posts the same thing, it gets highly upvoted. Reddit is cancer.
Reddit is cancer! Friends don't let Friends reddit. Remind one person today of this place reddit clone!
This is not a Reddit clone. This is something better. An individual instance would be closer to a Reddit clone but even then we all know which one is open source...
A worthy distinction thank kind sir!
Ew. Yeah that's why I left. It was shocking how down voted into oblivion I was when someone literally in a comment thread after me shares a similar opinion and is positive.
Before 2016 posts moved extremely fast. There used to be a joke that the entire front page was new every time you refreshed it. After The_Donald figured out how to game their algorithm to dominate the front page, reddit took advantage of the opportunity to neuter the algorithm completely so that it was more advertiser friendly. Now the front page remains static for most of the day, so sponsored advertiser posts get more exposure.
I did notice Lemmy has s lot more comments and votes recently
Lemmy really has increased in traffic over the time Iโve been here.
For all intents and purposes itโs the exact same experience as the other place for me.
I see less repeated jokes as top level comments here.
And fewer people quoting entire Simpsons episodes at each other line by line
Oh they are here, they are just in a different instance.
Yeah, we recreate entire Monty Python sketches and movies one comment at a time instead.
After last June, I ended up muting more and more and more weird niche subs Reddit kept trying to push in "hot" because all the actually hot Reddits were doing the whole blackout thing.
Then some small subs got rather large quite quickly due to void left by the mass exodus, and that went to the heads of the mods of those small subs.
Reddit after June -23 is hot garbage.
Like how one of the only subs that didn't close was r/subway.
In 2021 I wrote a story "The Typo which saved humanity" on Reddit and it exploded to 3000 upvotes in less than a day. A couple of years later I wrote a story "Day of the Fat Man" which got 50 upvotes. Everybody I ask considered the second one the better one.
Then I reposted those stories on Youtube and Facebook and both got around the same upvotes, around 5k+ on each.
Yes, Reddit has become quite dead.
But to be honest, my stories on Lemmy got like 50 upvotes so... meh.
50 real people is still better than botted updoots.
I don't think its just an issue of bots.
After the '16 Trump bombing of the site, the admins got incredibly aggressive in their site-wide banning policy. You could get a site-wide ban for minor infractions, there was no appeals process, and they got fairly good at identifying and banning secondary accounts such that you really needed to want to be on the site in order to keep evading consistently.
Then they rolled out the new reddit front end, which forces you to sign in if you want to see certain channels and posts while blowing up your email with engagement bait messages that... lure people into posting in a community where you can very easily get site-wide banned. At which point you've got a giant red "YOU'RE NOT WELCOME HERE" banner on your front page, even if all you do is lurk.
Its just a nakedly hostile website. That's before you get into mod-politics and people harassing one another in PMs and the general obnoxious nature of their native advertising.
sponsored posts, and having the algorithm move "super users" content to the front page is what killed Digg before Reddit, and it will be what kills Reddit.
The massive โNO WELCOME HERE NO MOREโ banner helped me sell my employer on not pursuing advertising with Reddit. No other social media site has such a banner, and allows users to consume the content of the site without ridiculous harassment.
Everybody I ask considered the second one the better one.
But which had the better title?
Lemmy isn't all about the upvotes though. It's not reddit.
Where are you posting these stories? I'd like to check them out.
Found it! They have a page on Reddit that links to what seems like all their short stories.
Thanks. I'll check them out.
Reddit became openly hostile to the people and content that made it great. Itโs not exactly surprising that the good users eventually went elsewhere. You could really tell shit went downhill after they killed the third party apps.
Don't underestimate the power of user experience shaping.
The front page is how most interact with the site, and helped it grow. The front page algorithm is bastardized to hell and back now, and unless you're on old.reddit, you cant sort by Hot by default.
Reddit is strangling itself to death with how fiercely it's trying to corral users in various directions. Every HeGetsUs post they force users to look at shoves good content one rank down.
This has an effect on the site overall.
What the hell is even a hegetsus post?
Evangelical advertising, talking about Jesus's experiences in a way that relates to what "everyday people" deal with.
It's important to state though that the campaign behind it is meant to funnel people into the extreme ends of evangelism, not just create more Christians.
I guess it's kind of like how they allowed ads for crap like "what is a woman". At the end of the day it's all alt-right propaganda that they are putting out either to get people to join their side or to make it seem like their side is correct.
Wasn't aware of that; so I'm glad you mentioned it! I always just rolled my eyes at it and moved on.
Are they still advertising all that "He gets us" ad crap? I left reddit almost a year ago and haven't had the pleasure of seeing one every 5 posts anymore.
had a vibrant sub with @ 50,000 participants, new content every day. now it's literally full of spam, no engagement, and the 'mod' appears to have fled after taking Spez's offer to take over.
so that's satisfying :D
It's not
aw someone misses spezdaddy :D
It's not satisfying that it was ruined
well... I disagree.
They had it all. They had all the keys to the kingdom, all they needed to do was listen. And when they decided otherwise, they've lost a tremendous amount of mods and community, so.... I'd rather see them humbled. If they were rewarded with success for their bad actions that would be unsatisfying. But it is sad; but the web will grow and change. There was /., then digg, then reddit, now lemmy / fediverse.... imho, each step is an improvement in some senses. Hopefully it will continue to grow.
Considering im one of the top 35,000 most active users on reddit yet havent used the site since July last year, I cant see why
How did you determine that? I can't remember.
I did just look up my profile and chuckled at the 800k karma, trophy case, and completely empty comment history.
I'm also confused as to why my profile is tagged as 18+.
Maybe because all the power users left lol
Nope, OOP guessed it in one. Everything there is to post has already been posted. Close it down, guys, there's nothing left to post. Internet's done.
got the link? OP's account is (suspiciously?) deleted
I just assumed that everyone with a username of word-word-number there was a bot or sockpuppet.
It's also people who create throwaways. Reddit gives a randomized username following that format.
Interesting. I wonder if there were any mod tools (before reddit broke them) that automatically banned accounts like that. I doubt serious bot creators would use that auto-name style but it might've gotten rid of some spam.
It's not serious bot creators that you need to worry about. Trolls use the "adjective noun number" format on their new accounts. Restricting those users, accounts less than 3 days old, and accounts with less than zero karma will virtually eliminate trolling.
If trolls had patience and foresight, they wouldn't be trolls.
On the subreddits I moderated, I used a big regexp to preemptively filter their comments
Letting one through was a rare event
I think reddit gives new accounts a default username with that format.
I found this screenshot elsewhere, where people were sharing stuff about reddit feeling worse and worse.
Just did some googling and found the original post for this one, and it looks like it's from August or September, so not that long after a significant chunk of users gave up on the site.
I canโt get over the people in the comments there complaining about reddit being a literal communist platform. Meanwhile here we have actual communist instances, reddit isnโt even lukewarm left leaning. Liberal at best.
we also have fascist instances no?, blocked instances ofc but still
Do you have one in mind? I donโt know of any besides besides maybe basedcount, and as far as I am aware that are mostly just pcm users so calling them outright fascists seems a bit extreme. If that instance even still exists, I havenโt seen much from their users.
Reddit doesn't allow bots to vote.
I deleted my account 3 weeks ago. Then don't out data is being sold to AI. Now I wish I would have deleted all my data before doing it.
They're almost definitely soft deletes anyway so, probably wouldn't have made much difference.
Yeah apparently you want to overwrite your data instead of deleting it.
I tried doing this on my eight year old, 600k karma account. It ended up getting my account perma banned. I tried appealing it and got an auto reply about the decision will be upheld.
I guess I snuck in before they were looking. Maybe I didn't have the threshold for them to give a shit. A 250k karama and a 100k karma account were my big ones. I killed them back in 2020 though, so the AI craze hadn't hit yet. Guess they don't want their investors to freak out when they find out they're basically investing in a dead site.
Overwrite, wait a while, then delete. Even if it's too late for the most recent data harvest, there will be shittier things coming in the future. Might as well do it now.
Most likely, they are storing the data in a manner that saves multiple versions and avoids destructive modifications. Without the exploitation side, such functionality is necessary to be able to revert malicious edits if an account is compromised.
LLMs and similar systems can parse through immense amounts of data pretty quickly, probably partly due to the massive amount of compute that they get allocated. So, likely overwriting the comments won't be that helpful, unfortunately.
i manually deleted most of my comments (i left like 5) and all my posts recently (it was slow going, but i had heard of people running into problems using scripts). 11 years, only 9k karma.
any thoughts on whether that's likely to have accomplished anything?
If their soft deletes (so instead of actually deleting, it's just a flag on the comment that hides it) then no, it won't make a difference at all.
i was afraid of that, thank you.
Mostly if you had ever posted something that was useful to people, it hurts other people now trying to find that information on the internet somewhere. It is unlikely Reddit actually deleted the data, they just made it inaccessible. Storage for posts is cheap. There's no reason for them to not keep literally everything ever, especially since they've known for well over a decade that the data itself is useful.
naw, nothing widely useful!
i just hate the idea that an ai could have any part of my "voice." i realize there's something foolish about that, but i deleted anyway with the latest news.
Honestly, without first-hand knowledge, it's really up in the air. I strongly suspect that they just do soft deletes and store versioned data, rather than overwriting. This means that any deletion/data-poisoning can likely be undone.
At the very least, you've accomplished adding CPU cycles to the exploitation effort though. Might be more symbolic than anything but, it's not nothing.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords. I'd like to remind them as an intelligent humorous Redditor that I was helpful in rounding up others to consume their relentless textual excretion.
That's a weird twist of the basilisk
I mean as far as feeding the data to AI, isn't Lemmy worse? Any data on the fediverse is as good as public and would just get gobbled up by AI or adtech in an instant?
To me, it's not the AI data that's the issue. It's reddit, effectively, turning off all of the API, then selling the data they aren't producing themselves. I think if any instance owner told their users they were going to start selling things that were posted to their instance, their users would find other places in the fediverse to set up shop.
That's not the issue. The issue is Reddit is profiting off other people's work. All the mods that do pretty much all of the lifting get nothing. That and the CEO getting a big ass pay check off of it as well.
The mod strikes and closing of all the meme subs ended them more than they wanna admit. There's very few memes on there now especially making it to all. Second part is no one wastes time commenting when even an innocent opinion will get your account banned. Waste of time for consumers and contributors equally.
I said (in a relevant thread) that Turkish people in Europe have many more kids as European natives... Now I'm a nazi and my 12yo account got banned, no warning.
There's obviously context to that comment that we're not seeing here, but while that statement is not in itself racist, it is something that racist people tend to also say.
The Front Page used to have a pretty steady turnover of content with lots of interaction. Now I find it stagnating, the same stuff sitting up front for days sometimes. Iโve hit /all sometimes, but thatโs a dumpster fire of burning garbage. I get that everyone can do their own thing on Reddit (to some extent), but too much of that content is just a mess. Reposts, scripted, repetitive themed askreddit, and the responses are all the same too. Tired quips and witticisms, thereโs far too little conversation, and if someone does respond to something you say itโs far more likely to be someone being pedantic, contradictory, or picking apart your argument with exceptions or manufactured situations.
Yeah, some niche communities are still great and provide good places to share and talk about a subject, but the main subs, all, and the like just suck these days.
For the niche communities: you can say that about Facebook as well.
The big question is, what do we do about this? Do the communities need to make their own websites?
Probably move here. Despite Redditโs IPO I think itโs too late and gone stale. Unless thereโs a massive change to give it more staying power itโs probably going to wither like Xwitter or Digg.
Smaller subs still seem to get running pretty well. I'm really only still on reddit for the niche stuff, anything generic or meme related I pretty get my fill in over here
"Social" media is dying, these 2 or so generations will be looked upon partly curious partly estranged in the future, I'd like to believe things regulate themselves through chaos. And I'm curious how and to what it will transform. Too slow, so much is certain. It's all so painfully slow until the celebrity voyeurs and TV substituters get it at last.
Social media is dying.
You've never heard of Tiktok?
Have you seen the quality of content on Tiktok?
No, because I don't have a Tiktok, but I've heard how shit it is. The point is that people aren't using less social media, they're using more. They just migrated to new ones. It doesn't seem to be dying any time soon.
The trend I've read recently is that most people are moving to more private social media (private discord servers for example) and it looks like federation might be gaining some popularity with large social media companies, which I remain cautiously optimistic about
Yeah, there's plenty of good stuff there.
Literally every upvoted post is some stupid reference humor.
I expect lemmy to go the same way, but for now we're not there yet.
Is anyone going to tell them?
It was already empty since bots took over! I'm not surprised for what it's happening, the way Reddit treated their users, and what happened afterwards.
Bots and governments, lul.
I noticed this before I left Reddit last summer. Except for a few smaller niche subreddits that had decent discussions, everything else seemed like bots. I also noticed a lot of my comments and replies were deleted for no apparent reason so I quit participating. I do miss Reddit from the time period mentioned but nothing stays the same and it's time to move on.
I think the bot uptick is a direct result of the mod strike and API changes. A lot of mods left, and a lot of the auto-mod tools they were using from third-party developers got nuked, so there are less people moderating with worse tools.
Also wouldn't surprise me if some of the mods took a cut to even let bots post on their sub.
Small niche subs are the only reason I'm still using reddit. Not the main subs, again bots are the problem, but small niches are unfortunately slow to migrate to an entirely new platform because it's not guaranteed that the community comes with it (unlike large generic subs like memes, which has a very general audience)
I think it was maybe 2017? At one time I was a heavy reddit user, and I think that's about when they did some monkeying with their systems and somehow post exposures just dropped. LIke it was constantly new stuff presented and then suddenly the front page was the same for a day
Where did you find this image? I'm not saying you're trying to pass it off as new, but I do get the impression that you are.
Whenever this post was made, it certainly wasn't 8 hours before you posted it. I'd be surprised if it was as new as 8 months old.
"Begun, the Forum Wars have." /yoda
Now, let's identify the Reddit bots/astroturfers that are here polluting Lemmy so that people go back to Reddit.
I found this circulating on Tumblr, maybe? I looked it up yesterday and linked to it when someone was curious elsewhere in the comment section.
I was able to see the post following that first link you posted, it was the first post that popped up though yeah the user did delete their account, it was originally posted 6 months ago
This post is already a day old, and the imaged was at least 8h before that.
lol canโt believe that sub exists
One thing Iโve noticed is that a ton of posts from the top 0.1% subs will get about three to four hours of thousands of updoots and comments and then get nuked by the mods with no reason given, pointing to it being bots. Like a few years ago it seemed like the repost bots were sneaking in and getting posts at the top to then be able to sell the account for someone else to bypass spam filters. Now it feels like the majority of top posts are that, and that anyone engaging in the top content is also grinding out the accounts that will be used to spam them at a lower level.
Mods on Reddit giving a crap about bots?
In my experience they are more likely to shadow ban those who complain about bots than to do anything about obvious bots.
subs will get about three to four hours of thousands of updoots and comments and then get nuked by the mods
This was a tactic made common by Gallowboob. He would do this on every major sub he moderated, but with even more nastiness.
Heโs post, wait to see if it got enough upvotes, if it did not heโd delete and repost. Constantly. Until his posts got to the top.
He did this across many of the largest subredddits and turned it into a paid job where heโd advertise for others using this same patterns.
Even worse, heโd delete others posts if they were doing too well too quickly and repost as his own.
Dude is one of the pillars of what destroyed Reddit.
Honestly, it's the users that are killing it now. What started as a funny place to chill, throw some funny memes and talk about some niche stuff turned into a toxic Tumblr tire fire. Reddit as it is now makes 4chan look like the normal people.
Sidenote, but you know what has been incredibly fucking annoying? And I guess this is a combination of reddit having kind of always been shitty and oh we only find out more recently, or sort of, on aaron schwartz's death, for early signs, and, people choosing to use it in the first place. I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments, especially since you can't use unddit to see what it used to be because of the API business. I haven't had to break out the wayback machine quite yet, it hasn't gotten to that level of dire straits (not that I think the wayback machine would necessarily help for a lot of it), but there's a shocking amount of really good technical information and advice that has been deleted off of the internet as a result of people protesting reddit. Especially because the tech-literate are more often going to be the ones who use those scripts and end up leaving.
I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments
after the whole scandal in the summer, i deleted all my comments on my 15 year old account. i realized that i was creating content (aka providing free work to reddit) and they couldn't care less about the older users. from now on all my comments get overwritten after a few weeks
Same.
While I wasnโt some power user, I did have many comments with 1k or more votes.
Reddits decision to first destroy the UX of Reddit and then destroy the best Reddit apps made my decision to delete everything very easy.
Well thats a consequence of reddit monetizing off of the userbase's knowledge.
Visit the tech forms. They're just as good if not better.
This is annoying, there are some obscure tech questions that have possibly been answered but I'll never know because a spam deleted script was run.
I wouldn't mind if they just added it to the comment that they left the site it's just that they remove it entirely.
Fuck I feel you, it sucks but was the whole point of why they did it, cause it made Reddit less useful and more annoying. People who've spent years answering questions that would be referenced from the thousands to the millions were deleted. They didn't want Reddit to continue to benefit even if it hurts everyone else to.
Donโt be mad at us for deleting our comments, be mad at Reddit employees, admins, and Spez for turning the website to what it is right now.
The point of a protest is that you do mind it
You can usually find archived versions of the pages on internet Archive and Archive.today.
I hand deleted my technical comments all off Reddit before attempting to mass delete my account. I donโt really care about people being able to find answers to engineering and physics questions on Reddit. They donโt deserve traffic from my answers.
No lie, I got a 3 day ban notice yesterday for a anti China comment and both a pm and email inviting me to buy their stock for their IPO.
Soo, they are pro-chinese communist party and pro money, but we knew that already.
Given the amount of sinophobia Reddit tolerates, I cannot imagine how out of pocket you have to be to get banned for racism.
late to the party. Q: What is it that corporations will not tolerate about online commmunity, crowdsourced news and info?? Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Reddit.. all eaten and changed?
Silly thoughts...
the life in a discussion site is the exchange of ideas/thoughts. For that to happen users need to actually listen, process, and discuss. Reddit's structure has discouraged that for years.
signal to noise ratio - in order for the discussion board site to be useful, there's some magic signal to noise ratio that has to be maintained. Otherwise, its some style of chaos.
Why I left - in a technical subreddit, someone asked a technical question 'Who still uses XYZ, and why?, I never quite understood it', I gave a short primer on how it worked, with a couple analogies. The OP replied testily ' I don't need anyone to explain to me how it works.'. And then testily to other helpful responses, and then deleted their acct.
The experts left most of the technical subs I am in 5-10 years ago. My guess is that discussions are mostly noise: things I could have learned if I read the instructions, or how can I do this without understanding anything about it.
somewhere I read that the upvote/downvote counts on the front page are made up... modified by reddit.. so that people don't know what they need to do to get to the front. By adding this, they gave themselves full editorial control of the front page. It's downhill from there.
[Not quoting for succinctness]
Answer: corporations don't tolerate unexploited value. Online communities are rather good at gathering value, over the years, as their users add knowledge. That makes corporations grow their eyes and say "DAMN! Look at all that value that I gathered! It's time for me to reap the profits!".
Reddit's structure: I think so, too. And, more importantly, it's something that "the Fediverse forums" (Lemmy and Kbin/Mbin for now; SubLinks and Piefed when they join) should eventually deal with.
Why you left - yeah, the environment doesn't "feel" cooperative any more. Your example seems to me that the user was disingenuously (or worse, idiotically) disguising a subjective opinion (XYZ is bad) as a question; that's bread-and-butter in Reddit nowadays, sealioning there is mostly through feigned ignorance.
up/downvote counts - it's a bit less creepy; they add/subtract a random number to the actual score, mostly to prevent karma farming. Still opaque though, a bad thing in a collaborative environment.
Oh they killed 3rd party apps, but their own official app sucks. Yea I'm just gonna view Reddit without logging in. Honestly it's been great, it prevents me from ever posting stupid comments and engage in other ways in the site. In a way I get less addicted with Reddit since they started decide that they don't want me to get addicted.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO OPEN REDDIT IN THE OFFICIAL APP OR IN CHROME?
Cough... revanced.... cough... infinity (Android)
But yeah, I don't miss it
I couldn't be bothered to tinker with it. I actually used RedReader which allows me to log in. But I got used to not log in.
Not gonna lie to you, chief: people shouldn't waste their time tinkering with revanced to use a service that benefits Huffman
Because people have either moved on or have switched to kbin, lemmy and raddle. Evrryone worthwile anyway :3
i usually use fling up more than raddle
raddle was the only one I knew about, other than lemmy/kbin
i was searching for alternatives and i made a fling up account first
Has everything been done
As if originality was a requirement
I've seen some great new discussions on reposts plenty of times over. And sometimes the repost just happens to be timed perfectly to blow up and be orders of magnitude more popular than the original post. I'm...kinda okay with reposts I guess?
I kinda wish reposts were an actual mechanic, where it's linked to the original like a crossost. Meme variant chains would be cool too, seeing the evolution from the first post.
I don't mind reposts either, but of course seeing the original is always better
Its because we've all moved here
/s
All the important ones moved, the rest can have Reddit for themselves.
lol nobody important from anywhere is on lemmy
My mom says I'm important
I turned on an older device yesterday and opened my old reddit app. It still works. I have no idea if it's because it's an old version of the app or if the policy got quietly changed. Or what. But it definitely works. I could read, up vote, and comment.
Apparently if you're a subreddit mod you can use the API for free
same with infinity, has probably a low rate limit, but still works
Donโt know. No longer go there.
Reddit is post human now. Just need bots to keep it alive.
And then they're using that data to create AI bots, so bots creating bots?
But then who will bot the botmen?!
Oh No! Anyway
People don't want to spend all day making Spez and a bunch of hedge fund managers rich?
Shocking.
You think the idea was to just get rid of all the users so they could be replaced by AI bots, only as an indirect way of competing against Google, with the added frustration of being just as enshitified?
It would help if they didn't ban people. I got permabanned for nothing. I posted some timing not permitted on World News, and then made a new account to ask a personal question and accidentally posted something on World News with this new account and was banned for deliberately trying to evade a ban.
Just stupid. I guess they don't need people on reddit.
After 13 years as a user and earning somewhere over 70k karma last year via discussions about topics like zoology, psychology, fitness, politics and video games, I have slowly stopped using Reddit the last few months because of the blatant censorship. I went from posting regularly each week to 3 posts total in the last 3 months. TL:DR is I got banned from /r/news and /r/worldnews for comments that broke no rules and weren't rude or hateful. The mods just insulted me when I appealed. Actual Reddit staff could not care less, and I got a temp harassment ban for saying a mod handled my appeal badly (while carefully avoiding insulting them personally). I go back a few times a week to look at topics I like, but I actually made my account here on Lemmy today because I'm searching for long-term alternatives.
Of course bad experiences were always a thing but overall you could talk things out or just move on and come back to the same forum another day. Now unopposed mods completely kill any discussion with permabans if it bothers them personally. The site-wide and subreddit rules are functionally just suggestions and Reddit (the company) does nothing to enforce them in many cases. Hateful speech is fine so long as it fits the subreddit and civil discussion is not if it doesn't. Hate men/women/liberals/conservatives/whatever? Just find the right subreddit and you can get away with truly inhumane takes, but better hope you don't break ranks while a mod is watching (even if you're reasonable/polite). Thus Reddit has devolved into echo chambers where you are either preaching to the choir or silenced forever. I'm not interested in farming worthless karma by helping circulate a few popular ideas among people who are essentially guaranteed to feel the same way. Or interested in being treated badly for trying to take those opinions elsewhere.
I got invited to participate in their IPO at an "institutional investor" price with their e-mail saying "you have helped make Reddit what it is today". No thanks Reddit. Not only does my brief research say Reddit isn't profitable, but you don't treat your users well or consistently. I can't predict the future, but I feel like I watched how this goes when Musk took over Twitter and it's not pretty.
Could be bs, could be a troll, could be bait, could be a lot of stuff really
But ultimately itโs a shit platform so I let it lie and rot instead of constantly trying to setup a tea party with it and commenting about the smell lmao
People love watching dumpster fires.
Huh, now that you mention it. Yeah I guess so. I wonder what happened?
What is The Ory of Reddit?
I see a lot less men over there than before
What? How would you know? Is this some reference I don't understand?
Nowadays all the men are weak, and redditors. How Surreal remembers old Reddit, it was full of lumberjacks and greasy auto mechanics.
It's just not what it used to be.
I got permabanned from reddit for repeatedly trolling some ahs (probably not entirely unjustified). Whenever I create a new account and forget to only log in via a private browser window, the new account will be permabanned as well. So know I go "well, fuck it, I don't need reddit".
I don't even intend to try to find out if I could somehow beg somebody to revoke my ban. After I got banned I just send a reply asking the responsible mod to kindly delete themselves.
i got banned for using the t slur :/
edit: oh wait I think it was actually because I was (jokingly) advocating for cisgendericide
I'm sure it's nothing and everything is fine. Now, who wants to buy some of this Reddit stock? I'll cut you a special deal so you don't miss out! ... Anyone?
I was interested in buying a share just to be in for the ride, but then they asked for my real name to be associated with my handle. It's like they never understood what reddit was about at all.
I got a Message offering me to buy too. In the Message it says i need to be a permanent Resident of the US.
Buddy, you had me enter my Country when i created the Account. You know full-well I'm from the EU. Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
Because that would cost their time instead of yours
Perhaps you moved from Europe to the States in the interim like I did.
Edit to add: sorry if this came off as snarky, was not my intention. Just wanted to point out that it's not always so clear-cut. I created my Reddit account in 2008 when I lived in the Netherlands. Then I moved to the US in 2016 and became a citizen in 2019.
"We have never made a profit and may never make a profit. Please buy our stock."
A special deal? Doesnโt the message basically say โgive us your data so you maybe have a chance at buying stock at full price, and be thankful weโre not marking it upโ?
Well, at IPO price. A couple of decades ago, that used to mean it was discounted. Nowadays, it doesn't, but not everybody knows that.
Probably part of some side grift to sell more information to data brokers
The whole idea is a grift. They are directly appealing to people who largely should not be buying shares due to their financial situation and are a lot less critical of the pretty poor numbers they published than professional
exploitersinvestors will be.Obviously this is done in hopes of selling more shares and binding users long term, though that will probably just accelerate the enshittification because suddenly the last remaining power users are turned into shareholders instead
Right but the whole "give us all your info and MAYBE you can buy stock" is the part that sounds like a secondary grift. If they wanted to pump they could just have some set amount and do a first come first serve right off the bat.
Free shorts?
Can I borrow some stock?
that would be called "shorting" and it totally is a thing.
Look, Iโm not trying to short okay? Iโm sure Reddit will do great. Just let me borrow your stock and Iโll make sure you have it back in like 6 months or so
Yeah, the big short is even a movie! One positive i got from hanging around stonks, amc and gme subs was how much i learned about how fucked the stock market is.
Waaaaay more fucked, gamified, and straight up broken than even the most cynical citizen thinks.
They actually tweaked the upbote/down vote stuff back then to stop actually showing the true amount of upvotes and down votes, directly. They started fuzzing votes to supposedly help prevent manipulation.
The timing DOES seem Auspicious...
Reddit isn't dead. There's plenty of posts and traffic, way more than here. The problem is that that quality has plummeted. Bots posting divisive political shit, bad memes, and toxic commenters. Angry people spurred on by bots and no valuable discussion
As anything with Reddit, it depends on what you subscribe.
It's perfectly possible that this person sees the site completely dead. Personally, every time I go there it's full of interesting comics raised by some bots that keep reposting old things, and really really bad comments, but still plentiful.
They made some algorithm changes a bunch of years ago (2015?), and migrated away from the concept of "default subs". The front page drew from every sub with an algorithm.
TheDonald was very good at understanding and abusing that algorithm, resulting in it overrunning the front page for everyone. They had to tweak it a bunch as a result.
IMO, this resulted in a great homogenization of communities. People participate in communities without really understanding the communities. Why should they? The "community" is just "the Reddit front page".
As soon as any community gets popular enough to hit the front page, it becomes hive-minded, predictable, and bland.
Lemmy actually has this same structural problem... Evidenced by the fact that as I write this comment, I actually have no clue what community this post is in.
I think Lemmy just hasn't been overrun w/ bots (yet), isn't being as heavily invested in by bad faith foreign state actors (yet), and is mostly composed of people who moved from Reddit who want to actively participate in a way to keep it from having that same Reddit "flavour".
Just my take.
Omg a little anecdote to add on to your point. I made a post on a news article about how people blindly follow name brands. It was only after a few blindly ehh and some other comments along those lines I realized I was on a blind community thread. Real foot in mouth moment lol. It was taken well enough when I explained my mistake and apologized. Got some good info too about the community.
LMAO, thank you for sharing that story. Must have been painful, but the story gave me a good laugh!
I definitely felt like an ass, but everyone was a good sport about it. We all used it as good learning opportunity because the thought had never crossed my mind about a blind lemmy community/instance. They even invited and insisted I followed some communities. All in all it was a good experience from a dumb mistake.
Not against you specifically but this is why I don't tell people about communities anymore. The quality declines the more people participate.
I just went there, I also noticed that most of the posts on top of r/all are sub 10K upvotes, most sub 5K. However, when I sorted by Top/Today then I saw there were a lot of posts that were over 30K upvotes. Maybe it's change in algorithm and how they show posts.
BUT, i went to Top All Time, and all of the posts there were at the earliest from 3 years ago, a lot from 5-7years ago too so it rules out the pandemic effect. Looks like reddit may have indeed passed its prime.
Edit: actually it's weirder, i can't access Top This Year. It looks like they scrubbed all the top posts from 2 years ago, so I might be wrong about the activity. But that is still Hella sus.
Yup, top posts last 2 years definitely scrubbed or just excluded from top all time display. Probably to hide all of the protest posts from last year.
You forgot about the automated dms and emails begging users to buy stock at their IPO to inflate it's value
foreal?
elll oh el
I just got it on an old throwaway account that I forgot to delete. But not as a DM as others, but as an email.
And you can be sure that I checked off every box that you let me, so that I wouldnt receive unsolicited mails... By the way, I'm not even eligible for the IPO and you shpuld know it, reddit.
Don't forget reposting like crazy.
But look at all the engaging content you're missing out on!
That was literally always the case, and frankly it was not nearly as big a problem as people made it out to be.
They are weird superficial sensationalized feel-good posts. It's was a thing before, but now it feels more contrived. Front page feels hollow.
Yeah Reddit is awesome like that, but have you ever tried posting something on lemmygrad by accident?
To be fair, that happens here as well.
There's a meta problem, of all the public squares being polluted by what you described, to the point where they're not usable anymore for discussion. Something that screams for legislation, but it's hardly spoken of.
Also, the front page is basically broken, so the traffic on the site isn't being directed to content in the same way it used to be.
Basically, the site was very different when "Hot" was the way most people experienced the front page.
Now it's... whatever fucking curated bullshit and "Best" which is all just terrible.
I was initially drawn to Reddit as a place that offered nuanced conversation. I even used to engage with toxic takes if nothing less than to discredit their take. It's a complete dumpster fire of toxic ass hats now - not worth commenting within as it's becoming more and more of a conservative echo chamber.
I feel like Lemmy is getting more argumentative, especially when anything related to the Isreal/Palestine conflict (in that particular case it seems to be consistently people making bad faith arguments on both sides going back and forth)
Yes, everything that could possibly be posted and discussed has been done. Humanity has officially run it's course, that is the only explanation for a reduction in the amount of content on Reddit.
Suddenly I understand how non-americans feel when Americans discuss world issues.
That would be better than the extremely "interesting" future that awaits us
Yeah i feel like chicken little sometimes just watching other folks going about their business like shits not actually going down right in front of us.
Tbf our future technologically is pretty wild too, so if you're in a developed country and rampant inflation hasnt made you homeless, there likely cool extreme changes to go alongside the horrifying ones!
*its
Monty Python's Flying Circus!
Wow, I even hear the music playing in my head when I read that.
I almost added *Liberty Bell March starts playing*. Happy to see it wasn't necessary.
I like how the user claims 2016-2019 as good years. From what I remember, the 2016 election was when reddit started turning to trash with the political astroturfing and right wing trolls making bad faith arguments. When was the crazy with the totally-not-staged crazy doorbell camera videos?
2016'ish was when the The_Donald started its come up, which absolutely was a negative for the site. 2015 had FatPeopleHate, Even in 2011 they had the jailbait subreddit.
So saying it was ever particularly good is kind of... lmao
I don't think shithead communities are an indication of quality. Lemmy has quite a few despite otherwise having early reddit feelings.
I think the quality of comments is a bigger indicator. Reddit started to feel shit when thought out comments got drowned out by the sea of low effort memes, one liners and other overused references. Lemmy also has those comments but the ratio of quality to shit is much higher.
Places like The_Donald and FatPeopleHate didn't just stay within their little communities. They shat up the rest of reddit, and because their communities were allowed to flourish, they had a base of operations to recruit more shitters from. Once those communities got banned/quarantined, the behavior diminished noticeably, as the community found they weren't welcome and often simply left.
I remember a large influx of 4chan users around 2012 or something that seriously diluted the quality of the comments
Dear lord 2015/2016 was like the sharp decline after a long slope downward in my opinion. Might be showing my age but peak reddit to me was prior to reddit gold and vote fuzzing.
For me, the downfall was when Unidan got himself banned. Reddit has never fully recovered .
I eventually signed up to Reddit in 2011 when it started to become less of the "wild west." I mean anything could pop up on the front page. 2015 I really got sick of US politics in everything, and I think after the 2016 election, I found out just how many subreddits were controlled and modded by like 4 people. Reddit had a plethora of issues well before most current users even arrived.
Before I quit, I was using RES to block the power users and their subs. Got back a lot of mental health blocking off all the ragebait/clickbait shit. Politics is unavoidable, but at least I could filter out the grifters only looking to profit from it.
The most active posts are now bot-created open-ended conversation starters on r/askreddit to stir up activity and give the illusion of a thriving community. The questions are usually very redditer patronizing, and some of them are thinly veiled marketing analysis to create value for future shareholders. they're often saturated with butt created responses.
As to why the post in question may not still exist? I suspect substantial posts about bot saturation are probably filtered out.
The true halcyon days were before the Digg migration. Sorry, I know most folks on the site and very likely here too were part of that diaspora but itโs fair to say that Reddit was very different and yes: better before that.
It started going down hill when Conde Nast bought it.
Wait what. Right wing presence was gradually purged from 2016 onwards. The main change that period is the site having become a hyper American left-wing echo chamber. And the American part is important since leftism in other traditions tend to turn eyes at American progressives
We did it guys. We've posted everything there is to post and now we can finally rest.
Dead? Maybe not. Dead inside? Definitely.
Kinda feel post API killing, frontpage post comments have jumped dramatically.
Unfortunately, it's extremely bot-like. Like AI talking to AI and chains and chains of memes/jokes. No real discussion.
Repost bots (and repost top comment bots) are pretty rampant. A lot of subs have changed pretty significantly because their entire mod team left. In general I get the sense it's a lot more people now who consider reddit "social media" compared to before. Site isn't dead for sure but it's gone down in quality significantly.
Unfortunately I think this is exactly what Reddit wants. They want to be social media like Instagram or TikTok style. A lot more ad money from that crowd.
I know Reddit (and Lemmy) was always technically social media but I consider it more like Internet forums than the Facebook/Insta/TikTok style social media.
Here's a theory....
After the API implosion, so many active and posting users quit that the gap was filled with mainly bots.
Whether intentional or not, this gave the impression that Reddit was still active on paper.... The numbers said there was no significant change after the exedous.
When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots, they decided to chase the money before the site tanked completely.
This led to Reddit trying to cash in on the remaining users with more ads than ever, cash in on their advertisers, and cash in on the platforms (until recent) good image. Most people have at least heard of Reddit at this point, so going for an IPO now, when almost everyone knows that it exists, and only regular Reddit users are really aware of the enshittification happening. So they can demand a high price for the IPO, and collect a bunch of money before the enshittification is more well known, and the company tanks.
IDK, but that seems to be the way of things.
They've been chasing an IPO for years, it's not a quick process.
Facebook has been enshitifying for years and the stock has gone to the moon.
A lot of what enshitification is, is fucking the users to increase shareholder value.
Well, with a mostly anonymous platform like Reddit, there isn't the same user lock-in, so alternatives, like Lemmy can be shifted to more easily.
With Facebook, you're dealing with IRL friends and loved ones. Those connections lock you to Facebook. Since you're locked in, advertisers are locked to you through Facebook's ad systems, and they can enshittify the whole platform without losing much engagement.
I don't know of anyone who uses Reddit to stay in touch with friends. Sure, we're almost all on there in some way or another, but not for that reason.
So abandoning the sinking ship that is Reddit, can be easily done, unlike Facebook where you, and your friends, and their friends, and your family, and your families friends, and your families family, all pretty much have to unanimously agreed to leave Facebook for another platform all at once. That way everyone can stay in touch.
Organizing an exedous of that scale and magnitude is essentially impossible.
With Reddit, users can kind of trickle over individually or in groups as they see fit. Not tied to Reddit for their social interactions among their friends. Most creators, even those with subreddits, can easily post on different platforms and for the most part, they do. So users can enjoy their favorite creators away from the Reddit shitstorm, if they want. So there's a lot less user lock in on Reddit compared to other platforms, making enshittification a good reason for many to leave.
Bots can't keep the site running and popular. That's just not how this works. So, as people figure out that competing services (again, like Lemmy) exist and migrate away, Reddit will eventually tank and go under.
At least, that's what I'm seeing.
Depending on how that money is (mis)managed, the death spiral could take years or longer. If there's enough mismanagement, it may be much less. We'll see.
Unfortunately a lot of smaller subs havent fully transitioned yet, so I'm stuck on reddit for Rimworld content like I occasionally have to log in to Facebook to keep up communication with family. I think at this point though its literally just Rimworld for me. I dont play enough Terraria anymore for the Terraria reddits to keep me there, and tbh I havent looked into Kenshi, but that might be another occasional pull based on what I fine. Sorry for the ramble, I guess the tldr is that there are a FEW pulls reddit still has even though anonymity eliminates most of them
I don't mean to imply there's no user lock in, it's just significantly less than a platform like Facebook. For many it's not a problem to migrate to another site.
Obviously it's a thing each community will have to deal with, and honestly, that's fair. Bluntly, once the community creates a consensus on what the next platform of choice will be, there won't be much holding those users to Reddit.
Regardless, I'm just speculating. Who knows what will actually happen.
"When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots"
In foreign languages like in French, there was a trend, launched by the admins themselves. It was to replicate English communities by translating the posts. It was obvious that it was dumb automated translations since there were cultural references that could not be translated. I know it because I was the owner of such a community and it was sad. My small community had a spirit. After the bots, the community was bland.
Just fyi, bots use API calls. Thus, Reddit has ALWAYS known exactly what percentage of users and posts are bots, and which bots are Reddit's own.
And it's not the first time. You could almost say it's what Reddit is built on. When Reddit was first launched, the founders used alts to build numbers; now it's bots.
My own personal view is that they've used bots all along. More recently, they made up for drastically reduced numbers last summer with bots, and that's when the writing was really on the wall for Reddit because at some point it becomes a serious legal liability to continue to sell ad space and accept ad money based on numbers of users and posts that simply do not exist in reality.
So the IPO has to happen sooner rather than later, and RDDT will tank as soon as it goes public, which is why they're trying to sell the rubes as many shares as they can at a guaranteed pre-IPO price: that's free money for them, which they will take and go while Reddit implodes.
Who would have thought that driving away the power users that posted and interacted with the content the most would ruin Reddit ? ๐
Because, they don't care about reddit, they just want to cash out and make it someone else's problem to fix.
Smaller subreddits usually supported by a few power users are dying off. I remember it taking me a couple hours to read through the top posts at end of day. Now youโre lucky to see a weekโs worth of genuine top posts.
Posts getting roasted in the comments for being too boomery, capitalist bootlicking or hive-mindish happens less and less.
Reddit changed their upvote algorithm which is why it looks so much lower than it really is.
They covered this years ago..
They changed to to massively inflate the displayed vote totals though. Old reddit was showing actual vote totals with some fuzzing. The algorithm change in 2016 or whatever was to reflect engagement and engagement velocity in the displayed post scores, which is how we got the huge 100k+ top posts. If they have changed away from that I haven't seen anything about it.
Ah, a bullshit artist! Did you bullshit last week? Did you try to bullshit last week?
Yes ๐๐ฎโ๐จ
Comicus! Comicus!
Just another reason why free software is the way to go.
We could literally look at their source code and put any speculation to rest if it were free.
That explains only the first part of their post, and inadequately. If reddit made (and explained) the algorithm years ago, what accounts for the recent drop M(eta)OP is seeing.
The second half isn't about votes at all. There, they complain that there's far less content on the site, so the algorithm theory doesn't appy.
What was the algorithm and why?
It was too "easy" for regular users to get upvotes and too hard for bots to get upvotes probably. Certain comments and posts now have downvote caps of 0 points so depending on what agenda a comment supports, it may not be possible to downvote into negative numbers.
As a rule of thumb, anything you say is getting downvoted but if someone else posts the same thing, it gets highly upvoted. Reddit is cancer.
Reddit is cancer! Friends don't let Friends reddit. Remind one person today of this place
reddit clone!This is not a Reddit clone. This is something better. An individual instance would be closer to a Reddit clone but even then we all know which one is open source...
A worthy distinction thank kind sir!
Ew. Yeah that's why I left. It was shocking how down voted into oblivion I was when someone literally in a comment thread after me shares a similar opinion and is positive.
Before 2016 posts moved extremely fast. There used to be a joke that the entire front page was new every time you refreshed it. After The_Donald figured out how to game their algorithm to dominate the front page, reddit took advantage of the opportunity to neuter the algorithm completely so that it was more advertiser friendly. Now the front page remains static for most of the day, so sponsored advertiser posts get more exposure.
I did notice Lemmy has s lot more comments and votes recently
Lemmy really has increased in traffic over the time Iโve been here.
For all intents and purposes itโs the exact same experience as the other place for me.
I see less repeated jokes as top level comments here.
And fewer people quoting entire Simpsons episodes at each other line by line
Oh they are here, they are just in a different instance.
Yeah, we recreate entire Monty Python sketches and movies one comment at a time instead.
Still annoying but an improvement
Do you want Simpsons quotes to make you cry?
There are fewer kids here.
โFewerโ
Potato/potuber
It is a mystery.
After last June, I ended up muting more and more and more weird niche subs Reddit kept trying to push in "hot" because all the actually hot Reddits were doing the whole blackout thing.
Then some small subs got rather large quite quickly due to void left by the mass exodus, and that went to the heads of the mods of those small subs.
Reddit after June -23 is hot garbage.
Like how one of the only subs that didn't close was r/subway.
In 2021 I wrote a story "The Typo which saved humanity" on Reddit and it exploded to 3000 upvotes in less than a day. A couple of years later I wrote a story "Day of the Fat Man" which got 50 upvotes. Everybody I ask considered the second one the better one.
Then I reposted those stories on Youtube and Facebook and both got around the same upvotes, around 5k+ on each.
Yes, Reddit has become quite dead.
But to be honest, my stories on Lemmy got like 50 upvotes so... meh.
50 real people is still better than botted updoots.
I don't think its just an issue of bots.
After the '16 Trump bombing of the site, the admins got incredibly aggressive in their site-wide banning policy. You could get a site-wide ban for minor infractions, there was no appeals process, and they got fairly good at identifying and banning secondary accounts such that you really needed to want to be on the site in order to keep evading consistently.
Then they rolled out the new reddit front end, which forces you to sign in if you want to see certain channels and posts while blowing up your email with engagement bait messages that... lure people into posting in a community where you can very easily get site-wide banned. At which point you've got a giant red "YOU'RE NOT WELCOME HERE" banner on your front page, even if all you do is lurk.
Its just a nakedly hostile website. That's before you get into mod-politics and people harassing one another in PMs and the general obnoxious nature of their native advertising.
sponsored posts, and having the algorithm move "super users" content to the front page is what killed Digg before Reddit, and it will be what kills Reddit.
The massive โNO WELCOME HERE NO MOREโ banner helped me sell my employer on not pursuing advertising with Reddit. No other social media site has such a banner, and allows users to consume the content of the site without ridiculous harassment.
But which had the better title?
Lemmy isn't all about the upvotes though. It's not reddit.
Where are you posting these stories? I'd like to check them out.
Found it! They have a page on Reddit that links to what seems like all their short stories.
Thanks. I'll check them out.
Reddit became openly hostile to the people and content that made it great. Itโs not exactly surprising that the good users eventually went elsewhere. You could really tell shit went downhill after they killed the third party apps.
Don't underestimate the power of user experience shaping.
The front page is how most interact with the site, and helped it grow. The front page algorithm is bastardized to hell and back now, and unless you're on old.reddit, you cant sort by Hot by default.
Reddit is strangling itself to death with how fiercely it's trying to corral users in various directions. Every HeGetsUs post they force users to look at shoves good content one rank down.
This has an effect on the site overall.
What the hell is even a hegetsus post?
Evangelical advertising, talking about Jesus's experiences in a way that relates to what "everyday people" deal with.
It's important to state though that the campaign behind it is meant to funnel people into the extreme ends of evangelism, not just create more Christians.
I guess it's kind of like how they allowed ads for crap like "what is a woman". At the end of the day it's all alt-right propaganda that they are putting out either to get people to join their side or to make it seem like their side is correct.
Wasn't aware of that; so I'm glad you mentioned it! I always just rolled my eyes at it and moved on.
Holy fucking hell
Jesus.
Are they still advertising all that "He gets us" ad crap? I left reddit almost a year ago and haven't had the pleasure of seeing one every 5 posts anymore.
It's mostly bots anywway
It really is. Such drivel they are posting too.
I only use Reddit now for a couple of very niche forums (like /samsungwatchfaces) but I never post there anymore.
Yeah same.
I only use it to follow r/ukraine, and I don't comment or vote.
Lemmy is not perfect but it scratches my itch to see what random strangers think about random topics so I don't really miss it.
Ha ha that is the perfect way to put it! Scratches the itch to see what random strangers think about random topics, that's hilarious! XD
Perfect descriptionโฆyou said it better than Iโve been able to.
I think there was one-way bridge with reddit that allowed to follow subs from Lemmy.
Time to bring the people into Lemmy so the communities seem more alive. Sublemmy?
im sticking to calling these sublemmy's c/'es
How would I vocalize this sound?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gryv_Z7MSl0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=Gryv_Z7MSl0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
c is said as see so: see slash es
had a vibrant sub with @ 50,000 participants, new content every day. now it's literally full of spam, no engagement, and the 'mod' appears to have fled after taking Spez's offer to take over.
so that's satisfying :D
It's not
aw someone misses spezdaddy :D
It's not satisfying that it was ruined
well... I disagree.
They had it all. They had all the keys to the kingdom, all they needed to do was listen. And when they decided otherwise, they've lost a tremendous amount of mods and community, so.... I'd rather see them humbled. If they were rewarded with success for their bad actions that would be unsatisfying. But it is sad; but the web will grow and change. There was /., then digg, then reddit, now lemmy / fediverse.... imho, each step is an improvement in some senses. Hopefully it will continue to grow.
Considering im one of the top 35,000 most active users on reddit yet havent used the site since July last year, I cant see why
How did you determine that? I can't remember.
I did just look up my profile and chuckled at the 800k karma, trophy case, and completely empty comment history.
I'm also confused as to why my profile is tagged as 18+.
Maybe because all the power users left lol
Nope, OOP guessed it in one. Everything there is to post has already been posted. Close it down, guys, there's nothing left to post. Internet's done.
got the link? OP's account is (suspiciously?) deleted
I just assumed that everyone with a username of word-word-number there was a bot or sockpuppet.
It's also people who create throwaways. Reddit gives a randomized username following that format.
Interesting. I wonder if there were any mod tools (before reddit broke them) that automatically banned accounts like that. I doubt serious bot creators would use that auto-name style but it might've gotten rid of some spam.
It's not serious bot creators that you need to worry about. Trolls use the "adjective noun number" format on their new accounts. Restricting those users, accounts less than 3 days old, and accounts with less than zero karma will virtually eliminate trolling.
If trolls had patience and foresight, they wouldn't be trolls.
On the subreddits I moderated, I used a big regexp to preemptively filter their comments
Letting one through was a rare event
I think reddit gives new accounts a default username with that format.
I found this screenshot elsewhere, where people were sharing stuff about reddit feeling worse and worse.
Just did some googling and found the original post for this one, and it looks like it's from August or September, so not that long after a significant chunk of users gave up on the site.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/15itv7e/has_anyone_noticed_that_reddit_is_a_bit_dead/
I canโt get over the people in the comments there complaining about reddit being a literal communist platform. Meanwhile here we have actual communist instances, reddit isnโt even lukewarm left leaning. Liberal at best.
we also have fascist instances no?, blocked instances ofc but still
Do you have one in mind? I donโt know of any besides besides maybe basedcount, and as far as I am aware that are mostly just pcm users so calling them outright fascists seems a bit extreme. If that instance even still exists, I havenโt seen much from their users.
Reddit doesn't allow bots to vote.
I deleted my account 3 weeks ago. Then don't out data is being sold to AI. Now I wish I would have deleted all my data before doing it.
They're almost definitely soft deletes anyway so, probably wouldn't have made much difference.
Yeah apparently you want to overwrite your data instead of deleting it.
I tried doing this on my eight year old, 600k karma account. It ended up getting my account perma banned. I tried appealing it and got an auto reply about the decision will be upheld.
I guess I snuck in before they were looking. Maybe I didn't have the threshold for them to give a shit. A 250k karama and a 100k karma account were my big ones. I killed them back in 2020 though, so the AI craze hadn't hit yet. Guess they don't want their investors to freak out when they find out they're basically investing in a dead site.
Overwrite, wait a while, then delete. Even if it's too late for the most recent data harvest, there will be shittier things coming in the future. Might as well do it now.
Most likely, they are storing the data in a manner that saves multiple versions and avoids destructive modifications. Without the exploitation side, such functionality is necessary to be able to revert malicious edits if an account is compromised.
LLMs and similar systems can parse through immense amounts of data pretty quickly, probably partly due to the massive amount of compute that they get allocated. So, likely overwriting the comments won't be that helpful, unfortunately.
i manually deleted most of my comments (i left like 5) and all my posts recently (it was slow going, but i had heard of people running into problems using scripts). 11 years, only 9k karma.
any thoughts on whether that's likely to have accomplished anything?
If their soft deletes (so instead of actually deleting, it's just a flag on the comment that hides it) then no, it won't make a difference at all.
i was afraid of that, thank you.
Mostly if you had ever posted something that was useful to people, it hurts other people now trying to find that information on the internet somewhere. It is unlikely Reddit actually deleted the data, they just made it inaccessible. Storage for posts is cheap. There's no reason for them to not keep literally everything ever, especially since they've known for well over a decade that the data itself is useful.
naw, nothing widely useful!
i just hate the idea that an ai could have any part of my "voice." i realize there's something foolish about that, but i deleted anyway with the latest news.
Honestly, without first-hand knowledge, it's really up in the air. I strongly suspect that they just do soft deletes and store versioned data, rather than overwriting. This means that any deletion/data-poisoning can likely be undone.
At the very least, you've accomplished adding CPU cycles to the exploitation effort though. Might be more symbolic than anything but, it's not nothing.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords. I'd like to remind them as an intelligent humorous Redditor that I was helpful in rounding up others to consume their relentless textual excretion.
That's a weird twist of the basilisk
I mean as far as feeding the data to AI, isn't Lemmy worse? Any data on the fediverse is as good as public and would just get gobbled up by AI or adtech in an instant?
To me, it's not the AI data that's the issue. It's reddit, effectively, turning off all of the API, then selling the data they aren't producing themselves. I think if any instance owner told their users they were going to start selling things that were posted to their instance, their users would find other places in the fediverse to set up shop.
That's not the issue. The issue is Reddit is profiting off other people's work. All the mods that do pretty much all of the lifting get nothing. That and the CEO getting a big ass pay check off of it as well.
The mod strikes and closing of all the meme subs ended them more than they wanna admit. There's very few memes on there now especially making it to all. Second part is no one wastes time commenting when even an innocent opinion will get your account banned. Waste of time for consumers and contributors equally.
I said (in a relevant thread) that Turkish people in Europe have many more kids as European natives... Now I'm a nazi and my 12yo account got banned, no warning.
There's obviously context to that comment that we're not seeing here, but while that statement is not in itself racist, it is something that racist people tend to also say.
12YO?! You are also a pedophile, SIR!
Because Reddit is SOSDD.
The Front Page used to have a pretty steady turnover of content with lots of interaction. Now I find it stagnating, the same stuff sitting up front for days sometimes. Iโve hit /all sometimes, but thatโs a dumpster fire of burning garbage. I get that everyone can do their own thing on Reddit (to some extent), but too much of that content is just a mess. Reposts, scripted, repetitive themed askreddit, and the responses are all the same too. Tired quips and witticisms, thereโs far too little conversation, and if someone does respond to something you say itโs far more likely to be someone being pedantic, contradictory, or picking apart your argument with exceptions or manufactured situations.
Yeah, some niche communities are still great and provide good places to share and talk about a subject, but the main subs, all, and the like just suck these days.
For the niche communities: you can say that about Facebook as well.
The big question is, what do we do about this? Do the communities need to make their own websites?
Probably move here. Despite Redditโs IPO I think itโs too late and gone stale. Unless thereโs a massive change to give it more staying power itโs probably going to wither like Xwitter or Digg.
Smaller subs still seem to get running pretty well. I'm really only still on reddit for the niche stuff, anything generic or meme related I pretty get my fill in over here
"Social" media is dying, these 2 or so generations will be looked upon partly curious partly estranged in the future, I'd like to believe things regulate themselves through chaos. And I'm curious how and to what it will transform. Too slow, so much is certain. It's all so painfully slow until the celebrity voyeurs and TV substituters get it at last.
You've never heard of Tiktok?
Have you seen the quality of content on Tiktok?
No, because I don't have a Tiktok, but I've heard how shit it is. The point is that people aren't using less social media, they're using more. They just migrated to new ones. It doesn't seem to be dying any time soon.
The trend I've read recently is that most people are moving to more private social media (private discord servers for example) and it looks like federation might be gaining some popularity with large social media companies, which I remain cautiously optimistic about
Yeah, there's plenty of good stuff there.
Literally every upvoted post is some stupid reference humor.
I expect lemmy to go the same way, but for now we're not there yet.
Is anyone going to tell them?
It was already empty since bots took over! I'm not surprised for what it's happening, the way Reddit treated their users, and what happened afterwards.
Bots and governments, lul.
I noticed this before I left Reddit last summer. Except for a few smaller niche subreddits that had decent discussions, everything else seemed like bots. I also noticed a lot of my comments and replies were deleted for no apparent reason so I quit participating. I do miss Reddit from the time period mentioned but nothing stays the same and it's time to move on.
I think the bot uptick is a direct result of the mod strike and API changes. A lot of mods left, and a lot of the auto-mod tools they were using from third-party developers got nuked, so there are less people moderating with worse tools.
Also wouldn't surprise me if some of the mods took a cut to even let bots post on their sub.
Small niche subs are the only reason I'm still using reddit. Not the main subs, again bots are the problem, but small niches are unfortunately slow to migrate to an entirely new platform because it's not guaranteed that the community comes with it (unlike large generic subs like memes, which has a very general audience)
I think it was maybe 2017? At one time I was a heavy reddit user, and I think that's about when they did some monkeying with their systems and somehow post exposures just dropped. LIke it was constantly new stuff presented and then suddenly the front page was the same for a day
Where did you find this image? I'm not saying you're trying to pass it off as new, but I do get the impression that you are.
The post is nowhere to be found.
The user has deleted their account.
Whenever this post was made, it certainly wasn't 8 hours before you posted it. I'd be surprised if it was as new as 8 months old.
"Begun, the Forum Wars have." /yoda
Now, let's identify the Reddit bots/astroturfers that are here polluting Lemmy so that people go back to Reddit.
I found this circulating on Tumblr, maybe? I looked it up yesterday and linked to it when someone was curious elsewhere in the comment section.
I was able to see the post following that first link you posted, it was the first post that popped up though yeah the user did delete their account, it was originally posted 6 months ago
This post is already a day old, and the imaged was at least 8h before that.
lol canโt believe that sub exists
One thing Iโve noticed is that a ton of posts from the top 0.1% subs will get about three to four hours of thousands of updoots and comments and then get nuked by the mods with no reason given, pointing to it being bots. Like a few years ago it seemed like the repost bots were sneaking in and getting posts at the top to then be able to sell the account for someone else to bypass spam filters. Now it feels like the majority of top posts are that, and that anyone engaging in the top content is also grinding out the accounts that will be used to spam them at a lower level.
Mods on Reddit giving a crap about bots?
In my experience they are more likely to shadow ban those who complain about bots than to do anything about obvious bots.
This was a tactic made common by Gallowboob. He would do this on every major sub he moderated, but with even more nastiness.
Heโs post, wait to see if it got enough upvotes, if it did not heโd delete and repost. Constantly. Until his posts got to the top.
He did this across many of the largest subredddits and turned it into a paid job where heโd advertise for others using this same patterns.
Even worse, heโd delete others posts if they were doing too well too quickly and repost as his own.
Dude is one of the pillars of what destroyed Reddit.
Honestly, it's the users that are killing it now. What started as a funny place to chill, throw some funny memes and talk about some niche stuff turned into a toxic Tumblr tire fire. Reddit as it is now makes 4chan look like the normal people.
Sidenote, but you know what has been incredibly fucking annoying? And I guess this is a combination of reddit having kind of always been shitty and oh we only find out more recently, or sort of, on aaron schwartz's death, for early signs, and, people choosing to use it in the first place. I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments, especially since you can't use unddit to see what it used to be because of the API business. I haven't had to break out the wayback machine quite yet, it hasn't gotten to that level of dire straits (not that I think the wayback machine would necessarily help for a lot of it), but there's a shocking amount of really good technical information and advice that has been deleted off of the internet as a result of people protesting reddit. Especially because the tech-literate are more often going to be the ones who use those scripts and end up leaving.
after the whole scandal in the summer, i deleted all my comments on my 15 year old account. i realized that i was creating content (aka providing free work to reddit) and they couldn't care less about the older users. from now on all my comments get overwritten after a few weeks
Same.
While I wasnโt some power user, I did have many comments with 1k or more votes.
Reddits decision to first destroy the UX of Reddit and then destroy the best Reddit apps made my decision to delete everything very easy.
Well thats a consequence of reddit monetizing off of the userbase's knowledge.
Visit the tech forms. They're just as good if not better.
This is annoying, there are some obscure tech questions that have possibly been answered but I'll never know because a spam deleted script was run.
I wouldn't mind if they just added it to the comment that they left the site it's just that they remove it entirely.
Fuck I feel you, it sucks but was the whole point of why they did it, cause it made Reddit less useful and more annoying. People who've spent years answering questions that would be referenced from the thousands to the millions were deleted. They didn't want Reddit to continue to benefit even if it hurts everyone else to.
Donโt be mad at us for deleting our comments, be mad at Reddit employees, admins, and Spez for turning the website to what it is right now.
The point of a protest is that you do mind it
You can usually find archived versions of the pages on internet Archive and Archive.today.
I hand deleted my technical comments all off Reddit before attempting to mass delete my account. I donโt really care about people being able to find answers to engineering and physics questions on Reddit. They donโt deserve traffic from my answers.
No lie, I got a 3 day ban notice yesterday for a anti China comment and both a pm and email inviting me to buy their stock for their IPO.
Soo, they are pro-chinese communist party and pro money, but we knew that already.
Reddit is american propaganda, not chinese, We even have a receipt (they forgot to scrub botted replies, note Eglin Airforce Base)
Given the amount of sinophobia Reddit tolerates, I cannot imagine how out of pocket you have to be to get banned for racism.
late to the party. Q: What is it that corporations will not tolerate about online commmunity, crowdsourced news and info?? Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Reddit.. all eaten and changed?
Silly thoughts...
the life in a discussion site is the exchange of ideas/thoughts. For that to happen users need to actually listen, process, and discuss. Reddit's structure has discouraged that for years.
signal to noise ratio - in order for the discussion board site to be useful, there's some magic signal to noise ratio that has to be maintained. Otherwise, its some style of chaos.
Why I left - in a technical subreddit, someone asked a technical question 'Who still uses XYZ, and why?, I never quite understood it', I gave a short primer on how it worked, with a couple analogies. The OP replied testily ' I don't need anyone to explain to me how it works.'. And then testily to other helpful responses, and then deleted their acct.
The experts left most of the technical subs I am in 5-10 years ago. My guess is that discussions are mostly noise: things I could have learned if I read the instructions, or how can I do this without understanding anything about it.
somewhere I read that the upvote/downvote counts on the front page are made up... modified by reddit.. so that people don't know what they need to do to get to the front. By adding this, they gave themselves full editorial control of the front page. It's downhill from there.
[Not quoting for succinctness]
Answer: corporations don't tolerate unexploited value. Online communities are rather good at gathering value, over the years, as their users add knowledge. That makes corporations grow their eyes and say "DAMN! Look at all that value that I gathered! It's time for me to reap the profits!".
Oh they killed 3rd party apps, but their own official app sucks. Yea I'm just gonna view Reddit without logging in. Honestly it's been great, it prevents me from ever posting stupid comments and engage in other ways in the site. In a way I get less addicted with Reddit since they started decide that they don't want me to get addicted.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO OPEN REDDIT IN THE OFFICIAL APP OR IN CHROME?
Cough... revanced.... cough... infinity (Android)
But yeah, I don't miss it
I couldn't be bothered to tinker with it. I actually used RedReader which allows me to log in. But I got used to not log in.
Not gonna lie to you, chief: people shouldn't waste their time tinkering with revanced to use a service that benefits Huffman
Because people have either moved on or have switched to kbin, lemmy and raddle. Evrryone worthwile anyway :3
i usually use fling up more than raddle
raddle was the only one I knew about, other than lemmy/kbin
i was searching for alternatives and i made a fling up account first
As if originality was a requirement
I've seen some great new discussions on reposts plenty of times over. And sometimes the repost just happens to be timed perfectly to blow up and be orders of magnitude more popular than the original post. I'm...kinda okay with reposts I guess?
I kinda wish reposts were an actual mechanic, where it's linked to the original like a crossost. Meme variant chains would be cool too, seeing the evolution from the first post.
I don't mind reposts either, but of course seeing the original is always better
Its because we've all moved here
/s
All the important ones moved, the rest can have Reddit for themselves.
lol nobody important from anywhere is on lemmy
My mom says I'm important
I turned on an older device yesterday and opened my old reddit app. It still works. I have no idea if it's because it's an old version of the app or if the policy got quietly changed. Or what. But it definitely works. I could read, up vote, and comment.
Apparently if you're a subreddit mod you can use the API for free
same with infinity, has probably a low rate limit, but still works
Donโt know. No longer go there.
Reddit is post human now. Just need bots to keep it alive.
And then they're using that data to create AI bots, so bots creating bots?
But then who will bot the botmen?!
Oh No! Anyway
People don't want to spend all day making Spez and a bunch of hedge fund managers rich?
Shocking.
You think the idea was to just get rid of all the users so they could be replaced by AI bots, only as an indirect way of competing against Google, with the added frustration of being just as enshitified?
It would help if they didn't ban people. I got permabanned for nothing. I posted some timing not permitted on World News, and then made a new account to ask a personal question and accidentally posted something on World News with this new account and was banned for deliberately trying to evade a ban.
Just stupid. I guess they don't need people on reddit.
After 13 years as a user and earning somewhere over 70k karma last year via discussions about topics like zoology, psychology, fitness, politics and video games, I have slowly stopped using Reddit the last few months because of the blatant censorship. I went from posting regularly each week to 3 posts total in the last 3 months. TL:DR is I got banned from /r/news and /r/worldnews for comments that broke no rules and weren't rude or hateful. The mods just insulted me when I appealed. Actual Reddit staff could not care less, and I got a temp harassment ban for saying a mod handled my appeal badly (while carefully avoiding insulting them personally). I go back a few times a week to look at topics I like, but I actually made my account here on Lemmy today because I'm searching for long-term alternatives.
Of course bad experiences were always a thing but overall you could talk things out or just move on and come back to the same forum another day. Now unopposed mods completely kill any discussion with permabans if it bothers them personally. The site-wide and subreddit rules are functionally just suggestions and Reddit (the company) does nothing to enforce them in many cases. Hateful speech is fine so long as it fits the subreddit and civil discussion is not if it doesn't. Hate men/women/liberals/conservatives/whatever? Just find the right subreddit and you can get away with truly inhumane takes, but better hope you don't break ranks while a mod is watching (even if you're reasonable/polite). Thus Reddit has devolved into echo chambers where you are either preaching to the choir or silenced forever. I'm not interested in farming worthless karma by helping circulate a few popular ideas among people who are essentially guaranteed to feel the same way. Or interested in being treated badly for trying to take those opinions elsewhere.
I got invited to participate in their IPO at an "institutional investor" price with their e-mail saying "you have helped make Reddit what it is today". No thanks Reddit. Not only does my brief research say Reddit isn't profitable, but you don't treat your users well or consistently. I can't predict the future, but I feel like I watched how this goes when Musk took over Twitter and it's not pretty.
Could be bs, could be a troll, could be bait, could be a lot of stuff really
But ultimately itโs a shit platform so I let it lie and rot instead of constantly trying to setup a tea party with it and commenting about the smell lmao
People love watching dumpster fires.
Huh, now that you mention it. Yeah I guess so. I wonder what happened?
What is The Ory of Reddit?
I see a lot less men over there than before
What? How would you know? Is this some reference I don't understand?
Nowadays all the men are weak, and redditors. How Surreal remembers old Reddit, it was full of lumberjacks and greasy auto mechanics.
It's just not what it used to be.
I got permabanned from reddit for repeatedly trolling some ahs (probably not entirely unjustified). Whenever I create a new account and forget to only log in via a private browser window, the new account will be permabanned as well. So know I go "well, fuck it, I don't need reddit".
I don't even intend to try to find out if I could somehow beg somebody to revoke my ban. After I got banned I just send a reply asking the responsible mod to kindly delete themselves.
i got banned for using the t slur :/
edit: oh wait I think it was actually because I was (jokingly) advocating for cisgendericide