They’ve even struggled at times on basic votes to keep the chamber functioning.

You seem to be assuming that proper functioning was their goal. They were sent there to tear it all down, which is precisely what they did. Never forget that they play by an entirely different set of rules.

I find it very interesting that this is reportedly one of the top subs on all of Reddit: "Comments Per Day" ranks it #1, by Subscribers or Posts Per Day it is #2, Growth (Day) and Growth (Month) are both #5, Growth (Month) and Growth (Year) are both #4, etc.

Not only that, it is by far the top sub by this "Comments Per Day" metric: it shows 15828 Comments reported in a recent 24-hr period of time, whereas the next highest sub is r/worldnews with a mere 5153 Comments Per Day, then r/AmItheAsshole and r/nfl also ~5k, then others rapidly falling further like r/NoStupidQuestions and r/AITAH each ~3k, etc.

To reiterate: this is the #1 sub over all of Reddit, with >3x more comments per day than any other sub, and like more comments than the next 3 subs all combined... and it still has fallen off a cliff, even by this same exact metric.

I do not know how reliable subredditstats.com is overall, but even if it were not so good lately, so long as all the stats are more or less evenly biased across all the subs, we should still be able to learn something from these comparisons? (please add a correction if you know of some evidence that this is not true) One caveat is that it might be harder to compare now vs. pre-API changes? But if it can be believed, the numbers fell from a peak of >100k in June 2023, to a more average ~75k, then dropped like a rock in July to ~15k and has remained hovering around that area ever since...

I do not visit popular subs on Reddit anymore, just one that has refused to migrate to Lemmy/Kbin, but this sounds entirely believable to me. If you click the links to the top posts, the very title titles of the posts and top comments to them also showcase the change: like the #2 top post to that sub is "Now that Reddit are killing 3rd party apps on July 1st what are great alternatives to Reddit?" w/ 78.1k upvotes, and has the top comment w/ 5.2k upvotes of "I might get back into reading books after over a decade." (and other comments likewise, pointing to Reddit alternatives, and angry exclamations about the 3rd party apps going away)

In short, THIS seems to be the evidence that we have been waiting for all this time, about just how far Reddit has fallen / died off?

Although comments on Lemmy/Kbin I do not think have risen by +~50k or so per day, so I wonder where all that Reddit traffic went? Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.

Edit: I nominated this post to m/BestOf.

As Global Warming slowly kills us all, try to enjoy it!:-) 😭

There is no possibility of this ever causing negative effects of any kind, certainly it will not ever be misused (like one pilot being pressured into flying 5 planes at once bc... profit).

• Elon Musk, probably

Please remember that it is okay to be sad - sometimes it's literally the only correct response to a situation:-).

For one thing, stop using debit cards on the internet. Credit cards do not take the money out of your account first, thus offering you an additional layer of protection, and many like Discover in the USA are known for offering $0 liability for unauthorized purchases. They can be more of a hassle to use like they may call your mobile number to check on a suspicious purchase, but at this point it seems you want that level of paranoia. Don't miss a rent (or any important) payment bc you have nothing left in your debit account to work with! (Even if it is added back quickly, will it be handled quickly enough?)

MoAr TrAfFiC = w1n, or something.

Most of us already have:-P

Every single time the FCC tries to do absolutely anything (no matter how modest), the telecom industry works with the GOP to first demonize the proposal (or regulatory nominee as we saw with Gigi Sohn) as extreme, and then set about working to dismantle it. Usually successfully. And often with the help of Democrats.

You should have used AI - this unfortunately sounds like it was written by a human.

And go where? Asking for a friend...

Oh great, 2020 part 5, wonderful.

Joke's on them - I got stupider all on my own, didn't have to go nowhere or nuthin. :-P

There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.

It's the first time I've posted in A YEAR AND A HALF that wasn't immediately downvoted, literally within seconds - just like most of the posts and even comments regardless of content and occurring with super-human speed in our tiny gaming sub, which Reddit admins do nothing about despite me (a mod) complaining multiple times with obvious examples mentioning that I have literal screenshots of people asking to brigade it.

I was thinking of Reddit as being less toxic than our Discord server - and tbf it is that:-P - but I forgot what "friendly" and "welcoming" even was, b/c it had warped & twisted my mind, normalizing such behavior as if "nothing can be done". But it can - I can leave!:-P

Test: if it says "hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?" - then it's a bot:-P.

Jon Stewart is a national treasure.

Spoiler alert: most people don't really have faith, especially the ones screaming at you loudly how much they have it.

When you realize that, you'll see that people are a lot more similar across all religions - authentic/thinking people from any background at all on one side, vs. those who merely "inherit" their beliefs without every really challenging them at all on the other.

Right now there are many people leaving a religion and going to atheism so much like lemmy/kbin it has that "early-generation" ring to it, but give it a few hundred years and dumb people who inherit it will just as dumbly smash others over the head with that non-religion as people have for countless millennia with past religions.

My advice: KEEP QUESTIONING! If you happened to come from a Christian or Muslim background, there is 1 Thessalonians 5:21 that literally commands that, therefore asking questions is in no way contradictory to whatever "faith" means - and anyway how could someone have that if they did not even know what it meant?

Wolf asks "can I come in?"

Piglet says "no!"

Wolf now knows it's worth busting down the heavy door...yummy.

Rich people's electricity stayed on, I'm just saying...

People seem surprised that the face-eating leopards who said that everything was going to be fine if you just allow deregulation of the market, proceeded to then eat the faces of the poors (but not those of the rich, at least whenever it could be avoided).

I'm not even kidding - see no /s - but in Texas, this isn't a bug, it's a feature. This is what "lower taxes" means, bc you don't get something for nothing; and when you pay less, you necessarily get less in return (even though the converse is not always true) - in this case lower robustness to perturbations of the system.

Good for you! I was mod of a tiny gaming sub, and 99% of its members did not care the least tiny bit about Reddit. They will when it comes for old-Reddit, but the "first they came for..." argument did not manage to penetrate their shells, especially as they were involved in multiple subs and those all stayed behind intact as well. So like 4 of us started a new community here... where we have maybe 1 post a week instead of 1 per hour. Even that much is inordinately complicated by all the bugs on Kbin/Lemmy, where ~80% of the time when you want to upvote or boost it asks you to re-login (actually it's ~100% after a certain threshold of time is reached, or 0% if you instantly do it without taking time to read or write anything first, but that is not normal behavior!), and my notifications have been permanently busted for weeks now due to a bug where if you comment on a post that a mod later removes, the notification of someone responding to you has no way to ever be removed or even seen, ever again. So what I am saying is... I really cannot even so much recommend that they come here, just yet? I am a techie person and can patiently deal with these things, but most of them are not, and won't.

But you cannot control them. You can only control yourself. Which you did? Thus, good for you! YOU at least did the right thing. Maybe others will follow your lead, especially as the software gets better (Kbin in particular is more in its infancy than Lemmy - like iirc it even has zero moderation tools right now!?), or maybe they will not, but that again is on them. You at least showed them the way.

What a fantastic idea!

-Huffman, right now pushing devs to roll it out onto Reddit also \s

Not true. They voted, and THAT legacy will be with us for a LONG time...

And sadly, I don't even mean DT - there's Ted Cruz, Moscow Mitch, the whole cohort - along with all the international agreements that we've already pulled out of and so on.

See, they left us something after all?! :-P This economy, lack of access to healthcare, and so much more!?

Btw, I don't know about you, but I have a retirement plan for my old age. I plan to die. :-P

In fairness, it is less that they are "selfish" and more that they are "clueless" (to the point of obstinacy, outright refusing to open their eyes) - b/c as you said, your mother didn't inherit anything, and yet THEY are fine, so why wouldn't you be, with nothing left to you either? (remember as you think this through to remove all of the actual "facts" first, and add the layer of Faux News Nostalgia factor)

They seem to assume that new mommies & daddies mods & content creators will rise up to take their place. Like all that effort grows on trees or something.

When asked for comment, Reddit's director of corporate, policy, and safety communications, Gina Antonini, said via email:

Sounds like none of my problem, tho it sure would suck to be you, bi!ches! (essentially)

"Reddit" is dead. It remains to be seen what, if anything, will replace it. e.g. where did those exact mods go, who were mentioned in the article? A Fediverse location, if they can stand all the bugs here? Or nowhere, if they were too shaken to want to devote their time to some other place? Or will they go back even, seeing >95% of their communities refusing to leave Reddit (until it literally kills them of botulism ofc)? Only time will tell...

However, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Normalizing (the opposite of shaming) people living in debt all the time is not necessarily a good thing either. Whether you actually end up able to retire or not, it is a good practice to live within your means. It's like all Zen and shit - seriously, it lowers stress, saves marriages, and eats babies, or like two of those three I can't quite recall which...

It doesn't have to be all prim & proper - things like just eating at home more than eating out, or the REALLY big one living in a cheaper place, can make such a difference.

Except that the previous (3rd) sentence ends in no punctuation.

Relevant post: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/451896/Is-Kbin-dying-I-wanted-to-address-the-deleted-thread, attempting to explain why contributions weren't being merged in and deployed.

Posts by Ernst since mention lots of bots and ads, and some outright DDOS.

The latest word: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/544021/So-what-s-the-status-on-the-update-edit-ernest-responded.

TLDR: Ernst has had a lot of unexpected personal issues to deal with, had to take on a temporary job, and has not been able to give full dedication to this project. What efforts were originally planned - e.g. an official API - seemed to instead have gotten redirected against maintenance vs. outside attacks rather than improvements to the underlying codebase. Back when he was not keeping up with contributors' proffered changes, he even planned to step down if he could not catch up, for which he gave himself a 1-month deadline, but he seems to have decided that he has met the basic minimum to not do that.

Looking forward, several months from now Kbin may be significantly better. Or barely better. Or not at all, who knows. But right now it is what it is, which is far behind Lemmy in terms of pure software features at least. I think Kbin's main selling point was that it was not built off of the original Lemmy contributors, and it does have a very nice interface (sort of, on desktop at least). Not that it matters: account migration doesn't exist on the Fediverse - even on Lemmy, right? - so those of us who migrated and asked all of our friends to do likewise are kinda stuck with our initial choices, good or bad, unless we make a clean break from our entire history.

Note I have nothing to do with Kbin, I just wanted to offer those helpful resources if you want to read them. I am glad that you found something that works well for you. I halfway wonder if I should make an alt somewhere even if just to more readily read posts from a mobile, b/c the mobile browser experience for Kbin is horrible (reading is mostly fine, but commenting is absolutely horrendous).

a) a lot of accounts are bots, and depending on how they are implemented, a LOT of these have remained (or even were created) after the API changes - remember, it's easy to spin up 1000s of these to each provide small traffic so as to not run up against the API limits. Overall, I suspect a ton more bots are there now, b/c the bot defense effort was suspended, b/c unlike a single bot, that one needs to look at ALL traffic (I suppose it could be re-written from scratch in a decentralized manner but... the developers did not choose to do that).

b) a lot of people who remain on Reddit, including myself, offer it WAY less traffic than before. I used to be a mod of a small sub, which I quit, so I went from checking it almost literally hourly, so at most once a day, and most days I do not even comment at all. Also, I used to browse r/all (actually, "popular"), but now I never do, instead preferring Lemmy/Kbin for that. My personal traffic dropped off a cliff just like this image shows, in fact probably a lot more so. Although I still do visit that small gaming sub, b/c while there is a version of it here, instead of like 5 posts a day we get at most 1 per week, which less than a handful interact with. So that is not an "exodus of users" so much as a (vast) reduction of interaction, which still impacts their advertising revenue and thus the continuity of Reddit as a corporate entity.

c) as people are saying, not everyone came to Lemmy/Kbin. Some went to Mastodon, others just stopped going online as much, and like myself I comment now a lot less than I used to, though I read just as much (here, not there). So just b/c the traffic did not come "here", does not mean that it did not leave "there". i.e., think of the shock of the event as making people regress more to lurking and not feel as comfortable interacting, especially given the lack of ability of smaller magazines (what are those called on Lemmy again?) here. Thus, even if they did not "go outside", they still may not be interacting on Reddit.

Except that many who support it do not know that is the goal. They think it's about morality somehow, like abortion=murder but somehow school shootings are meh, whatever.

Religion getting involved in politics doesn't always lead to a bad outcome - e.g. that's how slaves were freed in the UK - but it sure does create a pipeline where people can be fed whatever misinformation, anti-vax, anti-science, anti-facts, etc. Ironically Jesus Himself says things like "don't put heavy burdens onto others without offering to help them", "workers deserve their (living) wages,... that very same day that they work even so don't withhold it for days just bc it is convenient for you - they also have needs and you must be considerate of them", and my personal favorite, "test EVERYTHING against what you KNOW to be true" i.e. be skeptical, but unfortunately Christians aren't listening to Jesus anymore so much as whatever they are fed from the pulpit.:-(

I dunno about "everything" - I haven't seen proof that it can run on the wrapper yet? :-P

it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice

Okay but... I thought that was basically the point, in that if the advice survived for that long, then it is worth paying attention to at least, to consider if it might apply to a particular situation? e.g. chicken soup really is good for a cold, whether we knew the precise reasons why or not.

As Jon Stewart said in his podcast, liberal media aims to be correct, while conservative media is effective. It's a real thing - like when you marshal ALL your forces to stop abortion, whether you should have or not, and keep at it for a full decade, tying it to everything else like fiscal conservatism and more important NOT being liberal, it can achieve a powerful end...even if originally it was not meant to be taken entirely seriously.

All Democrats had to do back then was have someone else run other than Hillary - ANYONE else would have done just fine. People forget, but Republicans did not "win" that election - it was Democrats that did this to us. More people voted against her than for him in the "Never Hillary" movement, including lifelong liberals even immigrants. The "email scandal" - no not the one people talked about afterwards for so long where it was her emails that were leaked (well that too I suppose), the but the earlier one with the DNC emails were leaked and showed the collusion against Bernie Sanders - did a great deal of harm. e.g. we will never know (we are literally prevented from accurate measurements) exactly how many people died excess deaths from the pandemic that could possibly have been prevented, if truth had been reported from the halls of power rather than lies.

That is worth considering now that Kamala Harris will become our next Presidential candidate, under Biden's name but after he dies or becomes incapacitated somewhere along the way she will take the position. That may not be a 100% certainty, but it does seem a possibility that it might happen, with a greater-than-average chance given his age. So is that just handing Republicans the House and Senate, once again? I do not know...

I am not exempting Republicans from blame here, just saying that neither am I exempting those who claim to be the more responsible party. Like if the only thing standing between us and a horde of zombies is a locked door, then the person who swings that door open wide has some measure of responsibility, no? Even if they do none of the flesh-eating directly. And whoever handed that person the only key to the door has a level of responsibility as well, no? By this I mean our for-profit media, who all but outright lies to us, even if technically telling the truth then still spinning it wildly out of proportion, in order to clickbait. I just wish there were any options at all between shooting yourself in the head vs. a slow death by poison.

Oh well, who wants to live forever!?! :-D

(1) Do you remember that ennui engine article that was making the rounds a few months ago as Reddit collapsed? I had already started thinking along those lines so it being more advanced along that road, it really helped me realize that social media being that way is the point. Also, it was extremely well written I thought, or perhaps it was just so very timely, but in any case I recall that I could barely put it down bc I wanted to just soak up that article. I shared this thought both bc the content is relevant, but also bc I want to read more content that is like that, which really makes you think rather than as you say simply doom scroll. (Although typing on a mobile, I have to fight it from changing fully formed words making perfect English sense, to using entirely different words that do not match, which further matches our theme here in saying how technology is not always so friendly.)

(2) Check out this post if you would: https://kbin.social/m/BestOf/t/177639/u-at-lvxferre-at-lemmy-ml-discusses-the-dichotomy-between-effective-moderation-vs-low-content. First it is once again relevant in multiple ways to the discussion at hand, but also note the magazine it is in: an entire one dedicated to highlighting and sharing the "best" content on the Fediverse. Note in particular how there have only been 4 posts since my own that I'm linking here... that was from 2 months ago, which REALLY helps underscore the exact message about the content: the higher the quality filter, the less of it there is. We would love to see an excellent post in our doomscrolling once a day, but what if it were only available once every other month? That magazine btw does not accept primary submissions such as my former one, only secondary content i.e. it takes a second person to nominate a post.

I would love to see a similar magazine geared toward deeper thinking. If you create or find one, please let me know?

(3) If there were such a one (probably there could be and I simply not having done the due diligence to find it yet:-D), I would share this video to it: https://youtu.be/R943\_eAvnWw. If you don't want to watch the full thing, maybe skip to just the end summary, but I am saying that I found it highly relevant to again the type of content we are talking about here, compared to typical YouTube videos.

And once again, the only question is what to do about it. We cannot control others, who e.g. Won't Look Up, all we can control is ourselves. So what will we do, who want such as this? I cannot create such a magazine btw bc I am on Kbin which iirc has zero moderation tools (or an API). I might create a Lemmy account purely to create such a magazine, but then I cannot migrate my existing account over... that was a major selling point for the Fediverse but turned out to be a lie (for now). So the state of the current tools really does impact the end result. If you have a solution though, e.g. if you will create such a space for deeper thoughts, I would love to join it.

Note it is easy to make a bookmark to a specific magazine, so that someone can check that (once a day? week?) and still have access to doomscrolling on their mobile devices, which ngl is a heck of a lot easier to perform than to type (especially on Kbin using a browser rather than an app).

Well that escalated quickly!

I would love to see where it would go forward from there, but our puny human minds surely could not handle the Eldritch strangeness that would entail... (or rather, we could only do it once, then go insane forever afterwards - sign me up!:-P)

There have always been such (it is human nature) - but right now they feel bold enough to speak and act, whereas previously they had been too afraid and embarrassed to do so publicly.

In South Carolina, various KKK-like groups said in advance that they wanted to kill people, wrapped barbed wire around baseball bats (in order to better kill people with), showed up to kill people, then actually killed people, then bragged about having killed people... Oh right, but the other side was not successful in securing a permit for their peaceful protest, so you know, there are "many sides" to every issue I guess.

Misinformation/brainwashing techniques are powerful. Like if you believed that a particular type of human was the root of all evil in this world, then you SHOULD want them dead, under those circumstances... right? You do not bc you know better, not just about that one group but more fundamentally that it is ideas that bring about evil, not people. But the people killing people do not know that, and it is to the advantage of others who seek power, and want to use the army of sheeple to advance their own agenda, for those sheeple to not know that either.

The most toxic users of Reddit want to stay there rather than come here? Oh boo-hoo, cry me a river:-). If they are happy with their childish toys, then let them be - that's a win for them, and a win for us too?

Okay, so that's glass-half-full thinking, and more realistically the situation is also half empty at the same time, but both are true at the same time, so we'll see what happens I guess.

Why... is there oil there? :-P

I may check Reddit once a week now, instead of 10x a day. I'm stepping back from modding a 20k subscriber sub, and posting here instead. I used to respond to questions there, and spend maybe an hour or three a day communicating, now I'll quickly check the updates and move on. I'm not leaving Reddit, but I'm "leaving Reddit".

People who choose not to understand any hint of subtlety will decry that it did not die all the while, just the same as happened to Digg, and Tumblr too (which lost 90% of its subscribers, but technically does still exist). But the reality is plain & obvious, in spite of their alternative facts to the contrary.

Don't base whether you are a good mod or not on one user that was warned and chose to ignore the rules.