After all the BS from /u/spez?
Honestly, apathy. It is not like people have to start paying for the app or website explicitly
- Facebook/ Meta stole and continues to steal millions of users’ data, the vast majority of the users do not care
- Twitter hacked most third-party apps, but people still use it because it doesn’t affect them personally. They still use it for free, so why not?
- Reddit killed third party APIs? People will grumble, but they will recalibrate their mind and continue using the official app.
I completely agree, and I think another major factor is a function of when you started using Reddit.
I’ve noticed a trend that many of the people who’ve moved on from Reddit (or at least the ones who are posting here and in places like Hacker News) joined Reddit 8+ years ago.
I started using Reddit about 14 years ago, and I’ve definitely noticed a change in the overall vibe of Reddit over those years. There were obvious changes (like cracking down/banning specific subreddits) and there were more subtle changes (like communities growing so large that the comments turned to shit) and there was a departure from a text-heavy, original-content focused haven for like-minded people to a feed full of gifs and inflammatory comment (not to mention ads-that-are-pretending-to-be-posts).
People who have been using it for so many years notice this change, but it was so gradual and over so long a time that they were used to it – essentially the change was slow enough that we were lulled into accepting the new reality of Reddit.
But then this whole kerfuffle has shaken us out of it and made us realize that it’s only going to get worse. So here we are, onto greener pastures.
Now, on the other hand, we have the (many, many) people who started using Reddit more recently. They only know the “new” Reddit. And so they don’t get what the big deal is. They think the mods are throwing a fit and the power users are just whiny and “why the hell can’t I see my memes?”.
They don’t understand what we miss about Reddit.
As a fairly ‘new’ user of Reddit, I think you’re pretty spot on. I’ve been using Reddit for around 5 years or so now (and their mobile app, I know, burn me right now) and as you said, for users like me, it’s not that obvious how much Reddit has changed for the worst. Sure, a few things were changed for the worst, but compared to other social medias, Reddit still seemed like the better option to me.
The think is, this protest has shed light on a lot of issues I ignored, and the way Reddit Corp. has handled it just straight up made me sick and wanting to dissosiate myself from Reddit as a whole. But I’ve a strong political background, strong beliefs and I am french so… I’m clearly not the ‘common user’. Those, I get why they see the protest as an inconveniance at best, and just want to keep using the website conveniantly as they usually do. They don’t know about 3rd Party Apps, they don’t care about useful bots, they don’t understand forums and old internet culture. They just want their daily dose of content.
EDIT: Also my very first comment on Lemmy, as I’m trying to fly away from Reddit.
The arrow of enshitification flys in one direction only. the people that are still there will migrate out eventually. spez was right when he said the majority of users don’t care about the api, but fails to realize that the majority of users don’t generate content. The users that do generate content are jumping ship.
Yeah, the majority of users don’t care about the API because they don’t know what it means - that it’s the interface that enables not just third party apps, but also moderation tools.
The same users that will tell you that they don’t care about the API will start whining when the moderation of their favorite subs turn to shit, when they get overrun by trolls and spammers and bots and advertising.
People just fail to connect the dots.
Do you have any statistics though? Or it’s just something you want to believe in?
Because of what is WAS. While it still remains a bastion of information and data, for me Reddit has went WAY beyond a social media that I’ll use. I was already done when they decided not to reconsider their API decision - I could have been swayed, too. Companies deserve to get paid for their data and service; but not price-gouging rates like Reddit is attempting. It really sucks, too - I loved what Reddit, and its USERS, provided to the userbase… when I heard about mgmt planning to forcefully take back BLACKOUT sub-reddits, tho; that was it. NO ONE should remain there - I don’t understand how anyone could - federation is the only way forward, aside from going back to a website for every ‘sub-reddit’… Lemmy and LemmyNet should, as they are, really take hold right now. The devs need to find more help; I hate to say this, but theres money there. NO REDDIT, NO MORE. MORE Social, less Media.
Its the sane reason people still play old mmos. Theyve already sunk so much time into it and they are used to it, its were their community is and something new is uncomfortabke and scary.
Nah, we still play because we like them. I play oldschool Runescape because I can’t stand Runescape 3. It has nothing to do with 3 being scary, I just prefer the mechanics of the old school version.
Nothing to do with that. It’s all preference.
I had hope until yesterday. I was a mod and all my users turned on me and said some really hurtful things. I’m gonna give a mod position to someone else on a smaller sub I’m a part of or two and step down from the rest. I’m guessing I’ll still lurk, but I’m done with it.
I don’t think people understand how important moderation is. I’m sorry you had that experience. I appreciate all the work you’ve put in.
Thank you. Working to let it go.
One of my favorite subs went aggressively pro-shill. Not just “you did your best”. But nothing except contempt and endless mockery.
I would say it’s astroturfing. But previously a gaming sub had gone dark for a mere 24 hours as a statement about toxicity and the response was similar.
There’s definitely some hardcore shilling and astroturfing in a lot of subs where blackouts and John Oliver memes have become the norm. People with no posting history, brand new accounts and low karma accounts have flooded in to insult the mods and attack the protest.
Why don’t you just step down without assigning a new mod? Let Reddit self destruct itself.
They don’t see their niche interest groups migrating to a different platform.
Smaller subs may have had just enough critical mass when accessing the entire reddit user graf, but new platforms are not there yet. It is much easier to gain traction in a unified user base than in a federation of disparate user bases.
Yeah, that was it for me, I deleted my old 10+ year old user, who was a moderator, I might come back with a smaller account, but rewrote and deleted all my old stuff, the thing is there is really hard to find something for some of my really niche interests :/
Denial, at least for me. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that anyone could be that stupid and eager to destroy it’s most active part of the user base…
And the fact that it’s Reddit, a Site I always preceived as community driven and kinda above those corporate shenanigans, I still have hopes some saner heads might prevail. Although that seems increasingly unlikely by the minute…
Reddit is a VC backed startup so this was always going to happen. I am surprised it took so long, to be honest.
VC
I swear the only acronym I can think of is Vietcong. What do you mean by that?
It stands for “venture capital”.
Investors invest money in a company in hopes they’ll make lots of money on the deal in the future. Often high risk and high reward.
Thank you. The context makes sense now.
I have zero hope for Reddit. I had no idea there were much better 3rd party apps available for Reddit on phones, so the API changes don’t impact me. But I’ve noticed over the years more and more, astro turfing by bots, bots reposting popular things to karma farm, as to sell the bot to entities looking to influence reddit via the aforementioned astro turfing.
It’s all very gross, I started to feel like a duck sitting in a pond surrounded by ducks, but not really, they’re all decoys, fakes, mean to give the impression of a big crowd. I don’t like that trend, and on top of that, the idea of Reddit going public, and trying to push our content as their value makes me sick. The owners of reddit haven’t done the heavy lifting, we the users, the mods all did the work and built up content. The idea that some chucklefuck was going to profit big from our effort isn’t something I want to be part of any more. So here I am, and I gotta say, Lemmy feels like a 2000’s forum by comparison, and I hope its very nature makes it harder to fall into the same pit falls as reddit and digg did.
The wierd thing was the bots selling t shirts of art they steal off of reddit. But what’s stopping those bots from coming here?
Decentralization’s pretty hard to kill so as long as people stick around, I have high hopes for places like these.
You’re on the Fediverse where the more “extreme” people moving away from Reddit are. Hence, there is a strong bias toward experiencing the Reddit fiasco in a way that makes one think, that it’s already a sinking ship. For many, Lemmy isn’t as easily useable and mature as Reddit is.
The echo chamber will continue. Too easy to surround ourselves with the same opinions all of the time
That’s kinda true in both cases, right? Like the ones who remain attached to reddit and new transplants to Lemmy will both be like “good riddance”
Most of the subreddits I used to frequent (particularly/r/manga) haven’t made the move to anywhere, nor they blacked out in protest. While I see some parallels here, there’s still very few active users. I would love to be able to post more content myself, but I objectively do not have enough time in my hands.
I follow some pretty niche topics, and have had to make an executive decision regarding indifferent behavior from those who moderate discussions in those areas: Talking about a specific crypto, or a style of painting takes a backseat to my politics.
This was the final straw for me, and I feel that a collective lack of participation is the only recourse to assist those who are indifferent in generating an opinion.
Not only that, but I extracted (and continuously delete when they reappear) my contributions to those discussions, reposting them elsewhere.
In addition to few active users, there’s a lot of duplication when it comes to Lemmy communities. For example, there are at least 15 Linux communities across the various Lemmy instances - and that’s just general Linux communities. There are four coffee communities, four libertarian communities, three retro gaming communities, five general Windows communities, etc.
The best we can do as users is to only join communities with the most users and maybe ask moderators to delete their community if there’s already one with more users and if theirs has very few, if any, posts. It would be really great if it were possible to merge communities, especially ones with few posts. I guess the ones with few users and zero posts could have the moderator tell subscribers the community will be shutting down soon and they should locate other instances with the browse.feddit.de search tool.
Though, I do have to admit that there is an advantage to having duplicate communities across instances, which is that they make it easier for new users, since it prevents them from having to figure out how to get to other communities too soon. Though, every instance should probably have a sticky or something that tells users about browse.feddit.de and browser extensions like Lemmy Link.
The vast majority of reddits userbase are consumers. They are already using the official app and don’t care about the politics of the platform. These people are only there to get their content fix.
I realised this when I saw a post on a subreddit where someone shared on how to turn off some kind of notification in the official app. So many other people thanked this person… Reddit has become another mainstream social media site like FB, Instagram and so on.
Reddit is like the restaurant you’ve been going to for several years that was a mom & pop operation with awesome food and atmosphere. It got popular, and the owners made it a chain, so you could get the same food in a lot of different areas. The quality started to go down as they expanded, but it was already very popular. Then the owners started raising the prices, and the atmosphere started to get way less awesome. At some point, you realized that it’s not the restaurant you fell in love with, and it wasn’t a good value anymore, so you started looking for a similar kind of restaurant that was more like that one was early on. But the chain is still really popular, and a lot of people just keep going because it’s what they’re familiar with and they know the menu - they don’t want to go to the work of finding a new place and they’re content with what they’re getting there. The people who have left are a drop in the bucket so far, and the chain restaurant is likely to continue operating for the foreseeable future.
I remember almost everyone use facebook at a time, even chinese use facebook before it was walled off in china. But then everyone got angry because facebook got worse and anti-user and some deleted account. Yet, facebook is still kicking
In a nutshell, the communities move on to a more culturally and technologically suitable perform
Life is short, it is wise fast track to
Acceptanceforfive stages of grief. The best punishment for Reddit admins is to be forgottenFacebook is still kicking but they had to buy Instagram because they were bleeding users to it like crazy. They’re not declining in usage because the Internet (number of connected people) is still growing, but their user growth has slowed down significantly, to the point where they had a quarter with a decline in daily active users. That’s bad for a platform like that, and their stock price has reflected that.
Reddit is unsalvageable and had been for a long time, but again, you are not going to be able to take the redditor out of people even if they move somewhere else for a long time.
None of us should be trying to build a better reddit here, we should be aiming to build something new, knowing what works and what doesn’t from our time as redditors.
Something more sincere, I guess.
The farther this goes, the more I think you may be right about Reddit being unsalvagable.
I think with different ownership, things could have worked out very differently. But the current shareholders and board obviously don’t care much that their property has gone from one of the most liked and trusted sites on the Internet to one of the most publicly hated in like 3 weeks. They think this will make them money otherwise they’d have reined Spez in or fired him.More importantly, I think this sort of thing can happen with ANY non-federated platform. As long as the users aren’t the ones ultimately in charge, it can and probably will eventually happen.
Here’s one way to realize why Reddit should not be taken seriously: Suppose that the head moderator position for r/politics was put up for open auction. How much would it sell for? It would be purchased by someone who was interested in controlling what information people see.
Subreddits are moderated on a first-come first-serve basis. If you were the first one to squat a name 10 years ago, you get to be the head moderator, even if someone else might do a better job. This is the “landed gentry” comment Reddit’s CEO was referring to.
The irony that u/spez and others keep using landed gentry in the wrong way is hilarious.
Landed gentry bought their “title” (it’s not really a title, more a socio-political category). The first scenario you described, with someone buying the position of moderator… that’s 100% landed gentry. Commoners with wealth would buy a big house and property and then be considered landed gentry. It’s not something that was given to them like peerage (aka nobility).
The reality is that content producers and moderators are closer to cotters–somewhere in between serfs and husbandmen. They don’t own the land (e.g.: subs), but they work it. The only difference is that serfs and husbandmen could derive a profit from their labour, whereas most mods and content producers don’t (as far as I’m aware).
If we keep going with the middle-age titles, u/spez is much closer to a “lord of the manor” than he would care to realise. He owns the land, can choose who works it and who is able to make a profit and how much. He can withdraw that permission at any time, and he amasses vast amounts of wealth based on the work of the people who, effectively, work for him for free.
The overwhelming majority of Redditors probably don’t really know what the actual issue is, and on the surface, Reddit charging for an API that they’ve allowed free access to for years probably seems logical. Plus, people are creatures of habit, they’d rather go back to the same website they’ve been visiting, with the community that they already know, than try to figure out what the heck a Lemmy is.
I wouldn’t be so sure. In multiple subreddits the communities voted to destroy the sub in response of the admins trying to break the blackout (e.g. pics only allowing pics of John Oliver looking sexy, and several subs pulling similar moves).
Do you think there would be use in having a site like upstract.com (the new popurls) that would aggregate the RSS feeds from all Lemmys and people could just browse through popular somewhat curated posts of the day?
I would mildly argue that might be a good thing. The Masses [TM] are what changed reddit from interesting discourse to shitposting trolls. If everybody came here, it would just be more of the same.
So there aren’t a lot of people here. But the people who are here make the atmosphere we love. We want more lemmy, with all the open talking. Not beehaw, where apparently they want to remain in a vacuum. They can’t exactly, since that’s evidently not how defederation works, but they want to. They might as well just go back to reddit.
Keep in mind, this is all my take on what’s happening. I’m not completely sure I understand federation and how it works.
