Spyke
lemmy.world

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.

164
Kitreply
lemmy.blahaj.zone

Reddit has never been about privacy or anominity. Think of all the celebrity AMAs.

-80

Some great posts back in the day, and definitely some not so great posts haha. I had to unsub after it turned into celebrities hocking their products.

8

You can post on 4chan as anon and prove your identity too

Reddit is (or at least was) psuedo-anonymous. You can easily get identities, and they're not linked to you

For a lot of people, I'd say most in the early years (at least in my experience), you didn't share usernames with your friends on the platform... Irl Redditors loved to identify themselves as a Redditor, we shared communities and memes, but only two of my closest friends ever knew my main account

I kept a second account that could potentially be tied to me (more work related stuff), because on my main account I always had the freedom to discard it if I embarrassed myself enough. That knowledge makes me far more likely to hit post instead of discard

10

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.

9
lemmy.world

A special deal? Doesn’t the message basically say “give us your data so you maybe have a chance at buying stock at full price, and be thankful we’re not marking it up”?

23

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.

20
fluxionreply
lemmy.world

Probably part of some side grift to sell more information to data brokers

10
lemmy.zip

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

13

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.

6

Look, I’m not trying to short okay? I’m sure Reddit will do great. Just let me borrow your stock and I’ll make sure you have it back in like 6 months or so

11

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.

2
lemmy.world

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

283
marcosreply
lemmy.world

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.

83
Windex007reply
lemmy.world

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.

79
RampageDonreply
lemmy.world

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.

36
Kedlyreply
lemm.ee

LMAO, thank you for sharing that story. Must have been painful, but the story gave me a good laugh!

8

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.

6

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.

4
lemmy.world

I don't think the Donald was abusing the algorithm. It was literally the most popular sub, it was always on the front page because it's posts were getting massively and constantly upvoted. Changing the algorithm instead of waiting it out or just straight banning it ruined the site.

-4
beetusreply
lemmy.world

They tried to stand impartial (my most generous interpretation of reddits in-action towards the donald) and it really fucked them.

It's so weird how many platforms cater to harmful rhetoric in an effort to stay neutral only for them to later ban the community after the damage has been done.

If I were more conspiratorial I'd suggest the Donald survived for as long as it did on purpose and with the explicit support of the reddit admins/execs..

6
lemmy.world

No shit. They didn't have the balls to ban a sub with that many members when they should have. The damage all really came from half assing a solution.

Or alternatively, they could have done nothing at all like the orginal mission statement entailed

1

Again, if they just hadn't tried to tiktokize their algorithm it never would have been a problem to begin with because it, like every other sub, would have been purely opt-in

1

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.

43

As anything with Reddit, it depends on what you subscribe.

That's likely the case. r/theoryofreddit is mostly old users, who are emotionally attached enough to the platform to discuss it, and who often stick to smaller communities. It's practically "the" userbase that Reddit screwed the most with.

(I used to post fairly often there. I'd miss that sub if not for its moronic powerjanny godofatheism "randomly" banning people left and right because he's an illiterate.)

1
TheSladreply
sh.itjust.works

You forgot about the automated dms and emails begging users to buy stock at their IPO to inflate it's value

27

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.

5

That was literally always the case, and frankly it was not nearly as big a problem as people made it out to be.

3

They are weird superficial sensationalized feel-good posts. It's was a thing before, but now it feels more contrived. Front page feels hollow.

10

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.

4

Yeah Reddit is awesome like that, but have you ever tried posting something on lemmygrad by accident?

4

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.

3

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.

3

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)

2
sh.itjust.works

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.

147

Don't forget the Sugar Free Haribo reviews.

Sure, some of those would have been in a local newspaper or something and possibly collected in a book akin to "Strange Red Cow", but that was a beautiful moment of people going "This makes you violently shit yourself? I gotta try this".

13
moodyreply
lemmings.world

Congratulations. You have reached the end of the internet.

21

Suddenly I understand how non-americans feel when Americans discuss world issues.

25
fluxionreply
lemmy.world

That would be better than the extremely "interesting" future that awaits us

7
Kedlyreply

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!

2

I almost added *Liberty Bell March starts playing*. Happy to see it wasn't necessary.

2
lemmy.world

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?

125
Sternreply
lemmy.world

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

41
GoodEye8reply
lemm.ee

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.

9

I don’t 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.

9

I remember a large influx of 4chan users around 2012 or something that seriously diluted the quality of the comments

4

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.

36

For me, the downfall was when Unidan got himself banned. Reddit has never fully recovered .

18
aussie.zone

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.

9

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.

5

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.

2

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 it’s fair to say that Reddit was very different and yes: better before that.

2

It started going down hill when Conde Nast bought it.

1
lemmy.world

I always side stepped the whole gamergate thing while it was at it's height. Something always stank about that affair.

I would say gamergate wasn't the first battle, but more like a "Southern Strategy" of gaming. Previously, gaming culture was the target of conservatives. I remember Jack Thompson.

As gaming went "mainstream" and gamers aged into the voting range and boomers became less and less swing voters, conservatives started using the same tactics to draw in gamers as neo-nazis used to draw in the punk scene.

6
Moondogreply
pawb.social

Gamergate and 2016 US Politics go hand-in-hand, as Steve Bannon was an orchestrater of the former as a trial run for the latter.

I'd say I can't believe everything is shit because of porn-addicted white people on the internet, but historically speaking that's been the motivation behind almost every fascist movement.

3
lemmy.world

Gamergate and 2016 US Politics go hand-in-hand, as Steve Bannon was an orchestrater of the former as a trial run for the latter.

true

I’d say I can’t believe everything is shit because of porn-addicted white people on the internet, but historically speaking that’s been the motivation behind almost every fascist movement.

and you lost me. I'm assuming you live in "the west" where white people are the majority. Once you start looking at other areas of the world, you'll see the same methods being used by none-white fascist(or pseudo fascists) upstarts. Also, pretty sure sexual repression has a stronger link to violent politics. Chaste societies are easier to get to go to war. Why do you think "purity" is so valued in abrahamic religions and why the Nazis burned the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.

3
Moondogreply
pawb.social

Haha; You're right that my post, on its own, is indeed American-centric. I'll consider that, thank you!

Violent Politics are a tool of Fascists, I feel that doesn't need elaboration; I'm more exasperated that it keeps working throughout history, even as we have the entire world in our pocket.

1

Violent Politics are a tool of Fascists,

It's also the tool of progress. American 60's Era Civil rights Movement wasn't cause solely by the speeches of MLK, but the real threat that the protests would turn into large scale violence and the government deciding that it would be cheaper to give more equal rights to Black People. A fact that gets whitewashed by the school system.

2

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

1
lemm.ee

Dead? Maybe not. Dead inside? Definitely.

80
lemmy.world

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.

20
lemmy.world

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.

20

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.

1

Who would have thought that driving away the power users that posted and interacted with the content the most would ruin Reddit ? 🙄

70
lemmy.ca

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.

69

They've been chasing an IPO for years, it's not a quick process.

20
SailorMossreply
sh.itjust.works

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.

11
lemmy.ca

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.

9
Kedlyreply
lemm.ee

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

2

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.

5

"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.

6

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 you’re lucky to see a week’s worth of genuine top posts.

Posts getting roasted in the comments for being too boomery, capitalist bootlicking or hive-mindish happens less and less.

61
lemmy.world

Reddit changed their upvote algorithm which is why it looks so much lower than it really is.

They covered this years ago..

52
Socsareply
sh.itjust.works

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.

43
Anticorpreply
lemmy.world

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?

6

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.

1

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.

16
lemmy.world

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.

25
STOMPYIreply
lemmy.world

Reddit is cancer! Friends don't let Friends reddit. Remind one person today of this place reddit clone!

6
lemmy.world

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...

17

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.

6
lemmy.world

Lemmy really has increased in traffic over the time I’ve been here.

For all intents and purposes it’s the exact same experience as the other place for me.

38
5in1kreply
lemm.ee

I see less repeated jokes as top level comments here.

27
thecrotchreply
sh.itjust.works

And fewer people quoting entire Simpsons episodes at each other line by line

14
5in1kreply
lemm.ee

Meh, whatever you say oh arbiter of casual conversation.

3

‘Less’ is for stuff that isn’t individually countable, like milk, or bulk rice. ‘Fewer’ is for things that one could count individually; glasses of milk, or grains of rice.

It’s ok to use language accurately. Don’t be afraid.

-2
lemmy.world

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.

48

I only use Reddit now for a couple of very niche forums (like /samsungwatchfaces) but I never post there anymore.

44

Reddit became openly hostile to the people and content that made it great. It’s not exactly surprising that the good users eventually went elsewhere. You could really tell shit went downhill after they killed the third party apps.

44

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.

44
lemmy.world

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.

12

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.

13

The massive “NO WELCOME HERE NO MORE” 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.

3

Everybody I ask considered the second one the better one.

But which had the better title?

5
Gestridreply
lemmy.ca

Found it! They have a page on Reddit that links to what seems like all their short stories.

5
lemmy.world

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.

42
5tooreply
lemmy.world

Evangelical advertising, talking about Jesus's experiences in a way that relates to what "everyday people" deal with.

14
Maggotyreply
lemmy.world

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.

13

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.

7

Wasn't aware of that; so I'm glad you mentioned it! I always just rolled my eyes at it and moved on.

1
Kcgreply

It really is. Such drivel they are posting too.

6
lemmy.world

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

36
lemmy.world

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.

1
KeenFlamereply
feddit.nu

Conjuction fallacy. You only focus on your satisfaction and not on your own bigger reason for why

0
lemmy.world

Seeing reddit spiral into enshittification is satisfying to me, and that's all I assert. I never asserted it would be asserting for everyone, much less you.

I call this: the mojofrodojo conundrum: you assume I think you're real, and can experience satisfaction. or care. life is funny that way.

0

You can feel satisfaction over enshittification and still understand that humanity lost something. It's a simple fallacy nothing to cry about honestly

1
lemmy.world

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

32

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+.

3
dhorkreply
lemmy.world

I just assumed that everyone with a username of word-word-number there was a bot or sockpuppet.

46
lemmy.world

It's also people who create throwaways. Reddit gives a randomized username following that format.

32
Neatoreply
ttrpg.network

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.

4

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.

6

On the subreddits I moderated, I used a big regexp to preemptively filter their comments

Letting one through was a rare event

5
lemmy.zip

I can’t get over the people in the comments there complaining about reddit being a literal communist platform. Meanwhile here we have actual communist instances, reddit isn’t even lukewarm left leaning. Liberal at best.

6
Vilianreply
lemmy.ca

we also have fascist instances no?, blocked instances ofc but still

1

Do you have one in mind? I don’t 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 haven’t seen much from their users.

1

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.

27
lemmy.world

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.

24
JustMy2creply
lemm.ee

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.

4
NateNate60reply
lemmy.world

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.

1

Yes it is. But talking about actual facts and getting banned without any recourse, especially when they cna literally click my name and see not a single nazi thing.. I hate extreme left and extreme right!

So no checkup no manner of arbitrage, just ban for ever. And also ban any new account I made.. For one single mention of a proven fact by numerous official sources = perma ban on all my accounts. Thanks reddit.

-1

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.

23
lemmy.world

Yeah apparently you want to overwrite your data instead of deleting it.

13
sopuli.xyz

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.

11

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.

6

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.

9

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.

1
braxy29reply
lemmy.world

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?

5
danielblnreply
lemmy.world

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.

5
Mnemnosynereply
sh.itjust.works

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.

3

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.

1

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.

2
p1mrxreply
sh.itjust.works

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.

8
SolarMechreply
slrpnk.net

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?

4

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.

4

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.

1

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

19

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. I’ve hit /all sometimes, but that’s 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, there’s far too little conversation, and if someone does respond to something you say it’s 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.

19
Chuymattreply
kbin.social

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?

1

Probably move here. Despite Reddit’s IPO I think it’s too late and gone stale. Unless there’s a massive change to give it more staying power it’s probably going to wither like Xwitter or Digg.

2

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.

19
lemmy.world

"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.

18
dustyDatareply
lemmy.world

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.

19

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

3
lemmy.world

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.

18

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.

11

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)

5
lemmy.world

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.

16

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

16

Short short short short

Honestly the executive comp is outrageous for an unprofitable company, and yes, anecdotally it does seem to be shrinking, if not in sheer user activity, certainly in quality.

14

Didn't they start offering cash for activity like Twitter/X?

If people aren't posting because it's fun and because it's a "grind", the quality is going to drop significantly.

8

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.

14

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.

13

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.

13
lemmy.world

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.

13
kavareply
lemmy.world

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

25

Same.

While I wasn’t 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.

7

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.

22
macreply
infosec.pub

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.

10

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.

19

Don’t 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.

9

You can usually find archived versions of the pages on internet Archive and Archive.today.

2

I hand deleted my technical comments all off Reddit before attempting to mass delete my account. I don’t really care about people being able to find answers to engineering and physics questions on Reddit. They don’t deserve traffic from my answers.

4
lemmy.world

One thing I’ve 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.

13
DaddleDewreply
lemmy.world

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.

6

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.

He’s post, wait to see if it got enough upvotes, if it did not he’d 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 he’d advertise for others using this same patterns.

Even worse, he’d 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.

2

Because people have either moved on or have switched to kbin, lemmy and raddle. Evrryone worthwile anyway :3

11

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.

11
reddthat.com

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?

7

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.

6
LEX
lemm.ee

The comments is where I've noticed it the most. Scrolling endless comments on almost any post used to be a thing, but now the comments threads are much more sparse. Feels like Lemmy over there.

10
skozziireply
lemmy.ca

Atleast Lemmy is trending the right way. Reddit has been slipping hard, but Lemmy has actually been feeling better with good discussions. Alot of empty posts are starting to actually have real discussions and people engage.

I also noticed on my last month's of reddit how bad the bots were getting. Russian propoganda bots ran rampant across the platform.

At the end of the day porn will build lemmy, just like reddit and the internet itself.

19
Krauerkingreply
lemy.lol

Yup. Porn is the answer. We just need to get the really weird stuff on here and then Lemmy will be complete.

I mean what do we think everyone means when they say their niche subreddit isn't here yet.

1
lemmy.ca

All the important ones moved, the rest can have Reddit for themselves.

12
Pepsireply
kbin.social

lol nobody important from anywhere is on lemmy

7

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.

8

Apparently if you're a subreddit mod you can use the API for free

9

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.

7
kbin.social

Reddit is post human now. Just need bots to keep it alive.

7

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.

6

People don't want to spend all day making Spez and a bunch of hedge fund managers rich?

Shocking.

6

Could be bs, could be a troll, could be bait, could be a lot of stuff really

But ultimately it’s 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

5

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.

2