You must log in or register to comment.
I’m happy that they’re keeping it up, but I’ve already moved on to the point that even if Reddit were to completely go back on the API change, I wouldn’t come back. Personally I’ve already moved the goal post to where Steve Huffman needs to go before I’d consider ever going back. Reddit is dead for all I care.
Listen there’s a whole board at reddit that greenlit every decision he’s made. He’s not some mad scientist.
The way reddit has decided, as a company, to treat their users over the last 40 days or so, that’s enough for me.
Imagine if in the MySpace days we all found out that using MySpace was generating ad revenue for Tom so he could build a torture chamber for puppies. That would have been awful enough that even 20 years later, (holy shit MySpace was 20 years ago) and over a decade after Tom had left the company, we would still feel weird about going there to hang out online, and a lot of us would feel disgust every time we were served an ad on the platform.
What I’m saying, is Steve Huffman kills puppies and even accessing reddit.com is basically condoning puppy torture. Wait, no. What I’m saying is reddit has created a blemish so hideous that I wouldn’t, not even if I was like, really really drunk. Ya Digg?
Spez was a mod of the Jailbait sub so instead of puppies it was/is kids
I’ve been editing and deleting 10+ year old comments to deny them that sweet sweet LLM data. No way for me to go back, and I wouldn’t anyway
You should check to see that your edits hold. There’s been reports of users manually deleting posts and then showing back up a few days later.
They’re in full damage control mode.
Agreed. It is funny to hear about, but they would have to roll back years of changes for me to even consider it at this point. Since there is no money in that for them it is pretty much a moot point.
It doesn’t matter if huffman goes. This is the result of wanting to make $$$$$$. That won’t ever change.
Okay, hear me out:
I get the argument that most of these protests are meaningless/if you REALLY want to change you’re going to have to do this this this. whatever (I usually stop reading there). I understand, but I don’t agree.
Sure, it’s nice when a protest can actually enact real changes but lets face it; that’s not common and sometimes not going to happen: fine. The decision to make a protest shouldn’t be decided on the basis of ‘can I win’; a much less restrictive–and very deeply fun–philosophy should be "is this worth taking time out of my day just to annoy/frustrate/irritate those who are doing this?’ If yes (it should always be yes), "So lets find out how many ways me and anyone else I can recruit can make this happen’.
In other words: every time a subreddit finds a new and interesting and stupid and ridiculous and just weird way to be irritating and embarrassing af…I am living for this.
I’m glad to be totally off of Reddit now but I have to say, props to the mods doing this kind of stuff. It’s pretty hilarious
They’re getting no end of grief from bad/paid actors though.
The amount of whinging and bootlicking from people taking Spez’s side was insane before I left for good.
It doesn’t seem organic. Protest posts would get 95% upvotes, then suddenly 12 hours later get slammed with bootlickers and downvotes.
Reddit felt really astroturfed for years now. Start mentioning Neill Druckman in any capacity and your post immediately got flooded with copy paste hate centered on TLoU2. It seemed organic at the time, but when the TV series came out it was very sus, as if somebody had forgotten to turn off their bot army.
What a weird thing to target with bots.
Transphobes came out of the woodwork for it. And not only were they annoying for the obvious reasons, but they’ve also poisoned the well for criticism. I loathed the plot, but I have to be careful with my criticism so I don’t get lumped in with them.
So much this! TLoU2 was a major setback for me in many ways, but a normal discussion was impossible.
I’ve talked to a few that seemed organic, but those were basically people who wanted Reddit to get back to normal and not waste time on bullshit that didn’t affect them personally.
i did check in a few communities that i was engaging with before, and honestly, it seemed organic, but it was always lurkers/semi-lurkers who don’t post and only comment like once every two months. accounts for the delay as well, because they don’t check reddit that often (before everything went to shit posts would usually be gathering views for a good 24 hours)
but reddit also started using chatgpt to prop itself up lately (which afaik is against chatgpt’s tos, so that’s nice for the future lawsuit if they wanna cash in), so idk. that does put a damper on their legitimacy.
Wasn’t it proven that majority of the positive spez posts are from bots or chatgpt or something?
At least one post defending spez in r/programming has been shown to be chatGPT, that’s for sure. If they have one bot, who’s to say they don’t have thousands?
I can’t tell you how many 1-2 year old accounts I saw with little to no post history that popped out of the woodwork to defend reddit/spez. It was crazy.
Same for spam/ shill accounts on iPhone/ Google play reviews.
They’re definitely trying to plug the holes with bubble gum instead of fixing/ addressing the problem which is spez and the 3rd party app/api ban.
Is it ironic that ChatGPT is defending spez increasing API costs “to combat LLMs”?
Using the Reddit users to destroy the Reddit users I guess.
Only if you don’t consider the core tenants of capitalism. Clear cut it all burn the rest to the ground. What you missed, steal from its owner to sell it back to them at the highest possible markup. Move on rinse repeat. Fuck sustainability. Most of the LLMs have what they want. Reddit could burn tomorrow for all they care. It being around for others to use and train on only makes competitors to them which they absolutely do not want. Destroying Reddit is a win-win-win for them.
Genuinely curious: how was that shown? How do you know for sure a post is generated by ChatGPT?
One of its answers in a thread was the classic “as a language model, I am not able to (…)”
That’s a bit more straightforward than expected, thanks! 😅
I’m curious about this as well, because the lurkers in the montreal sub sure are quick to come out of the woodwork whenever the protest is mentioned. I can’t see how it’s not bots, but I’m curious about how that would work exactly and how you determine that
Before I left I tried engaging with some of them, the only one to have a discussion was either a very fast typist or was doing a copy/paste. Their arguments weren’t really consistent and only made sense independently, they claimed to have read transcripts of the Apollo dev interview with the Verge and various other sources but completely misrepresented or ignored basically every detail that made Reddit look bad. It did not feel like a genuine discussion with someone who actually believed their own arguments or was interested in anything other than muddying the waters in defense of Reddit management.
You just described Reddit in general
No doubt, but they’ve really ramped up lately. It’s like all the manchildren from t_D suddenly saw their chance to be assholes again without consequence.
The un-moderated right wing shit has been very pronounced on Reddit the last few weeks.
Watch r/ conservative and r/ conspiracy become default subs lol
I don’t think anyone would even notice next to the garbage that’s already served by default on Reddit.
Going to the front page not logged in is like visiting YouTube outside of your account. It’s fucking trash.
It’s almost as if making changes that are blatantly hostile to the unpaid group of people who literally keep your site from devolving into a cesspool on a daily basis isn’t the best of ideas…
… because Glorious Leader is a far right wing turd.
I look at it this way: it sucks, but it’s not surprising - it’s expected. There’s no reason for them to cater to the users, because that’s not how these things work. The people who made this decision
(a) mostly care about money
(b) were obviously willing to lose the favor of Reddit’s users for money
© have built a platform who’s monetization model has become somewhat at odds with what made Reddit good in the first place
(d) are probably going to succeed in making money from Reddit
It’s sad, it really sucks. But, there’s nothing we can really do about it, apart from things like post memes mocking Spez or making subreddits go “dark”.
Neither of those are long term solutions.
I’d rather we moved on and let it go, tbh. We could be doing a lot more
This is how the playbook for Fascism works.
Almost like they’re being paid to do it.
Exactly. Depending on what time you posted, you could get two totally different responses to a post.
Yup, before the 1st I was getting mass harassed by what were clearly new accounts for pointing out the responders were clearly copying/pasting from a script.
But once that was pointed out, only 12 year old accounts with little posting history showed up lol, which seemed bizarre.
I had a guy try to justify the latter type of account as “I’m just not very active on reddit”. My man, you made one post, commented on one other post a few weeks later, then complete radio silence for 9 years, just to pop up spreading anti-trans propaganda on post after post?
I’ve heard before that in the early days of Reddit u/spez had hundreds of alts he would use to reply to posts to make Reddit seem more popular. I wonder if he occasionally resurrects them to support political arguments he likes or to defend Reddit admins.
I think this guy was just someone who’s defunct account had been hacked and used to troll. All of his comments from that day featured a ton of both sides arguments and misrepresented statistics, which to me looked like someone who was given talking points and tried to fix any conversation he could into conforming to them.
It was obviously propaganda, and I guess previously I would have thought someone who ran something ad large as reddit wouldn’t be so stupid and oblivious…but here I am on lemmy a few months later, so who knows. It’s now apparent that spez is that stupid.
That was the rumor, and oddly one he himself confirmed in Reddit comments years back, but he’s since swept that under the rug while he’s trying to sell Reddit, again.
But there have always been so many trolls since IRC and the AOL days, it’s like dealing with flies. Dealing with them usually ends up harming everyone in the long run, but you have to clean it up eventually. The dead giveaway with spez, should’ve been that he defending the trolls.
It sounds like one of the many of spez’ alts he openly admitted to having years back, since he seems to laud him self as a troll.
I hope they don’t bend to them. Reddit fully deserves this level of overt trolling at this point.
Literally nothing new. - A Reddit Mod. They took away the tools too so it’ll be less hidden. There’s a lot of power tripping shitty mods, but a lot don’t deserve half the grief they get. Some people tend to take out a lot of negativity on mods when they cannot see the human.
The griefing doesn’t look good for Reddit either. Harassing your unpaid volunteers = excellent investment, probably, I guess. Maybe it does, controversy keeps people engaged.
It’s very much inline with how wine makers pivoted during the US alcohol prohibition era by instead selling concentrated blocks of grape juice and a nice little pamphlet with a warning on how to avoid turning said grape juice into wine.
I just went and looked at r/videos and I gotta admit that the text-only descriptions of videos and enforcing swearing in every post title is pretty funny.
That’s absolutely hilarious
No point in protesting, we already have a better alternative.
Deliberately using an alternative is a form of protesting.
Deliberately using an alternative is a form of protesting.
And it can be, sure, but it’s not always the case.
I’m not just using Lemmy until or if Reddit backtracks, I’m using Lemmy because I believe it’s the superior platform in many ways and has more to offer. I didn’t make an account here in sign of protest, I made one because Lemmy was suggested to me and I’m liking it better than where I came from.
I’m also aware that many users on this platform would go back to Reddit if they backtracked on the API keys.
Content is king! If you can find anything you need on here, there is no reason to go back!
No. And it’s specially not the case if you consider the “alternative” to be better.
deliberate, here’s the defintion
Yeah, the best protest is a reduction in monthly active users.
So long as it hurts Reddit, all the better.
This whole API issue is a lost cause, so the only thing that can be done now is to make Reddit lose big.
I’m really fuckin loving getting to watch this war being waged on Reddit from Lemmy. I was really worried that, on the first, all of the protests would peter and those of us pissed about it would be gone and things would just even out for the company. Love to see it still being fought, and more dirty than ever.
I’m just watching from here like 👀🍿
Yep the fight for Reddit is lost. All we can do is make an example of them.
Just like Reddit made an example of Digg.
Man… I forgot what even happened to Digg. The homepage algorithm was highly gameable… then what?
Well stated
It’s so weird to see all the people still fighting on Reddit when I’ve already moved on
Most importantly I think the app devs have moved on. They’d have to do something particularly amazing to lure them back. That’s the death knell.
Yes, I think the biggest mistake spez made was sending all the best devs on the platform directly to his biggest competitor.
I really dont see a point in fighting at this point. Reddit is dead for me.
The point is to trash the site so new users don’t join, if they replace the number they lost they can say “hey look, we recovered in only 6 months”
I haven’t even looked back. I have been through this a few times before. Yahoo chat and myspace to Facebook. They aren’t EXACTLY the same. But I have seen it enough to know that they clearly aren’t listening to their users.
Eh, I’ll go against the grain and be honest. I still use it on my desktop at home. Zero mobile use. The user base and information there is still massive at the moment. Once that changes it’s in my rear view, but I won’t pretend like I don’t.
Reddit is a lot less active now. Gotta love it
People on Reddit keep saying things are mostly back to normal, while tiny subs are hitting the front page of /r/all on the regular with like 2k votes.
Also, I’ve noticed a pretty significant increase in overt racism. Or rather, significant decrease in moderation of it. I shouldn’t be surprised but it keeps catching me off-guard.
Like what? I can’t say I’ve noticed much difference other than less activity overall
For myself, the quality in posts has dropped significantly. I’m always challenging myself to learn, I also learn better with things that interest me. I’ve found since Boost for Reddit went down that not even old reddit is catching my attention. I feel bored. This is for popular or r/all. If I’m on my own homepage it’s like Reddit never changed as I’m subbed to mostly all small subs.
For my frontpage the change is small but still noticeable:
/r/pcm was always holding on by a thread, it looks like all the quality posters and moderation have left/given up.
/r/chess is down about 10-20% of its normal upvotes
/r/ProgrammerHumor is down about 50%
/r/Sysadmin is surprisingly normal-ish for upvotes, but the posts aren’t great. Although that sub has been mostly off topic rants for a while now… not sure I want to purely attribute that to the API change.
I haven’t been back but do you have any data to back that up?
Not that I don’t believe it, I just want some schadenfreude
I agree.
Also when we’re all being fucked over no one has a right to say how we (in general) should be protesting. People get to show their anger in whatever way they want. It’s like people asking for civility so they don’t have to deal with uncomfortable messages. Um fuck no. NSFW all the way if that’s what one decides.
Thanks for agitating
For for how much heavy handed their initial reaction was, I’m surprised that Reddit doesn’t take more aggressive actions. Spez has the loudest voice on highest pole, yet so far he only managed to anger everyone.
Fuck Spez.
I wish more of the larger subs were still protesting and didn’t roll over so easily. But regardless the site has taken a massive hit to its reputation and one can only hope that recovery won’t be possible moving forward and it screws them out of their chance to go public.
The article mentions r/pics, r/vids, and r/funny
These are large subs.
Don’t worry, doordash_drivers is now a recommended sub for everyone 💀
I knew it was over when my feed was plastered with various subreddits for food delivery workers
I was wondering why I saw some much of that and shittytattoos my final last few weeks.
/r/truerateme is a lot funnier than shittytattoos. A chance for basement-dwelling incels to rate pretty girls who wouldn’t give them the time of day 5.5.
Right, I’m pretty positive r/funny was the largest sub to participate in the original protest.
I’m scared to open /r/OnlyFans now
I think most of the larger ones were forced to reopen by the admins
Admin was kicking mods that didn’t approve. Absolutely forced to reopen.
The thing is, Reddit doesn’t allow subs to run unmoderated, so IIRC there were instances where they’d kick out the moderators for not re-opening and then have to close the sub again for being unmoderated.
r/interestingasfuck has been without mods for 2 weeks now. It’s just so idiotic. They remove all the mods and then… don’t replace them? Now there hasn’t been a post in 2 weeks on a sub with 11+mil members.
I wonder if they just forgot about that particular sub?
Maybe it’s to make an example of them? Let the zombie subreddits stand as an example of “This is what happens when you cross the admins.”
I guess it’s possible, but what good would that do reddit? That’s millions people who aren’t going to be browsing that subreddit anymore, and presumably at least some of them aren’t using any ad blockers, so they’d be losing revenue…
I’m honestly not sure. Reddit’s decision making here has been so stupid I’m just guessing their motivations.
They are already finding scabs to come in and moderate. The quality will be shitty but they don’t care.
The quality started out shitty on some subs. Fuck spez, but he’s not completely wrong about the mods. Some are people who never have and never will have more power in their lives and it goes right to their brain. Where he’s completely wrong is blaming this situation on the mods when they are just the group of users who can frustrate him the most. I bet he thought he could throw the mods under the bus because they were already generally unpopular (though some subs were bad and others were fine) before all of this.
Something nice about the fediverse is that instances can be dedicated to mod evaluation. They don’t have to honour deletion requests; they could specifically highlight them instead to see what kind of posts specific mods are suppressing. Hopefully that can be used to check their power and reduce how much of it goes to their heads.
I’d love to volunteer as a scab. Problem is, what’s stopping me from running any given subreddit in a way that destroys the community further, like arbitrarily removing posts or banning users while simultaneously allowing clear spam/bots/scams to persist?
Is Reddit going to tell itself it’s being bad?
LOL… Who would buy into their IPO now? There’s a HUGE risk of this going to zero.
I think we’re going to see a figurehead change before the IPO if things continue this way. Spiz will “step down” (he’ll probably be bought out, which might be what he’s angling for at this point, talking about wanting to emulate Elon? The most obvious and egregious example of massively and publicly fucking up a social media site??) and the company will put out a statement of “changing course,” basically just muddying the waters about what’s actually happening (while most likely nothing will actually change), say that they’re going to try to fix this fiasco.
It would kill the protests. And that way they can either run out the clock and settle things down before the IPO, or they can put out some vague change that would figuratively make the API more accessible/affordable. But nothing would actually change in the latter scenario, they’d just make a lot of noise about being reasonable while not actually changing anything. Their value could inflate again, protests are quelled due to loss of momentum/loss of popularity, pizzle gets a golden parachute, the company goes public and banks, VCs roll in piles of money, etc. etc.
And the IPO itself is a bad sign no matter who’s in charge. It means the company will be shareholder-driven, and so aiming for maximum profit (or just straight up not operating at a loss to start with). Line must always go up, so when things start to stagnate, or they reach saturation, more and more bold anti-consumer decisions will be made to extract higher profits. See Netflix and their crackdown on password-sharing.
It may not happen straight away, but it will eventually.
Perhaps my opinions are different from others but I feel like these websites are forgetting that they’re an optional part of people’s lives. There are plenty of things I can spend my time on besides reddit and YouTube, and Netflix is forgetting that it’s marginally more convenient than piracy.
Considering Plexshares exist, the margin is really only taking the 30 mins to set things up while having a library 5 times as big for half the price.
Honestly, /r/all is pretty pitiful these days
I logged out of my account at the start of all this, but occasionally I go back and check out reddit as an unlogged lurker. It’s astonishing how low-quality the front page is when it’s not filtered by subjects you’re actually interested in. And good lord is new reddit ever a terrible user experience.
I’ve noticed a change too and I’ve tried to keep that separate from my feelings about Reddit. It just doesn’t seem all that entertaining or novel as it was a couple months back.
Perhaps when you piss off that tiny slice of your users that actually produces the content everyone else wants to see and the moderators who ensure they see that quality content, you’re going to have problems.
It wasn’t a perfect system for sure, but it was holding it together for quite a few years.
Give it 3 months and it’s all forgotten about. New users won’t know the difference.
The difference is right here, all of us being here instead of there.
Part of me, and I think everyone else here, wants some level of vindication in the form of Reddit taking a hit. Likely most of the current users won’t notice any big changes and most of it will be back to the content they’re used to in a few months. But as someone else here pointed out it’s likely Reddit will survive as Facebook has, shitty recycled content from other platforms and zero decent discussion. Which again, 90% of their current user base won’t notice or care about. I’m just glad we’ve got a new place where the discussion seems to be a bit more on par with old Reddit
The weird thing is that my experience of Reddit probably didn’t resemble 95% of what was going on there, ever. I had my slice of subs and things I followed and that was great for me. Every so often I would view it logged out and it seemed like a different site, full of garbage viral shite. I assume it will continue to be that. Gallowboob or whatever will still post crap for eyeballs.
Now that’s a name I haven’t seen in ages!
While I can relate to wanting to see some sort of vindication for my position in this issue and to see Reddit punished for their choices, I do think it would be better if Reddit stuck around and attracted a lot of the lowest common denominator traffic. Average quality seemed to go down as popularity increased (though the extremes also got more extreme, so good stuff improved while the bad stuff did get worse and some ended up banned entirely).
On subs like AITA, there were so many replies that misunderstood very basic and fundamental stuff from the main post. Also plenty of replies that just made something up entirely and ran with it, frequently highly upvoted and spawning other replies agreeing completely and also running with the baseless assumptions. It got to the point a long time ago where I realized the judgements themselves were useless and the sub’s only real value was for entertainment and seeing other perspectives, but it wasn’t very useful for its stated purpose: determining if you’re an asshole for something you did.
And the mods were so frustrating there, too. Shutting down active and interesting discussion because some arbitrary rule wasn’t followed or because the topic itself attracted a lot of dipshits.
Anyways, what I’m trying to say is that there’s benefits to having a more popular alternative. It means that lemmy has to continue competing to attract users but it mostly means that low effort users will end up just going to the more popular site until they have a reason to look for something else.
Completely agree. Back in the day I used to just scroll through /r/all and constantly stumble across cool stuff, now it’s devoid of any decent content. Whenever I read any of those millions of aita posts they’d always be clear fiction, and then full of comments as if they were absolutely true. The general quality of content on that site is at absolute rock bottom.
I am glad Lemmy has a small barrier to entry. It’s easy enough that you don’t need any sort of technical knowledge to sign up and use but it requires a little more effort than most social media, which hopefully acts as something of a filter. Reddit now kind of reminds me of usenets “eternal September”.
You’ll see the user experience difference. Janky ass Reddit will look lame compared to the cool Lemmy apps that are in development now.
Also a lot of the more high quality comments seem to be migrating.
Sorry, I’m mostly bringing over my low quality comments. Sorry guys.
Dang, Lemmy cancelled I guess. Pack it up everybody, @GamingChairModel@lemmy.world ruined it for everyone.
Me thinks you right. Hope stay good!
Ooh you comment write good
Long live the lemming motherland(s)
I followed mostly games and tech related stuff and they mostly rolled over quick or didn’t even participate. So figured it was a lost cause from the get go. When I was subbed there was not much difference in usual activity , since I did not sub to the main subs. In a lot of cases I actually had blocked them long ago.
On the plus side those communities have had good activity on lemmy without need for the reddit mods to bother migrating.
deleted by creator
I honestly expected after the API changes rolled out that the backlash on Reddit would stop but I’m glad to see the shenanigans continue.
Same, as much as I hope lemmy succeeds, I simultaneously hope that the API changes get reversed. Good job to those fighting for this over there
I am afraid the two might be mutually exclusive. Lemmy is like old Reddit and still on early adopters. We get more and more newcomers only because Reddit is going downhill.
At this point even if the API changes are reversed I’m don’t with Reddit.
I think Lemmy’s biggest challenges are server stability, increased complexity to use (most don’t understand things like instances), and low awareness from others. I only learned about it a day or two ago. Signed up out of curiosity.
But if Lemmy gets even more popular then the various popular instances are going to be stressed. It looks unstable to newcomers who go back to Reddit.
I signed up for lemmy.world originally, constantly had gateway errors. Lemm.ee seems more stable due to lower traffic.
But others may not be able to recognize that. Even if they did, might not want to create new accounts for several instances and go back to starting from 0.
Lemmy.world just finished pushing significant stability and performance improvements to the Lemmy codebase and to their own server, and from what I’ve heard it’s lead to significant improvements. I agree that Lemmy is unstable, but it’s also beta software undergoing rapid improvement, and I’m optimistic on where it will be by the end of the year.
I feel like most of the problem would be physical hardware. Costly servers that would need to be able to meet Lemmy’s growing demands.
I’m not sure how much optimization from the software side can be done to reduce resource requirements. There’s certainly things that can be done to improve user experience though.
Agreed. Also joined Lemmy a couple days ago and don’t yet fully understand how everything works. I’m hoping that lemmy apps add features to make it easier for people who aren’t very tech-savvy, like automatically assigning people to a general purpose instance (one that isn’t too full preferably) unless they wish to choose a specific one.
Another thing is that I believe links to posts are somehow instance specific and you have to “convert” them to point to your instance’s version of said post, or something like that, in order to see comments and interact. That seems clunky and should probably be made easier somehow, maybe apps could automatically convert links? Or maybe there is a way to make links instance-agnostic from the get go.
Just some things I’ve noticed in my time here. Very much enjoying the experience though!
One aspect I’d love (and is apparently in the works) is swapping instances while keeping your history. A migration tool of sorts. Would help.
Still the roughness is sorta endearing in its own way. But I don’t think it’d be endearing to most people.
Though it’s not like it matters to most of us if they do reverse course. I already deleted everything on my Reddit account. It’s all gone permanently.
I’m liking Lemmy a lot. I rolled my own instance so performance is great. The only issue is delayed federation of new posts, but comments seem to go through instantly.
How long of a delay? Do you known if the delay is on your end, taking a while to load from every other instance, or from the other ones being slow to “tell” yours about new posts?
I think the delay is due to syncing historic backlog on the community. Not 100% sure though.
On my instance it says that some communities are fully synced so it looks like there is zero delay. So long as lemmy.world or lemmy.ml are working on their end.
This has exposed the incompatibility of a company wanting to make $$$$, when it relies on volunteers. Mods aren’t eager to do unpaid work just so spez can get rich.
I hope they can manage to tank reddit’s IPO
I believe the failed Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus made spez and his yesmen cocky. I hope they underestimated how much more tech savvy the average redditor is - especially the nexus poster, who keep the community afloat.
I think they overestimated how much engagement the average reditter provides. Most people are consuming content, but not contributing any or posting comments or clicking ads or anything. 90% of engagement is driven by like 20% of users or some shit like that.
I suspect twitter is similar. But a difference between Reddit and twitter is how easily power users can migrate.
On twitter, you follow people. Power users were often cautious cause they didn’t want to lose their followers and non power users wanted to be where the power users are.
But on Reddit, you follow communities. For power users, there’s few direct followers to lose and for non power users, as long as there’s enough content, it doesn’t matter much who created it.
Another important difference is that reddit concepts map better onto lemmy than twitter onto mastodon. Additionally, one important aspect of twitter is the proximity to journalists, celebrities and politicians. Reddit doesn’t really have that (except for /r/iama).
To be fair, Mastodon is still growing and it’s much easier to use now than a year ago. Reddit didn’t uproot Digg overnight.
I personally have left for Mastodon and never looked back. Ivory is making it so easy and beautiful. But I’m not following sassy quipsters, c-tier celebrities and outrage farmers, so I’m not really anything that stayed on Twitter. But a lot of these “nexus posters” haven’t done the switch and/or had done it but returned to Twitter.
Indeed, which of course communicates a fundamental misunderstanding about how people use Reddit vs. Twitter. On Twitter/Mastodon people primarily follow other users, so Twitter remains dominant due to the large number of celebrities, influencers, and politicians that use it. On Reddit/Lemmy, people follow communities, and as such as long as both are active a given community on Lemmy is just as good as a community on Reddit. This also of course impacts federation. With individual user federation discovery can be challenging and small instances will have relatively barren all feeds, but with community federation even instances with a few dozen users will federate with enough communities to fill the all feed. Reddit was also famous for the multitude of very nice features implemented by third party developers, all of which they just ejected, which means now those nice features will be available to Lemmy users. Apps are capable of abstracting and improving the user experience by suggesting instances to sign up to and presenting a unified feed of all of the instance feeds that the app has connected to, making everything feel far more connected. In a way I’m grateful to u/spez, his awfulness as a CEO pushed people here and made a lot of this possible.
Eh. They_were_ until about 4(?) years ago. I noticed there was a big shift when all of a sudden nobody cared about spelling and grammar mistakes anymore, and Reddit itself started changing to be more average-person minded. But in the beginning absolutely yes, that’s why the format was the way it was
No, I figured this would go on a lot longer than just the blackout. There has been a lot of built up resentment in the mod community that the admins never really addressed. Now that the admins ripped away most mod tools, a lot of mods are pissed.
The saddest part about this is…it didn’t have to be this way. Reddit’s greed turned something beautiful (or at least with some nice pieces) into a hellscape….
I’d never thought that the protest would lay this long. Not a step back!
