I can’t believe how pro-reddit sentiment is. It’s like a totally different reality.
https://www.reddit.com/r/boulder/comments/156wih1/disappointed_by_reddit_but_dont_know_where_else/
A lot of users use the official app and are on new Reddit, and the only “disruption” that they noticed was the protests themselves. They have no idea the damage Reddit has done to moderators and may not even notice the resulting decline in content quality as the smaller subset of people who post and moderate the most wander away to newer pastures.
But over time, they will notice. More and more subreddits will become the domain of uninterested powermods and repost bots. It takes time for a giant to fall, Digg didn’t turn into Reddit overnight.
This is the biggest thing. A lot of my friends simply think Kbin and Lemmy are inferior and look outdated, which they are if you have only used the social media site called reddit, not the link aggravater called reddit
Experiencing Lemmy through a native app like Memmy or even a WPA like Voyager (former WefWef) is so much nicer than the default interface.
Now you can experience the greatness of http://old.lemmy.world or http://old.lemmy.ca
Digg didn’t turn into Reddit overnight.
That’s not how I remember the last days of Digg. The redesign happened and it was more like a tabloid news site than a the familiar user-submitted voted content in a list format we’d all grown to love. It was a virtually overnight change, unlike Reddit.
Reddit on the other hand, the changes are all mostly under the hood. The “default” subs are full of users who use new Reddit experience in the web / the default app. The number of users that use old Reddit / third party apps are exceedingly tiny but very vocal.
Based on that, my hypothesis is that not much will change with Reddit for a long time. It won’t be a swift downfall like the last few days of digg were. Most, if not all of my friend circle still use Reddit and simply don’t care about what they’re doing to their mod base. Personally I can’t in good conscience continue using a website that treats its most prolific users and moderators so poorly.
I remember this vividly. Opening digg and thinking “by god - what have they done?!” And to reddit I went.
That may be where you went, but you’ve also bailed on Reddit as soon as they went bad too so you’re a biased sample.
If you look at the graphs of the actual traffic visiting each of the sites, it took years for Reddit’s activity to surpass Digg’s and match its old level of popularity after Digg v4 rolled out. Here’s an old article I just dug up with one such graph, I remember seeing a more detailed one recently but can’t find the link right now.
We here on Lemmy/kbin are not “typical” users, we’re early-adopters and the sorts of users who are most aware of and most sensitive to the sort of problems that Digg and now Reddit are inflicting on their userbase. The rest will follow, slowly, as the degradation grows and reaches their thresholds of awareness.
And fake posts. They’re getting even worse, and the users more gullible.
I read a BORU post the other day about a girl whose gamer boyfriend was trying to get her to have sex with him while his mic was still on. In the update she said she found his old 4chan account from years ago where he had saved a post about getting a partner to “perform” on the mic for the guy’s friends. 4chan doesn’t have accounts, she was called out on this, then edited her post to say she didn’t really know how 4chan works (no duh) but it was in fact some link aggregation site of 4chan exclusively where you can save posts. Instead of calling out her lack of credibility, most users in the BORU thread were doubling down on believing her.
The quality of posts and responses since the “exodus” is completely apparent to any longtime reddit users. Admittedly elitist as it is, the spelling and grammar by it self has been base level evidence of that. Not to mention the myriad of other ways its taken a nosedive.
Reddit has already been in decline for a long time, but from the few times I’ve checked since the protests it’s much worse now, and quickly getting even worse. And as you said, most of the people left there do not care which is disappointing.
Unfortunately as optimistic as I was about lemmy, so far I’m not sold. Theres all of the same issues here if not more. We may have witnessed the birth and death of something really cool within a very short time (considering). Even if true options take a decade to build up I think it’s too late. The experiment has concluded.
It makes me sad because reddit used to be a really cool place. Rules were about allowing truly contributive content to be disseminated. Up votes were for ideas that added to the conversation in a meaningful way. Downvotes were reserved not for points that were disagreed upon, but thoughts that did not add substance to the conversation. It was a much better community to be a part of back then. That environment just doesn’t exist anymore on a broad level.
I used the official app, but I didn’t have to wait to experience a disruption to know that this was the last straw. I switched to Lemmy just prior to the protest and never looked back. Regardless of the actual dispute, I’m not going to use a site run by someone who so obviously thinks as little of their users as spez does. Even I have more self-respect than that!
I even went to a Digg gathering once. I got a poster of the dig guys. I forgot their names now. Dirty blonde chubby guy and black hair guy with faint mustache, last name Roses or Rosales?
Kevin Rose, the guy who threw a raccoon down his stairs? Also founded Digg, though that’s never what I remember him for.
