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
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.
Wasn’t it proven that majority of the positive spez posts are from bots or chatgpt or something?
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.
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.
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?
Literally nothing new. - A Reddit Mod. 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.
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 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.
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!
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 believe the failed Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus made spez and his yesmen cocky. I hope they underestimated how much mir 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.
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
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.
Yep the fight for Reddit is lost. All we can do is make an example of them.
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 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 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.
I was wondering why I saw some much of that and shittytattoos my final last few weeks.
Give it 3 months and it’s all forgotten about. New users won’t know the difference.
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
You’ll see the user experience difference. Janky ass Reddit will look lame compared to the cool Lemmy apps that are in development now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very refreshing take on it. The cynicism about whether the protests were ‘worth it’ because we didn’t see massive results felt like it missed all the fun of giving the greedy corporation the collective finger.
If the only reason you’ll fight is because you think you can win, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Win or lose or both or nothing at all, you do it because it’s worth fighting for. Sometimes this ends with Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell v. Hodges, but mostly, it won’t, so if the best I can do right now is give some people a very, very bad day, well, I’m in: let’s go.
Right. I fight not because I believe I’ll win, or even because I believe victory is “possible”, but because it’s more comfortable for me so to speak to be fighting than to quietly and passively support the ideology I disagree with. It is more “restful” to me to be fighting a fight I believe in than to be resting in a world I hate.
The problem is that the finger is still a form of engagement when you do it on the site you’re protesting. The admins don’t care as long as you’re still driving clicks.
Legit and I agree.
However, nothing in my experience with Reddit Admins has contradicted my impression that when they were five years old, you could give them a full screaming meltdown playing “I’m not touching you” in three minutes or less. Can I prove it if they aren’t melting down regularly over some of this where I can see it? No. But I know it’s happening, and that’s enough.
Honest question, is there such a thing as bad engagement? Or is engagement like that saying about bad publicity?
The protests remind me of the last night at bar on land that just got bought by developers and will soon be torn down. The battle is lost, you can do nothing and leave or you can get weird and write your farewells on the walls, steal the toilet seats, and otherwise vandalize the place on your way out and have one last laugh with your friends before you head your separate ways.
Been on Reddit a long time and feel this one is different. Not because it’s worse, or makes more people more upset, but because all those other times moderators still slightly trusted admins to not completely sabotage their own site. This time all goodwill has been definitively trashed. Above-and-beyond type extraordinary efforts to maintain communities like with IAmA and AskHistorians look to be going away forever, so are people maintaining tools to have a chance at handling spam etc.
Nobody wants to work for Reddit for free anymore.
