Why is this subreddit now just askreddit for movies?
Some time in the last few months, r/movies has been entirely consumed by askreddit-style questions like “What’s your favorite hidden gem??” or “What actor fell off the map??”
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What is now causing all these unique, seemingly-non-bot posters to suddenly start flooding this particular subreddit with their discussion posts, instead of going to askreddit? Did the whole reddit protest shit change the moderation rules? Has the subreddit been infiltrated by a secret Buzzfeed content farming cabal? I unsubscribed from r/askreddit because I got sick of this shit, but now it’s back on r/movies!
What is going on??
I think the comments are most interesting though
Because the audience for reddit has dwindled since July. Reddits offial site and app push controversial posts over just well yovkted ones. Most controversial posts asks inane questions. Then there’s bots reposting those questions for karma and then websites juicing social media for content to get crammed down your throat via SEO.
They should make a second internet just for people
This all started with the boycott.
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I’d assumed things would go back to “normal” after the boycott, but it looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?) Maybe reddit will regret removing the 3rd party apps, after all? Maybe we’ll just accept a future where niche subs become little more than BuzzFeed polls, but we get paid if our poll does well, so users won’t care?
It’s because Reddit is trying to drive engagement. I don’t know if you noticed, but since the purge of third-party apps, the comment sections have been kind of meager, and things don’t get as many upvotes as they used to. Heck, half the comments act like bots anyway. It seems like reddit has been distilled down to those most addicted to it and has taken a hard lean into all the most extreme views.
When Reddit killed third party apps, the quality fell off all over the place. It took me about a month to realize the timing and why r/all had so much AITA rage bait stories and celebrity gossip and stuff now. I think a lot of the quality posters and people who liked more high brow discussions just left Reddit.
This makes me sad. Not just because of what happened with reddit, but because I’m still missing that high-brow discussion. Most of my reddit comments were replies to other people, rather than top-level comments, and I spent more time reading comment sections than I did looking at the content they were discussing.
I like it here, but I don’t feel like I come across the depth of content I did on reddit. I don’t mind the lower quantity - that’s expected on a small platform - but I’m definitely not enjoying the lower quality. Most of the activity seems to be around memes and American politics, neither of which particularly interest me, and most of the comments across most posts feel fairly unsubstantial. It’s so much rarer for me to find something I want to reply to on here than it was on reddit.
I don’t mind the lower quantity - that’s expected on a small platform - but I’m definitely not enjoying the lower quality.
I think the issue here is that there’s a sweet spot where quantity and quality are in equilibrium. You NEED a certain quantity before you have a high chance of finding insightful comments on a given topic – to simplify things, if there’s a 1% chance a given comment is going to be from an expert with great insight, you have a ~9.6% chance of finding that on a post with 10 comments and a ~63% chance of finding that on a post with 100 comments. The threadiverse just hasn’t hit that threshold yet.
Of course, there’s a tipping point which reddit is long past, where higher and higher quantities start to drown out the insightful posts with memes and quips, or downvote and mock them with a confidently wrong counter-opinion the mob wants to hear more.
I hope the barriers to entry with decentralized services that the masses find “confusing” are such that we eventually manage to reach equilibirum and not tip too terribly far past it.
Oh I agree completely (and thought about going off on a tangent about “critical mass” myself but decided against it). It’s a rough path towards reaching that point, though, if we can’t have enough discussions to draw those kinds of people in and keep them around in the first place. I agree, also, about the “signal-to-noise ratio” on reddit being too low in general nowadays - especially post-third-party apps controversy - although I think that’s preferable to there simply not being enough quality content in the first place; good moderation (not that reddit has much of that nowadays…) can deal with the noise, whereas it can’t make up for lack of substantial comments.
I’m not sure what the best way to address the barriers to entry to the fediverse might be, but I’ve thought that the various apps either hosting their own instances or partnering with other instances to funnel users towards them and streamline the signup process would probably be a good first step. I think having some barrier to entry is a good thing, though - so we don’t tip too far past that equilibrium.
I’d like to see more outreach initiatives in posting Lemmy content to Reddit. Nobody not specifically looking for Lemmy is going to even be aware that it exists. Think about how many times the same posts hits #1 on /r/all. The API protest was massive and I would still guess that less than one percent of Redditors have even considered alternatives like kbin/lemmy exist.
I’m personally not worried about growing too much because instances can only get so big and still afford to be online. There’s no incentive to grow an instance beyond sustainability.
I don’t know. I get the same raw energy here as I did when I first joined that other site. I get a rush of joy when I discover a new, cool community. The truth is, Lemmy is literally what you make it, not shoved down our throats by someone looking for their first billion.
Lemmy is what we make it. I can’t keep a community alive on my own, but sadly that is the reality for a lot of subjects right now.
This is it. I can (and do) filter out the communities I don’t want to see, but I can’t generate the activity required from other people to make for interesting discussions. And as much as I want interesting discussions, I’m not interested in trying to carry every conversation myself. I want other people to bounce off and interact with, not just to feel like I’m typing into the void!
It’s also far too confrontational for such a small community. People’s posts asking for help get downvoted, comment replies get voted down just because of tribalism (shit on Windows, much?), and replies devolve to insults far faster. There’s really no place for any kind of nuanced discussion.
I hate to say it, but I think that’s just an issue with online culture in general nowadays. I’ve been saying for years at this point that “the internet is where nuance goes to die”. But I agree; I wish it wasn’t the case here, and I wish it was something that got called out more. Calling out people for their extreme and distasteful political opinions is fine, but piling on people because they’re fine with using Windows or whatever is just ridiculous.
Calling out people for an extremist, strawman version of a popular opinion is not accepted. Because people eliminate all nuance, and you’re either for it or against it.
I’d give examples, but they’d get downvoted. I’m generally in favor of the government staying out of personal issues that don’t affect larger society. When it comes to a woman’s right to choose, that’s popular. When it comes to certain religious practices, it’s unpopular.
piling on people because they’re fine with using Windows
Ive personally attacked that toxic mindset before and found myself slipping into it. Windows is “bad”. I find by attacking windows on instict, I indirectly attack its users. Most (I too) struggle to imagine a diffrent and hopefully better world. So the current one becomes immitable and “natural”. By attacking their OS without showing somthing practical but better, you might as well the saying the flowers secretly spit asid too.
That’s what happens when you openly express contempt for your userbase after doing nothing about spam or influence operations for 8+ years.
About movies, !moviesandtv@lemmy.film has discussion threads for every new movie being released
I have invite codes from when I tried it out in 2018 if anyone’s interested.
I find tildes.net fills the role of in-depth discussions pretty well, they don’t tolerate memes and other fluff which I do still find entertaining but lemmy has plenty of that. Only thing neither do very well is lots of content for niche hobbies or topics that just require a lot more users to work well.
Yeah I like tildes for the slower pace in depth discussions and thoughtful comment section, and Lemmy for the scrolling and occasional laughs. Throw in Hackernews for very in depth technical discussions and I don’t miss Reddit much at all. Spending a lot more time reading books or learning new things instead of doom scrolling on Reddit.
I agree with much of this. Though, I’ve been here for a couple months now (only just made an account) and I’ve noticed as the posts have become a bit more diverse. The commie stuff is a little wack/comical but eh - I like my commies out in the open and proud of who they are.
Agreed, I had largely the same usage behavior as you. Blocking dozens of meme communities managed to filter out most of the junk but substantive topics and discussions are still rare. While things seem to be decelerating lately, I’ll be sticking around in the hope that over time the sort of thing we’re looking for grows.
I want Lemmy to grow, but nobody I recommend it to is particularly interested. My husband thinks it’s really no better than 4chan or reddit. He’s never been a fan of either. He feels that the people here are too high handed and snobby and considering that 4chan has a better time dealing with trolls and (tankies) problem users because it’s hard to stalk someone on a completely anonymous web site he just feels like we’ll end up going up like a flash in a pan. Here one day gone the next. I hope he isn’t right but I also do see my fair share of what he’s talking about. We aren’t nearly as welcoming as we make ourselves out to be.
Quality is subjective. But there’s always gonna be some slag in the smelting pot. Pretending we can make a community that’s free of all of Reddit’s problems is kind of foolish.
On the other hand communities don’t just spring up over night. The kind of quality the majority of people say they want happens organically and I don’t think we can rush that. I do think that people with message boards or discords could migrate here and start their own instance or subs. That would be a good way to grow the community.
I’m more grateful for paywalled Web 1.0 platforms from two decades ago than I have been in a long time. Metafilter’s FanFare section is low-volume but particularly satisfying for thoughtful movie chatter. It’s fun when bursts of comments in an old thread are years apart between a title’s theatrical release and arrival on streaming.
Many of us are still piecing together where our new homes will be on Lemmy. Several of the popular subreddits were re-created here but the content is largely bots cross posting reddit content that sucks. It’s taking longer than I expected to find content I enjoy interacting with too, but I suspect that’s a problem that can only be solved by continuing to interact with those posts as you find them.
While I don’t think Reddit is going to collapse anytime soon or anything, any moderators that chose to stay after seeing how little Reddit cares about them, are not going to be the sorts of people with a bold vision on what they want to see in a community. What remains of the culture is just going to get more and more generic as evidenced here.
Digg didn’t collapse overnight. Neither did MySpace. Or Fark. It was little by little then all at once.
And even then, all of those websites still technically exist, in some form at least. They died, but they’re not dead.
A lot of people seemed to expect reddits crash and burn to eventually shutter the service entirely, but even if every single major content creator left the bots would keep things running semi-smoothly for the less engaged users for probably years to come.
It’s not going to collapse its just going to turn into Facebook.
Right wing memes and every post is gonna be the “did you know there aren’t any words in the English language with two o’s next to each” level posts where dozens of people leave the same comment to prove how clever and unique they are.
Basically it’ll be full of people with nothing better to do because everybody else went to a site that wasn’t a charicturature of a robber barron wringing pennies out of people.
I think the main community that I was in wouldn’t mind jumping ship, but there’s no where for them to jump to yet.
Lemmy’s mod tools don’t seem to be rolled out yet and I haven’t found anywhere on Lemmy that has a wiki built into their community yet.
I agree mod tools are the largest hurdle right now. Startrek.website has a wiki but I understand it’s not built into Lemmy.
!Piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com has a wiki of sorts, too.
looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?)
Nah we’re doing the same shit just on Lemmy now
Are they not allowed to mention lemmy or do they not know?
If people don’t know, how can they be reached?
You get shadowbanned for mentioning lemmy. The post likely wont even be visible either.
I thought there would be a lot more discussion on reddit about the new privacy changes and migrating to Lemmy. Either people genuinely don’t care or Reddit is actively suppressing discussion about this to keep their user base.
There’s more normal people on Lemmy than you think. I posted the other day that this place really needs to try to be less of an echo chamber if we want to grow it at all.
They will prefer becoming slaves to touching “open source communist” software.
That’s likely got nothing to do with it for most of them. Reddit still has people, and people go where people already are. Most people do not want to be a pioneer building a new community, they just want to go read shit and maybe throw a comment on it.
Where are the good movie communities on Lemmy? I searched a couple of times but couldn’t find one that matched the old Reddit one.
!moviesandtv@lemmy.film is fairly active.
This comment showcases a major problem I have with Lemmy. The latter loads correctly in the Instance I subscribe too. But there’s no way for me to view the former the same way is there?
Yup. Fluff principle - TL;DR barely passable content will flood any vote-based community, unless you take measures against it.
I got tired of holding the line against that long before the protests - that is why I believe what I heard said about the fact that most mods that cared about their communities only lasted a year, maybe two. I gave up modding one game community, and then along with the protests a second one, and each time I can barely stand to go back and read the posts there, bc they always trend more towards this, as you say bc it takes continual efforts to stop them!
And like, on the one hand, if that is what the people there want…then power to them? Except even they complain about it too, bitterly - both “why can’t I say whatever I want, when/however I want?” while also at the same time “why are others free to say what they want too, can’t they be removed somehow?” (ignoring the obvious answer that yes they can be blocked, though that takes all of two whole clicks!:-P). Also, they seem pissed whenever they ask a question on the sub’s main feed (ignoring the rules & things like a prominent Questions megathread pinned for precisely that purpose, or in some cases a “Questions” flair, instead putting something like a “Guide” flair, representing the exact opposite purpose of what that was designed to mean) but then nobody remains who wants to answer it. Like: “What phone should I purchase?” (ignoring the fact that the previous 10 posts all had an identical title, nor are there any details about what the person is looking for, plus again a megathread for precisely that)
I would say that it’s literal children taking over the internet, except some of the people complaining say they are retirees, others middle-age with kids, others in college, etc., so it is not a matter of mere physical age. Still, it is a childish mindset of wanting others to take care of them, while not being restricted from doing any of the things that they want to do. Nor is it selfishness, I believe, not precisely; although it may be more akin to self-centeredness. In this way then, it is like a public park or playground where people choosing not to abide by the rules destroy the experience for everyone, ironically also including themselves (when they come in wanting to play, and then everyone leaves rather than play with them, under those circumstances).
And like, on the one hand, if that is what the people there want…then power to them?
Two important details on the fluff principle: it isn’t exclusive to Reddit (it was first noticed on Hacker News, and it’s probably here too) and it’s a bit independent on what users want. It’s mostly the result of good content being often hard to judge, so people often skip it while upvoting barely passable content.
As you probably know, mods usually handle this by discouraging the barely passable content, either directly (“don’t post memes here”) or indirectly (random/small post requirements to cull out effortless posts). Or at least they did in Reddit.
I would say that it’s literal children […] although it may be more akin to self-centeredness.
I know which type of behaviour you’re talking about. I wouldn’t call it childishness, self-centredness, or even selfishness; it’s simply lack of reasoning and insight, as those users ruin the very subreddits that themselves would use, so I call it “stupidity”. And Reddit in special has an endemic stupidity problem. It’s a bunch of vicious cycles:
- users ignore why rules exist →users post shit → mods take action → users whine → mods give up reasoning with users → nobody explains the rules → users ignore why rules exist
- users post shit → mods create new rules → users rule-lawyer their way out → users post shit
- users demand spoonfeeding → users are spoonfed → higher noise/info ratio → users give up looking for info due to high noise → users demand spoonfeeding
- users assume words onto each others’ mouths → finger-pointing goes rampant → users feel the need to state things to avoid finger-pointing → assumptions get reinforced → users assume words onto each others’ mouths
- etc.
I’m saying this because this “endemicity” of stupidity in Reddit is one of the reasons why moderation there is so fucking shitty and laborious, even with comparatively better tools (even now!) than Lemmy.
the real cycling community hung out at the circlejerk sub because the regular sub was full of the most boring, trite, entry level shit imaginable.
When you monetize karma, this is the result. Reddit will be Buzzfeed / WatchMojo / Snapchat Top 10 lists in a couple months. But number 1 will shock you!
Well, what is it? And is it the hit 1996 film Kazzam starring Shaquille O’Neil?
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