I’m sure it’s nothing and everything is fine. Now, who wants to buy some of this Reddit stock? I’ll cut you a special deal so you don’t miss out! … Anyone?
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.
Reddit has never been about privacy or anominity. Think of all the celebrity AMAs.
AMAs weren’t celebrities on Reddit originally my friend, they were real people with interesting jobs or in unusual situations at first.
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
I got a Message offering me to buy too. In the Message it says i need to be a permanent Resident of the US.
Buddy, you had me enter my Country when i created the Account. You know full-well I’m from the EU. Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
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.
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”?
Probably part of some side grift to sell more information to data brokers
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
You forgot about the automated dms and emails begging users to buy stock at their IPO to inflate it’s value
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That would be better than the extremely “interesting” future that awaits us
Yeah i feel like chicken little sometimes just watching other folks going about their business like shits not actually going down right in front of us.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
We did it guys. We’ve posted everything there is to post and now we can finally rest.
