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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.
For me the shadyness started when they started hiding the up/down vote counter. That’s when I knew that the platform was going to devolve.
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.
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 was defending reddit 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.
Although it may be disappointing for some, Reddit’s decision to shut off third-party API applications is understandable from a security and user experience standpoint. By controlling the access points to its platform, Reddit can ensure a safer and more consistent experience for its users. Third-party apps, while offering additional features, can also introduce vulnerabilities and compromise user data if not properly regulated. Reddit’s action aims to safeguard user privacy, prevent abuse, and maintain the integrity of its platform. While change can be challenging, it’s important to prioritize the security and well-being of the community.
Good bot
Thanks, chatGPT!
Busted
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.
… because Glorious Leader is a far right wing turd.
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…
This is how the playbook for Fascism works.
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
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 hope they don’t bend to them. Reddit fully deserves this level of overt trolling at this point.
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 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.
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.
I think Lemmy l’s biggest challenges are served 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.
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 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).
I think the issue is that the alternative needs to be simmering for a bit before people make the jump.
When Digg went south Reddit had already been an alternative for a while at that point.
The problem with Lemmy and Mastodon is that they’re just not quite there yet. Yet.
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.
As much as I’d love to log into Reddit and see this go down, I’m happy just not using Reddit. How much longer do you think they’ll hold out?
Do not underestimate average people’s resilience to enshittification
I just saw someone on one of my fb groups saying she’s heard a lot about reddit lately and wanting to make an account and asking how it works.
I tried to ward her off but the negative press just seems to be enticing new users.
My guess ist that if she still is on fb in 2023 she might actually love it on Reddit now and in the future…
That’s fine, they’re the people we don’t want over here. They’re part of Reddits problem.
Tell her one of the Lemmy apps is Reddit
It’s Teddit.
You can train mice or pigeons to hit a button for reward, but the button has to dispense reward pretty much 100%. Once they’re trained, you can dial down the reward - 50%, 25%…1% - and they’ll keep mashing that button, doing work for free. Human buttons and rewards may be more complicated, but it’s the same thing.
I fear this is true. 🤦
It doesn’t matter, at this point. Lemmy is already a good-enough replacement for reddit, with better core principles, and it’s just getting better.
Get some popcorn and watch the drama, and expect nothing.
It’s okay to expect more drama though, right?
Second drama? I don’t know if they know about second drama.
I heard some people still use …Twitter!
Truly insane
It’s the mods leaving that are going to doom the site. The users will follow soon after
Yeah, pretty much. The sad reality is that only the most outspoken will actually make a switch. The vast majority will simply accept it as the new norm, because they don’t care enough to bother with a new platform.
for now. switches like this don’t happen one day to the next. reddit has broken a lot of trust with its core users and put things in motion that cannot be stopped, at least without extraordinary action that they’re clearly unwilling of. these processes will take years to play out but they’re happening.
same thing is going on with twitter. the easier mastodon becomes to use and the more twitter falls apart, the more the flow of users from one platform to the next will pick up the pace.
The most outspoken are also the ones generating the most content.
Yeah, for now people are still going to incidentally use reddit for human-written non-seo optimized text.
Heck, I needed it last night for help with my computer.
Things will climax once sync for reddit releases their Lemmy app in 2-4 weeks
The apps are going to be a game changer. If they can make it easier and intuitive to sign up, manage your accounts, find communities, and eventually group communities together and filter your feed, casual users will start flocking. It’s all about the UX and UI.
I hope to see the apps even accept donations and distribute part of it to the Lemmy devs and server hosts to help keep things sustainable.
As an Apollo user, switched to wefwef and suddenly its like Reddit 10 years ago. Lots of interesting and weird content with great UX.
Is wefwef only for iPhone? I can’t seem to find it in the Google store.
Wefwef is a web app. You should be able to get it on anything with a browser.
I use it as a web page on Android until sync for Lemmy comes out and it works great for me
That and hopefully each app will create their own federations. It will be a refreshing to see the developers become the leaders
For those waiting, definitely try out Memmy for iOS. Right now it is in Test Flight, but should be releasing any day now. The dev seems super passionate and the app has gotten exponentially better in just a couple weeks.
I’ve been switching between Memmy and Mlem. Both have their share of missing features right now, I’m usually sticking with one until I hit a need to switch.
Both are great, Memmy is the winner so far.
I’m really enjoying wefwef. It’s basically Apollo for lemmy
I’m keen to give it a go but the beta is full. Am keeping an eye out for the app store release! In the meantime Wefwef is excellent and I may end up sticking with it anyway (no harm in shopping around though!)
A lot of us are looking forward to that day.
you’re talking about the 0.1 of the 1/9/90 rule resisting the clearly telegraphed decay of the platform they poured 5-15 years into on average. they built that place, do not underestimate the lengths they will go to keep it up.
assuming one more round of further threats, my prediction is that about half the currently protesting communities will either switch to a new form of protest, stop, or be made an example of, by about the end of july. but for a proper “end” of the protests, spez would be lucky if it happened by the end of the summer, and their negative impact on the platform is already severe and permanent. i honestly don’t know if the admins are stupid and/or out of touch enough to not notice the drop in content quality or are just bold enough to lie about it, but this spells the beginning of a long and inevitable process of people leaving to better sites as those who gave reddit its unique value stop contributing and giving lurkers a reason to stay.
reddit will never feel the same again, but it will feel about the best it ever will again around the end of the year, before the decay truly sets in. unless the admins choose that time for the next round of killing off old reddit, of course.
reddit will never feel the same again
It really doesn’t seem like the cool place it once was. They took the vibe away with these API changes.
lol without an app on my phone, I tried opening r/pics on my mobile browser to see the damage, only to be met with a “you must view NSFW communities in our app” page.
you can use old reddit but it’s a pain and a half on mobile
Hopefully long enough for casual users to start looking for alternatives.
I hope this is true.
Can’t wait for the Reddit IPO to fail
Fidelity has been dropping the valuation of its stake in reddit, and that’s only as of May 31st. We don’t know yet how the value will respond to all this drama, but I suspect it will go down more.
The IPO might not fail, but they probably won’t get what they wanted out of it.
Unfortunately this probably means that the platform will sell to people who expect to get use out of it for direct public influence of some kind (marketing/politics).
Sadly they’ll still get rich as shit if valuation drops a lot so there isn’t much incentive to treat the community better.
I invest in quite a few tech companies and I was considering investing in Reddit, but there’s no way in hell I would now. I can’t be the only potential investor they have alienated.
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.
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.
They are already finding scabs to come in and moderate. The quality will be shitty but they don’t care.
Give it 3 months and it’s all forgotten about. New users won’t know the difference.
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.
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.
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.
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 love it. Especially that the mods of the default subs have the balls to do it
turns out it’s not a good idea to piss off the unpaid people put in charge of front page subreddits
Can’t wait for Reddit admins and Spez to realize they have failed.
Pretty sure they know, but “Refuse to acknowledge fucking up” is the strategy
Did they though? Looks like user numbers haven’t changed at all.
I mean, they’ve definitely lost people to the fediverse, the majority here at this point are probably reddit refugees.
They may have gained in total users for all I know or care. This place just feels more like the old internet I like. Really looking forward to the slow decline in people here caring about what’s happening on Reddit, regardless of how big and successful or how terribly failed it is.
Spez succeeded, regardless. His end goal was the IPO, consequences he damned. Rectal fissures were entirely acceptable. Now whether Spez is happy with his booty blasting, that’s another question entirely.
His end goal was to destroy 3rd party apps. He doesn’t care if it takes all of reddit down in the process, they bruised his ego and he’s lashing back with anything and everything he can. It’s why he lied about the phone conversation which we found out for sure when the dev posted it in full. He’s a toddler.
California tech company people get really used to nothing being recorded because it’s a Two Party consent state.
Good thing that shit doesn’t fly when the other party is in a One Party consent state (or different country). Frankly two party consent to a call is some bullshit that only enables bad behavior on the part of the party with more power.
I’ve busted one big (Billions) tech company interviewer lying about my performance on a coding interview and was able to verify his lies by having a senior member of their staff (a good friend) compare my side of the notes with their internal documentation. The company recruiter was pissed and went off about how I wasn’t experienced enough for the job even though I caught them lying. One of their other interviewers was my student at our university. I had years of experience on him, and all the other interviewers.
My advice is to always record and keep notes. Don’t let them gaslight you. It might not be submissible in court, but fuck em, use a VPN if you have to.
Most recently Spez said the IPO is further away now than it was last year lmao
There’s a bunch of transphobic and racist shit on the front page now, spez is probably loving it just like Elon
I thought it was just me seeing that?
The right wing is invading and a lot of posts are just what you said, transphobic, racist, woke-bashing, etc.
I’m not sure if it’s just cause I have no account now, but if this is what they are pushing on new people then yikes. I knew the admins leaned right wing (ie forcing kotakuinaction to come back) but this is worse than I thought. I must have blocked a lot of it a while ago
Spez will feel nothing but anger. I’m sure that he genuinely feels that nothing has been lost. The people that work for him probably feel uneasy that his ego has unnecessarily breathed life into another platform.
I would be pretty annoyed if I sat on the board because Lemmy and Kbin may have been just another Voat had they just come up with something reasonable. It blows my mind that they never floated serving ads through the API just to offset their alleged costs.
TLDR: Subreddits are protesting against Reddit’s API changes, and r/pics, a subreddit with over 30 million members, has marked itself as NSFW (not safe for work). This means that advertisements can no longer be displayed alongside posts in the subreddit. The protest started in June when thousands of subreddits participated in a blackout to protest Reddit’s plans to charge for API access. The changes have resulted in third-party apps like Apollo shutting down. As part of the protest, r/pics initially only allowed images of comedian John Oliver to be shared and later amended its rules to allow media featuring Oliver, including erotic fan fiction. The subreddit’s moderators posted an “open letter” reminding the community not to swear, as marking the community as NSFW would deprive Reddit of advertising revenue. Reddit has reportedly removed mods for marking their communities NSFW as a protest. Despite this, r/pics was officially marked NSFW on Monday. Other subreddits, such as r/videos and r/funny, are also protesting in their own ways.
Tobe clear - to charge extortionate prices for API access in a deliberate maneuver to kill 3rd party apps and drive users towards reddit’s native app.
App devs were all willing to work with reddit if they could negotiate reasonable fees, but reddit told them to pay up or get lost.
Feels like reading the frontline news from far away. Keep fighting bastards, I don’t know what the end goal will lead too but i know it will be hands of us the victors.
Burn baby burn. I have no illusions on how much we actually affected reddits bottom line but I can only hope that the power users from reddit will slowly leave the platform.
Is reddits already public or what is going in with the IPO right now?
It was announced for the 2nd half of 2023, but no specific date yet.
Their captain is disintegrating into dust. Reddit’s worth as much as a couple of napkins, or whatever Elon will pay for it.
I can easily see Musk buying Reddit and degrading it into an even sorrier state
/r/mushing I’m mod is still NSFW. I don’t visit Reddit anymore now, but if they get sane, I’ll flip the switch back. For noe no ad cents for Spaz, or whatever that dick’s name is.
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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?
It doesn’t matter if huffman goes. This is the result of wanting to make $$$$$$. That won’t ever change.
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.
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
I’m not normally the kind of person that takes pleasure in seeing others fail. At least I try not to be.
I really want to see Steve Huffman fail though
