I’ve been on reddit for a long, long time and i’ve seen all the changes that have happened in the past decade. I spent a lot of time on Reddit, and have seen the slow infestation of bots, karma whores, and guerilla marketing disguised as posts.
I’m genuinely excited for the fediverse - it seems like an actual improvement over reddit, and not just a clone. There’s a learning curve, but there was one when joining reddit too.
I participated in the migration to Voat, and saw how/why it failed. I’m more optimistic about the fediverse for various reasons, and I’m dedicating my time to helping this thrive.
I was a lurker on Voat, but I’m trying to be active here. I don’t like modding, but I’ve even created my own community here, which is saying a lot given how lazy I am. Hope to interact with y’all more!
And if you’re still reading this, i hope you don’t mind a shoutout to my new community, maliciouscompliance - recreated this as it was one of my favorite places to lurk on reddit!
https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance
EDIT: since a few people asked - I posted in this comment below why I think lemmy has a much better chance than voat did
What ruined it for me was hidden viral marketing and low-effort karmar whores. I think it was HailCorporate which highlighted just how many posts were straight up viral marketing attempts, and how many of these were posted from accounts with a strange comment history. I couldn’t unsee it after that.
As for karma whores… it’s funny to see a pun chain, but not when that’s the top comment for 99% of all popular posts.
Any examples?
well… go to /r/HailCorporate and sort by all-time top scores.
Here’s a specific example, although you may not be able to see the actual post until/if the sub is back up https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/6cq3xe/i_told_popular_shaving_company_i_was_canceling/
I can’t stomach too much corporate content, so that’s why I asked if you had only one good example of it ^^
What happened to hailcorporate anyway ? I remember a few years back it was cited or showed up on my feed regularly, but you made me realize it stopped at some point.
It seemed like there was a backlash against it. At some point you would get downvoted for citing hailcorporate in comments. If I were more conspiratorial-minded, I would think that Reddit started throwing in downvotes at any comments mentioning hailcorporate, because it would hurt Reddit’s image and advertiser-friendliness. But I’ve noticed that, across social media, some folks seem to get really upset when you point out that a post is fake/marketing/staged. So maybe that’s just online culture now…
Edit: there were legitimate issues with people citing hailcorporate on posts that they just didn’t like. But that seemed relatively minor to me.
Certainly feels like there’s some ‘ignorance is bliss’ to it. Folks don’t want to hear something is an ad because it takes away the illusion that their feed is in their control. And they don’t want to feel gullible.