What's really baffling to me is that a bunch of nerds with too much free time on their hands basically stomped out a fully fledged Reddit alternative within a few months, including multiple frontends and apps.
Yet Reddit spends millions on development every year, for no discernable improvement whatsoever, while still turning no profit.
Where is all that money going? Seriously, Reddit is a very simple site. There's nothing that hard about it. The amount of data is tiny, since the content is external, none of the resources are that time critical, a lot of content can be cached.
The ideas leading to Lemmy go back at least a decade, that I can remember. There are many little things that people figured out when developing distributed federated social media networks of this type. It's a success story of collaboration over a long time with a shared goal of making Reddit and Twitter easy to replace with a superior product.
I tried last year but a month back I got banned for 'ban evasion' after going on a 5000 mile roadtrip for a honeymoon and using the sketchiest of unsecured wifi APs.
This time around I realized I can set the default sort in account settings to the top posts in the past 1 or 6 hours, def give that a shot, neverending stream of new posts, zero reason to wanna doomscroll reddit ever again
This is just the latest in a long string. Spez has demonstrated repeatedly throughout the years that he's an entitled cretin - equal parts smug and ignorant.
My personal favorite was when he snidely commented on Reddit's unprofitability in his AMA after the API debacle, making it sound as if it was somehow our fault, only to then not only have it made common knowledge that the official app was useless garbage and had been for years, but that the entirety of Reddit's loss for the year was just about exactly equal to his salary alone.
I used Reddit for 12 years, which granted, isn't as long as some others, but it is really sad to see what it has become after all these years. It helped a lot back in the day, but now it is time to let it go.
The third party app ban was doubly stupid because not only did it piss people off but then they replaced all of those apps with something that didn't work properly. Even if you didn't care about third party apps all that much you cared that the only option you now had was terrible.
I hopped on Reddit the week before the Digg migration happened. I'm not sure how I really took in the Internet before that (lolcats and wimp mostly), but I remember nearly the exact moment it happened. I'd never heard of Digg before that. I'd barely heard of Reddit.
It's not the same as it was back then, and I'm very happy to be done with it. Fuck spez/Steve Huffman, that piece of shit burned everything to the ground to enrich himself and piss on the community.
I think we should stop with copium every time some change happens on Reddit.
It's not going anywhere and it's still the front page of the Internet. A few thousand folks migrating to Lemmy doesn't mean Reddit is gonna die tomorrow.
And the CEO knows that perfectly well. Spez can juice this place more and more, and people, for the most part, will eat that and stay after a tiny show of discontent.
You know what? That might be for the better. While it sucks to have less content here, we at Lemmy also have a healthier demographic, and that's something we should praise and look after.
If anything, at our best we should not spend our energy shitting on Reddit, but rather direct it to care for Lemmy. Start your cozy or important community and share it! Make new interesting posts, preferably not about Reddit or American politics - plenty of that in here. Leave useful and/or supportive comments. We can for once build our beautiful garden, not a place of powerless hate and spite.
It's not "copium", reddit is genuinely heavily populated by bots, advertisers, and sponsored content. There aren't nearly as many actual people using it as before. I'm not saying they all came here, but reddit is definitely not "the front page of the internet" anymore, and hasn't been since long before the api exodus occurred.
Nobody talks about reddit in daily conversation like insta, tiktok, youtube, or even facebook. The majority of people on the internet do not know it exists. It's a weird, niche website desperately failing to claw it's way to the mainstream, when the whole charm of it was that it wasn't mainstream social media.
However, I agree that I'd like to stop hearing about it here.
Nobody talks about reddit in daily conversation like insta, tiktok, youtube, or even facebook. The majority of people on the internet do not know it exists.
The movie "Good on paper" had a joke about Reddit, but the joke basically implied that Reddit is full of sexist incels... so I get the feeling that most people have heard of Reddit but that Reddit is not viewed very favorably by the average person.
I agree! After my initial fury over Spez's whole tantrum, I found Lemmy, and I gotta say, yeah I really do think we need a lot more communities and diverse topics, but for those of us who remember what the Usenet was early on, it was a paradise for free-thinking, tech-savvy individuals to socialize and share ideas. I'd love to see Lemmy stay under the radar, because once something becomes popular enough, it gets enshittified by people looking to monetize and people looking to just plain shit all over it. If it remains fairly small, but in that it is a concentration of the most desirable people (mostly), I'll take it. I can always hop over to dread-it if I really need something not here.
Even when Reddit exploded in popularity there were still plenty of great, but smaller, communities. I really enjoyed being part of Reddit until the API changes when all the decent moderators quit. The quality of Reddit went off a cliff shortly after that happened.
So I think Lemmy will be fine even if it explodes in popularity. Capitalist greed that betrayed the OG members and mods who built Reddit is what is making Reddit a cess pool, not the number of users.
If they had just done the obvious thing and made ad-free 3rd party API access depend on a subscription fee, then I would have just paid it and wouldn't be here. But no, they have to do everything the worst way possible.
No, they are charging the app devs instead of the users directly (who would then be free to use Any app, and the apps would have remained as they were: ad-supported or paid or whatever)
I got permabanned on Reddit because of events involving powertripping moderators and every appeal I tried has been met only with generic bot auto replies. It seems impossible to get an actual human to look at my case for which I provided a lot of detail on what went wrong and how I was incorrectly permabanned (I was confronting moderators of one of my favorite subs about them violating their own Subreddit and Reddit's policy).
I've been trying for over 9 months but there's literally no way to get it fixed. And every new account eventually gets permabanned as well.
I'm so done with that garbage platform. Shame about the small fun communities I was in. But the downfall of Reddit can't come soon enough.
I've officially said my goodbyes. It's absolutely fucked over there. This is just one of many serious problems with Reddit. The CEO is tanking it harder than Musk tanked Twitter. He's musk'd it.
Is there a way to fully download or scrape a full subreddit or say stackoverflow since they've both committed themselves to enshittification and alienating their userbases?
asking because that seems difficult to do and there's a lot of useful information on both sites
Its not super hard, but the main hurdle will by bypassing whatever api limits there are such as by using multiple accounts
Certain libraries like praw still work to some extent (my discord bot is still running somehow) but trying to scrape all of the posts in a sub might have to be done slowly. You might be able to sort by old so that the results dont move relative to the page and then go page by page.
Reddit getting rid of paid rewards pre-IPO only to reintroduce the feature later on and boast it as a major QOQ increase in non-ad revenue while artificially inflating their on-paper growth was slick.
I went back to reddit after being away for six years and I'm already done with the mods, the toxicity, the fakeness, just the whole thing. So here I am.
If you want to have peace here - beware of political spaces, they are often just as toxic. Other than that - the place does magic for mental wellbeing.
I was awarded Reddit gold a few times. The private subreddit it gave access to was underwhelming. There were also mixed feelings about someone liking my comment so much that they gave Reddit money for it. I'm sure there were better ways to spend that money that also wouldn't have affected me much. I generally prefer relies anyways.
I hope that won't last for long. I made a joke that Reddit was circling the drain with how hateful and political every subreddit was becoming and then they permanently banned all of my accounts. 10 years on reddit, 10 years of putting effort into my posts and comments with over 250k total karma and I was banned for a half serious joke. My appeal was instantly denied as well. It was unreal. After the API changes that was the final straw for me. Fuck Reddit. I was joking before but now I really am hoping that the company sinks.
I don't think the "investment" in Reddit is the usual "invest in company because it will make money directly", but "use wall st money to give stronger incentives about controlling the narrative than ad revenue was previously able to give".
I bet employees have to agree to a hefty NDA to remain employed there. I hope someone breaks that NDA at some point.
Reddit is dying. Spez is a degenerate freak, a scam artist, and a Nazi. The OpenAI training platform / propaganda website begins to circle the drain. Microsoft is starting to lose the last iota of goodwill they once had.
Nothing about Reddit looks good into the future and no one, with serious cash, is going to invest in a dying platform run by a scam artist, a freak, and a Nazi.
The questions now are, "How long?" and "What's next?"
I'm Just hoping that more sub reddits move over I know a few have that I use thought (which are dead) it was during the time spez pull this bs just seems like every company lately has gotten more greedy with their product
Reddits an echo chamber for the worst ppl 9f the left. Disagree and you get a ban. We need more online places where there is no banning and people can just disagree and learn that they are not the only type of person.
I'm gonna let you know right know, Lemmy isn't the place for alt-right nutters who had disgusting enough views to get banned from Reddit of all places (a pretty conservative community in general) for being too right-wing. Lemmy is literally a gradient of full-on communists to centrists that at least agree we should have basic social welfare. Even the prominent conservatives here aren't openly vehemently anti-lgbt and anti-social welfare like American conservatives usually are.
Lemmy isn't exactly politically extremist, but even the relatively right-wing-friendly Lemmy instances (like world) look communist compared to Reddit
Jesus dude there's something wrong with you because Reddit is pretty right wing. If you think they're lefties then good God you must be some kind of extremist or something.
You're not going to have a fun time over here I'm telling you that for sure.
It’s not about political views but more about certain outrage culture that maybe is less noticeable than twitter but is more annoying.
Redditors are just kinda special and happily ride any moral high horses and such with zero room in the brain for hey maybe I am wrong. Whole Reddit is confidently wrong usually with this annoying absolutism that leaves no room for anything else.
I cannot describe in words how much contempt I feel for users of AITA or the like. Just imagine posting your family shit online for some strangers to have fun with it. I hope the servers burn and erase all these archives of cringe