“Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. It cannot.” - The Verge
“Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. It cannot.” - The Verge
That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
“That’s why we’ve spent the past few weeks threatening and strong arming them. Now please, shut up and get back to work.”
Also: we're still not going to pay you, but treat you worse. And if you quit, and the people after you keep quitting... we're going to have to replace you with PAID moderators... and if you play your cards right and we forget who you are, you might be one of those paid mods, so uh... shut up and get back to work for free!
Reddit will die off in stages. Slowly.
First the power users are leaving now. These are the mods and the major content creators (think Minecraft leaving)
Eventually they will piss people off again and the more common content creators will leave.
Then after reddit has worse and worse content, the users who just comment will leave.
After that there will be nothing worthwhile for the lurkers and they will leave too.
Reddit will then be a wasteland.
This will all take quite a while. Even Digg took time to die off.
I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won't be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.
I’m the same! Although I’ve even tried to avoid clicking search links to Reddit as well
Unfortunately for me, one of my favorite uses for reddit has been live game threads for various sports and that really only works with a larger user base. For instance, I follow the Seattle Mariners and I have found two different Lemmy instances for them. The one with the most subscribers (44) hasn't had a game thread posted in 13 days despite the Mariners having played like 10 games in that stretch. The other one has 9 subscribers, although it looks like someone has set up a bot to automatically post a game thread and a post-game thread; however, every single one I looked at has 0 comments.
I'm not gonna be able to pull the plug on reddit entirely until Lemmy gets a serious increase in users.
Yeah Digg didn’t die in a day. It takes time. I joined lemmy today, but I looked into it a few weeks ago first. It wasn’t worth the effort then, it is now. Having an Apollo-like app is a big help too.
Every previous major exodus had the problem that it was the people everyone was better off without leaving. Maybe you hated Reddit in 2015 and were pissed at their decisions, but the alternative was a place dedicated to mocking fat people and saying slurs.
Comparatively lemmy just kinda has a similar vibe to Reddit. Like I need to look for equivalents to some spaces I miss, but it’s not the people we said good riddance to
I'm in the same boat, I just joined today and I'm surprised but Lemmy already scratches the same itch that reddit did
I'm in the same boat. I don't particularly mind using reddit during my work day because I can still do that in a web browser via old.reddit and RES. I honestly have no clue what new reddit even really looks like because my user experience hasn't changed in YEARS.
But I'm bitter as fuck about my personal time wasting ritual outside of work being seized from me. I've used their app a handful of times for different things and it's fucking abysmal. I'm just not interested at all in using it. I feel like a smoker being forced to quit. The period between now and whenever a "sync for lemmy" app is released is going to be long and painful.
But I'm here, and will do what I can to help this platform become something better. It's been incredible to watch it grow over a period of weeks. It felt so empty 4-6 weeks ago. Now it kinda has a "dorm move in day vibe." Boxes strewn about, doors propped open, everyone sorta mingling and chatting, asking/answering questions, giving tips, and a general air of excitement. Pretty cool.
Not only is the vibe similar, is markedly better, like Reddit from around ten years ago. Just a vibrant community of actual people, not a Mob of bots and astroturfers with a few people in between.
It's been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.
And it's due to things the users said not to do
I'm not sure if Reddit will "die off". There seems to be a significant portion of users who don't care about the API debacle or protests - they just want to scroll through memes.
I would definitely like to see Reddit experience more pain, given how cunty they've been to users and moderators. But we live in a world where big companies act like shit and get away with it.
As a lurked that left when infinity for reddit announced it's closing, I must be winning the lurklymlics of leaving!
I'll never understand the people who are hell bent on trying to get reddit back. No matter what they won't have a say in anything that happens, own anything, or even have a voice. I'm glad people are finally moving to an open source alternative.
I think only linux users moved over here... maybe
I know a good bit of them did a while back. I think it was in r/opensource or r/linux but a couple years ago they posted about lemmy and I checked it out but I didn't move over to lemmy. I love open source but it's hard to move over to another platform when it doesn't have a user base. Back then it didn't but now I'm all in
I’m here from Apollo. Currently testing out Memmy, Thunder, and now wefwef. Tried Mlem and Liftoff too but I don’t like them as much.
Like others, I'm also here from Reddit Is Fun. I was a reddit user for over 16 years (with a 15 year old account). For over half of that time, RIF was my exclusive conduit to Reddit as the desktop site became increasingly unusable. Now that RIF is gone, I won't be going back.
Invested time... And this place is pretty far behind a usable replacement in terms of content alone.
I was an early user of reddit, and it had a lot of the same problems this place had. There were no "smaller subreddits", everything was small. But the quality of content was good, so I stuck around. It really takes a lot of effort to build a community, it doesn't come for free. I hope you stick around and help 😀
Invested time... And this place is pretty far behind a usable replacement in terms of content alone.
Invested time or sunk cost fallacy?
Long live OSS.
Dude I have communities I still want to be a part of there. It's not easy to just walk away. I have now but when the NFL season starts it's going to be hard to not go back unless there is a good alt here.
After being a Lemmy lurker for a few weeks, I submitted a request for an account on an instance that manually approves accounts earlier this week. Just checked and confirmed that my account was approved. This was based on calls for engagement to help grow the community. While I've been here for a bit, here's my first participation. Ayo!
Good job on not only lurking!
Why do they do manual approvals?
Moderators need to understand that Reddit doesn't care if you've been in charge of your /sub for 10 years. They have, can and will tell you how to run it. There's nothing for you to "negotiate." As far as Reddit management is concerned, it's "my way or the highway."
Part of ending a toxic relationship is figuring out that it's time to let go.
Well, we former Reddit mods don't need to understand anything in that regard. Fuck Reddit in its entirety. I'm not wasting time considering their point of view. I understand that they're pieces of shit. I did negotiate - they doubled down and so I carried through and walked the fuck away, revoked my registered copyrighted material and took the first steps to litigation when they reposted it. They've taken it back down after the DMCA was filed, we'll see if it goes back up.
An ultimatum is a negotiation.
Good work! Way to stand up for your principles!
Good on ya for standing up. Keep fighting the good fight!
First time I'm browsing Lemmy for longer than ten minutes and I get two Stephen King references in the first two posts I read, nice!
The mods need to understand that the admins see the mods just as the mods see the users.
They can be gotten rid of on a whim and no one will care
Reddit CEO calls unpaid moderators' concerns "noise"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOm_UKGyrZg
This is abusing volunteers. If there are 140,000 active subreddits and if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits. They can close the subreddits, pay someone to moderate, try to pawn them off on a new sucker, or have bots run the subreddits. The question is, in the meantime, will the spammers abuse Reddit like their mods are being abused by Reddit? Let Reddit deal with these problems. If you're a mod, why are you giving your time away for free to a company that doesn't care about you?
If you're a mod, I get that you care about your subreddit, but why waste your talent on someone who thinks your concerns are just noise?
The Minecraft Devs left Reddit:
Leave Reddit? To quote Din Djarin, "This is the way."
Spammers must be salivating, like "Yes Splez! We would be happy to take over this sub for you!"
It's like they forgot what happened to Digg. They have forgotten the face of their father.
They're just looking for that sweet IPO cash grab.
Unfortunately for Spez and the rest of Reddit, they're too late to actually cash in on their 18 year-old startup.
Makes me wonder if that's what Digg was doing...
Dark tower reference, nice
I wasn't on digg back in the day. What happened to it?
Digg went to shit in a similar way Reddit is doing right now, and most of its users moved over to Reddit, which essentially killed it.
Digg went through a series of redesigns in a short period of time and the final straw was a redesign was one that removed users abilities to manage their feeds so that they could force ads into the feed. A few years later when they sold they said that overnight they lost a quarter of their users from that change. And those users were the initial userbase of Reddit, which was essentially the answer to Digg's attempt to monetize users through forced ads.
Now, Reddit is "not even noticing a change in traffic" so much that they felt the need to make a public statement about it. Reddit is killing users abilities to customize their feed so that users are forced to use a feed which includes ads. It's literally the same thing.
I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product's users and mods to be a winning strategy.
I don't think he knows what he's doing.. in his mind he's running the last meter of the finish line to the IPO when all these "problems" are cropping up for "no reason" and he just wants to finish the race
I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product
s users and modsto be a winning strategy.FTFY.
The users are the product being sold to the advertisers. Framed that way, it makes it even more clear how idiotic driving away users is.
Reddit is too big to fail, they have achieved critical mass. Keep in mind facebook is still around despite being a reviled company, and instagram certainly hasn't had a mass migration off of the platform either.
At the end of the day Lemmy isn't a replacement to reddit yet. It depends entirely upon it getting traction which thus far still hasn't occurred - we are not at critical mass yet. I hope it happens but there are many reasons why this site could fail even after reddit's admin blunders. Too many people are apathetic to the changes and not all of them are lurkers who do not post or comment.
Today you can't just stop using reddit either, especially for google searches. Too much content is ONLY on reddit. It's a huge problem. We really need a wikipedia style reddit where it's not for profit and still moderated for content.
lol nah Reddit can fail. Just like Tumblr, and Digg, and MySpace, and LiveJournal, and GeoCities, and the list goes on. Reddit relies on volunteer work to provide its content, and just like when Digg tried to do almost the same thing, the community will move on. It always does. It has since the 80s and will until the extinction of humanity or the collapse of civilization.
Let it fail.
Exactly. Where's all that information that used to be on Newsgroups when you had to use dial-up? It's kinda not at your fingertips anymore. If there was anything relevant in the 21st century, it's been repeated somewhere and you can find it. This is something that people seem to have forgotten: useful human knowledge is not reliant on the Internet. It's in our brains and we pass it on from generation to generation. Reddit or any other social media platform is not the owner of human knowledge. It's just a tool for its distribution that we use. People still control the useful knowledge and the internet is still controlled by people. Maybe we're fast approaching some sci-fi horror movie where that won't be true anymore, but that moment hasn't happened yet.
Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the "metaverse" to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn't seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There's no denying that. But, it's their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.
As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There's a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there's also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don't know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can "get back to normal" and continue being Google's sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that "the beatings will continue until morale improves," it's hard to imagine how they can get back to "normal."
I'm okay with lemmy getting just enough traction to bring in the best users without being "popular"
Digg had critical mass. It went down in flames.
It doesn't take bajillions of users to generate enough content to form a reasonable alternative.
Niche subreddits will be hard to recreate though unfortunately, but plenty of time to grow. And long-term, federated seems like a good model so that once these communities are rebuilt they aren't at the mercy a company who's main concern is short-term profits.
Digg had critical mass relative to other sites of that era, but that was a very different Internet. Digg was never even close to as huge or ubiquitous as reddit is now. I really think the two situations, while similar, really are not comparable.
Federation makes so much sense for reddit style communities. I hope it's able to catch on
Federation makes so much sense for reddit style communities. I hope it's able to catch on
Maybe showing others in real life might help them make the switch?
This is the most level-headed take. Reddit is going to continue to slog along with or without my account, with or without Lemmy's 53k active users. Anyone who thinks this protest is going to sink them entirely is naive.
However, they may stagger along as an enshittified website that has lost it's spirit and never meaningfully grows again. Reddit is still better than any other alternative at this point in time, but Reddit is not by my estimation going to improve again. It's all downhill. So I'm doing my part and trying to work to build community elsewhere.
We don't need 50MM users to reach a mass where the content is fresh and engaging all the time. Probably a fraction of that would be. Lemmy's userbase is double Squabbles and there is already a noticeable difference in content.
Yep. I think people need to think about what "failure" means in this context. Reddit isn't going to go away, and honestly the "default" experience - what you see when you just visit the homepage - isn't likely to change much at all IMO.
The thing is I haven't liked the default reddit experience for many years. The draw of reddit was that they could do all their crappy changes to the default-level site and it still left the niche discussion-based communities to their own devices.
Now they've affected those communities, which is why I'm here. But I'm well aware that a great majority of reddit's userbase uses reddit to doomscroll through endless insipid bot-generated meme lists. None of that is going to change. People like me who care about the small places that will be impacted are in a very small minority compared to the overall userbase of reddit.
So reddit will fail (or has failed) for my use case, certainly. But I'm under no illusion that it will cease to exist.
Too big to fail doesn't mean it's too big to decline.
I don't think reddit is going anywhere as a company and a platform, for a while at least. But that doesn't mean it can't lose a good share of it's users to competitors.
I don't think the comparison with Facebook is a valid one though. Primarily because Facebook is a "true" social media platform. You have your friends and family on it which creates a very strong network effect.
Reddit on the other hand is primarily a content aggregation platform. I don't need to convince my friends and family to switch from it.
Additionally, Facebook is a lot more successful than Reddit financially. They make disproportionately more money per user due to having very targeted advertising. They own other platforms like Instagram and whatsapp. Unlike reddit, Facebook doesn't need to concern itself with having financial troubles.
A better comparison would be tumbler, which was quite big and while it still exists, it's a shell of its former self.
Facebook may not have failed, but it's a shell of the platform that it was. Twitter is on the way to that status, Tumblr did it to their users and it's happened time after time. The little bit I've browsed the front page of reddit in the last little bit there's been a noticeable drop in post and comment quality.
I know there's a few reddit archive projects, and it may be worth looking into a project that could scrape the html and present the info without it being Reddit.
You think facebook is dying? their monthly active users have grown year over year every year so far. It slowed down approaching 3 billion but still grows. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
Twitter's user count by comparison is a joke, 368m in 2022, but as of current statistics they have only ever grown despite doom and gloom over the changes. I always hated twitter, but the facts are what they are. They do predict a decline of the platform but it's far from an abandonment. Since twitter is now private it's unlikely we'll get great data from them moving forward. https://www.statista.com/statistics/303681/twitter-users-worldwide/
Reddit doesn't have equivalency statistics since it's always been private. Best I can find places it somewhere between 800m and 1.6 billion monthly active users. Way bigger than twitter and honestly given that lemmy has yet to break 0.01 billion MAU i'm not convinced lemmy will succeed or not. I'm obviously here because I want it to, i'm just not drinking anybody's koolaid because I wish things to be a certain way regardless of reality.
I don't think reddit will go anywhere, i'm just not using it anymore.
Digg still exists even if it's a shell of its former self. Tumbler imploded and moved to Twitter, which is trying its damnedest to destroy itself too. They don't disappear, they just slowly become irrelevant.
Reddit will still exist, but the content will continue to dry out. Sanitized for advertising and low effort for consumption. The thousands of small self contained communities that really drove the site will slowly die off. Subs that relied on outside moderating tools to ensure quality content will give up and move on.
As small hobby subs find new places to take residence I would absolutely believe reddit will become less relevant.
MySpace is still up, you can theoretically go open up a new profile on there right now and connect with whoever the heck else is still on there, but it's no longer a zillion-dollar megasite.
Yes, reddit will always retain some user base and they might even continue to grow. But the quality will be worse. Just like Facebook and other social media platforms, there will be users that simply don't care enough to look for alternatives. I really hope that it will be a downward spiral for them. Too many (contributing) core users leaving, moderation getting worse and spammers and karma farmers reducing the quality of posts to a point where it's just too cumbersome to scroll through all the crap to find a worthy post. I think that reddit either reverses its decision or that it will slowly fade into meaninglessness....
The quality has been dropping for years and years. I miss reddit from a decade ago, when niche little community things could happen leaving waves across the site.
Now we just get a ton of the same things over and over, hardcore advertising and mass manipulation. It's no longer the tiny little site nobody knew about but is instead the big focus for all the businesses out there that think there's a market to be had. Plus there's the herd mentality that always comes from giant populations on a platform.
Don't get me wrong, there are still niche communities but they just don't have the same flavor of cohesion that they did in earlier times.
This is also my take. Reddit today is very different from DIGG 10 years ago, in that for a majority of users, their experience of USING the site will not change. These users access the site normally, or even with an ad blocker, but that's about it. For them, nothing has changed.
What's left is a vocal, but powerful minority. Reddit Enhancement Suite for desktop users won't notice a change at all, until Reddit decides to do otherwise. Same with old.reddit. 3rd Party app users are the only ones FORCED to use something different: Official app, Desktop, or leave/move to Lemmy/Kbin. Reddit will still keep going, but the overall quality and usefulness will decline. Spez is betting that this will be enough to survive, and he's probably right. Their valuation can tank all they want but it's still in the Billions from what I last saw.
Man i really hope Reddit dies and people move onto decentralized networks, in time I'm sure we can figure out how to index a decentralized network for search engines completely replacing Reddit.
If the content gets great enough, that will happen. Going to take time, but it will absolutely happen. Especially with so many people deleting their comments and Reddit having their feet held to the fire with people making complaints about them violating GDPR.
Lemmy, Mastodon, and the entire Fediverse are really what the internet was supposed to be. I am glad to see the pendulum swinging back and I hope it continues. I am mostly really excited about the mobile apps being developed for Lemmy. Those are coming along at lightening speed and I those will be THE THING that makes Lemmy happen.
It's easy to index decentralized networks is literally Google. Every website is decentralized from every other website the fact that Lemmy/kbin/Masterson sites can communicate with each of the doesn't really make any difference.
I wonder if search engines will see content duplicated across multiple instances and derank them thinking it’s SEO spam. Or maybe I’m overthinking since google is already full of SEO spam.
You can use Lemmy Explorer to search through all 900 or so Instances for the communities you're interested in.
A lot of Mods might be looking at all the work they have put into their communities over the years and think "I can't leave all of this." Which at this point, given Reddit Corp's behavior, is a sunk cost fallacy.
It's time to jump ship, or learn to live with the new reality. Which is really the same as the old reality, the thin veneer of civility has just been stripped away. This is Capitalism and it always turns out this way. Just look at how many products have been ruined, because someone, somewhere decided they needed more money. Anyone familiar with Hasbro's heavy handedness with Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons knows what I am talking about.
I completely understand Reddit wanting to be as profitable as possible, however it's the approach to the users, developers, and blatant lack of care, respect and transparency that got my back up - suspect a lot of people may be the same. Communities always move and change, no platform is too big to fail.
All they had to do was allow Reddit premium users to access the site using third-party apps.
Ohh interesting. Thinking about that, yah I would of signed up probably.
Yup. I was plenty happy to pay to keep using BaconReader. Give everyone a few months to set that up and I think things would've been fine. Instead, we get basically the most ham fisted way it could've gone.
Not only this, but this has happened before. It was called Digg back in 2010.
I'm with you. I get needing to make money, but needing to go public and become just another cringe social media platform is just sad. RIP Reddit. Hello Lemmy.
I was waiting it out until I heard mods were being threatened. That's the final call.
I'm going to be replacing posts with links to my never used socials because who cares if I'm spamming at this point.
As soon as the threat was made all the mods should have quit. An unmoderated reddit would collapse in hours. It would have been glorious.
This is true. I suspect for many mods the power they have to push their ideas, ideals and beliefs and punish who they see fit more than makes up or the fact that they do it for free.
Mods like that probably exist. There are also many quiet mods, particularly in smaller communities, who try to govern even handedly. I never engaged in any protests or pushed any agendas until the recent API changes, and am trying to set up an alternate space to help ensure a space exists for the content/community.
Quite honestly, I don't like moderating or leadership and sort of fell into the role. Now that I'm here though, there's a sense of duty/obligation that makes it hard to leave.
I really doubt many mods see it like that.
Obviously their biases come out in their moderation, but I'd assume the majority think they're doing a service and what users want.
Except the puppet mods on news/politics subs whose day job is pushing a narrative for someone. Those ones know what they're doing.
The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever. There's a real problem of Apathy in today's culture when people are just jonesing for their fix of daily content/memes, or at the very least nothing that disrupts the status quo. They don't give a fuck about "ideals" or what corporations do or farm from them so long as their instant gratification and daily intake of said content remains unchanged.
People just need to change their attitude for how they interact with Reddit now. Gone are the days of good faith and honest interaction. I'll happily lurk and absorb content and provide no interaction back, not wasting my time curating / generating content for them anymore.
I'll happily lurk and absorb content and provide no interaction back, not wasting my time curating / generating content for them anymore.
Same here, on old.reddit only, with adblocker enabled of course. On my phone I will not go to reddit at all.
I deleted my account, have been on there for troubleshooting drivers and other pc related stuff last week I confess. The times I f5'd reddit out of boredome for the latest dank memes or drama has passed tho. I can't handle the attitude from the uberstaff.
Reddit will REALLY be good when those apathetic users are all that's left to produce content and moderate subs! /s
I think you overestimate the willingness of people to stay in a Spam, porn, and bot infested hellhole (if you think it's bad now you haven't seen nothing yet), especially as public consciousness starts to realize that. There will be a point in the future where Reddit will be seen as about as respectable as an adult video site, there are people who would be willing to stay through that but there are plenty of people who wouldn't either.
Another good thing to remember is that most of the people on Reddit are the kind of people who laugh and upvote stuff, they're not the kind of people who are going to be making high quality posts. So when the people making high quality content leave the only thing that will be left is the lowest common denominator. It doesn't really bode well for the continued survival of the platform, at least as a place that people are going to want to go.
My hope is that you’re right, but my fear is that I am.
they love the spam and porn
Who is investing in Reddit at this point? I guess they can just dump their shares against etf buying.
Reddit is not public, so it’s just private investors at this point that funded series tranches. They, of course, are pushing to have Reddit get profitable and then IPO.
I guess we will see what happens, but Spez may have totally messed-up their plans with the inept API pricing and the response to the concerns about it.
It could have been totally averted if they just introduced a reasonable user fee and license that could be used in any third party app.
Spez could have even required 3pas to carry Reddit ads - a lot of us would have grumbled, but stayed.
But Spez didn’t want that, did he? If I had to guess, I'd say Reddit's official app is even more rigged with tracking than Tik Tok. That's why it lags - it phones home every time you pause in your doom-scrolling, to log what stories you're interested in.
That’s what gets me. It would have been so easy to have a sliding scale based on the gross size of the company using the data.
But nope, spez wanted all the golden eggs right now.
Kinda sad but platforms come and go.
The only thing that makes me sad is we cannot take the years of knowledge stored in reddit with us. Some of those co tributors who posted valuable contributions are not active anymor or some has quietly passed away irl.
If reddit decides to wall their site, unviewable to non paid subscribers, then it will be like an end of a small scale civilization where poeple go back to basic living,
I hope in time we can rebuild the same kind of knowledge here.
For me, the loss of AskHistorians was/is/will be the worst. There's so just much important knowledge there, they've changed how I see the world (and I assume that's true for others as well). I really hope they figure out a way to save some of that, but it won't be surprising if it just fades away... Just heart breaking.
I hope we can rebuild some things here, but AskHistorians definitely felt special.
Good news. According to lemmy explorer, there are "Ask Historians" communities on 3 different Instances. (the one on "lemmygrad.ml" has the most subscribers right now but it's only 403.)
It won't take long.
Like TIL or any kind of help/diy sub was mostly reposts from bots. And the top comments were either bots copying the top comments from last time, or sometimes a real user who saw it so much they recite it from memory.
The knowledge is still out there in people's heads. Eventually someone will ask the question again. Then it's on here instead of reddit. We can wait for people to ask, or bots can just repost here like they still do on Reddit.
Bots aren't really good or bad, it's how they're used.
Bots can simultaneously kill reddit and boost Lemmy into its replacement
All the trouble shooting help on the sysadmin board...like tears in the rain. I guess chatgpt
stolelearned from the posts so until that gets completely ruined by being trained to sell us things instead of just providing the information we need, we got some of it saved.
Verge should give up on Reddit like we all did. It's a waste of energy.
Honestly, fuck 'em.
Reddit deserves to crash and burn in my opinion. Every social media platform eventually runs it's course and then is supplanted by something else. No idea if Lemmy is the platform that eventually rises from the ashes of Reddit, but everything from the way Reddit was run from a corporate level, down to the users was toxic as hell. It needs to go away.reddit was the same thing as twitter, just a woke censorship mob that deleted dissenting opinions or even insinuating a slightly different viewpoint.
Reddit can't run without its moderators and it can't monetize without data. I encourage everyone who's defected to Lemmy from Reddit to wipe their old Reddit account using Redact. I just wiped my old account of 15 years worth of comments and post history.
I'm waiting for a couple of days until I'm sure my deleted comments stay deleted. After that, I'll wipe my 6 years old account.
That's how I'm doing it too - overwrite everything, then once I can confirm it hasn't been reverted, purge the account. Fuck the way Reddit treated the mods that made their business possible.
I wiped my 10 year old account last night. Everything except my last post telling spez to fuck off and that he and his board have no soul or humanity.
It was hard seeing it all go, but if life has taught me anything, it's that all things are impermanent and we should always be prepared to let go.
There was a YouTube vid posted a few days ago showing that posts are being reinstated after deletion.
As much as I would like to do this I have too many posts there have legitimately helped people who were struggling with things.
I've had people respond to months old posts thanking me on several occasions for helping them. I can't in good conscience remove thay just to spite reddit, and I do a lot of stuff out of spite.
I take issue with the next part of the quote: “it’s a symbiotic relationship”. No, it is not. Reddit gets value from the moderators, but the community the moderators have on Reddit could be anywhere.
Damn right. The admins I've worked with over at Reddit understand this, but spez seems to think he can get out of this without causing an entire mass exodus... and just let his communities bleed off and die. The community team at reddit understands how important both the users and the mods are, why doesn't spez?
My theory is he's heard Musk brag about how he's made Twitter profitable, and only lost bots and scammers - the users and advertisers all came crawling back (without releasing numbers)
No way that's true, but every owner of social media seems to have paid attention. They want to believe it - there's growing pressure to turn a profit now, so when someone tells you "the users might get mad, but they'll come crawling back if you stand firm" they pay attention
It's pretty easy to convince someone of something so convenient
It seems like it's a common blind spot for all tech bro types, they have no idea how communities work, both online and IRL. That's also why they want to get rid of government.
Hasn't Musk also laid off like 70-80% of Twitter staff?
Forget power users and mods. Shouldn't Reddit worry about their admins jumping ship before it goes down? If Steve is copying Musk's playbook, there's no way he would skip that "crucial" step, so they might as well get out now.
Honestly in my opinion Huffman isn't the brightest bulb in the bunch, he also seems to have a problem with understanding the consequences of his actions. He thinks that we're stupid, he also thinks that users will stay on Reddit no matter what. I'm sure some will after all there were a small minority of users that stayed on digg right up until the bitter end. However a large majority of users aren't going to keep up voting and posting there as the platform slowly devolves into a spammy mess. Maybe he thinks that that won't happen, after all they do have the audacity to think they can reliably prosecute "ban evasion" when in reality they can't, especially for bots.
Idk if it matters what happens to reddit. It would just be nice to have something better. Its hard to see though how reddit can progress anywhere now.
Digg still exists as of today. The lack of moderators and content creators will probably lead to a bot / meme / political agenda factory.
Twitter is still here as well, without much moderation.
The platforms survive. Interactions just get a lot worse. But most people still refuse to leave.
I don't want to be a part of that system anymore, which is why I'm here even though I don't necessarily believe this form of federation social network is designed very well.
To be fair, a lot of Reddit was starting to turn into that anyway. Not the more niche subs, but many of the bigger ones had been going in that direction for a while now.
Yes, r/all felt like bots responding to bots lately. Multiple times people "steal someone's comment". Niche subreddits are definitely not that though
Interested, so I went to have a look.
Holy shit, it's.....not great.
I don't want to be incendiary, but aren't they just getting new mods? Are the new people going to show up and wreck the place for fun?
Ever worked somewhere where management got cleaned out and replaced with new people who had no existing connection to the place?
Bad mods have always been an issue, but for most places there would at least be some sort of chain of succession where the person who started the community brought on somebody they thought was good, and so on. Most places in having multiple mods would have crossover between new and old mods.
Nuking all that and appointing some rando has a much higher chance that the new mod is going to be bad. Look at the snackexchance drama where some rando totally “randomly” got appointed head mod and his first action was talking about getting government ID verification going for exchanges without asking the community anything.
Reddit will likely be able to subdue most subreddits eventually, but the time and effort spent doing so will be wasteful and publicly ugly as they parade in various mods, and have to step in to crack down on userbases bent on being disruptive.
This is a common argument that I usually see people making, there are a few big problems though with the idea of just getting new moderators. The first problem is that moderation is difficult. It's really easy to look at online posts talking shit about moderators and think that you could do a better job than them but you couldn't and neither could most people, it is a very tedious and difficult process, while there may be many people who are willing to do it there are not as many people who are cut out to do it.
The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit's promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum. This is a problem because it means that even for seasoned moderators content moderation is going to become increasingly difficult. Now imagine for somebody who isn't a seasoned veteran moderator, who was freshly appointed by Reddit's administration to fill the roles of mods who quit. I imagine they're probably not going to be able to do this job effectively.
Even If you hired a paid moderator team they would still be nowhere near as effective as the volunteers who poured their heart and soul into it, especially considering that those moderators will be working regular jobs. They're not going to be able to moderate to the lengths that an unpaid volunteer could. This is also ignoring the fact that Reddit very much cannot afford to appoint paid administrators to moderate all of the largest subs on Reddit, considering that making a lot of money is their goal that just isn't sustainable.
So yeah while they could get new moderators it would not be a very easy task for them, and would definitely come with severe drawbacks. Obviously Steve Huffman doesn't really care, he'll probably try it anyway and who knows maybe it'll seem to work out short term, the new moderators won't really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated. A good thing to keep in mind is that the scammers are watching this scenario, they've already started using it to their advantage by messaging moderators pretending to be administrators as a phishing attack. An experienced mod might be able to Ward this off or not be affected, but in unexperienced mod may fall for this kind of attack without knowing better.
The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit’s promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum.
r/ZeroWaste has had to close comments due to spam comment-bots promoting a retail website that the built in tools cannot deal with. Since they can no longer use the third party tools they rely on to handle issues like that they're just not able to operate the sub anymore and are recommending their users visit [email protected] instead.
the new moderators won’t really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated.
That same ZeroWaste post claimed that as of 17 hours ago SpambotSwatter had a 200k+ backlog in theeir span detection system. The sharks were already circling the water waiting for the defences to drop. I suspect there will be a big increase in spam through this weekend. The question is what that will lead to? Will Reddit magically produce a way to fill in for the lost functionality and solve the issue? Will the flood of disruptive comments just be accepted as the new normal? Will it cause enough disruption to otherwise uninterested users to drive an unignorable level of people kicking up a fuss or just dropping their usage?
I suspect it'll be the worst possible outcome but I guess we just have to wait and see what happens.
Edit: by worst possible outcome I mean worst possible outcome for Reddit's username not for Reddit as a business sadly.
Unless they pay for new mods, their only option is to take volunteers.
The people who would volunteer to be the new mods after this shitshow are not the kinds of people that can run good communities. It's going to be power tripping psychos and uncommitted absentees and, yes, saboteurs that want to wreck the place for fun. They'll get a few good mods, but they'll be outnumbered.
I'm guessing extremists (of both political sides, but in particular one) will be salivating at the prospect of getting moderator positions to manipulate more media.
Troll bot farms are already a thing. Who's to say the same groups aren't going to be trying to gain moderation over as many subs as they can?
Once all the good mods leave, which hasn't happened yet, it's going to be an absolute disaster
They won't deliberately wreck the place, but they won't understand what made reddit a great site.
Its not just replacing mods though. Take the issue that happened with that snack sharing subreddit. The current mods held it for 10+ years. They built several tools that automated verification and rating people who shared with each other and it prevents a LOT of drama and scams. Then reddit replaced them because of the protest. But what about the automated tools that they personally made for "their" sub. The owner of those tools took them down. The new mod put them back up. They will die on the 30th anyways because they wont make the API requirements and if they are forced to stay up byt he new mods then the person who will have to pay reddit for the API usage is no longer the mod there.
This is not a unique situation either. Tons of people made auto moderation bots and tool over the past 16+ years. Most of those tools break today and if the mods are replaced then those tools are stolen from the owners. If the owners remove the tools reddit sees that as protesting and removes the mods.
It's going to be a train wreck and a legal nightmare.
Even in a perfect world you are replacing mods that know the communities and have created them and worked on them for years with a new set of mods with no attachment or experience running those communities.
Reddit is going full Twitter and it's not going to end well for them.
They are going to lose a lot of good people and be much worse for ware over it.
Anyone else read the headline in a Tommy Wiseau cadence?
Oh hai Mark
I am now
I’d dare say that reddit cannot survive without its content!
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite works great for backing up, then editing, then deleting your content from reddit.
I’ve used it on a few of my accounts and I’ve noticed the following:
- You have to baby sit it as occasionally it’ll display an error box you have to click on.
- You definitely have to run it a few times, across a few days, to catch everything.
It seems that (at least for my accounts, keep in mind) you have to edit the comment, then delete it. That way spez’ world of woe backs up the edit, not the comment.
EDIT: Oh! It’s a javascript that runs from the old site so it can be a bit funky at times. With macOS and Safari I’ve (as instructed) added the link to my bookmarks and sometimes I need to click it a couple of times before the UI comes up.
I'd been using RES to overwrite, then delete all my posts and comments every few weeks for the last years. If Reddit tried to restore any of my stuff, even if they went past the overwrite nonsense strings, they most likely only caught a fraction of it.
True, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to become mods, even with no pay and awful administration.
Indeed there are, and most will be shitty at the job, making Reddit even more unpleasant to be on than it is now.
I'll be honest. It's hard to feel much sympathy for someone who chooses to continue kissing the boot.
Unfortunately very true!
With so many of the power-users and mods abandoning ship, we'd better start a death pool for old.reddit.com, since it's mostly power-users that stay with old Reddit. How long until it gets Spez'd so desktop users have to suffer enshittification with the mobile app users?
Reddit is dead after this
Sadly, I don't think so. I think they looked at the number of new users and the number of users using 3rd party apps and decided they can lose those.
Edit: apparently Reddit has between 500 million and 1.6 billion active users monthly. According to RiF developers, RiF and Apollo have a combined 3 million active users. If all of those 3rd party app users decide to never go back, Reddit might lose between 0.6% and 0.2% of their userbase. I think they'll be fine...
I don't think the issue is that users will abandon, but that the site was only as usable as it was because of the mod tools that allowed the people who worked for free to moderate.
Now spam, hate, and all other such garbage will be a lot more common. One subreddit I subscribed to only had a single active mod and the only reason the sub was functional was the mod tools that now no longer work.
It may take some time, but people will leave when the subreddits are flooded with hate and spam.
That’s until you factor in that the majority of that 0.6% and 0.2% were the people running their site for free, disabled people, or both.
Should have thought about that before you started treating them like serfs.
Good. I hope Reddit crashes and burns or turns even more into a cesspool than it is today so it gets abandoned by shareholders and dies.
It's time to pass the torch, Plebbit. Just let it go.
Im a proponent of just hammering their servers with mass DDOS. Follow black cats example and keep compromising and ransoming their data. And dont stop.
Hell ya! That's the only path to meaningful change. If I knew how to do that myself, I'd take part in it.
The comment is from last September, completely unrelated to what's happening now on the platform.
Did the core business model change since last Septmeber?
In the sense that there no longer appears to be a core business model yes
The quote is absolutely relevant to what is happening now though, it just doesn't jive with their current PR line.