reposting one of the worst things i've ever heard someone say:
“There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
Yeah... I don't know if the person you're mentioning meant productive stuff or not, but I was in a pretty niche community there. One where parents were dealing with their kids on operating tables, but not often. It was as exactly the kind of thing internet forums were made for: medical advice from doctors, venting and whatnot from strangers who'd been there. I said a lot of practical helpful things and a lot of meaningless nice platitudes at the right time.
And I was happy to do it the same way I swapped guitar tabs as a kid.
There's honest money in making a community space.
There's no honest money in monetizing a community.
I dont have any direct experience with reddit any longer.
What I can say, is that I think a verrrrrrry significant portion of comments and commenters are actually reddit run bots. My source for this is my experience in the daily thread of a certain degenerate gambling forum. There were maybe like 12-30 posters who would reply, engage, etc... in the daily and day after threads. However, there was a yyyyyuuuuugggge number of accounts that would just comment with no real further engagement. Like you would respond to them, but they wouldnt respond back.
I truly believe that reddits internal business model is predicted on the use of reddit run bots to create synthetic engagement in certain audiences around marketing targets that a selective group of advertisers (read, not buying reddit ads) are given access to. The basics is that reddit astroturfs synthetic engagement until organic engagement takes over. I have no way of proving this and its pure speculation.
This is why I don't even worry about considering the user numbers on lemmy. Relying on my anectdotal experience, we've got about the usership/ engagement numbers from around the 2009-2011 time period, which is actually pretty amazing. Also, the overall lemmy experience is far superior, for example, just the ability to sort by a couple of different 'hot' options is a major improvement. I really think if the devs just keep vibing on their plan, lemmy will be more than strong enough to survive and continue for decades to come.
The fact is that reddit stole from us our faith in a 'good internet'. The users of reddit built reddit, not the company that owns it (they suck). The users of reddit paid for the server time and made the system work. That good faith was utterly exploited by the leadership of reddit and we should never forget how they stole from and exploited their community.
They also started handing out usernames to companies over "trademark infringement." Someone with the username "FoodNetwork" is losing the username to the real Food Network.
I was on reddit long enough to remember how people used to run corporate stooges out with pitchforks.
"These are fan run forums," they would say. The idea that you could have your username taken by a corporation was unheard of, because originally, it was considered really bad form to have anyone from the business running the subreddit, because then it wouldn't be a neutral source of information.
Nope, now they can steal usernames and it's totes okay for subreddits to be completely controlled by their corporate namesake.
Reading what happened to the german subs, that also happened with newly created spanish subs, many got thousands of subscribers but no engagement, only one or two comments per thread and little content but a lot of subscribers.
You're absolutely right about most of it. My only criticism is the first paragraph as I am notorious for just commenting and not responding. Literally if you reply I won't respond lol but I can't imagine I'm the only one. A better way to sniff them out would be profiling them and finding things like hobby subs where they would be significantly more likely to comment vs addiction subs where they may feel some shame in interacting or engaging in their addiction.
I'm pretty stupid so I could be talking out my ass but I figured input for data collection and such.
That's what caught my eye too. I rarely, if ever, respond to someone who's responded to a comment I've made, especially if they're arguing or trying to correct me. And that's if I've even bothered to go back and check it.
Not that you'll ever see my reply to your comment...
Yo you might've dropped this, King 👑. This post is the best way of putting into words my thoughts on the matter that I'm too smoothbrained to formulate into creation. Especially the last paragraph, the theft of "good Internet". Fuckin A, m8
The fall of Digg didn't happen in one single wave.
Lots of people just want to stay with what they're familiar with, and it takes loss of critical mass of content/interaction before they'll look at the door.
I think there might be another wave when old.reddit.com stops working, a number of people still access it that way, despite it not being well known by the modern reddit audience.
Honestly, dark theme is how they got me with that one. Haven't used the site aside from search results since the API changes went live but I like to think I'd leave if a new redesign was worse.
I mean, yes and no. It's the same reddit from six months ago yeah, the vultures hungry for an IPO and who don't give a fuck about users.
The change in font actually speaks massively to a huge change in how reddit functions, and this has been a slow, gradual change.
Reddit was originally an all text site. The name fucking implies it.
"Oh did you see that link?"
"Yeah, I already read it."
The pivot to sound and video has been going on for a few years. The logo still referenced the text-heavy nature of the site by being stylized as text you might read on a website. Now it is clearly a logo that has dropped that pretense entirely, as they have said "fuck people who like to read," we're here for eyeballs on screens, and video is what makes that happen!
So yeah, it screams a huge change in direction that's been happening for years now. They're just updating the branding to match the site direction.
And that’s the day I completely stop using the site.
I’ve still been using it for technical stuff, because there’s a absolute shitload of extremely valuable and informative content on a bunch of engineering- and tech-oriented subs, but a lot of the users who were involved with that seem to be switching here, and a lot of THOSE users have applied scripts to nuke all comments on their account, so it’s steadily becoming less valuable and more out of date. That said, it’s a bummer that that the knowledge base contained in those communities are largely going to seed.
I still browse reddit, simply because the size of the communities I want to visit is much larger there. My browsing is however confined to the mobile page in Firefox, which is slow, clunky, and breaks frequently, which means my reddit usage is down by something like 99%. Lemmy has the sync app, and without the app I wouldn't be here. Browsing Lemmy before it was awful.
Also, I kinda like that Lemmy is smaller. There's much less noise, less of an algorithm feel to browsing. It feels slightly more like the internet I grew up with in the 90s and 00s, and I kinda missed that.
I go back for sports communities because they're still active enough on reddit for back and forth during live games, but literally yesterday on the hockey sub people were talking about how there's less content. API changes meant less autoposted game highlights and it even seems there's less back and forth on the game day threads. Now it depends a lot on the team these days.
In particular, it feels like lemmy is mostly memes and news.
While on reddit, you can have productive discussions about the internals of the Haskell compiler, or ask questions to actual historians. Niche subreddits having a quorum of experts to actually have discussions about stuff was always the best part about reddit. And that part has always been sadly lacking from lemmy because of size.
Everyone? Those people who say these companies are sinking ship are probably so addicted to them they have to mention it anytime anything vaguely relates to it. Normal people use both and don't give a shit where their meme comes from.
Same, I posted something about one of my game jams a few months ago, and that was it. And that's only bcz I realized I had my game dev account logged in on my pc.
As soon as copious amounts of money are involved, you see the change. I never even used the 3rd party Reddit apps, but when money made OG Reddit act like a dick towards them, I peaced out. Sorry Reddit, but I think you’ll eventually be Digg. And I have no interest in sticking around for that.
i still use reddit a lot of comunities havent left and my god the amout of bots now is insane entire threads are coppied with 1 year 6 month old acounts with zero history and what i think is ai spam from simualr acounts its a mess over there now what brainless idiot is letting this happen
A friend of mine was talking about how they had blatant homophobia sent their way on an LGBT subreddit, which was upvoted. Went to check r/ApolloApp and someone critical of the dev (because he was selling merch) was being blatantly and casually homophobic with similar upvote behaviour.
I'm not an easily offended guy but, honestly, I'm glad I left that shithole.
Had a brief look at r/WorldNews yesterday. Every comment was blatantly disgusting Islamaphobia that I couldn't believe hadn't been deleted yet. I don't ever remember it being that bad over there
Maybe they should have spent some of the money they used on this questionable design update on improving their app or working with third party app developers.
Anyone wanna place a bet on how long it will be before the porn on there gets banned for good?
I know what Spez said about keeping it but he has lied before.
My bet is once they nail down the investors for the IPO, Reddit users are going to see a sharp shift in moderating - including what is allowed regarding NSFW/NSFL content.
Reddit also said the font has "large x-height for readability and disambiguated letterforms for rapid identification" and improved accessibility.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Reddit is "holding talks with potential investors" for a 2024 IPO filing.
The top comment on Acidtwist's post announcing the branding refresh reads: "My love of old.reddit.com continues to grow."
Another reply pokes fun at the Reddit marketing video shared that encourages people to "think of something you like or enjoy."
And after Huffman reportedly warned employees to "be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public," due to potential backlash in June, maybe a new look was necessary.
Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
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