I think the older core of reddit has always viewed itself as a bottom-up community, rather than a social media platform. Reddit won’t die for now, but this is a sobering wakeup call from that idea.
Reddit is no freehaven, it’s now just another company, and slowly everyone on it will get squeezed into the businessmold…
Hmmm. Maybe it’s intentional. A purge. Flush out the old crowd with their adblockers and their nonsense ideas about “free speech,” and whoever stays – out of ignorance or compliance – is left with the ad-ridden hellscape that is the new interface and the official app.
I’d certainly agree that this is at least Huffman’s internal thoughts about the whole thing at this point. Stabilize their large, more easily monetizable userbase, and get to the IPO asap. The only ones who “suffer” here are the users who give a shit, and the only remedy is to move on from reddit and create that content that matters, elsewhere.
I certainly never viewed it as a social media site. I joined it as a link aggregator and a way to find information on topics I thought were interesting, not make friends. It always seems odd to me when people refer to it as a social media site.
Everything that I liked about reddit was the fact that it was NOT social media. Everything they’ve done in the last decade (avatars and all that), I’ve religiously ignored.
Lol, I told my friend to join Lemmy and he immediately asked how to friend me. Pls no
Indeed. Reddit is knowb as the site where you talk with strangers on things you care about - whereas Facebook is talking with people you know about things you don’t care about.
Reddit *still is * a bottom-up community, that’s why all their monetization efforts never worked and there’s so much backlash against the API changes. All of the content and value on the site is created by the users and mods. Reddit the company doesn’t own that, and redditors take offense at management’s attempts to take advantage of the users’ free efforts for their own gain.
What Huffman and Reddit should have done was think long term and set up a Wikipedia-like entity that could have ensured the health and growth of the site while only taking a modest cut. Instead they tried to pump up the value and cash out with an IPO, and when that likely fails, they’ll end up with nothing.
Mir offers another business metaphor for the tension on Reddit: “If you have a really good music venue, but you break relations with every notable artist, you’re not going to be a very successful venue. You need to really prioritize the needs of the folks providing the value on your platform.”
Honestly this sums it up pretty well
Additionally, it’s not even that good of a venue.
I was talking to my friend about this and asked if he could point out a single improvement that reddit has made in the last decade that hadn’t been about monetization, since I exclusively use old.reddit.com and third party apps, I certainly couldn’t. We couldn’t come up with anything…
There’s nothing. It’s been slowly getting more and more shitty for years. It’s just been happening so slowly that there wasn’t a breaking point where most of us left until now.
I’ve been casually looking for an alternative for years, because the content has gotten so low effort. There just hasn’t been any good alternatives. I tried Voat, but that got over run with racists and Trumpers almost from the jump.
Lemmy is the first thing I’ve found that seems half decent and it needs to triple ot quadruple it’s engaged user base to really have a shot. Too many posts with no comments or very few. What made reddit special was the comments and interactions. I have hope lemmy can get there, it just needs way more users to do so.
What made reddit special was the comments and interactions.
And in the past few months, I found several instances of karma farmers copying a good comment that was low in the thread and pasting it as a reply to one of the top comments to get visibility and upvotes. Idk if it was bots or people with no life, but I bet shit like that was happening much more than we realized, vastly padding engagement. Personally, I’d rather have a smaller and more authentic community here than disingenuous reposts, shitposts, botposts, trollposts, and general farming like what many subreddits became. I like that this platform seems to have much more thoughtful engagement between users who feel more like people than some cardboard cutout. I think we all can learn and grow as people by sincerely engaging in real discourse in the serious communities, and have interesting OC in less serious ones that are just about memes or storytelling or whatever.
I agree that interactions are special, and I agree that Lemmy needs more users, but I’m wary of bloating the userbase and packing garbage into here. I’d like to see a little growth, and give lurkers a reason to engage in an inviting community that isn’t hostile.
Reddit is inauthentic. Nothing but censorship everywhere. Nobody can say anything if you’re a real person and not a bot. I made a comment comparing new and old Star Trek in a Star Trek community, and my comments got deleted and I got a punishment ban for…some reason. I asked a question about others’ experiences with gay businesses under /AskGayBros and my question along with the thread was deleted, and I was banned for 3 days…for conducting illegal transactions. Those are just two examples, but there are plenty more. I pretty much know that if I post something on Reddit - no matter where and no matter what I say, it will get deleted and I will get banned for 3 days. No matter what. Nobody can say anything over there. I don’t think there are any real people posting, just bots. Because you have to watch what you say and even then, you will likely get deleted.
If I post ever my account is instantly permanently banned and I still don’t know why. AITA mods are incels
I agree. Lemmy is really promising but not quite at the critical mass yet. I’ve been trying to post more myself but we need consistentand sustained activity.
I think we’re gonna get there fairly soon. Lemmy.world only started on June 1. I joined a week ago when there were 1-2k users. Now there’s almost 30k.
I really hope so, but it will taper off at some point.
I think it depends on the user experience. If it’s good, then people will use it. That depends on people saying that it’s good to each other.
I bet reddit corporate is shitting bricks over chatgpt. They want to get their IPO and be able to sell their shares before AI upends online discussion. AI Bots are going to be a big deal, not in a good way.
Fully agree. I used to slap “reddit” on Google searches because that seemed to be the only way to find human generated input. No longer.
Its a better analogy that Reddit pissed off the roadies, ushers, ticket takers, and other crew because they wanted 300% of the concession stand’s gross take.
It’s more that they just treat every artist with a lot of disrespect, but they know they’re the only big venue and there’s a basically endless supply of artists that wants to play there.
However, there’s smaller venues that will host these artists and treat them with respect. If it gets too bad, these small venues will grow and gain fame. Ultimately becoming a viable competitor to the original venue.
The comparison doesn’t hold exactly, because the nature of social media makes it so that the advantages of scale are exponential (the more users your platform has, the more attractive it becomes). However, federation breaks this. Which is why I believe this is the way to go. It’s probably not a coincidence that the reddit-style Lemmy has seemingly the most potential. The appeal of joining is not really dependent on famous accounts (e.g. twitter) or having friends that already joined (e.g. Facebook or Instagram). People move regardless, build communities and grow the platform.
I hate that the main issue reported is third party apps are dying. That’s a side effect, not the main issue.
The main issue is the access of the reddit’s data. We all built that. The volunteers who gave all of those hours to supervise that content is the real MVPs of reddit. Not the useless execs. The real founder of reddit has been gone for a while now (he was a true freedom fighter of access to knowledge).
The execs of reddit realize two main things. The first is the known idea that third party apps have the option to change how reddit looks to the user (including blocking ads). The other is that academic types and AI builders could use the content that we cultivated together in order to build datasets to train AI. The reddit execs know groups like these would be willing to pay extra for our data.
R.I.P. Aaron Swartz. It’s been 10 years and these are the issues you warned about and fought against.
I hope this whole ordeal, no matter how it goes down, ends up being a landmark for “social media as a monopoly”. I think there’s been a lot of talk about this in past years, with little real interest, because people are more interested in their next dopamine fix no matter how much they say they care about their data being sold. I hope this is the push we need to start considering these things for real. Most of us are uncomfortable with personal information being sold to 3rd parties, or knowing that users of these sites are technically the product being sold. It’s more weird and uncomfortable knowing the CEO and other execs are throwing a tantrum because user data and user submissions AREN’T being generated for them to sell to earn money to buy some yachts and golf courses.
Should social media be a public commodity, same way a community center or library is? Something paid for by taxes and regulated by government. I think it’s interesting in concept but odd to consider once you get into government censorship and surveillance aspects. Not a good idea either.
I guess I never thought about that. Technically, due to the first amendment of the US Bill of Rights (freedom of speech, press, right to assembly, etc.) the government has less authority to censor a public forum than any company has to censor their own private forum. Still, it would be an easy way to speak propaganda.
Government agencies already sell data (California bureau of vehicles, Florida in general). But I agree that the government would be much less incentivized to maximize profits like the way current social media platform are doing. This would keep the product focused on making conservations better (even the boring ones that don’t attract high volumes of people/viewership).
Also, I would think the content would belong to the public. Does this mean bad actors have access to identifying information as well?
For me its just the third party apps that I care about
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I love how WIRED, being part of the commercialized, centralized internet itself, cannot bring themselves to mention actual Reddit alternatives like Lemmy or kbin, and end this write-up of Reddit’s folly with basically “uh so people might go back to tumblr, I dunno, maybe someone should like, give someone startup money for a like new Reddit and we can live the cycle of the good ol days again”. Yeah don’t worry guys, you’ll get us next time.
What a wet fart.
FTA:
(Disclosure: WIRED is a publication of Conde Nast, whose parent company, Advance Publications, has an ownership stake in Reddit.)
They mentioned “federated alternatives”
And they couldn’t mention names? Lol
conde naste was reddit and wired’s parent company and I believe still a major shareholder so probably why
cast yourself into the kiln, and ignite the age of fire once again
Yet another article that (knowingly or not) frames it as “people don’t want to pay for the API”:
Reddit charging for access to its API is also about more than just third-party clients, Bruckman says. A move like this has angered so many people on Reddit because it feels like a betrayal of the community’s trust.
No mention that several third-party app creators are fine with paying for API access, as long as they can build a business model around the pricing.
I really don’t understand why reddit doesn’t just charge end uses for API access. Heck chuck it in with premium or something. They can generate an API that you use in whatever client you wanted.
I’d happily pay Reddit for a key to then use in Apollo, but bizarrely this isn’t an option. It’s not like Reddit lacks the ability to charge end users, they already have premium after all.
Because they don’t want 3rd party apps to exist at all.
The more this drags on, the less people think this is about money, and more about controlling the platform.
A real business person finds a common ground, sets terms everyone can at least pay forward. Because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if I have $100 lemonade, if no one is able to buy it.
Yeah, it’s unfortunate that all the reporting I’ve seen so far has failed to capture all the nuance involved. Unfortunate, but not surprising, I suppose.
Just sad how far wired has fallen. This is extremely poor journalism.
at this point, even if reddit backpedals on their decision it will be just for damage control not because they care about the community.
If reddit backpedals, even just for damage control, it will cement just how much power the users and mods have over that site. As it should.
I think that’s precisely why spez is going to do everything he can not to backpedal.
How are none of these news organizations reporting that is not about the API becoming a payed service, but rather about the amount of money they are charging for it… It’s quite infuriating.
The rich control the narrative.
No, Spez is breaking Reddit. The blackout is a symptom, not a cause.
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Go back and check your content. I’ve seen some post where people are claiming Reddit rolled back and their deleted or changed content has all been restored. If that’s true, it needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
When you use a comment deleter app they cannot delete comments from subs marked private. (They’re hidden) So if you ran a deleter app in the last week while the subs were protesting a lot of your comments wouldn’t have been axed on the participating subs. Once the subs come back to normal from private mode, you’ll see those comments appear even though you thought you deleted everything. I’ve had over 200 comments come back from as far back as 11 years ago due to that.
We should edit all our comments to “spez is a cuck” and then delete. So when they restore our deleted comments they’ll only get that.
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The EU has the GDPR and California has the CCPA that both give people in these places the legal right to have their data removed from sites upon request. If they end up putting your stuff back up or reverting edited comments/posts back to their original form, you can submit a notice through these organizations to bring the law into it and either make it illegal for Reddit to restore your stuff or at the very least force them to pour money into legal disputes to argue to keep it against government enforcement.
Other states/areas may have similar internet privacy laws in place so check to see if this exists where you are!
A few times a day I go back to Reddit and see that subs I had followed are back to public and my comments in those subs are now visible in my history. So I delete the comments and leave (un-join) that sub. What that is showing me that there is a trickle.of subs flipping from private to public all throughout the day. (It does not mean that they will comply without protest going forward. They also may have new subs, ljke r/privacy. ) So if you want to make sure that your posts and comments are gone you will have to check more than once.
I’ve been slowly going back through my content and editing it all by mostly-deleting and inserting exerpts from a Rammstein sex scandal in today’s WaPo - it makes the comment threads become quite humorous sometimes!
I tried to nuke mine, but it was back after a day. Just not looking back for now.
If you live in the EU, GDPR them. California (and maybe some other US states) have similar laws iirc.
Anyone who has been online long enough has learned to deal with the fact that sites and communities they love almost never stay the same over enough time. Even here on the Fediverse we already have situations like Beehaw defederating.
I still think that’s one of the most damaging events to the success of the fediverse over the past week
People, including admins, have a right to make dumb decisions. They can be unfortunate, but it’s better to allow dumb decisions than to have a singular, benevolent ruler like Spez pre-2023.
yeah, this is both a feature and a bug of federation. I just wish it didn’t happen during such a critical period in lemmyverse.
Reddit won’t really die. It will filter out users that (I believe) are providing value to community. Reddit will keep corporate marketers, bots and fake discussion.
Oh well 🤷♂️
Reddit is downplaying the effect, but don’t believe it. The quality of posts and comments there has dropped by like 90%.
With how shitty they have been lately will that overflow and flip back to having goof content?
With how shitty they have been lately will that overflow and flip back to having goof content?
I love how WIRED, being part of the commercialized, centralized internet itself, cannot bring themselves to mention actual Reddit alternatives like Lemmy or kbin, and end this write-up of Reddit’s folly with basically “uh so people might go back to tumblr, I dunno, maybe someone should like, give someone startup money for a like new Reddit and we can live the cycle of the good ol days again”. Yeah don’t worry guys, you’ll get us next time.
What a wet fart.
Convenient how Wired (who is owned by Conde Nast who is owned by Advance Publications who has a stake of ownership in Reddit) mentions that “Like with Twitter, no clear alternative has emerged as a replacement.” and fails to mentioned the fediverse or forums.
Not to whitewash the take, but it’s a bigger issue.
The idea of success and being big meaning nearly the same as being relevant are the true villains of the story here. Every business wants to go big, every businessperson wants to make more, every platform wants to aggregate more and more content, etc. The people making the most impactful decisions in companies are plagued with these ideas and lead their businesses in the opposite direction, while staying blind to the alternatives, no matter how small, because they believe that the fact that their users are fleeing to smaller places is a joke, a temporary inconvenience, or a failure.
But it’s not, truly.
Kbin and Lemmy and Mastodon and Calckey are, indeed, smaller platforms than Reddit and Twitter are, with less content and fewer people, but the fact of the matter is that is a considerable amount of people that fled both Reddit and Twitter for good in favor of smaller, to some “less relevant” platforms. The effect is the same - less traffic for Reddit and Twitter, less influence from these two, less ad revenue.
I don’t want to sound like I truly believe that CEOs and other exec-level people are stupid and make decisions based on ego and simple solutions (like looking at numbers and judging nothing but the numbers), but hell, it does feel like humanity, as a whole, is not perfectly capable of properly functioning at the scale we’re trying to function at right now. Smaller companies are more sensible and have higher net profit margin, smaller communities are often safer and more welcoming (on top of being more manageable, too), smaller projects are easier to keep track of and deliver with more satisfying results, etc. Execs don’t seem like the type of people to even consider these simple facts, instead opting for being the bigger fish with the bigger wallet and market share.
Maybe that’s just me feeling increasingly less comfortable about anything that is sized to unmanageable degrees, thus just seeing things… but then again, that’s the tendencies we’ve seen time and time again in this late stage capitalism, with synergy becoming the same good ol’ monopoly, while the common folk begrudge another “mall”, its policies, and their results.
Damn I really feel this. I own a game dev studio and the pressure to make the biggest, best selling game is real from all sides (publishers, staff, gamers). However the people who fund games (publishers, platforms, etc.) are starting to understand AAA is too expensive and takes too long to make. There’s some silver lining in that more ‘medium’ experiences are getting a chance and I want to stay at this scale because I know infinite growth is just a recipe for eventual collapse. I may never own a mega yacht but I will happily work with my friends and take care of my family by being content with what risk and reward is available at this scale.
While you have absolutely made some good points here, particularly psychologically, there is a good reason these larger corporations and entities came in to existence and then became so effective.
As much as we are typically tribal animals rather than herd, we can’t ignore the simple facts of economies of scale and de-duplication of effort. The Fediverse will need to use more hardware than reddit would to support the same number of users as they spread across instances, and the admins of the various instances are all having to do the same kinds of setup, troubleshooting, scaling tasks as their communities grow, that reddit only had to do once.
You’re right that it’s a bigger issue, but it’s also a little more complex than your comment presents, I think.
I mean. I’m going back and forth between Lemmy and kbin, but let’s not kid ourselves. We’re not at a Digg-level exodus yet. The, for lack of a better word, hardcore users are moving on, but the casual redditors aren’t showing signs of going anywhere.
Not saying it might not happen, but we’re not there yet IMO.
The power users and enthusiasts go first to clear the path and kick the tires to make it easier for the others to come later.
Let’s see what happens when the 3rd party apps die at the end of the month & moderation goes all to shit. That’s when things get real for more people.
I agree, switchover isn’t going to be instantaneous, but when trolls & fascists start taking over and the collective IQ there drops 30 points, the exodus will accelerate. People won’t go to Reddit for discussions when the threads there assume Youtube quality, and without that, it’s just another doomscrolling app.
Reddit has so much more content than Digg that you really only need a small fraction of that on your new thing for that new thing to be viable.
This.
And this place doesn’t need to be the place where 50 million redditors go overnight.
It can’t be. That would crush it.
But just as the Fediverse microblogging space has seen steady growth following Elon taking over Twitter, this space will see steady growth, too. And it’s ok if that growth doesn’t include people that don’t understand that Reddit is a website and not just an app that lives on their phone or whatever.
They can come later when there’s more and better support for them.
Are you surprised? The status quo does not want a new competitor. Unfortunately for us, the easiest way to keep the fediverse down is to not even acknowledge it as an option.
it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thingThey kinda bring it up but nothing is named directly.
That’s also pretty dismissive. Who’s claiming to be the “next big thing”? And also, if they’re federating with each other, does it actually matter?
Like I know BlueSky isn’t federating with ActivityPub sites, but once their protocol is released, there’s a very good chance that it gets integrated into at least some Fediverse projects.
Good, don’t send the normies here plz
