The link contains db0’s views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it’s worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:
- a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
- the illusion that everything is fine based on “raw” numbers like engagement;
- that Reddit was never a “good” site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
- the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
- the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.
The text mentions an article from Cory Doctorow. I’ve copied it to a pastebin, in case someone can’t access it.
EDIT: I hope that the author doesn’t mind, but I’ll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it’ll be a bit more accessible.
Reddit is a dead site running
from July 10, 2023
Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote
"The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah boyd, describing the last days of Myspace:
If a central node in a network disappeared and went somewhere else (like from MySpace to Facebook), that person could pull some portion of their connections with them to a new site. However, if the accounts on the site that drew emotional intensity stopped doing so, people stopped engaging as much. Watching Friendster come undone, I started to think that the fading of emotionally sticky nodes was even more problematic than the disappearance of segments of the graph.
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
This is exactly what is happening to Reddit currently. The most passionate contributors, the most tech-literate users, and the integrators who make all the free tools in the ecosystem around reddit which makes that service much more valuable have left and will never look back.
From the dashboards of u/spez however, things might looks great. Better even! As the drama around their decision making certainly caused a lot more posts and interactions, and the loss of the 3rd party apps drove at least a few users to the official applications.
But this is an illusion. Like MySpace before them, the metric might look good, but the soul of the site has been lost. It’s not easy to explain but since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time. half a month ago, posts could barely pass 2 digits, now they regularly break 3 and sometimes 4 digits. And the quality of the discussions is a pleasure to go through.
I said it before, but reddit was never a particularly good site. Their saving grace was the openness of their API and their hands-off approach to communities. The two things they just destroyed. It’s those 3rd party tools and communities that made reddit like it is. As as the ecosystem around reddit sputters and dies, the one around the Threadiverse is progressing in an astonishing rate.
Not only are the integrators coming from reddit aware what kind of bots and tools are going to be very useful, but a lot of those tools are shut off from reddit and switched to the lemmy API instead, explicitly cannibalizing the quality of the reddit experience. And due to the completely open API of the Threadiverse, those tools now get access to unparalleled access and power.
Sure if you visit reddit currently, you’ll see people talking and voting, but as someone who’s been there from the start, the quality has fallen off a hill and is reaching terminal velocity. But it feels like one’s still flying!
Not just the quality of the posts where only the most superficial meme stuff can rise to the top, not just the quality of the discussion, but even mere vibe of the discussions is just lost.
There’s now significant bitterness and hostility, especially as the mods who were responsible for maintaining the quality, have gone or are being hands off or just don’t have the tools needed to keep up. I’ve heard from multiple people who are leaving even while they were not originally planning to, because the people left over in reddit are just so toxic.
This is a very vicious cycle which will accelerate the demise of that site even further.
A house fire can go from a spark to a raging inferno in less than a minute. The flames consuming reddit are just now climbing up the curtains and it still appears manageable, but it’s already too late. Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.
Those “bad actors” are users too though. They’re real people who enjoy causing outrage. We’ve had them since the invention of BBS. We used to call them trolls. I think we still call them trolls, but we used to too. Seriously though, so often now people jump to the conclusion that the guy with the shitty take and horrible attitude must be from some Russian cyber farm. Maybe he’s just an asshole.
Personally I suspect that a significant amount of the negativity on Reddit really was was organized by state actors in order to sow division. The constant ageism, for instance, always struck me as suspect. Someone would inevitably bring up how awful boomers were no matter how irrelevant it was to the discussion.
Yes, to some degree, it could also just be the usual toxicity that people explore when they get their first taste of anonymity on the internet. I like to hope that people eventually mature and grow out of it, but the younger you are, the less time you’ve had to work out those dark indulgences.
I don’t see that kind of talk being representative of real world interaction and whenever that happens it’s a useful reminder that some of what we see on the internet is kind of a glitch, like an artifact of an attempt at simulated communication that ended up failing because of broken mechanisms in the human component failing to translate real interaction into the virtual space.
Like the whole woke-war that bad actors are trying to drum up to increase cultural divide…the internet spotlights only the worst stories and segregated social groups know nothing about the out-groups except these rage-bait stories.
Well, except a bunch of subreddits straight up banned you for calling out trolls. Because it hurts the Facebook crowd’s feelings to be ostracized for being stupid.
I hear you and I agree they’ve been around since I first started using mIRC 27 years ago. But the trend now is that there are more of them than there are of us. It takes ten minutes to load up a large language model to behave like a right or left wing troll and let it loose on Reddit, or here for that matter. In fact, I’m going to code one up tonight for shits and giggles that spreads positivity.
How do you train the LLM? Just follow the ChatGPT docs and point it to the API as a source?
ChatGPT can work, but it’s expensive. You can use oobabooga and grab a model off huggy face then code up a personality. After that you have the API send generation requests to the model and post as if it’s a human.
Thanks! I’m going to give that a shot. I’ve been messing around with the ChatGPT API as a content generator for another project.
I made a bot that interacted with my Twitch chat using this! Very fun use of the model. I’ll warn you it always uses 100% when processing, usually for a couple seconds. It can cause stuttering while gaming.