I've never been sentimental about a social media site but it's sad for me to see reddit so clearly killing itself. Pushshift is already banned and Apollo is soon to follow. Reddit will either pivot fully to a mainstream audience or die out. It's just sad for me to see it doing it to itself.
Reddit is not what it was when I joined. Back in the early 2010's reddit really felt like the internet's evolution from forums. Not going to pretend it was the first, but it really did feel like something was special about it. The community aspect was really important back then. All of the sudden, it felt like you could literally build a community around anything, with little effort, and the "Build it and they will come" factor would kick in.
But things have spoiled since then. We have over a decade worth of "Eternal Septembers", and being a redditor turned into "being a redditor" has turned into, we'll it's just another part of social media infrastructure. Pretty much everybody I know who has use the site has basically sectioned themselves off from using the site as a a whole and just have their specific subs that they browse. I'm a programmer so I basically just use it for the programming subs and different games I play like OSRS, Factorio, etc.
And I guess, a last thought, I don't think reddit is going to die from this. I would wager the vast majority of the userbase really doesn't give a shit, and to be honest, that is fine. Like I said, reddit is part of internet social infrastructure at this point. It's probably still going to be useful to prefix google searches with "reddit some product" to find the best human reviews of that product. But for me, I don't really feel the need to keep using it day to day. I'm looking for a community and I can find it elsewhere.
I’m mostly just upset about the fact that healthy niche communities that existed on Reddit are likely to die rather than migrate in earnest. Reddit itself has been feeling downhill pretty much from the moment I joined, but it was the only service that managed to have not only very specific niche communities, but a wealth of active ones with quality contributors.
I just joined here and haven’t lurked too much, but the format here looks nice to foster that type of growth over time. I just hope it can be rebuilt to even a portion of what I’m leaving behind.
In a way, I mourned for reddit a long time ago. I stumbled (literally, stumbleUpon'd) reddit way back before the great Digg migration, when it was still mostly a haven for techies. The site went through a great many changes. Some good, some bad, some just... different.
At some point it got a little much. I've known for a number of years that I was growing increasingly alienated from it. Part of it was the Nazis and Reddit's inability or unwillingness to deal with any of the hate and bots. Part of it was the pervasive meme / low effort image culture. Those things were always there, but there was a time it'd get you the stink eye and an annoyed upvote.
Besides Hackernews (which has always been full of a certain Silicon Valley type), there wasn't really too many places to go. I've just been kinda waiting in the funeral parlor, hoping a ride to something else would come while I mostly browse the niche subreddits.
It's my hope that this incident starts the seeds of old forum culture as expressed through multiple lemmys. That's a pretty ambitious hope, but still. It's well past the time for the big social media networks to break up.
Reddit felt like one of the last decent places on the internet that wasn't being completely taken over by ads or suggested content. Sure it was there, but I also knew that there were a lot of real people there too. When in doubt, anything you googled could have the word "reddit" added and get you an answer. It feels like all of the social tools we use to communicate with each other on the internet are rapidly deteriorating in favor of profits.
I don't mourn Reddit, but I am sad that it's another example of the commoditization and corporatization of the modern internet.
Hopefully federated networks, P2P protocols, and FOSS software/frameworks are able to provide a robust and healthy web going forward into the future. The era of the free general internet is over, has probably been for a long time honestly. Now if massive companies want to stay afloat in that space, they will need to make huge profits. Everything as you are seeing nowadays, is being monetized and centralized.
Maybe this truly is late stage Capitalism and the collapse of it all is on the horizon, idk. But as long as I have an internet connection and things I am interested in doing on there, I will be trying to resist the corpos.
Long live the free and open internet!
(PS, power to the users, and I can and do contribute to the products and services I use from these wonderful people in our communities <3)
IDK...On one hand, we lose a repository of content and information. On the other hand, people will move to federated, non-megacorp-controlled/ran places like the Lemmy federation and safeguard our future. I'm personally excited if it means priming the pump for a mass migration to the Fediverse as a household name. However Reddit was the sole savior of enshittified Google Search since like 2017, and if it goes away that means Google Search will also stagnate heavily. People usually migrate from proprietary service 1 to proprietary service 2 so I really really hope people keep flocking to Lemmy despite the excessive load concerns. lemmy.ml and beehaw should close registrations at some point to distribute the load more evenly though
I think what I'm most sad about is losing easily searchable information. Finding an obsscure thread about some weird question I had is great. Maybe that will be preserved somehow. Idk. That and the more unhinged reddit posts and copypastas throughout history.
And the lemmy equivalent of the jumper cable guy. Or the ol' switcharoo. Makes me sad to think of all the stuff that we are losing but there will be some interesting new legends, no doubt
There's definitely some stages of withdrawal going on for me. Having relied on that site for many years as a source of information, commentary, and just plain ol' entertainment scrolling on my lunch break, I definitely feel the sense of loss.
But that AMA yesterday with Spez really enforced that the site's not going to be at all what it used to be.
I feel like reddit dying could be a positive thing for me. For years now I have felt the negative influence that its toxic environment - fueled by impersonal, discordant interactions - had on me. Not to mention the complete destruction of my ability to concentrate caused by the micro dopamine hit targeting of social media UX. I'm hoping that moving to a smaller platform will help with some of that pervasive anger I feel as a result of constant reddit usage.
There was a recent comment I read about how it’s become this incredible resource for the most obscure tech issues and they were reluctant to delete their posts and accounts because they’d receive random messages of thanks years after a tech resource post was made.
And it’s true. Reddit has become an invaluable resource for these kinds of things. Not only that, but it’s one of the few places that exists on the web where cohesive and coherent discussions even exist. It was always the community and discussion that made reddit great and they want to turn it into yet another swipebait infested serotonin sponge. I sincerely hope lemmy can take its place, but there are going to be some major growing pains if we get big influx of “redfugees.”
It almost makes me think that when something becomes such an enormous and invaluable public resource, there should be a legal compulsion to archive it before doing anything that will compromise its accessibility.___
Yeah for sure. I was on reddit for 13 years, there were users I recognised by name, people I was friendly with, people I'd have intense debates with, many, many, many subreddits I loved.
But nothing lasts forever, and this place seems nice so here's to new beginnings 🍻
Same exact situation here. Been on reddit since digg v4 happened. Reddit was far from perfect, but for the most part I enjoyed my time there. If this is the end of reddit, then so be it. Lemmy/Beehaw looks like it can grow into a good replacement.
Add comment