I miss reddit

Warning: This is a rant.

I don’t really know how to describe it but the content isn’t quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn’t quite seem as ‘normal’ as what I’m used to from reddit.

There’s a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn’t toxic… just saying). Random conversations go into: “omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service.” Then we have the ‘if we don’t defederate with Meta the world ends’ conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized…idk. Then the: “if your app isn’t open source its awful and terrible for the world” people.

Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn’t quite my cup of tea.

These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn’t stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).

The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.

Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.

In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn’t such assholes and this whole thing didn’t happen the way it did.

I’m completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that’s to be expected with something at this stage.

Please don’t hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion. Though I genuinely wonder if others feel the same way.

/Rant

eugenia,
@eugenia@lemmy.world avatar

I will reply as someone who in 2015 had 340,000 followers overall in the big social media of the time (tumblr, insta, fb, flickr etc). I was the world’s most popular collage artist at the time (not an exaggeration). I even got selected by NYTimes for having among the “best book covers of the year” in 2016, among other works for many magazines etc.

Long story short, for an artist to make it without a gallery (I despise the whole idea of galleries because they force you to make the same kind of art all the time), they must base their business via social media. There’s no other way. And so I did, and did well. Well, come 2017, the enshitification of these platforms started happening. Nothing was chronological anymore. And since I’m not a person who shows what they ate today, or making it all about myself (I was only posting art, not personal stuff), their new recommendation algorithms destroyed my business. I used to make thousands per year to sustain my life, because each time I’d have a sale, people would SEE my post about it and if they liked my art, they’d buy. Now, my posts are served to about 1/10th of my followers, and no new users find me, because hashtags aren’t embraced for finding new users anymore, everything’s just recommendations. Within 5 short years since the big algorithmic, I was now making only about $100/month via my art. And that was not just for me, but 95% of other artists and photographers out there too. The recommendation system of all social media (including youtube now) only promotes a few superstars in any given field, not everyone is getting their share fair of exposure based on chronology. Many online small businesses don’t work anymore because everything is not a fair field anymore. Even buying ads doesn’t make a difference.

So, I have no interest in using things like Threads, where you are literally bombarded with celebrity and brands content, but almost none of the people you follow.

Reddit has followed the same line, it’s just that we see it less, because it’s more discussion-driven. But similar changes have happened to it – in spirit. I still use reddit only for 3 sub-reddits that are too specific and don’t have enough people for here yet. I don’t use the rest of reddit.

On top of that, I’m not interested in trackers, ads, and everything that eventually lead to enshitification of these platforms. So now, I only use federated services. I have accounts with lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, peertube, nostr, matrix, etc.

No, none of my friends are there (my husband has a mastodon account, and that’s it). And I don’t care if they aren’t. When I’m with my mom next time I’ll install a matrix client for her too, so she can call me for free (so we don’t have to use fb messenger, the only big app I still use, so I can talk to her in Greece for free). Then, I won’t need of these big social media apps.

As for my business, it will never come back (especially now with AI art). But at least, I have MORE eyes here on the fediverse than I have on the big social media. I posted a new painting on my pixelfed yesterday, and it got 17 likes, out of just 27 followers. On instagram I usually get 70 likes out of 3600 followers (that’s on my illustration account, my other, collage account, had nearly 170,000 followers in its hey day). And consider that Pixelfed only has 160,000 users (plus federated via mastodon by some instances). Given that amount of likes on the fediverse, if Instagram was still chronological and hashtags were still bearing importance as they did in the past, my posts there could have about 5,000 likes – given their 2+ bn users. Instead, with their recommendation engine, I get only 70 likes, and no new followers. So proportionally, I get more eyes on the fediverse, than I do on the big social media. So why would I want to go back to big social media? Just to be served Kim Kardashian content that I never asked for it? I won’t.

csm10495,
@csm10495@sh.itjust.works avatar

I do miss sequential feeds. … do also agree with the general shitification stuff.

Sorry about the loss in livelihood. That sucks.

Lateralking,

I agree, the content is just not here at the moment and I want to back to Reddit. I’m holding strong for the moment but we’ll see where it leads.

Wooly,

I’m fine with lemmy, but I’m really noticing the lack of videos now. I didn’t think I’d miss it so much but the porn is just pics, the dog content is just pics, no TikTok videos.

It’s a big hole I hope gets filled.

Holyhandgrenade,
@Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world avatar

I was kind of feeling that Reddit had started to prioritize videos over everything else, so I’m fine with this for now. But I also hope Lemmy gets some video support soon because posting links to Youtube videos isn’t ideal.

Wooly,

Even if some apps figure out a way to play links in app I’d be happy. Pretty sure Boost/Reddit used to be able to do that with links from redgifs. Just apply that to TikTok and shit.

ScreaminOctopus,

Unfortunately it’s really hard even for huge companies to reliably and profitably host video, youtube bled money for decades before they added the insane amount of advertising and changed their content policy to be as ad friendly as possible. I’d expect reddit was profitable, I or near break even at the least, before they added video hosting. VCs definitely wouldn’t have let reddit bleed for 18 years on large losses, it’s just not part of the business model. The problem is, after they accepted VC money they were likely pressured into adding video as a way to copy tiktok. It would really difficult for instance hosts running on goodwill and a bit of donation money to pay for video hosting without bankrupting themselves. The amount you need to pay for data transfer and server infrastructure is exponentially higher.

That said, I’m not sure how scalable peertube is irl, maybe it could be done with good peertube embedding support or something? That probably be the ideal solution because it forces users to give something back in return for being able to watch video due to its P2P nature.

imrichyouknow,
@imrichyouknow@sh.itjust.works avatar

Block whatever communities you deem to be noise, problems mostly solved.

g0nz0li0,

Lemmy/KBin are in early adopter territory right now, but with some of the iOS and Android apps maturing and hitting the app stores (scarily fast!) there’s a pathway for less tech-centric people to find their way over.

For now I try to focus on the pro of the “small user base” con, which is that engagement is way higher and there isn’t a metric shit-ton of karma-whoring comments and posts.

I’m using Memmy (iOS) and am subscribed on communities via a couple instances. It’s a Sunday arvo and I’m enjoying a drink and scrolling away, and for a minute I forgot I wasn’t scrolling Reddit on Apollo. That’s pretty amazing considering that a few weeks ago I couldn’t conceive of an alternative platform - and there functionally wasn’t, at least to the extent it is now. I reckon in another few months things will have really progressed again. So hang in there 🐱

csm10495,
@csm10495@sh.itjust.works avatar

👍

Guatch,

I don’t miss Reddit. I do miss Redditors. I’ve been through 20, or 30 different social media platforms from open source to Nostr to here for now, and what they all lack is that snarky something Redditors had. That’s not Reddit though. That was the people.

csm10495,
@csm10495@sh.itjust.works avatar

This is so true. For me it’s the community, etc.

Guatch,

%100 I wish more of them would migrate elsewhere. Id end up wherever they did if that happened

Legendsofanus,
@Legendsofanus@lemmy.world avatar

I miss people randomly breaking out in songs

Guatch,

The hour long smart ass replies to smart ass replies is what did it for me.

Legendsofanus,
@Legendsofanus@lemmy.world avatar

The graveyard of deleted comments in a controversial post or the numerous awards cuz someone made a punny joke. r/foundthemobileuser

Guatch,

But the replies to deleted comments still remained so you could kinda see how big of an ass the dude was, but not exactly, and when the question was in-fact to stupid for r/nostupidquestions

Legendsofanus,
@Legendsofanus@lemmy.world avatar

This kind of dissociative coherence when you didn’t know what the fuck was going on was hilarious and I think a seed for how i came to think about media (e.g. not caring if it’s a sequel and watching it just to see what the fuck is going on) Shame that people on Facebook don’t delete shit halfway nor that Facebook tells you this post was deleted, would be so much more fun. omg the mix-up of r/trees and r/weed haha

toasteranimation,
@toasteranimation@lemmy.world avatar

yes! Always loved seeing a lost redditor come into /r/trees with a picture of a laurel oak in their yard asking a bunch of stoners if it looks diseased Lolol

Legendsofanus,
@Legendsofanus@lemmy.world avatar

lmao that is hilarious

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

There are a lot of niche communities that will stay on reddit for a long time.

But let's face it, the prolific posters on the big subs, the ones that generate lots of views and engagement and comments, are already leaving reddit. They were posting there because it was fun and easy. They weren't paid, except in laughs and comments. When reddit decided to sacrifice usability on the altar of revenue, they started to drive those people away. As reddit makes more changes to align to revenue generation, they'll drive the most prolific posters away, and eventually regular consumers of that content will quit coming.

Many will come to lemmy and kbin and Mastodon, in time.

charlieb,
charlieb avatar

Just want to point out reddit was open source, and built on top open source software. Techie weirdos built that community and the masses came along later. I expect we'll see the same around here for a while, but people will contribute what they want to contribute.. infosec and oss is pretty niche, I suspect it'll be out grown eventually.

anon,
anon avatar

I miss it too - the curated experience after years of filtering out the crap and muting the nonsense, the sleek UX in Apollo, and the many friendly and familiar voices left behind who didn’t make the switch.

My advice would be - don’t give up on the Fediverse just yet. It will take a bit of time for the dust to settle and these multiple federated communities to find their voice. Like on Reddit, don’t ever browse /all - it’s just a litany of low-effort memes. Be deliberate about which communities you sub to, and browse by /sub. There’s enough quality content here to fill a feed, though perhaps not in any single community where the critical mass has not yet been reached to offer fresh content throughout the day.

Potatomache,
Potatomache avatar

It's kinda tricky because a lot of people who just left reddit, left for the reasons you're ranting about. I think that's why there's such a prevalence in posts that are anti-Meta/anti-Threads/anti-corpo. It's so fresh in everyone's mind how greediness has ruined a lot of communities they've built.

I will say, there's a learning curve to using the fediverse (I'm still getting the hang of it). But there's a way to get more "normal" content, you just have to deal with the reality that a lot of those communities are starting out and need your contribution to become a real community.

Besides, you don't have to completely give up reddit. I still use mine and I don't have any intention of deleting it any time soon.

yool_ooloo,

Thanks for your post. I totally agree.

I've been at Reddit for over a decade. Reddit is comfortable, I don't have to think very much after work to browse and post.

Now, on Lemmy/kbin, everything is new and I'm learning but I like it for the most part.

It's like going to school after coming home from work!

I still go to Reddit, but only briefly and I don't contribute.

soft_frog,

I only use it logged out via web. Right now there's no alternative for a lot of things, but I'm not participating anymore, and I am trying to participate in the fediverse and build up some new communities.

coconutxyz,

It is understandable but also lemmy is so new you can’t expect the number of community and user as reddit

csm10495,
@csm10495@sh.itjust.works avatar

Agreed. It needs time to build up.

MisterMoo,
MisterMoo avatar

I miss Reddit as seen through Apollo, and that Reddit is dead.

crazyminner,

“I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized.idk.” Meta won’t normalize the fediverse, people educating themselves and understanding why we need the fediverse will normalize it. Meta/Threads will kill the fediverse, this is a known playbook companies use to kill things they can’t buy.

csm10495,
@csm10495@sh.itjust.works avatar

That’s a thing though: I’m not really a big fediverse person. I’m a person who wants a community, info, etc.

If Meta can bring that to me better than I might be ok with that. I wouldn’t want it to kill the fediverse by any means, but still I’m not talking about that.

user1919,

Even if and it’s a big if meta kills fediverse, privacy oriented people will just move on to other new thing as they are already used to packing up things and leaving no traces.

lom,

For me it’s outdoor communities and niche communities. Haven’t quite left Reddit, but I’ll be continuing to use my third party client with an injected API key

Willie,

Be the change you want to see. If you have something to say about a post that isn't a meme, pop in and leave a comment on it. If you don't want to talk about Meta and Open Source Software and privacy, then don't interact with those comments.

Or at least that's the way I see it.

csm10495,
@csm10495@sh.itjust.works avatar

I try to do this and will continue to. Thanks!

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