It is a totally different reality. The nature of social media bubbles means that you are experiencing an entirely alien experience just by dint of being here. The problems of Reddit look huge when everyone around you keeps talking about them, you subscribe to communities that hate Reddit, and it sounds like everyone is on board with the exodus from Reddit because, well, they're here.
But Reddit has ten? a hundred? times more users than the Fediverse has, even fully federated. All the people who stay are going to be people who didn't deem the problem serious enough - this means complaints about Reddit won't be upvoted, and there is a high chance that the only way that users feel affected by what Reddit has done at all are the blackouts that affected their performance. Everytime someone posts there about what is wrong with Reddit, it simply results in ten replies about how the problem can't be that big, and Reddit still enjoys the engagement.
The nature of human intuition and social media means that it's very easy to fall into the trap of believing your universe is the real one, and it's just as true for us as it is for them. In my case I've chosen not to go back to Reddit entirely and provide the one objective metric I can of my unhappiness: -1 user on their site.
I don’t think there’s a benefit to trying to convince people to get the way you feel. Instead, make sure people looking for an alternative have one and let people who like Reddit go in peace.
Your post reads a bit like spam. Rather than saying “here’s another community” to a potentially skeptical one, you can post questions about whether something on another site is true or just link posts when appropriate. As proZD put it, you have to tickle their balls a little. People love to feel like they’ve discovered something.
Yeah I experienced that when I tried to invite some of the people in a subreddit to one I created in lemmy. I even invited the admins to lemmy to admin as well.
I’m really surprised how unwilling people are to change even if it’s in their best interest.
A lot of users use the official app and are on new Reddit, and the only "disruption" that they noticed was the protests themselves. They have no idea the damage Reddit has done to moderators and may not even notice the resulting decline in content quality as the smaller subset of people who post and moderate the most wander away to newer pastures.
But over time, they will notice. More and more subreddits will become the domain of uninterested powermods and repost bots. It takes time for a giant to fall, Digg didn't turn into Reddit overnight.
And fake posts. They’re getting even worse, and the users more gullible.
I read a BORU post the other day about a girl whose gamer boyfriend was trying to get her to have sex with him while his mic was still on. In the update she said she found his old 4chan account from years ago where he had saved a post about getting a partner to “perform” on the mic for the guy’s friends. 4chan doesn’t have accounts, she was called out on this, then edited her post to say she didn’t really know how 4chan works (no duh) but it was in fact some link aggregation site of 4chan exclusively where you can save posts. Instead of calling out her lack of credibility, most users in the BORU thread were doubling down on believing her.
I used the official app, but I didn’t have to wait to experience a disruption to know that this was the last straw. I switched to Lemmy just prior to the protest and never looked back. Regardless of the actual dispute, I’m not going to use a site run by someone who so obviously thinks as little of their users as spez does. Even I have more self-respect than that!
The quality of posts and responses since the “exodus” is completely apparent to any longtime reddit users. Admittedly elitist as it is, the spelling and grammar by it self has been base level evidence of that. Not to mention the myriad of other ways its taken a nosedive.
Reddit has already been in decline for a long time, but from the few times I’ve checked since the protests it’s much worse now, and quickly getting even worse. And as you said, most of the people left there do not care which is disappointing.
Unfortunately as optimistic as I was about lemmy, so far I’m not sold. Theres all of the same issues here if not more. We may have witnessed the birth and death of something really cool within a very short time (considering). Even if true options take a decade to build up I think it’s too late. The experiment has concluded.
It makes me sad because reddit used to be a really cool place. Rules were about allowing truly contributive content to be disseminated. Up votes were for ideas that added to the conversation in a meaningful way. Downvotes were reserved not for points that were disagreed upon, but thoughts that did not add substance to the conversation. It was a much better community to be a part of back then. That environment just doesn’t exist anymore on a broad level.
I'm staying here. At least I'm never going back to reddit so it's this or nothing. I've watched the decline in real time so I know what the bullsbit over there is
This is the biggest thing. A lot of my friends simply think Kbin and Lemmy are inferior and look outdated, which they are if you have only used the social media site called reddit, not the link aggravater called reddit
Absolutely superior on desktop, especially when combined with RES. It has also been what older users who started out with old.reddit have been used to. New.reddit is like forcing a social media site format like twitter or instagram on a forum type of website like reddit. Imagine a vertical twitter-like feed on a desktop browser. Inefficient and lots of wasted space.
On the other hand, lemmy web apps like Alexandrite provide a modern look while at the same time maintain the efficiency of a forum-style site.
The old Reddit site straight up shows more relevant info. The space on the page where it shows people’s comments (or text in case of self/ask type posts) is substantially bigger, compared to the “new” Reddit page which is clearly designed to optimize ad impressions.
It was more useful than new Reddit, and really only worked on desktop. New Reddit was slower and less customizable for specific subreddits. On desktop it also was impossibly unintuitive and hard to use for users who relied on accessibility tools.
It’s a desktop interface and it works best on desktop but I will say, I hated the mobile app so much that before I had found RIF i used old reddit in on my phone. I still use it whenever I need to search something on Reddit on my phone, with the auto redirect extension
I even went to a Digg gathering once. I got a poster of the dig guys. I forgot their names now. Dirty blonde chubby guy and black hair guy with faint mustache, last name Roses or Rosales?
That’s not how I remember the last days of Digg. The redesign happened and it was more like a tabloid news site than a the familiar user-submitted voted content in a list format we’d all grown to love. It was a virtually overnight change, unlike Reddit.
Reddit on the other hand, the changes are all mostly under the hood. The “default” subs are full of users who use new Reddit experience in the web / the default app. The number of users that use old Reddit / third party apps are exceedingly tiny but very vocal.
Based on that, my hypothesis is that not much will change with Reddit for a long time. It won’t be a swift downfall like the last few days of digg were. Most, if not all of my friend circle still use Reddit and simply don’t care about what they’re doing to their mod base. Personally I can’t in good conscience continue using a website that treats its most prolific users and moderators so poorly.
That may be where you went, but you've also bailed on Reddit as soon as they went bad too so you're a biased sample.
If you look at the graphs of the actual traffic visiting each of the sites, it took years for Reddit's activity to surpass Digg's and match its old level of popularity after Digg v4 rolled out. Here's an old article I just dug up with one such graph, I remember seeing a more detailed one recently but can't find the link right now.
We here on Lemmy/kbin are not "typical" users, we're early-adopters and the sorts of users who are most aware of and most sensitive to the sort of problems that Digg and now Reddit are inflicting on their userbase. The rest will follow, slowly, as the degradation grows and reaches their thresholds of awareness.
I don’t get your first paragraph. I didn’t claim Digg went poof overnight. Just that I was shocked at how the redesign was so different from the day before.
You said "Your graphs are actually consistent with Digg traffic dropping off a cliff immediately after the redesign." My graph actually shows a two-year-long decline, which I don't consider to be much of a cliff.
Your graphs are actually consistent with Digg traffic dropping off a cliff immediately after the redesign. My memory is hazy but according to this a week after the release they replaced the CEO and two months later they layed off 37% of staff.
That graph shows a two-year-long "cliff." Even by the end of it Reddit still hadn't reached the level Digg had been at yet. They may have immediately launched into layoffs and whatnot but the inertia of the userbase carried on much longer than that.
Reddit hasn't gone a month since cutting off the API. This is super early times by comparison.
Your graph only three data points. Lets say hypothetically the traffic was 100m requests/yr and dropped off immediately after the redesigned you’d still expect to see something like
2009 - 100m
2010 - 60m
2011 - 0
This page has some graphs with more data points but the tl;dr is traffic was down by more than 50% within a month.
Admittedly reddit’s growth was much more muted but Digg did really just destroy the site.
Indeed, that's much more of a "cliff." Sorry, I should have spent more time trying to find that more-detailed graph I saw earlier. But as you say, it took a long time for Reddit to grow. And Digg's remaining activity was surprisingly stable for a "dead" website - half the users seem to have stuck around indefinitely.
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