Reddit became openly hostile to the people and content that made it great. It’s not exactly surprising that the good users eventually went elsewhere. You could really tell shit went downhill after they killed the third party apps.
I’m sure it’s nothing and everything is fine. Now, who wants to buy some of this Reddit stock? I’ll cut you a special deal so you don’t miss out! … Anyone?
They actually tweaked the upbote/down vote stuff back then to stop actually showing the true amount of upvotes and down votes, directly. They started fuzzing votes to supposedly help prevent manipulation.
Look, I’m not trying to short okay? I’m sure Reddit will do great. Just let me borrow your stock and I’ll make sure you have it back in like 6 months or so
Yeah, the big short is even a movie! One positive i got from hanging around stonks, amc and gme subs was how much i learned about how fucked the stock market is.
Waaaaay more fucked, gamified, and straight up broken than even the most cynical citizen thinks.
A special deal? Doesn’t the message basically say “give us your data so you maybe have a chance at buying stock at full price, and be thankful we’re not marking it up”?
The whole idea is a grift. They are directly appealing to people who largely should not be buying shares due to their financial situation and are a lot less critical of the pretty poor numbers they published than professional exploiters investors will be.
Obviously this is done in hopes of selling more shares and binding users long term, though that will probably just accelerate the enshittification because suddenly the last remaining power users are turned into shareholders instead
Right but the whole “give us all your info and MAYBE you can buy stock” is the part that sounds like a secondary grift. If they wanted to pump they could just have some set amount and do a first come first serve right off the bat.
Perhaps you moved from Europe to the States in the interim like I did.
Edit to add: sorry if this came off as snarky, was not my intention. Just wanted to point out that it’s not always so clear-cut. I created my Reddit account in 2008 when I lived in the Netherlands. Then I moved to the US in 2016 and became a citizen in 2019.
I was interested in buying a share just to be in for the ride, but then they asked for my real name to be associated with my handle. It’s like they never understood what reddit was about at all.
You can post on 4chan as anon and prove your identity too
Reddit is (or at least was) psuedo-anonymous. You can easily get identities, and they’re not linked to you
For a lot of people, I’d say most in the early years (at least in my experience), you didn’t share usernames with your friends on the platform… Irl Redditors loved to identify themselves as a Redditor, we shared communities and memes, but only two of my closest friends ever knew my main account
I kept a second account that could potentially be tied to me (more work related stuff), because on my main account I always had the freedom to discard it if I embarrassed myself enough. That knowledge makes me far more likely to hit post instead of discard
I got permabanned from reddit for repeatedly trolling some ahs (probably not entirely unjustified). Whenever I create a new account and forget to only log in via a private browser window, the new account will be permabanned as well. So know I go “well, fuck it, I don’t need reddit”.
I don’t even intend to try to find out if I could somehow beg somebody to revoke my ban. After I got banned I just send a reply asking the responsible mod to kindly delete themselves.
After 13 years as a user and earning somewhere over 70k karma last year via discussions about topics like zoology, psychology, fitness, politics and video games, I have slowly stopped using Reddit the last few months because of the blatant censorship. I went from posting regularly each week to 3 posts total in the last 3 months. TL:DR is I got banned from /r/news and /r/worldnews for comments that broke no rules and weren’t rude or hateful. The mods just insulted me when I appealed. Actual Reddit staff could not care less, and I got a temp harassment ban for saying a mod handled my appeal badly (while carefully avoiding insulting them personally). I go back a few times a week to look at topics I like, but I actually made my account here on Lemmy today because I’m searching for long-term alternatives.
Of course bad experiences were always a thing but overall you could talk things out or just move on and come back to the same forum another day. Now unopposed mods completely kill any discussion with permabans if it bothers them personally. The site-wide and subreddit rules are functionally just suggestions and Reddit (the company) does nothing to enforce them in many cases. Hateful speech is fine so long as it fits the subreddit and civil discussion is not if it doesn’t. Hate men/women/liberals/conservatives/whatever? Just find the right subreddit and you can get away with truly inhumane takes, but better hope you don’t break ranks while a mod is watching (even if you’re reasonable/polite). Thus Reddit has devolved into echo chambers where you are either preaching to the choir or silenced forever. I’m not interested in farming worthless karma by helping circulate a few popular ideas among people who are essentially guaranteed to feel the same way. Or interested in being treated badly for trying to take those opinions elsewhere.
I got invited to participate in their IPO at an “institutional investor” price with their e-mail saying “you have helped make Reddit what it is today”. No thanks Reddit. Not only does my brief research say Reddit isn’t profitable, but you don’t treat your users well or consistently. I can’t predict the future, but I feel like I watched how this goes when Musk took over Twitter and it’s not pretty.
Honestly, it’s the users that are killing it now. What started as a funny place to chill, throw some funny memes and talk about some niche stuff turned into a toxic Tumblr tire fire. Reddit as it is now makes 4chan look like the normal people.
late to the party. Q: What is it that corporations will not tolerate about online commmunity, crowdsourced news and info?? Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Reddit… all eaten and changed?
Silly thoughts…
the life in a discussion site is the exchange of ideas/thoughts. For that to happen users need to actually listen, process, and discuss. Reddit’s structure has discouraged that for years.
signal to noise ratio - in order for the discussion board site to be useful, there’s some magic signal to noise ratio that has to be maintained. Otherwise, its some style of chaos.
Why I left - in a technical subreddit, someone asked a technical question ‘Who still uses XYZ, and why?, I never quite understood it’, I gave a short primer on how it worked, with a couple analogies. The OP replied testily ’ I don’t need anyone to explain to me how it works.'. And then testily to other helpful responses, and then deleted their acct.
The experts left most of the technical subs I am in 5-10 years ago. My guess is that discussions are mostly noise: things I could have learned if I read the instructions, or how can I do this without understanding anything about it.
somewhere I read that the upvote/downvote counts on the front page are made up… modified by reddit… so that people don’t know what they need to do to get to the front. By adding this, they gave themselves full editorial control of the front page. It’s downhill from there.
Answer: corporations don’t tolerate unexploited value. Online communities are rather good at gathering value, over the years, as their users add knowledge. That makes corporations grow their eyes and say “DAMN! Look at all that value that I gathered! It’s time for me to reap the profits!”.
Reddit’s structure: I think so, too. And, more importantly, it’s something that “the Fediverse forums” (Lemmy and Kbin/Mbin for now; SubLinks and Piefed when they join) should eventually deal with.
Why you left - yeah, the environment doesn’t “feel” cooperative any more. Your example seems to me that the user was disingenuously (or worse, idiotically) disguising a subjective opinion (XYZ is bad) as a question; that’s bread-and-butter in Reddit nowadays, sealioning there is mostly through feigned ignorance.
up/downvote counts - it’s a bit less creepy; they add/subtract a random number to the actual score, mostly to prevent karma farming. Still opaque though, a bad thing in a collaborative environment.
It would help if they didn’t ban people. I got permabanned for nothing. I posted some timing not permitted on World News, and then made a new account to ask a personal question and accidentally posted something on World News with this new account and was banned for deliberately trying to evade a ban.
Just stupid. I guess they don’t need people on reddit.
Lemmy is not the perfect replacement but with some work it can become better. It could use some improved tooling, I want the ability to follow other users, and there’s always room for improvement with the apps.
I’m not sure what’s up with the front page algorithms too. It should be moving way faster - I see almost the same posts there day to day but if I go to each community there’s tons of new stuff.
Lemmy.world is still running Lemmy 0.18.x and will soon upgrade to 0.19.x and 0.19 has scaled sorting.
Improved Post Ranking There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes
I feel the same way about some of the subs that I’d like to see on here as well. I just worry about how to gain traction. Like how to get more people to engage and actually use the community. Is it just random people stumbling across it? Or is there a better way?
Like how to get more people to engage and actually use the community.
When you create it, populate it with as many posts that you can, that are original/legit, before announcing it to the public.
When someone shows up and they see a new sub and there’s no posts they just leave and never come back.
Then I would try to figure out a way of advertising it on Reddit, letting them know that the Lemmy equivalent exists. I’m not sure Reddit will allow you to get away with that, but that would be important to do.
But most importantly, you got to ‘prime the pump’, you have to make it look like it’s already got traction, it’s already got attention, before announcing it to the world.
I agree with you there. I imagine Lemmy doesn’t have it nearly so bad yet, but it was sad finding a cool-sounding subreddit that was positively littered with spam.
With like one post saying “So is there anything relevant about the topic here?”
You could tell there was an idea there but it needs gardening. I’m honestly surprised there is such a high percentage of people willing to be active, unpaid mods on some of those higher traffic subs!
I like the phrase you used for maintaining a community. “Gardening” seems appropriate. You’ve got to till the soil (infrastructure), plant the seeds (content), water and fertilize (users), and watch it grow as you pull the weeds (moderate). Lemmy definitely needs more and better gardening tools so we, the community, should build them.
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