‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit::A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever
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“We will teach them our respectful ways. By force.”
Come on now, give him some credit. He waited a whole few days before completely going back on his words.
Not one mention of where said moderators who left went to…
A lot of which were good mods too. I’ve noticed a lot more racism and otherwise right wing posting being left alone/unmoderated since the protest, in the subs I used to browse actively - nowadays I just check in with them every now and then without an account and the intentional or not lack of moderation is making me want to stop doing even that.
Probably depends on your subs. Most of mine have went far, far left and have become a tiresome dog pile of virtue signaling from behind keyboards and screens.
And I’m a leftist. There seems to be a huge difference these days in being a leftist and being a “this is now my only personality trait” leftist through which all views must be fundamentally filtered. Even non-political/non-social. It has made some subs unreadable for me, specifically my state and city subs.
Edit: I guess where I am going with it is that the extremes are becoming more extreme and seeking out new frontiers now that moderation is light.
I started an entire instance - https://lemdro.id - to provide a home to Reddit subreddits such as r/Android and r/Google Pixel (and other technical stuff)
The Granuiad has been pushing a lot of sideways shit lately. That’s a shame.
The what?
Completely stopped using Reddit since they blocked third party apps in July 2023. I never accessed Reddit through other channels than smartphone.
Exactly. This wasn’t a protest as far as I’m concerned. They shut me out. So I no longer visit reddit or moderate any of my subreddits. It’s that simple
Yup. Both the desktop website and the official app are garbage UX. With no third party app option, I could not use Reddit even if I wanted to.
old.reddit is still usable, but I’ve also pretty much stopped using reddit since the blackout.
RedReader on mobile still works. You can find it in the fdroid app store. There’s also rtv for a terminal reddit client on the desktop.
Wait, how is it still working?
Just FYI, I can still access Reddit through the Infinity app on F-Droid on Android. I don’t have a clue why or how, but it works.
Same, my version of boost still works for some reason. No idea why but it’s useful if I’m trying to search for something
That’s why I’m here too 🤝
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Completely quit Reddit. It’s a shame that the article fails to mention the fediverse as a new rising alternative in response to enshittification.
Windows is experiencing enshittification as well, but I still have yet to see anyone recommend Linux to me. The only mainstream device I know that runs a Linux distro is none other than the Steam Deck.
It really is a shame that not many people are actually trying to use these genuinely great alternatives.
Windows 10 is for me like Infinity for Reddit was (now I’m on Eternity 🙏). As soon as Windows 10 is EOL it’s Linux time. I’m already getting used to it with VMs. Maybe even before that depending on how long my current device will last.
This is a surprisingly good comparison.
Thanks.
2024 will have mentions of ActivityPub and Fediverse.
Probably in context of Meta and Threads, sadly.
Leaving Reddit basically helped me use social media a lot less. And I’m proud of myself.
Yeah it has been nice. I definitely miss out on some news, but it’s worth it to avoid a lot of the other content there. I pop in with redreader every so often, but honestly it doesn’t seem worth it to ever fully go back.
Despite spending around 15 years on Reddit, I found it surprisingly easy to quit. I do miss some niche subreddits that just won’t get traction here, but overall my switch to Lemmy worked out for the best.
With that being said, Reddit is still going strong, and you’re deluded if you think this will change their IPO fortunes. The quality will plummet, but once the shares are owned and sold they won’t care.
It will definitely affect the ipo. Ipo’s are all based on expected growth. Any loss of users, mods, content, etc affects that. It was already in the news that whatever company wrote down the value of their holdings.
And people are getting wise to traffic numbers being inflated by bots.
As a moderator of a fairly large sub over there, I strongly suspect this is happening on a mass scale. According to our stats, we’re getting 120k unique views a month (dropped dramtically during the exodus, but has seemingly returned to normal now), but posts rarely get more than 20 upvotes or comments. I know most redditers are lurkers, but even still, that just seems like an oddly high number of views.
Give it time. Eventually the AI with learn to completely mimic human activity. Just not their actual spending habits.
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In fact, they’ve already failed their quarterly projections from ad revenue which has already negatively affected their IPO evaluation.
Exact same. Was there for 12 years. Easy switch.
I’ve been having trouble finding another site with so many sub topics.
I’d use discord - but you have to manually find each room. There’s no generic search function (not that I’ve found on mobile anyway - feel free to correct me)
If there’s another large site I could use (other then lemmy which lacks the numbers) let me know. I’m watching reddit die and I genuinely feel the void it’s leaving in my heart.
Damn I hate Discord for information. It’s not open. It’s nice as a chat (except for the whole thing with using Electron), but not for having information available.
It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren’t just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or was I just so used to it before that that I’d never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself ‘well, that’s just reddit’. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
I’m not claiming the fediverse is perfect or free from that sort of shit but either through the practicalities of federation, or better moderation or a smaller userbase or a more mature userbase or a mix of one or more of those things it doesn’t feel exclusionary to me. I often see on posts like this some people calling Lemmy a left-wing echo chamber and whilst I do agree there’s more people of a left-wing bent on here I think echo chamber is a bit much and is a phrase maybe used by those who live in a country without a functioning left-wing political party. I’ve not encountered a communist or tankie since Hexbear fucked off back to their kindergarten.
As for the Guardian article, they’ve fallen into the same trap as I’m concerned the fediverse might fall into by federating with Meta - assuming high numbers equal success or victory. If you have corporate/economics based mindset I can see how that works, but to me success equals a popular, useful community site entirely free from algorithms and other forms of manipulative control. One that isn’t gathering data via ads and tracking on its userbase to sell on (lets remember that reddit weren’t upset that AI were scraping reddit, they were upset that the company weren’t seeing any money from that). A community that grows organically, with all that that implies - sometimes growth might be very slow, it might stop entirely for awhile, maybe even reverse - but the emphasis should be on the people making the community better.
Reddit forgot somewhere along the way that it was the users who made reddit what it was. Look at the stats for r/askreddit - in particular the posts per day and comments per day - look at the trend since 2020. There may well be the same amount of users on reddit, but we all know a certain percentage of them are bots and even if they weren’t, just looking at those two graphs tells you everything about people’s level of interest in participating on reddit.
The only thing high user numbers guarantee sites like reddit is ad revenue. Nothing else.
You say, “I’ve not encountered a communist…”, like that is a good thing. Let me fix that for you
I’m a communist. Companies would be better off if they were owned by workers rather than rich people. You know, workers owning the means of production, instead of capitalists?
Hopefully this hasn’t ruined your Lemmy experience!
Yes, this is the popular side of lemmy communism. When people say they are bothered by Lemmy’s politics, that’s not what they are talking about. They are talking about tankies and campists who seem more interested in simping for shitty autocrats and making tyrants into folk heroes than engaging seriously with anything resembling contemporary political science.
Basically, as a leftist, I am annoyed by the part which is legitimately indistinguishable from right wing trolls trying to make leftists look stupid, which is unfortunately a large and vocal part of many leftist communities here.
It’s made my lemmy experience better, thank you. 😘
I mean workers could own the majority of company stocks and be the share holders in a twisted sense of communism.
Sort of along the same vein - as unions grew weak in Australia a different way to represent workers was needed. Industry Superannuation funds were created. Workers pay into these retirement funds which in turn invest in the companies. These funds now represent the investors interest in the companies the investors work at.
There are certain kinds of market socialism that are intended to work this way I think, still have companies and markets and the familiar structures of a capitalist system but turn all the companies into worker co-operatives
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Well said! I agree with almost everything, except I still want algorithms. I think I’d say “free from algorithms that serve corporate interests” instead. Algorithms that help me find content I genuinely enjoy are sorely missed.
I think algorithms can certainly be useful tools, but if they can somehow be made client-side, transparent in what they do, and customizable/replaceable, that would be ideal. In that scenario, they’d actually be working for the end user instead of the platform owner.
With Lemmy you probably can do that “fairly easily”
Wow, this stats website is interesting. I checked a number of subs I used to frequent: r/thenetherlands, r/idiotsincars and r/Europe . All of them see meteoric rice in subscribers, but number of posts goes down significantly since 2020-2021 (r/idiotisincars is the outlier here, you can clearly see the pandemic, but once it resumes the trend is downward again).
I just checked a couple old subs I used to visit. And the stats are very dramatic in the drop of actual content. So i tried to actually go to reddit to check. Something I haven’t done since opening my Lemmy account 7 moths ago. Somewhat surprisingly to me the stats actually seemed to reflect reality. One of the subs hadn’t had any activity for 5 months!! And it used to be reasonably active for a niche sub, with new content every day.
I also tried to look at the most popular non controversial sub I could think of. Which is r/funny by subscribers, and indeed it’s ranked #1 since 2019, and that too had a dramatic drop in activity. https://subredditstats.com/r/funny
From these stats, it really seems like reddit is dying, it’s going about as bad as some of the worst plausible predictions 7 months ago!
The most notable thing IMO is that content doesn’t seem to be picking up again, but rather the decline continues.
It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren’t just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or was I just so used to it before that that I’d never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself ‘well, that’s just reddit’. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
Am I taking crazy pills or something? Subs and users get put down HARD over that sort of stuff (See r/politicalcompassmemes). I haven’t seen content like that unless I actively searched for that sort of stuff due to morbid curiosity. Would you mind sharing the subreddit/posts in question? Not to deny what you’re saying but I find it hard to empathize without any evidence.
I also don’t understand this infatuation with “old reddit” when that allowed subreddits like coontown to exist.
I’m not suggesting hateful content wasn’t edited or removed, I’m saying when I went back there was a lot of it that had obviously just been posted. I’ve no doubt it’s mostly gone now if I went back and looked (which I really don’t want to do unless I absolutely have to) but my point is that it happens so much and so often that its often there for awhile if a mod or mod team is a bit slow off the mark. It’s indicative of the type of user on there.
I also don’t understand this infatuation with “old reddit” when that allowed subreddits like coontown to exist.
I guess when I think about ‘old reddit’ I mean reddit as it was before there were even subs or when subs first launched. Reddit was created by Digg users who were annoyed with Digg’s direction. There was a lot of hope and effort put in to it being ‘better’ - not just technically but also in terms of ethos. I’m the first to admit I stupidly just ignored the influx of bad subs like the one you mention or jailbait etc. But it’s become impossible to ignore to the point where it feels like its a constant drip-drip of hate content that mods are barely on top of.
And even without that outright race (or gender, or sex, or sexuality etc) based hate, reddit just feels to me like there’s a constant undercurrent of aggression and sneering. Maybe, like I said before, it’s always been there and I was just so used to it I became inured to it but revisiting it after several months away it was impossible to not notice.
I was just so used to it I became inured to it but revisiting it after several months away it was impossible to not notice.
Correct
“Old Reddit” generally refers to the design and layout of the page. You can find it by replacing the www. portion of the link with old. It’s a more user friendly layout for some people.
We both know that’s not what I was talking about
Well no, that’s what I thought you were referring to
On occassion I also go back there and some comments of mine felt like were downvoted way harder than I felt usually about reddit.
Granted they were bad takes but I felt like responses were way harsher.Lemmy feels more direct in a sense that the discussions are more fact based instead of the aspects you already mentioned.
Author didn’t seem to have a clue. Many of us didn’t protest or leave because of the fact that they implemented charges for their API - nope, was totally open to that! - it was the way they started charging.
I don’t think I’m alone either here. So many were open to paying fair prices for usage. But reddit repeatedly promised it’d be fair and reasonable. For months. And then when they finally dropped pricing info it was outlandish and would be taking effect before third parties had a chance to make appropriate changes.
This amounted to a power play meant to drive mobile users back to the reddit app. Why? Money and control. Bad for mods, users, and developers, it was a selfish play I will never forgive them for.
How did the author not know this, or if they did, why was it not front and center? Feels like they were parroting company talking points.
And if you add how Steve Huffman(Reddit’s CEO, AKA u/spez) lied and manipulated information about the API talks, painting the third party developers as greedy, money hungry assholes, then got caught with his pants down when the recorded call was made public, shows how absolutely planned that move was.
Exactly. The app developers were willing to make changes but they didn’t give them nearly enough time to do it. They dropped the changes at the last-minute and then lied about what they and the developers said in their private conversations. Then they got mad at the Apollo dev for recording it to cover their ass. It’s like getting mad at your partner when you cheated on them lol.
I don’t post on reddit any more but I still look there now and then. I don’t notice much change. From everything I’ve heard, the protest failed. A few snowflakes like me quit posting and/or moved to Lemmy, but mostly things at reddit were back to normal within a few weeks after the blackout.
Yaknow, i guess i get why people feel like it is hopeless to try to change the world, that trying to stand up against powerful corporations, to “force their hand”, and that’s because it is.
But i feel that is missing the point. When you tell a company that they need to treat you a certain way or you leave, and then you follow through, you win. Forget a large company, when in this life can you ever force anyone to treat you right?
You can’t.
You tell em what they can do to keep your around, and if they don’t, you take your self respect with your on the way out the door, and your life, the one that matters, is improved, and the next step in ending that bad relationship is no longer caring who else they might be seeing.
I for one am happy with you cats. Me n reddit are quits
Well said. I’m not going to be a fairweather-ethical-decision-maker. Every time I make a right choice (and I decide what’s right for me) I’m rebelling against the machine of marketing and convenience. In fact, often the more inconvenient it is, the more confident I am in my decision.
People like to think that they’ve made some far-reaching change with what little actually happened. The painful truth is: they didn’t. There wasn’t a big hit to the userbase, most people on Reddit already hated moderators and didn’t give a shit if they got removed, and overall people caved far too quickly (how many people folded instantly when their internet moderator position was threatened? (I say this as someone who was one of those moderators that flat out quit everything and nuked my account rather than continuing to toil for free for a corporation that hates me)).
The actually important thing that was accomplished by the protesting was platforms like Lemmy getting enough of a userbase boost to become stable - in the future, Lemmy and others may be able to act as viable alternatives to Reddit, because there’s already a community here (however small). Reddit will continue to enshittify, and people will continue to leave in small numbers that may escalate to big numbers if they commit a truly massive fuckup. The more heavy Reddit users (read: more invested, not necessarily more active) are small in number compared to the vast majority who lurk, don’t give a shit about any ongoing meta-drama, and don’t particularly care about any changes to the UI or browsing experience as long as they can still get an endless feed of memes.
Even if it hurts to realize this, it’s important to make sure people get this message beat into their skulls so that we aren’t stuck with a bunch of Redditors (derogatory) with over-inflated egos that think Reddit will bend over backward to appease them, then cave as soon as they receive literally any pushback from the corporation running the site.
I think this is a good point. Lemmy pre protest sucked. There was just no content or activity. Post protest, it’s not too bad here. It’s viable. Slowly, hopefully more people end up here over the years. I still browse Reddit (not logged in, my account is kaput) and it seems the same as it was before though. However, digg too died, so there is hope yet.
Yeah, I knew of lemmy long before any protests, but it was more linked as a back up sub for like the rom sub in case a ban happened. But, activity was pretty nonexistent compared to now. For lemmy this is a success with it leading to many more consistent users of the platform.
I came to explore Lemmy with the migration after Reddit’s API changes. Baconreader was my app of choice, and it died with the change.
I didn’t have any anger against Reddit - there was no righteous “fuck you!” in my actions - but the reason I stayed on Lemmy and very rarely touch Reddit is because the concept of the fediverse really speaks to me. I want to see a more decentralized internet succeed and so that is where I will spend my time, niche as it is.
I dunno the front page seems way lower quality than it was before we left. Like not just a little.
I basically only go there for the two stupid flash games I play on my phone and sometimes a Google search ends up with reddit as the best answer. Otherwise I don’t go. I used to go there dozens of times per day.
I agree. The change in total Reddit users ended up small, but the drop in quality is huge. A lot of my favorite subs are now just memes, reposts, and astroturfing. There’s very little left of genuine worth. But it’s no great loss. The days of Reddit being the front page of the Internet and a hub of discussion are long gone. C’est la vie.
Personally I’m glad to see Reddit fading away. I have found so many more artist, makers, and thinkers on Mastodon, Lemmy, and Pixelfed than I ever did on Reddit. The fediverse is hard to navigate and has a higher barrier to entry. But those same qualities keep the influencers, astroturfers, and advertisers at bay. I love the experience of exploring people’s feeds and follow lists as a means of exploring. It feels so much more organic and engaging. It’s not for everyone, and the fediverse will probably never become a giant of social media. But maybe that’s for the best.
At any rate for now we have our own corner of the internet to explore and enjoy away from the some of the more negative influences wrought by social media. Enjoy it. It may not last. Just like old Reddit.
I’ve been noticing lately that the front page of reddit now only contains some posts from the last few subs I visited, even more posts from subs I barely even read before, and currently two posts from subs I’ve never seen but are now part of my subscribed reddits. And when I take the time to go through the posts that actually look interesting, those read posts stay on my front page for the rest of the day and no new content is brought up. At this point the front page is completely worthless and the only reason I visit is for r/comics and r/facebookscience, all my other content is found on lemmy and mastodon.
Try surfing on your porn account. Totally obvious when all you intend to browse is NSFW
People keep separate accounts for their porn? That just seems to suggest they are embarrassed by their kinks. 😄
I don’t want to see porn all the time. When I want to see porn that’s all I want to see.
I didn’t subscribe to any of the subs, rather I created a multi with a collection of the ones I was interested in, and gave it a generic-sounding name. Easy to click on but it never pops up on my home page and doesn’t stand out if I’m reading reddit at work. Gives me a nice bit of separation under a single account.
Honestly I wish lemmy would introduce a feature like multi-reddits. I have a pretty long list of communities here and would love to break them up into groups. That’s the only feature of reddit I actually miss.
My porn account was older than the devolopment of multi-reddits. The blocking, subscribing, and discovery of communities on lemmy is terrible. The average user will flounce before they discover anything they like because they’ll get overrun with creepy anime porn and foreign language communities.
Interesting. It never really occurred to me to look at the front page but I guess it is supposed to be popular. I look mostly at a few specific subreddits and afaict they haven’t changed much.
Haha. You made a comment about nothing changing on Reddit, yet you haven’t checked the main selling point of the site or anything outside your old sub bubble?
I’ve checked both, and believe that content and comment quality is much lower … but there was a steady decline in quality the entire time Reddits user base grew … because the majority of the human population are, quite simply, idiots.
I used to live on reddit basically. I left due to the API shit they were pulling but did eventually get curious after closing my account but when I took a look, it was hot garbage. I unsigned from many of the big traffic subreddits and engaged in a lot of smaller and technical forums. Those users seem lately gone, or the ones who remained aren’t as knowledgeable or maybe there’s just been enough site changes that discussions aren’t happening like they used to.
In the meantime I’ve found fallbacks that I enjoy more, this place feels like early day Reddit which is super fun.
Yeah, Reddit became read-only to me after they killed RIF. I still check in on a couple subs, but all my comments and posts go on Lemmy now.
I scroll through all/hot a couple times a week and I don’t find the content nearly as funny, interesting or engaging as it used to be. There’s definitely something different about the algorithm that is making the content more sanitized for a wider audience.
There’s definitely something different about the algorithm that is making the content more sanitized for
a wider audiencepotential investors.
Yeah, nothing changed. People might say /r/all changed, but that place has always been crap and avoided by long time users in favor of subscribed feed.
I’m honestly not at all surprised. Social media has turned into both an addiction and a way to feel like you’re doing something you’re not doing. Jessica changed her status to: “Black lives matter!” (Jessica continues to do nothing about racial injustice or inequality). “I stand with Paris!” “We are Charlie hebdo!” “Fuck spez!” (Continues posting on reddit with the title “fuck spez” on every post). Now, I know these all vary wildly in importance, I was just recalling every topical “i care” post I could remember.
People don’t do anything. Social media gave us an out to bitch and moan for the purpose of people seeing that we know enough to bitch and moan about the topical, popular issues (read: the “right” issues)—but only while they’re topical and popular and then never think about them again because now we’re talking about the new tragedy or war or injustice or crisis, etc.)
People don’t actually care about anything anymore. I know that sounds like an old person hing to say, but I mean that everything is superficial. We either don’t have the attention or the passion or the heart or the capacity for caring anymore. We care when other people care—we care when other people can see us caring. So the entire populace is incredibly malleable because if people are paying attention to a touchy subject for capital or establishment, well, manufacture another. Or, really, why even bother? It’s not like we’re going to do anything about it.
I thouht, for a brief moment, that Reddit was actually going to be hurt by a larger portion of people leaving. I thought, for a brief moment, that we were learning how to act as a collective to stick it to large companies treating us like the fuckin bottom of the barrel of capitalism that we’ve collectively become. We aren’t the customers anymore. Other goddamn companies are the customers. We’re the fuckin goods. And it’s so deeply disturbing to me that people just…don’t seem to care past recognizing this as the reality—if that.
I hate being a pessimist. But at what point is pessimism just realism about the bleak outlook for humanity?
I’m another snowflake but I feel like the protest did alot to slow down and water down reddit’s obvious money grab. Where I would have been a stockholder at their IPO before, I will now be warning others against it.
It may be due to many different factors, but I’ve noticed a lot of content from my niche subs just downright fuckin sucks now. Like, a lot of posts are stupid af, either being a question that is very easily googled, or some sort of “pick me” bitch post try to low-key show off and humblebrag about something.
There used to be really good content like write-ups, visual guides, or discussion builders, but it feels like a lot of it is just grabbing at the low hanging fruit for fake internet points
Came to Lemmy because it’s FOSS and doesn’t fuck me in the ass
Meh the reddit software isn’t that important, and it was once mostly FOSS. It’s about the data, not the code. Spez has a ridiculous sense of entitlement.
The main thing I notice is how shitty the app is. Thats still my main complaint.
The reddit app? It never would have occurred to me to use that monstrosity. old.reddit.com still works (dk for how long), same with redreader, and my personal API client still works though they have been messing with that (certain endpoints no longer work through vpn’s).
Eh it failed in the most reddit way imaginable: Most of the users are too addicted to astroturf accounts posting heckin puppers and epic memes to organise a boycott beyond a few days. Reddit ownership knew how pathetic the “protest” was going to be from the outset and didn’t even bother trying to disrupt it beyond nudging out a few of the remaining holdouts on subs too small to matter in the grand scheme.
All the mods who thought they were irreplaceable just discovered their users are all the more happy to digest low quality slop moderated by amateurs who are more interested in the title than doing anything to protect the quality of said content.
People are even relenting and PAYING for access to the API to use previously-free apps.
…and yet, here we are. I left Reddit recently because of the drop in quality, and a lot of folks I know agree that it sucks even if they aren’t yet tapped into the fediverse. The internet still has a lot of friction and inertia. These things take time. But the momentum has shifted. These social media cesspools can’t last, even the most idiotic knuckledraggers will eventually smell the stink.
The downside is that they will find their way here. Lemmy will be bigger and less cool. Eternal September, am I right?
I found in recent years the quality was hit by spammers who were basically regurgitating content from other social media sites and spamming it to whatever subs would allow. Even though they’d get banned they’d have like a dozen alts, all co-mods on the same subreddits, and just make new accounts to get around it. You’d report them for ban evasion and nothing would happen. It would be political spam too, like you’d have accounts posting to “antifascist” subs and red pill subs just so they could cover all the bases.
Speaking of quality, it basically became the things your parents like on Facebook or Google Image results for “epic internet meme.” Political humor was reduced to AI images of angry Trump looking damp with captions like “oh no I’m going to jail.” For niche-interest subs it basically becomes people posting pictures of boxes of products they bought or asking which products to buy, people getting angry and debating about products and people who sell products.
Case in point that Oliver guy who would sell his books and shit on his subreddits and respond to every comment with links to his own blog posts, sold anti-Trump merch that hilariously looked like it was pro-Trump, posted ACAB stuff but also made racist copaganda comics, pretended to be an enlightened leftist but also wrote a red pill book about how rape is natural. Guy got banned for harassing mods of other subs and got his network of 20+ spam subreddits and dozens of alts banned, but the admins don’t do anything when they try and rebuild their spam network.
Gangrene is natural, etc., etc.
The pathetic-ness of the system stems within the fact that Moderators and Subreddit Creators cannot delete the Subreddits they created. I don’t know how we didn’t see this as a red flag.
/HFY did. A ton of authors including Hambone stopped posting there at all around 2018 or 2019 because we found out that Reddit was claiming that they owned our work, since we had posted it to Reddit, or something like that
What is /HFY and who is Hambone? Sorry for my ignorance.
Humanity, Fuck Yeah! It was a subreddit that focused on a subsection of Science Fiction, where humanity is frequently not the underdog at all.
Hambone is the author of The Deathworlders series, also referred to as The Jenkinsverse.
https://deathworlders.com/books/deathworlders/chapter-00-kevin-jenkins-experience/
That “chapter” got posted and Hambone forgot about it for five years, then came back and posted a chapter a month for seven(?) years to turn it into a book. It’s a long book.
He did this because at least three other authors wrote their own stories in the universe he created.
Salvage (this one is only canon until Adrian attempts to “blow up” a black hole. Something like chapter 73 or so. Jennifer Delaney, the main female protagonist, makes an appearance in The Deathworlders)
Humans Don’t make good pets ( Canon, but we never meet the unnamed main protagonist in The Deathworlders)
The Xiu Chang Saga (Totally canon, and Xiu becomes one of the main characters in The Deathworlders)
All of these can also be found as audiobooks, in varying degrees of completion, on YouTube. There’s also a guide somewhere as to when all this stuff takes place. A large amount of it takes place between chapters 0 and 1 of The Deathworlders.
Your passion for these stories is endearing. I’m going to check them out.
HFY = Humanity Fuck Yeah! A place for writers to post their stories about humans being awesome. Many of them were sci-fi space operas which is what I loved.
I used to read there a lot on my phone. My main activity on reddit at the time.
Then Bacon reader died, and I just stopped reading there
I deleted a 13 yr old account due to spez’s fuckery and I haven’t been back. I used to be very active in several subs but now I want fedi to happen.
Thank you for your service 💪
On the note of traffic, I still browse Reddit because it has niche communities that I want to interact with. However, I don’t comment, post, or even up/downvote anymore. My interaction is now purely browsing, and I imagine it may be similar for other once-power users.
It’s the same for me
Except, i try to give reddit as little traffic as possible, unless i need it for reference for something
It’s annoying to me that sometimes I have to use Reddit because the only answer I can find to a problem I’m having is in a Reddit post or comment. I would prefer to never use it again, but I’ll settle for only using it when strictly necessary.
And, don’t forget to use uBlock among other add-ons to keep that infrequent visit as unlucrative for those fuckwads as possible.
Unfortunately Reddit became such a database of niche information it’s damn near unavoidable when it seems to comprise most of my search results nowadays.
I redirect from reddit to lemmy in my main web browser. I wish there were some sort of proxy so I could read reddit without that information being lost - but that’s exactly the sort of service the API changes have killed. Fuck them for what they did to reddit.
archive team runs a distributed effort to scrape and archive all of reddit, it gets uploaded to archive.org, so at least a large amount of it is accessible through there
Well that’s good at least but ideally I’d like some way of automating it like through an extension. I try viewing an answer to a question on reddit, and I get redirected to somewhere that stores the answer without giving reddit any traffic.
Same here. I actually went a step further and decided to browse the site permanently logged off. I do not wanna access my old account anymore (which I still didn’t delete).
This is what I do. Also, I mostly access reddit from a RSS feed so I don’t even really visit the site much. I read everything I want in my feed reader, and maybe look at the comments on the site if a particular post looks interesting. Never logged in, never comment, never vote on a post.
Good.
This is the way.
I’m still glad Reddit actually lets you browse their site logged off.
That’s something that Twitter-I mean X doesn’t do anymore.
I’m in the same boat. Lemmy has some decent ‘gaming’ communities, but very few active communities around specific games. So when I need to find advice or discussion I still end up having to search Reddit for that sort of thing.
Be the change you want to see.
Which are your favorite on Lemmy?
These are some of the generalish gaming communities I’m subscribed to across lemmy:
That’s my problem right now. Recently a couple of friends and myself got into the Antistasi mod for Arma 3. Tons of fun but getting everything setup and being able to host the dedicated server took a few trips to Reddit. Had to find stuff on the Arma sub and the Antistasi sub.
I am the same - I obliterated all my posts and comments, and try to see whatever answer I can’t find elsewhere, and run.
It was much easier than I thought it would be, which was a nice surprise. :)
I’ll copy/paste a comment I made above again here in case it helps
If you find you want to go back to browse but limit the ad revenue, you can still reach it with some front ends like teddit.
Here is a good link: http://farside.link/teddit.com
Or, for example, you can directly access subreddits by appending /r/yoursubreddit to the end http://farside.link/teddit.com/r/memes
Sometimes an instance will be down. If so, try it again in a few minutes or in a new browser or tab so another loads.
I only use reddit for tech related inquiries, but besides that I quit it.
I went from 8 hours of screen time a day to an average of 2 to 3 hours and Lemmy often isn’t on the top. For me it has to do with a lack of content at some point, but I started enjoying it like that. If there’s nothing new, I shouldn’t have a reason to stick around in an app
Exactly. I still occasionally land there due to google searches for obscure tech issues, but that’s only to read and lurk. I used to be a regular poster, (I had ~1.2m karma between all my various accounts) but haven’t even commented since the API lockout.
Same here. Spend several hours a day on reddit since 2014, but haven’t logged in since the API shutdown. Only the occasional Google search brings me there.
Damn! That’s an insane amount of dedication lost to greed :(
Reddit having a huge audiences feels more like a disadvantage than a advantage
I was on reddit for 12 years. My time spent on that platform and posting directly correlates to when I first found it (posted a lot) vs. when I quit earlier this year.
Reddit in it’s infancy was great and the users and the subreddits, with a few notable exceptions were great too.
Once it got too big/popular… About 6 years ago you could note the decline and quality of the posting
Weird how it feels manageable to keep in the loop on Lemmy compared to Reddit. I like it a lot more.
Well that’s the issue. Reddit as a tool/service is fine. The only thing that I have an issue with is the api / third party app stuff and their leadership. Subs like Homelab , league , etc are ones I used heavily and they still function the same more or less. I just lurk more and use Reddit in browser with an extension that helps.
Lemmy and the various instances and apps are cool, but the lack of content(or content creators rather) is what makes it a little depressing. Outside of memes and discussions like this, it doesn’t replace Reddit because the user base is like 10+ years behind. I can show up and find posts from days ago which just leads me to keep using Reddit and rss for new content
Same. The UI got so much worse on mobile.
That’s why I use boost for Lemmy as well
The changes that lead to the protest were only the preparations for an IPO. When that sale actually happens, I think things will get even worse with new corporate interests and influence. This story isn’t over.
it happens to every sacred tech company once it inevitably decides to become profitable
When it comes out how many hundreds of millions spez made of the back of unpaid mods, they’ll rightfully ask themselves why they’re doing all that free work just to make spez rich.
Second American Revolution Now
While traffic has not changed substantially, many users report the quality of content and the kinds of posts that are surfaced on user homepages now seem different. RamsesThePigeon said the content on some of Reddit’s most-followed pages, which he moderates, had “gone sharply downhill”.
This has been a long term process. I was on reddit since 2012 or so. In the early days I used it to help me change careers and grow as a developer, and keep track of tech and space news and other topics that mattered to me. But the reality is it wasn’t even the API stuff that drove me away. The first thing that really got to me was when I couldn’t get rid of r/all as a subscribed sub, and that was full of quick dopamine hits and clickbait. Then every sub seemed to go downhill in terms of content, filled with outrage and pictures of tweets as if I would use twitter if it only used images of text instead of raw text. By the time the blackout happened reddit had become a net negative time sink in my life and I figured it was time to cut it off for good.
