cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19466667
Money, Mods, and Mayhem
The Turning Point
In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it’s a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.
The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn’t mince words: “Reddit’s API changes are not just unfair, they’re unsustainable for third-party apps.”
Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.
The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.
One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”
What trips me out is that somehow they still have the video of the dude that somehow survived after blowing his own face off with a shotgun. It’s fucked up, sad and sickening.
Honestly I would have just put him out of his misery if I had found him like that. And no, I will not be linking that video here or anywhere for that matter, it’s pure nightmare fuel.
then what’s the point of crying about it
The point is that once they went public, they said they were gonna be removing certain horrible communities, and the particular community that particular video is on would have been like at the top of the list if I was in charge of Reddit.
But honestly I don’t give a flying fuck.
Corpos gonna corpo, there is a lesson here folks but people reading this right now, already know this.
They banned bots from WholesomeMemes and there were no posts for 2 days. Dead Internet is now, and it’s at Reddit.
That subreddit always seemed so off-putting to me and now I know why. I don’t hate wholesome stuff, but there was just something off about that subreddit that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Let’s be honest, most of Reddit’s default subreddits (or whatever the fuck they’re called now) are basically just karma farms with no real moderation beyond removing extreme content. The real value of Reddit has always been in its smaller, niche subs. But as those grow in popularity, they end up having the same problems as bigger subs.
Badbye, Reddit
they’ll be fine. as evidenced by twitter, there is absolutely no amount of enshittification that will make some people leave
i guess you dont remember digg https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/the-demise-of-digg-how-an-online-giant-lost-control-of-the-digital-crowd/
Digg era is very different than today. Peak user for Digg is 30million, while Reddit and Twitter is 330million and 368million respectively, almost 10 times the different. As demonstrated by Twitter, even in its worst form they only lose like 30million user. Reddit won’t go anywhere, the vibe though, will.
That only works when there’s competition. There’s like 5 sites left on the Internet. It’s been centralized and monopolized.
Fuck, I remember Yahoo.
It was never cool but in the stone age it was hip for about 30 minutes.
Weirdly enough, I never cared for Yahoo. Back in the late 90s, their homepage was a cluttered mess
Always but for a few minutes there it was the only niftily human-curated view of “The Internet”.
Let me tell you tales of the mythical Geocities…
I wish my old angelfire site was still around…
Neocities is now, old man!
I missed digg. I was on fark before reddit and somehow fark is still around and hasn’t changed at all
Slashdot is still kicking around too. Remember the Slashdot effect?
Yup. I walked the whole path. Slashdot->digg->reddit->now lemmy I guess.
Yeah I remember when cmdrtaco was in charge. It was great back then. Now it’s full of anti woke stuff.
Interesting, I never used digg and didn’t know about it’s history. It seems like they could have easily fought back bots with captchas, email verification, phone verification and so on.
Phone verification? In 2010? Only 20% of US citizens had a smartphone in 2010. That kind of verification was extremely rare at the time. Privacy was still very much a thing, sites that requested personal data like that was regarded with suspicion.
I mean phone number verification like steam does. It’s only one of many possibilities when you are a major company.
I keep seeing YouTubers who host their own subreddits still mentioning Reddit a lot in their videos. Yeah, some people probably don’t even care what happened.
A big streamer I watch is sorta in that camp. He mentions his subreddit all the time and it’s an active part of stream/communication with chat, he bitches at reddit and it’s broader base all the time but I see no signs of moving away from it.
That’s because there will alway be new 10-year-olds who are just discovering “new” parts of the Internet. They are growing up with the enshittification, so they don’t know that things were better before they were born.
Hasn’t Twitter lost ~30 million active users, about 10%, since Musk bought it? Plus there’s probably going to be a couple million more gone from the Brazil ban.
I’m also willing to bet a ton of the remainder are bot or alt accounts for people too.
My girlfriend doesn’t use Twitter but the platforms she does use she has multiple accounts on and I bet a lot of people do that too.
Musk himself said there are way more bots than he thought when he was trying to weasel out of buying the site. That was before AI that could solve recaptchas, and respond like a human. Imagine how many bots there are now.
Reminds me of the handful of big subs on reddit who had no new posts for days when they banned bots lul.
And now they’re teeming with bots* and drove away the power users. Look how many posts and comments they’ve lost in the last year just from me alone.
Edit:
The beauty of Reddit was its decentralized structure.
Users created and moderated their own communities with freedom and autonomy, and it led to an explosion of niche interests and discussions. Want to debate the finer points of medieval weaponry? There’s a subreddit for that. Obsessed with pictures of birds with human arms photoshopped onto them? Yep, there’s a subreddit for that too.Took a bit but I’m glad we found the actual decentralized structure we needed
Reddit’s strength has always been its community
There’s something nobody talks about much when it comes to reddit. It’s that the internet has moved past community. It now revolves around monetized “influencers”. Nobody fosters community for the sake of it anymore.
Reddit has outlived its time. It’s apparent they’ve been trying to evolve with the times but the platform isn’t fundamentally geared towards this coporatized era of the internet. They’ve been trying to pivot the platform into social media style. Users now have profiles with avatars, bio text, followers/subscribers. There’s now a social graph. The big picture with these things is they’re trying to make it into a corporatized social platform like all the rest.
The problem isn’t reddit itself. It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.
It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.
It’s more like people aren’t geared to community, not the internet.
People are geared to community. Modern society isn’t.
That sounds more appropriate ya
I very strongly disagree. It may appear that way, but community is simply less profitable than “influencers”, so communities aren’t invested in. Social media and even following influencers/content creators is an example of people looking for community, just not having healthy communities to pick from.
That’s not the internets fault though. That’s a people fault.
People aren’t willing to support the communities they want so they don’t get them as people find other ways to finance them.
Maybe the problem is that they’re all trying to be the same goddamned thing, like how there are 15 or more goddamned hamburger chains.
“We want to be like facebook! Also like Youtube and twitter and tiktok! And like Instagram!”
Maybe if they stuck to their speciality and strengths, pick a lane and stay in it, they would prosper. But no! God forbid!
And Spez’s response?
“OMG! STOP GOING DARK OR I AND MY LEGION OF SLIME ADMINS WILL REMOVE YOU FROM POWAH!”
And so he did which is why some subreddits came back from being dark. Some subreddits submitted to their own fates. Other subreddits reluctantly came back, proving the protest was just a mere farce that amounted to a nothingburger.
And what did Spez do after the whole fiasco? Why, he punched Reddit into now being Public. Completing what people had long speculated that he’d do.
And what did Spez do after that? He’s now rolling out the concept that Subreddits will be monetized.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing from these incidents and expects it to get better, with that stupid shit eating grin on his face because he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts.
he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts
This is comedic gold. But the bad part? I envisioned it. Thanks a lot.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing
He’s learned he can do this shit and make money. It may not be a perpetual money machine. But he now has enough and will milk it for all that’s left. That’s what he’s learned.
And he’s getting rich off of it too. I mean, that’s his whole gain, right? Money! He’s given his soul for money. The whole community hates him, but at least he’s gotten rich now. I’m sure reddit’s annual founders parties must be a hoot.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists, Reddit users seem to have a knack for taking it up dry than doing anything about their problems.
I guess that is truly Reddit’s nature.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists
Those were the early days of Reddit. They’re long gone now that everyone has joined. Those so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists have now abandoned Reddit. It’s mostly just the sheep left there now.
It’s the same story with Twitter.
I’m a sheep and I left reddit. Bah.
Has anyone told them? I think they might not know that.
Well, it’s dort of an anti-survivorship bias. Those that still sick around seem to not care even if it gets as bad as the other Corpo sites.
What does he care if a bunch of people that he thinks are losers hate him? He’s sitting on his private yacht, anchored just off his private country club, and eating lobster in the hot tub. He’s a major world player now. He doesn’t give a fuck what reddit users think of him.
Oh the irony getting removed by a mod here. Although its probably in the mod logs somewhere with an actual reason :)
actually it’s not … An admin banned OP (troll account). Seems that no record of comment exists. Kinda a bug in the Lemmy software where logs of banned accounts aren’t stored, or at least I don’t know how to see them.
What do you think he would learn? He got like $190 million dollars in compensation last year, broke the protest, and only lost a small fraction of users. He doesn’t view the site with the same love that we did. It’s just a business to him, and he’s just a soulless executive.
I’m calling bullshit on any user count they release. The site was filled with bots even when I still used it. People kept complaining about “karma farmers” as if there were users who repost popular content. It has always been largely Reddit’s own bots too keep new users entertained and recycle popular content so that it reaches as many users as possible. They turned this up to 11 before going public.
Now that they no longer provide an API, they are free to make up any fake metric they want to try to pump up their worthless stock.
I’m very doubtful too. I look at “active users” stats, and for every sub at every time it never goes above a few hundreds.
The millions subs numbers are bs
“Karma farmers” is a major reason Digg collapsed and Reddit took its place.
People kept complaining about “karma farmers”
I remember the “Reddit is just you, me and /u/karmanaut” meme from 2008. He was the original “karma farmer”. It was a problem since the early days due to how they setup Reddit as a system. It just enforced his behaviour.
One of the really popular subs - with hundreds of posts per day - cracked down on bots and nothing was posted for two days afterwards.
Can’t recall which sub it was,It was WholesomeMemes. I caught wind of that a few days later and it was truly a ghost town. Even now they’ve only got something like 5% of their pre-bot-ban traffic back - about 4-6 posts a day.
How can the demise of reddit be hastened ? Its bloated corpse clogs up the pipes of the internet still.
I heard that 99% of the internet traffic is marketing bots fucking each other
The remaining 1% is those humans still plugged into the matrix, they won’t be able to escape until the pipes get unclogged of all the Web 2.0 big tech floatsam still swimming around.
flotsam* :)
I remember when they kicked mods off their platform when the subreddits went private on the API retaliation. Now quite a few are on here. Meanwhile, some of those subreddits are still having issues moderating.
Personally I think mods should be rotated once in a while by the community instead of giving power to them indefinitely on communities. But reddit really messed up there. Some mods are mods of hundreds of subreddits which is silly and unsustainable.
Could moderation be handled democratically with votes and such? Create a system with central authority and you’ll just get people trying to be the central authority.
You end up with the problem of Who Watches The Watchmen all the way down in infinite layers. We don’t really have an inherently trusted party here that could arbitrate a vote. Unless you try to do something funky with blockchain, but I couldn’t tell you about that, that isn’t one of my spell schools.
It’s such a mess. I mean spez is an ass, but some of those career mods were just as bad. Moderating hundreds of subs because they enjoy the power. And you can tell that was the case when they’d harass random people because they did some little thing that upset them.
Yep. If they were periodically replaced, then the communities might have a better mod (or at least a less burnt out one).
FU Reddit
For a site that says it doesn’t care about reddit, there sure are alot of posts about it.
don’t know what marketing blurb you heard, but lots of users moved here from a disdain for reddit
I’m trying to upvote as many Lemmy posts as I can find on the Reddit search function to hasten the demise of the pet project of Spez since the third party apps are up to snuff now!
Let’s hope more people will join the fediverse so we can all stop feeding our data to these greedy companies.
I like my transparency, third-party apps, community and open source nature of Lemmy.
Tbh I doubt companies would stop scraping data. They wouldn’t care to respect the ToS (they never did) and feed in their AI models all the Lemmy posts and comments they can find. Still better than Reddit willfully selling these info
They still can’t game it for engagement optimization to that extreme, not like the closed loops of monolithic sites.
True. Let’s drive away from them as much as possible
You don’t think once Lemmy hits mainstream, companies won’t start polluting Lemmy and harvest data here?
As Lemmy users we always have the freedom to jump ship to a different Lemmy instance if the admins of the ones we’re on decide to sell the site out and/or let the polluters take over, or we can even start up our own Lemmy instance (with blackjack, etc.)
I’m not sure if there is any way you can promote links to my account, but feel free:
https://www.reddit.com/user/FlyingSquid/
Your page has been bookmarked. Thank you for the idea of updating the display name to LEMMY IS BETTER.
Good idea!
ngl i feel like reddit starting falling off after the api thing it became mainstream
