This is not a smart choice, they do know that the alternative to peaceful protests like this is violent protest right? They want to challenge that or do they think it won’t be done because it’s “illegal”, that didn’t stop these guys now did it?
May I be blunt? I don’t think that anyone still moderating Reddit has a shred of dignity, decency, or concern about their userbase. As such this shit will pass and nobody there will care.
So long as we’re being blunt, this criticism can be levied at Lemmy too. There is less accountability here and your only option is to ‘find a similar federated community’ because nobody seems to want any kind of accountability or standards in the mods. Well, you have basically 2 major communities and both of them are equally stupid but in opposite directions. Viable option indeed.
We’re talking about two different problems.
The one that I’m talking about is Reddit admins being clearly hostile towards the community, including mods, and the mods still being willing to lick the admins’ boots, instead of migrating their comms to another site. Even at the expense of the userbases of the subreddits that they moderate.
Here in Lemmy this shit does not roll - both because it’s easier to migrate comms across instances, and because the userbase is mostly composed of people with low tolerance towards admin abuse.
Now, regarding the problem that you’ve spotted: yes, it is a problem here that boils down to
- Lack of transparency: plenty mods and admins here have a nasty tendency to enforce hidden rules - because actually writing those rules down would piss off the userbase.
- Excessive polarisation and oversimplification of some topics, mostly dealing with recent events. (Such as the one that we both were talking about not too long ago.)
I am really not sure on how to compare the extent of both issues in Lemmy vs. Reddit, nor how to address them here, and thus to get rid of the problem that you’re noticing.
The guy who admin my lemmy instance is also the mod of r/Brasil and he and the Brazilian mod team worked a lot to avoid the subreddit to become an alt-right shithole like the rest of country subreddits (the losers from the alt-right national subreddit even had to pay for reddit ads to try to funnel user there).
That’s hilarious. And surprisingly uplifting if the alt-right sub in question is r/brasillivre, since that shithole is still empty.
It was customary in r/Brasil to never mention the other subreddit, but yes I’m talking about that one.
Well, at least here we can talk about Voldemort without evoking him, right? (Unless this shit is like Betelgeuse - on the third time you mention his name, he pops up to ruin your day.)
Okay, serious now: that’s sensible since in r/brasil it would be basically advertisement.
Roll it up
I agree. Especially with how some moderators talk down to users, they sure licked those boots stomping on them to not lose their reddit powers.
Looking at you, r/de who’s “protest” was to “allow memes” for a week.
There is no chance in hell any of these cowards would stand up for their community. The ones that did are already here.
That was clear from the article as well, where they said they took the opinion of 150
bootlickersmoderators
I’m so glad I have a Reddit alternative now like Lemmy. Every news article I see about some corporate move Reddit makes, it seems further and further removed from the community-driven website I had hoped it would be.
It’s sad how many docile idiots remained on Reddit and Twitter after last year.
I don’t know, I feel during that exodus we got the best of the best. I miss some of the niche communities, But there’s so many fewer assholes over here.
People still use AOL internet. I expect Reddit and twitter to die sometime in the 2050s.
Not just AOL Internet, but also the email service. Same for Hotmail. I used to work at iHeart, and the number of those email services (from prize winners) was not insignificant.
Hotmail was owned by Microsoft when I signed up in the late 90s. It’s no surprise it’s still around. It hasn’t been my primary email for a long time, but I still use it as my MS account. So really it’s just my Minecraft account.
I have a few accounts floating around for different services Microsoft has bought out or since integrated logins for. I genuinely don’t know how many Microsoft accounts I have, and it’s always a pain trying to guess which one a given service is on
Digg still exists. Death of websites is rarely a complete shutter, but usually more of a steady decline into obscurity
Wow!! It’s the Divide By Zero admin!!
I’m not a celebrity :D
I missed the part where Aol. was promoting toxicity and hate while attempting a short-term grift on its users like Reddit and X have.
That fact that Aol. is still alive is amazing by itself. It’s just another sleazy, beleaguered company that used to be meaningful. You leave because other companies have better products, not because they offend your sense of morality.
(Or maybe they do.)
I think you underestimate how ignorant people can be. The reason Aol still exists is because they are grifters too. My Aol example was to show that people are docile idiots and won’t change their habits. Aol is grifting just as much as reddit does. They’re just grifting different groups in different ways.
That’s why i think reddit and twitter will continue on for a long time. Maybe not as powerhouses but they won’t implode or go away any time soon.
My mom was still paying for dial-up AOL in 2016. She had been paying them $20 a month for over a decade while having high-speed internet that she was also paying for.
When I asked her why she didn’t cancel it, she said she would lose her email.
So I canceled it because AOL provides free email because they make money off of the ads.
I believe you missed the point. There’s people there because they know that their content won’t be found elsewhere.
A lot of it is just propaganda bots at this point.
Those still on are a bunch of bootlickers IMO
There are a lot of subreddits for which there is no real replacement. Sometimes the strength in a community is the people. Doesn’t matter if reddit sucks if the people are there.
There’s still one protest possible.
LEAVE REDDIT!!! GET THE FUCK OFF OF IT! LET IT DIE. MAKE IT DIE!
Same with twitter.
And all things Meta.
The problem is that FB is the “core forum” for tons of niche hobbies. Irts the only reason I still have a account. They successfully killed off the old php forums.
If you live in rural America sone information is only posted to Facebook, from private businesses to small county or town governments
Additionally FB Marketplace killed Craigslist, at least in my area (also US). Nextdoor somewhat is a counter but that has its own problems.
Yep, agreed. The biggest problem there is that Meta is generally not making life worse for its users than they’re used to. Facebook and Instagram are giving you almost the same shitty experience you got a decade ago.
at least they are developing affordable vr
Yeah they’re subsidizing the price to get between you and reality.
Affordable purely by the money you pay upfront. They earn more by the ridiculous amount of tracking they do, and they’re also forcing you to stay within their services.
As with so many other things, you’re paying with more than just money.
they’re also pushing the technology and pressuring other manufacturers to adopt and be competitive
And locking it behind their account system
Meta is a little hard because they acquired a lot of existing social networks in their prime and have kept things subtle. Think about how long it took EA to finally strip Maxis of everything but The Sims. The only way you would know something is owned by Meta is from the splash screen.
Twitter and Reddit went so much to shit and lowered the bar so much that Meta actually became almost not bad in my eyes, almost.
There’s a guy in the world of pro wrestling named Jim Cornette that said a quote this reminds me of.
Cornette is known for holding grudges, and being hateful. He keeps a shitlist of people he hates.
Well in the 1980s he was working for a wrestling company, and hated one of his coworkers for a year. Then a new guy came in and was so much worse.
Then one day he says to the first guy “You know, you used to be at the top of my shit list, but with all these new fuckheads coming in, you managed to move down a few spots simply by not doing anything!”
They’re doing a Bradbury, in a way, kind of like Tumblr and Steam. Everyone else is shooting themselves in the foot.
I think Meta is doing a decent job with Instagram. I mean except for collecting all possible data and psychological profiling of users to serve them targeted ads, it’s a decent enough platform. And the only one still allowing for engagement with your actual friends rather than exclusively professional content creators.
Even if you ignore all the ads and data-mining IG its still a shit experience.
- You can’t share any links, which does nothing but make it a worse experience, because people just use annoying workarounds.
- All the buttons for user profiles, hashtags, and comments are impossibly small.
- In the search function you can conveniently “flick” between posts so you don’t have to line each one up perfectly on the screen, but this works nowhere else in the app for some reason.
- They created what are essentially 2 completely isolated social media platforms (posts and stories) into the same app, which results in fragmentation of where people post and where you have to look find their posts.
- Every time I try to scroll down, I scroll to the side instead.
- Every time you open the app, it shows you a post, and then that post disappears 2 seconds later.
- They abuse the DM system by cramming other notifications into it for tags and “broadcasts”, presumably to force you to receive them after you’ve disabled all the other notifications.
- Of course there’s the flaw of not allowing text posts, which again does nothing except force people to post photos of text, which undermines the fundamental purpose of the platform.
- Incessant “suggested” posts that I do not have and have never expressed interest in.
- No scroll bar for video, so if there’s something you missed or want to watch again, you have to watch to the end or start from the beginning.
- Read receipts subject users to abuse. Any other platform you can disable them.
- Standard image posts are hidden by the algorithm, so no point in even posting them anymore, which essentially makes it almost entirely a TikTok/Snapchat clone.
- You click the play button on an image, thinking it’s a video, but it’s just a still image with annoying ass audio.
- Auto-playing videos.
- Stories just flip along without you doing anything, and trying to go back and see them again is a nightmare.
I could go on but I digress.
Don’t worry that’ll change, they haven’t owned it for that long yet.
they haven’t owned it for that long yet
they acquired it in 2012.
…OK, well I guess we wait until the wrong person is in charge of that division. Also I’m old because that feels like yesterday…fuck.
WTF are you on about? no one likes instagram shorts and the feed is a jumbled mess of bullshit and advertisements. I deleted mine a long time ago and don’t regret it for a second.
I mean except for collecting all possible data and psychological profiling of users to serve them targeted ads, it’s a decent enough platform.
It’s not. Instagram is popular the way it is because “It’s going to be a lot harder to pull off massive protests” there.
I really don’t understand how people use Instagram. I’ve tried, but it’s about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don’t follow, it’s not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it’ll show me about 40 posts before saying “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!” and then refuse to show me any more.
I guess this is why I’m here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I’d rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.
Yes the random feed filled with ads unrelated post suggestions and limited to three days is the main issue. i use an Instagram mod but they didn’t manage yet to replace the main feed with the friend only feed you can get by clicking on the Instagram button
Meta is still on a whole other level when it comes to data privacy.
Gee are you implying that storing passwords in plaintext is a bad thing? /s
That’s security, not privacy.
How much privacy do you have when someone has your account password?
You have none, because your security has been compromised. This is a flaw. Poor privacy is intentional.
That’s security, not privacy.
helenslunch - the slayer of untruths
I’m still pissed off that I’ve never had a facebook. I never gave them any info about me. I gave them no reason to have a profile on me.
Yet because OTHER people have facebook, they know my name, my address, my phone number. I don’t know if they can identify me in pictures that other people post, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
That shouldn’t be allowed. I did not consent.
Correct. And the same is true for the mobile phones, carriers, and a slew of apps that all look at contacts. They know who you are and who your friends and family are.
Meta probably is the hardest one given that in many influencal countries WhatsApp is the app everyone uses for communication
It’s also the main organization tool for “groups”. I have tried to migrate mine to other platforms with no success.
And also the biggest online classifieds marketplace for trading goods. Even though it’s a fucking awful experience and simply ignores any filters you give it. If you want to actually sell your stuff, or sell it for market value, without shipping, you just have to use it.
I left Reddit 6 months ago when I was permabanned for asking a question about what is forbidden. They can kiss my ass. And I hope they go broke.
Aw man. I left Reddit on my own terms as soon as the writing was on the wall re: 3rd party apps.
To have access ripped away without notice must have bred some deep hatred for the platform.
I left Twitter for much the same reasons. All the replies are basically unusable now, because bots just pay to get put at the top of the sorting algorithm, and it’s now full of bait and spam, since the website formerly known as Twitter now pays for engagement, since that apparently worked out well for Quora (!).
I genuinely tried to leave but lots of communities didn’t leave Reddit and therefore had to stick to Reddit. I did with RRSS-feed and avoided their app.
Recently figured out we can Sideload Apollo app with almost all functions available. So did that.
Thankfully never used twitter! I read valuation dropped from 44B to 9,4B recently.
You can create the community and begin the migration
I’m not the right person to start a community, that’s the main problem. I’m not fit to be a Moderator and such.
It’s super easy, the main problem is no one will move. I still moderate a couple on reddit, but it was hard enough getting people even there, certainly no one will come here.
I feel like internet users have become so lazy, stubborn, and resistant to change. I’m pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo, IRC, ICQ, AIM… people used to try new things
There have always been people like that, it’s just more noticeable now because the numbers are larger.
People still use MySpace and Digg, and there are people on Bluesky, Mastodon, here, etc.
It’s in its afterlife phase right now. Much of the comment sections on any given subreddit are full of newbies using colloquialisms from other platforms. e.g. Users call subreddits “groups” which I think originates from Facebook. Or users trying to “bump” posts. There’s a lot of signs that the core userbases are gone.
Eh, not everyone is fit to be a moderator.
I don’t feel I have the time (this issue is made worse by my timezone not aligning up with the most active hours for communities), nor do I have the maturity and level-headedness to be a fair and impartial moderator.
E: oops replying 3 days later. I’m surprised this thread is still in my feed…
Gee, I sure wonder why…
I’m pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo
In some respects it was somewhat easier to get them to be on multiple platforms instead of moving. Think of the original messenger proliferation, where sometimes people would be on IRC, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, or etc. so much so that you had software like Pidgin and Trillian to help consolidate server/chat rooms and friends lists to more easily chat with all your contacts.
Even with Ventrilo, I remember being open to also switching to Mumble or vice versa if there was some hiccup with either.
Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their “ecosystem” of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you’re “invested.”
The hold outs for these sites are so fucking dumb. They act like social media is somehow an important part of their existence when just 10, 20 years ago it was an emerging technology. These early iterations of social media are toxic as fuck. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They don’t deserve your patronage and are taking your goodwill and turning it into social decay.
10-20 years and you people can’t give it up for something better. There is no argument. You don’t owe them loyalty. They aren’t innovating. They have contributed to the rise of authoritarianism.
Yeesh.
No, because then they’ll all flood here. Then I’ll have to consult with 9,006 different rules between each sub, while subsequently making sure I’m bending to each power-mods weird and unwritten agenda.
No I’m good with reddit. I encourage reddit. And I encourage all the weirdos to use reddit!
Nope.
If you encourage it, it will continue to fester and rot, and the entire internet will lower their expectations.
We need to destroy these companies. We need to smash them to pieces, and hey guess what - it’s going to hurt a bit! We need to be prepared to stand up against evil, corrupt, racist, bigoted robber barons. We need to make some sacrifices to fix the internet.
Burn the fuckers to the ground, and let spez rot in a hole.
I think you have misconstrued what I’m saying here. I hope reddit exists to collect the weirdos, and be a breeding ground for the gross shit it is, and keep it away from here. We don’t need to inherit the 2024 users of reddit, no one wants them. Let them echo in their bot chambers until they literally spin into the ground. Keep Lemmy normal.
I get what you’re saying, but it never works like that.
You said it yourself: “I hope reddit exists to…be a breeding ground…” And it will. The worst of humanity will collect and fester and grow in numbers. And what’s going to happen then? Some will spill over to here, and other ‘safe’ communities.
There’s no way we can thrive and simultaneously isolate ourselves from assholery; and by encouraging it to thrive elsewhere, we’re only expanding its power and reach; and at the same time, enriching and empowering asshole billionaires like spez, Zuck, Musk, etc.
No, we need to fight them. We need to wade hip-deep in the shit to shovel it down the drain, rather than hoping it’ll just go away on its own.
Look at it another way: If you have a garden, what happens if you designate one corner as “the weed corner?” It grows, spreads, and takes over the rest of the garden.
We can fight them, but ultimately these companies have the control. They can enrich and empower, and there’s probably not a lot we can ultimately do about it. When the chips fall, I’d rather they just stay on a sub and endlessly echo chamber themselves into oblivion. Some will come here, but it seems like most will stay there until something ultra stupid forces them here. And I mean at this point, even ultra stupid hasn’t, so yeah. If they have to collect somewhere, I’d personally rather it be there than here. I think that’s the main point I’m making.
If you’re still posting on Reddit or Twitter, and it’s not for a niche community, please don’t come here.
Like what the hell are they even protesting about now? What is left to protest about? And why? Just go.
The only way to win the reddit game is to not play.
I just lost The Game
LOL!
Damn, I hadn’t lost since June
How about a nice game of Chess?
Launches entire US nuclear arsenal against Russia
Can we launch it against Spez?
Very good Joshua
I fear Reddit might be going the way of Twitter and Facebook, too many users which makes them too big to fail or their failure is sooo slow that by the time they do fail they will have cemented their footholds in our politics they will puppet our politicians more than now.
More hilarity: as of about a week ago, it appears the reddit algorithm has also started boosting posts with negative karma on their horrible mobile app. Guessing it’s a move towards ‘negative engagement’. I have not seen it myself (I don’t use the reddit app) but I see users complaining about it.
I have to imagine that when some c-level suit saw that term in his moth-eaten copy of “Social Media for Dummies,” I don’t think it was intended to be taken quite so flagrantly visibly literally…
So that’s what happened?! I rarely come here, but last weekend was so bad that I started updating my subscribed communities here.
I thought I interacted with too many downvoted posts, and screwed up what reddit thought were my main interests. Guess I was expecting too much from reddit…
At reddit, line must go up. So user experience must go down.
This isn’t limited to the Reddit app. You can see it on the desktop and mobile website too.
Basically, “you can do whatever you want as long as it benefits us.” I hate for-profit social networks.
At least here you don’t see a single ad.
Yet
Instance owners could potentially insert ads to help cover server costs. Users would likely just migrate to a different instance, but I could definitely imagine one of the bigger instances doing that eventually.
That is due to the fact that Reddit - and I can’t stress this next part enough - sucks.
You’d think this would drive away what mods are left, i imagine they are mostly there for the illusion of power they get at this point and this will be a step towards removing that.
But then, the entire corporatization should be enough to drive people away on it’s own but it doesn’t seem to be.
Most mods are corporate stooges anyways
You also have some newer mods who are controlling the narrative for profit.
who cares what that shit show, bad example, internet stain is doing at any given moment. fuck spez.
said a lemmy commenting on reddit subreddit on the fediverse hehe
Reddit is already dead, the corporate AI shell is all that remains amongst some folk who dont realize everyone is a bot or an idiot.
/r/android used to be one of the hottest subs - it’s literally just posts from the same 2 OPs linking to their professional news articles.
Reddit sold whatever soul it may have had to the devil, as does every company that goes public.
It’s literally taking our words and our conversations and using them to train an inhuman computer system to sound more human.
And we are not allowed to say no.
It doesn’t get more devilish than that on the internet.
And of course, I deleted my account when this whole debacle happened, but I’m sure they’re still taking all of my old comments and selling them to any person with a dollar.
Just like digg back then after they switched the format.
Reddit keeps forgetting they depend on the users, including the mods.
Heresy? Is that Roblox Burlyman? It’s heresy, right?
I think this will cause as many problems as it solves (from Reddit’s POV), going private has always been a panic button for mods when shit hits the fan. Now those controversies will have much longer to build and have news stories written about it first. Short sighted.