I found Reddit about 6 years ago, took a little while to understand what it was about but when I finally got it, I felt like I had found the best place on the internet. Somewhere I could be my true self without being myself. Every time I logged in, I felt free. Like solo roaming the streets of a new city in a foreign country for the first time. Intellectual conversation, assistance on vague problems, sharing life experiences, advice, watching porn you didn’t know existed, and then slipping out the back door when you were done.
As many here already know, those days are gone. The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall. The entire personality of Reddit has changed and will never come back, it even shows in the users. The community is broken, unauthentic and the Truth has left the conversation. Freedom is dead over there. What a shame. It’s like my favorite bar burnt down.
But the thing that really gets me is that it didn’t just change, it became the exact opposite. It has become the exact reason why someone built it, in the first place.
I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps. Best performing app, which means the end is near. Soon it will just be a limb of the pretend society that we used to hide from behind the walls of Reddit. And for some reason, I just want to see it burn.
By now, predicting the end of reddit is akin to putting a date to the end of the world.
And who cares? This is not a competition, these are not teams, and there’s more internet than some famous url.
Ill say that reddit died when they canceled reddit gifts
So where is everyone going because it’s not Lemmy. And Reddit still is huge. I don’t understand the “it’s so bad, everyone is getting banned” but also the site keeps growing.
The most vocal does not necessarily represent the majority
prob digg, need paid moderation and more ppl, it looks like a decent reddit clone, will prob have a higher population than lemmy just going off early adopters, reddit just needs competition, once ppl try one alternative theyll be open to trying more like lemmy
Did digg2 finally go live?
android and ios alpha for groundbreakers (ppl that paid 5% to reserve a name, it got donated to a foundation picked by voting), its not bad, getting updated fairly fast, has the former apollo reddit app dev
So people paid to be alpha testers? So weird
no, they paid to slowly filter ppl in and avoid spam none of the money went to them it was a donation that was voted on by the donators, its literally 5$ Once it’s out of alpha and the website and apps are ready it’ll be open to all. They’ve only let in whoever asked for it out of the donators also so it’s a small percentage of the donators using the platform right now, most did it to reserve a short username early im assuming
Twitter had a suspiciously convenient massive uptick in bots that conveniently hid the shrinking user base from investors. I expect Reddit to conveniently have the same “problem”.
I have been off reddit since the api thing so I’m way out of touch with the current content and status.
It just seems odd all these posts about Reddit dying and it makes me think of the people that loved reddit aren’t all here on Lemmy, so did they quit all of it or went somewhere else?
No one I know in person switched away, technical or not, they still use reddit. The whole situation is just not adding up.
Bots. I swear its all bots reposting content from 10 years ago that people might not have seen yet or rewording old posts/comments. Check the account history and posts if something seems suspicious. Usually those people have lived all over the place, are different genders and have lives different time lines… Unless reddit is now all whovians… im calling bots
Ive been around long enough to know its an inevitable cycle, hopefully federation saves lemmy from the same fate.
That was my next question… is it inevitable? Like the fall of every major power in human history. At some point they break.
everything you said is correct, except replace communist regime with christofasism/capatilism. The rich are tired of the poors again.
I remember when I first used Reddit feeling much the same way. However there has always been boatloads of toxic users and posts there. The only redeeming communities had dedicated volunteer admins because general content moderation was awful.
However once they pushed the toxic coontent to the forefront and made the site much more walled off, a lot of those admins left. The result is the site as it is today.
Yeah, most “reddit sucks now” people don’t even remember the days when Reddit worshipped Rand Paul and r/jailbait, r/fat peoplehate, and r/spacedicks were around
There was so much fucking awful content there for so long
I laugh when people say that it’s “leftist”, because it sure as fuck wasn’t, and isn’t now either
I feel like this is comparing (bad) apples with (bad) oranges. Yes, Reddit has always sucked, but the way in which it sucked has changed.
They got rid of the bad apples, but then they carried through with that momentum and managed to turn everything else bad in an entirely new way.
Can’t forget coontown in that mix either.
As much as I hate what reddit has become, it’s kind of an amazing example of media coverage manipulation and PR.
All that heinous shit on it and they still had the kind of celebrity AMAs they did.
Thank Ellen Pao. She made Reddit what it is and got shafted for it with no credit
The good times. 😌
The narwal bacons at midnight.
Clop clop motherfuckerssss
It feels like it’s all just Ai and bots in control… the human feeling is gone. There must have been a huge issue with terrible content, because unfortunately amongst us humans live monsters. I did however enjoy letting my darkness out a bit on Reddit. Just enough to learn a bit about myself. I miss it
Eff reddit. They ban me anytime I say shit about trump or musk.
You’ll say shit, but not fuck? Why censor yourself at all?
I’m guessing that English is not your first language? To talk shit about someone means to say negative things about them, it doesn’t necessarily mean using any swear words.
That or you were joking, and I just whooshed myself.
I think you misinterpreted my comment. OP wrote “Eff” instead of fuck, but in the very next sentence said the word “shit”. I don’t understand why they would censor themselves on one situation, but not the other.
Yes, English is a first language for me.
So a whoosh from me it was.
Exactly. Not communist though, fascist. Communism is something entirely different.
But its also clear that this happened because to thrive in the capitalfascist system, you need to adhere to the rules:
- strong hierarchy
- ideologically homogenous
- strictly controlled ingress
- constant fear of being excluded
- pushing individualism and competition
Its the same everywhere and it is scary.
Exactly. Not communist though, fascist.
Was going to say this, lol.
Completely agree otherwise with the op.
Hahaha I should have listened more in history class. I’m being corrected all over the place, but you can be sure I will go read about it and accept my shame and embarrassment for about an hour or so. It’s the “something entirely different “ that is spotlight on my miseducation 🤣 but you know what I meant though!
I don’t think anyone is going to survive Reddit, at some point the rules will get you, regardless of your contributions, age on the platform or any other credibility you have gained. It’s gonna eat itself.
Well, actually that is pretty much what you learn in history class. Its just not true. If you read anything about communism that is not western education, you get an accurate picture. Marx for example.
The idea of communism (and anarchism btw) is to have a classless, stateless society. Both are left wing extremists and incredibly dangerous in their constant, violent fight for human rights, equality and against discrimination. (/s)
Jokes aside. Especially german government owned media and state documentation portrays both as dangerous which is hilarious.
I’ve been on there for 12 years and it’s been a pretty steady decline since then. It was actually even worse before I joined, like a free range cesspool of edgelords, bigots, and adults wanting to fuck teenagers. There was a period where a lot of the shit was chased off before it started heading towards the corporate direction; that was probably when Reddit was at its best
I was there from day one.
When Spez implemented user registration, I was like the 5th sign up and I ended up mailing him his own source code because he had his server misconfigured to report verbose errors.
All this to say, the site has always sucked. From day one it has sucked. It has never not sucked.
Edit
I feel like Reddit in general is remembered far more fondly than it ever has a right to.
For those that believe Reddit was some bastion of intellectual discourse, it never was! The very first or second conversation I was involved in (remember it didn’t even have users or comments at one point) immediately devolved into people calling each other robots and morons.
It just immediately cast my mind back to the BBS days where there was some cool techy people but lots of people that were just… there… And bored… And stupid.
I didn’t never really changed from that formula. Reddit grew somewhat in tandem with overall NA society’s ability to just get on the Internet. And it was always just a slice of society, never really any special qualifications or commonalities generally speaking. It’s very naive and myopic to think that it was a Tech community. It’s every dingbat you’ve ever met in your life and all the cool people as well in a giant heap. Please don’t kid yourself.
Politics immediately took over the site. And as most people know, the dialogue surrounding American politics is most dignified by taking place within a monkey house at the zoo.
Politics was immediately quarantined into its own special sub thingy.
Spez being the absolute moron that he was, implemented communities instead of tags which is what the fking site actually needed.
They refused to show at the outset that giving users the ability to categorize content mattered. They wanted it to be a fire hose of content right from day one.
Later, they did an amazing public relations job of faking community and faking community spirit, while they had secretly embedded social media managers from outside agencies plugging most of the content onto the front page.
I can’t remember the first time Reddit lost its virginity or perhaps had its heart broken, maybe first coming of age… when we collectively rooted out that one of the biggest community builders and participants was actually a plant! I might be wrong but somewhere in the back of my mind I remember the username Sahadra(?).
I just got a three day account ban, for threatening violence, by commenting that I hope someone got charged for running a red light. This is the second time this has happened in two months, all thanks to maniacs on our community subs.
It took me awhile to go back to that shit hole, and I’m getting a good reminder why. I just wish Lemmy would get a bit more active, and I can finally put Reddit to bed.
A handful of lemmy mods are now just as bad as reddit mods. It didnt used to be that way.
The great thing with Lemmy though, is you can leave instances. I could get banned into the 6th dimension and I just have to start a different account on a different instance. Often can find whatever kind of sub I’m looking for on different instances too.
The cost of this will be less users but I mean if you can get a couple hundred, that largely eliminates that issue. Lemmy will keep getting bigger, we’ll have to deal with the nutsack mods at some point, but there’s no big daddy reddit for them to hide behind here. They are on their own.
This scenario basically sums it all up.
Try doing more posts yourself! I do multiple a day they all get interaction, everyone is just sat round waiting for others to post
I know you didn’t likely put too much specifically pointed thought into your phrasing of ‘feels like a communist regime’, but please do realize you are describing a hypercapitalist, shareholder driven, investment seeking and profligate monetization enacting regime, governance structure, moderation style.
Reddit is now the Pepsi Ad with cops and protesters getting their Pepsis and singing kumbaiyah… and then the after credits scene is the cops finish their Pepsis and beat everyone’s heads in.
This is enshittification.
This is the relentless and ultimately brutish and stupid drive to extract as much wealth as possible out of anything, in a way that actually destroys the thing, manifest in an online message board.
Lure in the user base, lock down the market demographic, destroy competition as much as you can, and then squeeze every penny out of em when they have no alternatives.
Fuck Spez, RIP Aaron.
EDIT: Oh also, you are a lemm.ee user, your instance is shutting down at thr end of June, you may want to look at setting up another user account on another instance.
to this i’d like to add that when i browse there sometimes i keep seeing people saying things like “this is reddit libs are everywhere” “this is reddit even slight conservatism will make people call for a death sentence” or “this is reddit you can’t say anything non-progressive” and those are getting many upvotes, whilst anything said that’d paint you as anywhere left of centre will get you downvoted.
it seems like the conservatives have taken over and yet they still feel like they’re surrounded
sorry, when you say ‘when i browse there’… do you mean… .world? or reddit?
Its 3am and I think my language parsing skills have given out, lol
oop sorry, seems like i’m from the opposite side of the world and my phrasing after waking up could also have used some work
by “there” i meant reddit in that comment
Ah, all good, no problem!
Given that clarification, yes, I completely agree.
Conservatives tend to be the masters of projection, of seeing themselves as victims when they objectively are not…
…well, small caveat to that, as lately in the US they’ve become victims of the party and policies they voted for, but claim they didn’t vote for, because they are too ignorant to understand how anything actually works, as well as too devoted to their orange cultic god to see any of his insane hypocrtitical nonsense as such.
But anyway yeah back to reddit: yep, the platform has gone fully corporate, anyone aware of … what that means for a social media tech company bailed the hell out as soon as news of that broke, now the easily predictable enshittification has begun, and the less well informed but still generally capable of objectively assesing the world crowd is now also starting to stream out… and the people who are left are the asocial or antisocial conservative dullards who continue to gaslight themselves and refuse to acknowledge or understand what has happened…
… because for an insecure conservative, admitting you were ever wrong or uninformed about something is seen as a damnable sign of weakness and personal failure… instead of the learning and growing opportunity it could be with just a bit of a mindset shift.
I know this because I was raised that way, in that kind of a household, and was fortunately able to un-brainwash myself and realize that its ok to be wrong about things, to learn and grow.
Phrasing like that reminds me of all the “this is the commu-social-marxism the libs want” and it’s just a picture of current capitalism.
I’m being nice because this person is a refugee, the fact that they are here, describing what they’ve experienced and witnessed, realizing that it is bad and another place could be better… it means they’ve got a good head on their shoulders trying to escape the hivemind.
Please don’t lose them in the pattern buffer, O’Brien =P
this person is a refugee - are you referring to me? The analogy is perfect if you were.
Yes, I am referring to you, as a refugee, I am glad you find it an apt description :D
I hope you do manage to poke around a few other instances on lemmy and find another one to migrate to again, rather bad luck that the one you recently joined is abruptly shutting down soon.
Its probably worth saying that… that doesn’t happen too often (ever?) a fairly large lemmy instance just shutting down permanently… that’s anomalous, not a thing you’re probably going going to encounter often.
Everyonce in a while an instance will have some downtime during an upgrade, or due to accidentally misconfiguring something, but even that is becoming rarer.
Also, when you do quotes…
its based on line breaks
So you can’t end them with a dash, you’ve got to hit enter, make a new line, and that new line will be non-quoted. :D
Yes listen, I got it wrong, I took art instead of history and my knowledge of politics and such terms is limited. I generally get my ideas across with emotion and action, but I can’t help admire those who can articulate themselves through words. I also sense the passion in your response, you care about these things, and I’m sure you’ve destroyed a few opponents in a debate.
I like that we both exist, and you shared something that is useful to me. Thank you.
Second part: any suggestions for an alternative to lemme.ee thanks for letting me know. Will I lose all my data?
Hey friend, no problem!
Yes, I am passionate about these things… got one degree in econ, another in poli sci, and a good deal of work experience in the tech sector… fun how all these things are increasingly intermingled and also unavoidable these days, eh?
A lot of people who spend waaaaay more time online that normal people (I’m counting myself in that group)… often forget that most people have not spent the last decade or two having online political arguments… we get used to the idea of people using terms somewhat incorrectly as being a sign that they are doing so intentionally, as a rhetorical tactic to confuse a topic or argue in bad faith… as opposed to the possibility that someone just isn’t as well versed in the topic at hand and is more or less using terms very colloquially.
But some of us can be friendly and at least pretend to be normal, lol!
As for an instance recommendation?
I’d go with .zip, my old, now inactive account is still sitting there, good admin and mod team, decently sized, and they’re federated with basically every other lemmy instance… which i think is good for a newbie to lemmy, as that way you can learn for yourself if there are communities or other instances you want to avoid or block, instead of having your instance have already done that for you preemptively.
As for… losing your data, like your account data?
Yeah I think that will end up happening. Though it may be theoretically possible to migrate a user account to another instance… I don’t think anyone ever actually does this?
Basically, just make a new account on a new instance, and re subscribe to your favorite communities from your lemm.ee account, and/or block ones you don’t like, while your lemm.ee account still exists.
Hopefully this won’t be too difficult as your account is fairly new.
There… may also be some kind of thread addressing these concerns on lemm.ee somewhere?
I’d think that if an instance is shutting down, the prudent thing for the mods to do would be to set up some kind of sticky or megathread to give general advice and answers to these kinds of questions?
By 2015 it was already a hollow shell of what it had once been, and by 2020 it was spiritually completely dead. Now it’s just shocking how far it’s continued to decline, far past what I’d come to think of as rock bottom
I really feel like it peaked in 2012 or 2013. Hot on the heels of the “rally to restore the sanity” (which proved the true power of Reddit, but was co-opted and defanged)
Lots of big AMAs but they could be very chaotic.
Allowed content wasn’t quite as wild as two years previous but it was still possible to find some real taboo/NSFL/disturbing/subversive communities of all sorts.
The userbase was large but still most of your friends would make fun of you for going there, and your parents didn’t even know it existed.
The admin team was still pretty small and they even would make a point to hire users who understood the culture and spirit of the site.
I’d agree that it peaked a long time ago. I joined in 2008 or so because my teenage sons had joined. We didn’t know each other’s IDs, I wanted to know what they were interested in and found a couple communities I liked for myself. Every year it got less inclusive and the toxicity that was contained to some communities started to spill over. I had already left when the corporatization started in earnest.
This post feels like something I wanted to write. I agree 100% I want to see that shithole burn
6 years ago? Shit. You must be a lot younger than me 😂.
I should actually go see when I joined to verify, but reading through the comments I joined well into the decline already . Social media didn’t grab me like the rest of the world, I didn’t like the lack of privacy and, joined Facebook like 10 years in or so, because I went traveling and wanted to connect with my family. I stumbled upon Reddit basically.
I had searched a few forums for some answers to random things that Google directed me to, but other than that knew nothing about what was attractive about them. I immediately found the real life experience advice on subjects from normal people very interesting and unique, that’s what got me to create an account. Then I stayed for the subreddits of the things I was in to and contributing felt good.
I really liked the fact that you could almost find a subreddit about anything, 5 people in it with the last comment being 5years old, but still it was amazing to me. The authenticity that people allowed themselves to show ( some were definitely lies) but i felt like I was engaging with people on a different level than real life, small talk BS. Anyway I’m probably older than you and if you’ve read this whole thing then bless you, I’m probably just using this as therapy 😂
The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall.
Much like the current American hellscape, you’re thinking of fascism, not communism.
Hehe thanks I’m not to clued up on my ‘isms but I know it’s something I don’t like! I am watching the American story with an outsiders perspective and it’s doesn’t look good. I’ve never been deep into data, but I have seldom gone wrong by reading the people. And the people are spelling downfall, I think it’s further down the slope than people realise and the opposition smell blood. Just like Reddit.
Hehe thanks I’m not to clued up on my ‘isms but I know it’s something I don’t like!
What an incredibly moronic and dangerous way to go about life
Words driven by fear. Learn all the words in the world, my bet is you freeze in the face of opportunity. I wish you, happiness and sorry that they took if from you.
