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.
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 😂
I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps
Most of those are not real users and never have been.
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
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.
Reddit trained us not to post/comment as much with the frequent deletions, especially post, always get removed for no reason so I get anxiety when posting
Rejection sensitive disphoria, however its spelled
Reddit and Stack Overflow both drilled this into me and I’ve been off those sites for a while and now they are dying, I couldn’t be happier
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
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 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.
Mainstream social media is ridiculously censored now. I called a bunch of racists a single word: “gross”.
My comment was removed while the overt racism stayed up. the digital world ain’t it.
It is. It’s also melted all our brains though, like some people need to be parented, but I mean the absolute garbage shit. That’s morphed from people cleaning that up and the spam, to mods trying to enforce a whole bunch of unwritten rules and arbitrarily deciding what people can post or comment based on their own opinions. Those people are mostly neckbeards too, so that don’t help.
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.
Try doing more posts yourself! I do multiple a day they all get interaction, everyone is just sat round waiting for others to post
This scenario basically sums it all up.
everything you said is correct, except replace communist regime with christofasism/capatilism. The rich are tired of the poors again.
You never lived in a totalitarian communist country, did you?
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.
Expect some (additonal) really nice privately owned Federated instances to launch after Reddit finally dies. (Embrace - Twitter and Mastodon are far enough along that Bluesky exists, already.)
They will have all the usual features, but also a few surprisingly nice additonal (closed source, added by corporate sponsors) features. It will cost some mild annoyance when visiting from an open source truly free federated instance. (Extend)
Eventually the new features will result in lost compatibility with the rest of the fediverse. Users on the new platform can enjoy the rest of the fediverse, but other fediverse users cannot reach any content contributed by users of the new platform. So everyone needs an account on the new platform, to enjoy it. (Extinguish)
Then the new platform enshitifies. (Enshitify)
This prediction is primarily based on how Google managed “Google Talk” when it joined XMPP. Many feel XMPP did not survive it. I still use XMPP, but many folks I talked to on XMPP do not.
The recipe is: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Enshitify.
I’m not sure about this, but does defederation or blocking work both ways? I.e can an instance stop federating their own content to another instance? I would think so. It seems like corporate instances be pretty effectively boycotted like that.
I’m not sure about this, but does defederation or blocking work both ways?
I think it’s by choice in each direction? I’m not sure.
I.e can an instance stop federating their own content to another instance? I would think so.
Yes. And I think that’s our best defense against what happened to XMPP. Opinions vary, of course. I guess it’ll be up to each instance owner how they handle it.
It seems like corporate instances be pretty effectively boycotted like that.
I hope so. I worry because they say “history usually rhymes”.
At the very least, the fediverse was designed with knowledge of lessons learned from XMPP. And I’m certainly, myself, less naive than I was when I fell for Google Talk. Hopefully others are too.
Google did this to RSS too. Both still exist and work as well as they ever did but are niche now. We should bring both back
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
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.
The good times. 😌
The narwal bacons at midnight.
Clop clop motherfuckerssss
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
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
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.
Reddit died when they killed 3rd party apps and removed mods who protested, but it has been on the decline for a long time since Spez decided that reddit has to be transformed into something that shits money for him
It’s the mods that are killing it. Absolute 1 dimensional neckbeard thinking, and the bots. I mean who the fuck in their right mind volunteers to work for a multi billion dollar tech company, right? Absolute neck beard degenerates, that’s who.
Modding probably sucks ass, don’t get me wrong, but expel your efforts on modding something like a Lemmy instance, where it’s for good and not just efforts that go to buying another yacht for some billionaire laughing all the way to the bank
I think its naive to think they dont take money for shilling, they could just discuss it off platform, links in the sidebar, referrals everywhere, ppl shilling their companeis in every post but some ppl get banned for it some dont
I’m sure there’s the odd mod that gets paid or allowed to monetize, but the vast majority of them are unpaid.
Reddit also power mods, and power hungry mods that love gatekeep. Remember the antiwork mod fiasco
That antiwork fiasco was a perfect example of a typical reddit mod. At least what my interpretation would be.
that was so embarassing, they even allowed her/him back on the sub as a mod.
Really? That sub went from being legit to being a global beacon for a failing platform in less than 30 seconds.
its just all whining , quitting because of such a small disagreement with your boss? its not that serious. that was like 50-70% of the posts there.
Early days COVID it was kind of entertaining but you are right, it got weird super fast
A lot of those neckbeard mods had been there from the start and are responsible for building the Reddit community from the beginning
It’s no longer a community, it’s just trash
It died before that. There was a time you would know breaking news hours before traditional media reported it. Then they changed the algorithm and the flow of info crawled to match the speed of advertising and people who want to control the capitol class narrative.
Twitter turning to X had a similar result but it was already on its way there
Yuuup. It started when they removed the ability to view downvotes and heavily inflated and skewed upvote counts. That’s when I stopped seeing breaking news at the top of /r/all. The it just got shittier from there. My final straw (as my join date shows) was killing Apollo.
Yeah, I heard that about the site and official app but having my 3rd party app Joey let me customize my feed and filter a lot of garbage out
It was working great all the way up until they shut it down
The site now is a joke, r/news and r/worldnews used to always be front and center on the frontpage. Now, it’s buried under a wall of noise
That’s true, in hindsight. I felt it, but couldn’t really put into words yet what had changed or tgat it even had changed. None of it really hit home until they killed third party apps and started striking down the resulting protests like dystopian authoritarians. That’s when they fully lifted their masks and came out as the nazis they had become.
Reddit died in June of 2023.
Bot posts, upvotes, comments from 1d accounts quadruppled since I’m very sceptical about the projected stats. It’s like the first human users setup a social culture and as time progresses new users see the potentials and become the first “parasites” of a settled community. A bot army is just a tool.
It’s like the first human users setup a social culture and as time progresses new users see the potentials and become the first “parasites” of a settled community.
We did.
I was one of them.
I had a reddit account before I had a facebook account, back when digg still actually existed, and reddit was basically just trying to be a better version of digg.
It was good for a while, and now its run its course, corrupted by … so many different things, insane mods, insane political movements, and of course, money money money.
The internet utopia dreamed of in the 90s has crashed and burned and warped into a dystopian panopticon of hate, misery, greed and lies that a younger and more optimistic me was convinced could only happen in cyberpunk fiction…
’ I had dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me. ’
The dream lives on, here and not im the corpo torment nexus. I don’t really ever want to use something by a corporation ever again. It used to work out fine but now it doesn’t.
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.
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.
Exactly. Not communist though, fascist.
Was going to say this, lol.
Completely agree otherwise with the op.
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.
The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall.
OP,. you’re not thinking of communism. You’re thinking of authoritarianism and hierarchy. This is what happens to all hierarchies. Go to almost any for-profit corporation, and the same stifling of freedom will be on display. Marxist-Leninist regimes are hierarchical and authoritarian, which is why they act the same as any corpo, but that’s not due to “communism”
Please scroll up to read my acceptance of failure to correctly identify the name of the crappy thing that Reddit is doing. Thanks for the correction, and I’m glad you could still figure out what I meant dispite my use of correct terminology 🤝 I’m really good at other things though haha
it feels like a fascist regime
Fixed. Pete boy wants to get rid of the progressive content he deems offensive, so that he gets better showing with the other white techbros come shareholder day.
