That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
It’s like they forgot what happened to Digg. They have forgotten the face of their father.
Dark tower reference, nice
They’re just looking for that sweet IPO cash grab.
Unfortunately for Spez and the rest of Reddit, they’re too late to actually cash in on their 18 year-old startup.
Makes me wonder if that’s what Digg was doing…
I wasn’t on digg back in the day. What happened to it?
Digg went through a series of redesigns in a short period of time and the final straw was a redesign was one that removed users abilities to manage their feeds so that they could force ads into the feed. A few years later when they sold they said that overnight they lost a quarter of their users from that change. And those users were the initial userbase of Reddit, which was essentially the answer to Digg’s attempt to monetize users through forced ads.
Now, Reddit is “not even noticing a change in traffic” so much that they felt the need to make a public statement about it. Reddit is killing users abilities to customize their feed so that users are forced to use a feed which includes ads. It’s literally the same thing.
oh wow, yeah, there is definitely a parallel there.
Digg went to shit in a similar way Reddit is doing right now, and most of its users moved over to Reddit, which essentially killed it.
The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever. There’s a real problem of Apathy in today’s culture when people are just jonesing for their fix of daily content/memes, or at the very least nothing that disrupts the status quo. They don’t give a fuck about “ideals” or what corporations do or farm from them so long as their instant gratification and daily intake of said content remains unchanged.
People just need to change their attitude for how they interact with Reddit now. Gone are the days of good faith and honest interaction. I’ll happily lurk and absorb content and provide no interaction back, not wasting my time curating / generating content for them anymore.
I deleted my account, have been on there for troubleshooting drivers and other pc related stuff last week I confess. The times I f5’d reddit out of boredome for the latest dank memes or drama has passed tho. I can’t handle the attitude from the uberstaff.
Reddit will REALLY be good when those apathetic users are all that’s left to produce content and moderate subs! /s
Let’s be honest, reddit had already gentrified itself internally into subs that either
A) act like mob rule is cool
or
B) so libertarian it hurts
The B users can’t stand A and the A users can’t stand B, sadly, the A users are the ones who only care about “content” and don’t care about much else.
There’s actually another group— people who just haven’t figured out where else to go. There are subreddits for neurodiverse folks, as an example, that are really active, and I’m trying to decide whether to post and say, “Hey, folks, here’s where to move this group to!”
I think you overestimate the willingness of people to stay in a Spam, porn, and bot infested hellhole (if you think it’s bad now you haven’t seen nothing yet), especially as public consciousness starts to realize that. There will be a point in the future where Reddit will be seen as about as respectable as an adult video site, there are people who would be willing to stay through that but there are plenty of people who wouldn’t either.
Another good thing to remember is that most of the people on Reddit are the kind of people who laugh and upvote stuff, they’re not the kind of people who are going to be making high quality posts. So when the people making high quality content leave the only thing that will be left is the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t really bode well for the continued survival of the platform, at least as a place that people are going to want to go.
they love the spam and porn
Reddit can’t run without its moderators and it can’t monetize without data. I encourage everyone who’s defected to Lemmy from Reddit to wipe their old Reddit account using Redact. I just wiped my old account of 15 years worth of comments and post history.
Ignore, duplicate 😣
I wiped my 10 year old account last night. Everything except my last post telling spez to fuck off and that he and his board have no soul or humanity.
It was hard seeing it all go, but if life has taught me anything, it’s that all things are impermanent and we should always be prepared to let go.
As much as I would like to do this I have too many posts there have legitimately helped people who were struggling with things.
I’ve had people respond to months old posts thanking me on several occasions for helping them. I can’t in good conscience remove thay just to spite reddit, and I do a lot of stuff out of spite.
Reddit is dead after this
Sadly, I don’t think so. I think they looked at the number of new users and the number of users using 3rd party apps and decided they can lose those.
Edit: apparently Reddit has between 500 million and 1.6 billion active users monthly. According to RiF developers, RiF and Apollo have a combined 3 million active users. If all of those 3rd party app users decide to never go back, Reddit might lose between 0.6% and 0.2% of their userbase. I think they’ll be fine…
That’s until you factor in that the majority of that 0.6% and 0.2% were the people running their site for free, disabled people, or both.
I don’t think the issue is that users will abandon, but that the site was only as usable as it was because of the mod tools that allowed the people who worked for free to moderate.
Now spam, hate, and all other such garbage will be a lot more common. One subreddit I subscribed to only had a single active mod and the only reason the sub was functional was the mod tools that now no longer work.
It may take some time, but people will leave when the subreddits are flooded with hate and spam.
Who is investing in Reddit at this point? I guess they can just dump their shares against etf buying.
Well, WSB is planning to short the stock as soon as the IPO opens. Technically that’s investing
Look, much like Kanye we love those guys but they’re jackasses.
WSB was never the same after the $GME debacle.
Pretty sure that was also the catylst for the death of Reddit too. It became the new Facebook after everyone heard of it because of the news coverage
You’re onto something here
It was just another wave in eternal september imo, a big one but just another bit of notoriety for the website
Pretty much, between COVID and GME, the sub 10x’d its users within a year and became a pool of the same handful of low tier memes that are cycled through every week.
Reddit is not public, so it’s just private investors at this point that funded series tranches. They, of course, are pushing to have Reddit get profitable and then IPO.
I guess we will see what happens, but Spez may have totally messed-up their plans with the inept API pricing and the response to the concerns about it.
It could have been totally averted if they just introduced a reasonable user fee and license that could be used in any third party app.
Spez could have even required 3pas to carry Reddit ads - a lot of us would have grumbled, but stayed.
But Spez didn’t want that, did he? If I had to guess, I’d say Reddit’s official app is even more rigged with tracking than Tik Tok. That’s why it lags - it phones home every time you pause in your doom-scrolling, to log what stories you’re interested in.
They never even updated the API to show ads… Like, you could’ve worked on that at any time, it’s your own API.
That’s the most bizarre thing to me. Without knowing Reddit’s financials, it seemed like everyone could have their cake and eat it too. We could get a UX catered to how we choose to interact with Reddit and Reddit could make money hand over fist. We all knew the totally free experience wouldn’t last. Reddit very easily could have been like “ok guys, party’s over. We need to force ads on 3rd party apps”. We’d bitch about it, but it’d ultimately be fine. This scorched earth approach to how they handled it is just so out of left field.
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It was just a matter of time, really.
I completely understand Reddit wanting to be as profitable as possible, however it’s the approach to the users, developers, and blatant lack of care, respect and transparency that got my back up - suspect a lot of people may be the same. Communities always move and change, no platform is too big to fail.
I was waiting it out until I heard mods were being threatened. That’s the final call.
I’m going to be replacing posts with links to my never used socials because who cares if I’m spamming at this point.
I’m with you. I get needing to make money, but needing to go public and become just another cringe social media platform is just sad. RIP Reddit. Hello Lemmy.
All they had to do was allow Reddit premium users to access the site using third-party apps.
Ohh interesting. Thinking about that, yah I would of signed up probably.
Yup. I was plenty happy to pay to keep using BaconReader. Give everyone a few months to set that up and I think things would’ve been fine. Instead, we get basically the most ham fisted way it could’ve gone.
Not only this, but this has happened before. It was called Digg back in 2010.
Kinda sad but platforms come and go.
The only thing that makes me sad is we cannot take the years of knowledge stored in reddit with us. Some of those co tributors who posted valuable contributions are not active anymor or some has quietly passed away irl.
If reddit decides to wall their site, unviewable to non paid subscribers, then it will be like an end of a small scale civilization where poeple go back to basic living,
I hope in time we can rebuild the same kind of knowledge here.
It won’t take long.
Like TIL or any kind of help/diy sub was mostly reposts from bots. And the top comments were either bots copying the top comments from last time, or sometimes a real user who saw it so much they recite it from memory.
The knowledge is still out there in people’s heads. Eventually someone will ask the question again. Then it’s on here instead of reddit. We can wait for people to ask, or bots can just repost here like they still do on Reddit.
Bots aren’t really good or bad, it’s how they’re used.
Bots can simultaneously kill reddit and boost Lemmy into its replacement
Good news. According to lemmy explorer, there are “Ask Historians” communities on 3 different Instances. (the one on “lemmygrad.ml” has the most subscribers right now but it’s only 403.)
Maybe pass on the lemmygrad.ml anything…
For me, the loss of AskHistorians was/is/will be the worst. There’s so just much important knowledge there, they’ve changed how I see the world (and I assume that’s true for others as well). I really hope they figure out a way to save some of that, but it won’t be surprising if it just fades away… Just heart breaking.
I hope we can rebuild some things here, but AskHistorians definitely felt special.
Man i really hope Reddit dies and people move onto decentralized networks, in time I’m sure we can figure out how to index a decentralized network for search engines completely replacing Reddit.
It’s easy to index decentralized networks is literally Google. Every website is decentralized from every other website the fact that Lemmy/kbin/Masterson sites can communicate with each of the doesn’t really make any difference.
I wonder if search engines will see content duplicated across multiple instances and derank them thinking it’s SEO spam. Or maybe I’m overthinking since google is already full of SEO spam.
If the content gets great enough, that will happen. Going to take time, but it will absolutely happen. Especially with so many people deleting their comments and Reddit having their feet held to the fire with people making complaints about them violating GDPR.
Lemmy, Mastodon, and the entire Fediverse are really what the internet was supposed to be. I am glad to see the pendulum swinging back and I hope it continues. I am mostly really excited about the mobile apps being developed for Lemmy. Those are coming along at lightening speed and I those will be THE THING that makes Lemmy happen.
You can use Lemmy Explorer to search through all 900 or so Instances for the communities you’re interested in.
Moderators need to understand that Reddit doesn’t care if you’ve been in charge of your /sub for 10 years. They have, can and will tell you how to run it. There’s nothing for you to “negotiate.” As far as Reddit management is concerned, it’s “my way or the highway.”
Part of ending a toxic relationship is figuring out that it’s time to let go.
Well, we former Reddit mods don’t need to understand anything in that regard. Fuck Reddit in its entirety. I’m not wasting time considering their point of view. I understand that they’re pieces of shit. I did negotiate - they doubled down and so I carried through and walked the fuck away, revoked my registered copyrighted material and took the first steps to litigation when they reposted it. They’ve taken it back down after the DMCA was filed, we’ll see if it goes back up.
An ultimatum is a negotiation.
Reddit is too big to fail, they have achieved critical mass. Keep in mind facebook is still around despite being a reviled company, and instagram certainly hasn’t had a mass migration off of the platform either.
At the end of the day Lemmy isn’t a replacement to reddit yet. It depends entirely upon it getting traction which thus far still hasn’t occurred - we are not at critical mass yet. I hope it happens but there are many reasons why this site could fail even after reddit’s admin blunders. Too many people are apathetic to the changes and not all of them are lurkers who do not post or comment.
Today you can’t just stop using reddit either, especially for google searches. Too much content is ONLY on reddit. It’s a huge problem. We really need a wikipedia style reddit where it’s not for profit and still moderated for content.
This is the most level-headed take. Reddit is going to continue to slog along with or without my account, with or without Lemmy’s 53k active users. Anyone who thinks this protest is going to sink them entirely is naive.
However, they may stagger along as an enshittified website that has lost it’s spirit and never meaningfully grows again. Reddit is still better than any other alternative at this point in time, but Reddit is not by my estimation going to improve again. It’s all downhill. So I’m doing my part and trying to work to build community elsewhere.
We don’t need 50MM users to reach a mass where the content is fresh and engaging all the time. Probably a fraction of that would be. Lemmy’s userbase is double Squabbles and there is already a noticeable difference in content.
Yep. I think people need to think about what “failure” means in this context. Reddit isn’t going to go away, and honestly the “default” experience - what you see when you just visit the homepage - isn’t likely to change much at all IMO.
The thing is I haven’t liked the default reddit experience for many years. The draw of reddit was that they could do all their crappy changes to the default-level site and it still left the niche discussion-based communities to their own devices.
Now they’ve affected those communities, which is why I’m here. But I’m well aware that a great majority of reddit’s userbase uses reddit to doomscroll through endless insipid bot-generated meme lists. None of that is going to change. People like me who care about the small places that will be impacted are in a very small minority compared to the overall userbase of reddit.
So reddit will fail (or has failed) for my use case, certainly. But I’m under no illusion that it will cease to exist.
I feel like I’m being repetitive, but yes your point that the Reddit popular/all front pages won’t be dramatically affected is spot on. Those are where a huge amount of passive users spend their time, and the posts there have been trash and reposts for years now.
The quality content enjoyed by many people who jumped ship was never showing up on the front page anyway. I made numerous original content posts that gained a lot of traction relative to the niche subreddit it was in, but my 3K upvoted quality content was never going to compete for popular/all space with a 50k upvoted repost of a repost of TikTok video.
I did notice, when I visited Reddit desktop today that r/popular has a lot of political posts, despite one of popular’s reasons for existing to be a non-political alternative to r/all. I wonder if that’s something that’s crept in over time and I never noticed, or if that’s the result of losing so many subreddits that politics had to backfill popular though.
I think being repetitive is ok, because I continue to see the sentiment out there that everyone who is upset about reddit is delusional and think reddit will be closed in a month, etc.
The reality is more complicated. And I think a lot of people don’t get it because a real lot of people actually don’t ever see the great parts of reddit that we all loved.
I like to get that message out there as much as possible because saying reddit is ruined for my usage isn’t the same as saying it is going to go under.
Digg had critical mass. It went down in flames.
It doesn’t take bajillions of users to generate enough content to form a reasonable alternative.
Niche subreddits will be hard to recreate though unfortunately, but plenty of time to grow. And long-term, federated seems like a good model so that once these communities are rebuilt they aren’t at the mercy a company who’s main concern is short-term profits.
Federation makes so much sense for reddit style communities. I hope it’s able to catch on
Federation makes so much sense for reddit style communities. I hope it’s able to catch on
Too big to fail doesn’t mean it’s too big to decline.
I don’t think reddit is going anywhere as a company and a platform, for a while at least. But that doesn’t mean it can’t lose a good share of it’s users to competitors.
I don’t think the comparison with Facebook is a valid one though. Primarily because Facebook is a “true” social media platform. You have your friends and family on it which creates a very strong network effect.
Reddit on the other hand is primarily a content aggregation platform. I don’t need to convince my friends and family to switch from it.
Additionally, Facebook is a lot more successful than Reddit financially. They make disproportionately more money per user due to having very targeted advertising. They own other platforms like Instagram and whatsapp. Unlike reddit, Facebook doesn’t need to concern itself with having financial troubles.
A better comparison would be tumbler, which was quite big and while it still exists, it’s a shell of its former self.
I’m okay with lemmy getting just enough traction to bring in the best users without being “popular”
Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the “metaverse” to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn’t seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There’s no denying that. But, it’s their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.
As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There’s a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there’s also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don’t know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can “get back to normal” and continue being Google’s sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that “the beatings will continue until morale improves,” it’s hard to imagine how they can get back to “normal.”
At some point it’ll be easier for Google to buy reddit for the content than to unfuck their own search engine. Bonus points because they can tell themselves they fixed it for good and keep making google search even shittier.
I have wondered if some of the big players interested in AI might decide to buy or recreate (again) something like Reddit so that they just have the data and control it. Google owns Youtube, so they are already managing the liability that comes with moderating a social media platform.
Yes, reddit will always retain some user base and they might even continue to grow. But the quality will be worse. Just like Facebook and other social media platforms, there will be users that simply don’t care enough to look for alternatives. I really hope that it will be a downward spiral for them. Too many (contributing) core users leaving, moderation getting worse and spammers and karma farmers reducing the quality of posts to a point where it’s just too cumbersome to scroll through all the crap to find a worthy post. I think that reddit either reverses its decision or that it will slowly fade into meaninglessness…
The quality has been dropping for years and years. I miss reddit from a decade ago, when niche little community things could happen leaving waves across the site.
Now we just get a ton of the same things over and over, hardcore advertising and mass manipulation. It’s no longer the tiny little site nobody knew about but is instead the big focus for all the businesses out there that think there’s a market to be had. Plus there’s the herd mentality that always comes from giant populations on a platform.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still niche communities but they just don’t have the same flavor of cohesion that they did in earlier times.
Reddit CEO calls unpaid moderators’ concerns “noise”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOm_UKGyrZg
This is abusing volunteers. If there are 140,000 active subreddits and if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits. They can close the subreddits, pay someone to moderate, try to pawn them off on a new sucker, or have bots run the subreddits. The question is, in the meantime, will the spammers abuse Reddit like their mods are being abused by Reddit? Let Reddit deal with these problems. If you’re a mod, why are you giving your time away for free to a company that doesn’t care about you?
If you’re a mod, I get that you care about your subreddit, but why waste your talent on someone who thinks your concerns are just noise?
The Minecraft Devs left Reddit:
Leave Reddit? To quote Din Djarin, “This is the way.”
Reddit will die off in stages. Slowly.
First the power users are leaving now. These are the mods and the major content creators (think Minecraft leaving)
Eventually they will piss people off again and the more common content creators will leave.
Then after reddit has worse and worse content, the users who just comment will leave.
After that there will be nothing worthwhile for the lurkers and they will leave too.
Reddit will then be a wasteland.
This will all take quite a while. Even Digg took time to die off.
I’m not sure if Reddit will “die off”. There seems to be a significant portion of users who don’t care about the API debacle or protests - they just want to scroll through memes.
I would definitely like to see Reddit experience more pain, given how cunty they’ve been to users and moderators. But we live in a world where big companies act like shit and get away with it.
no memes to scroll through if there is no one to post the memes
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I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won’t be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.
Unfortunately for me, one of my favorite uses for reddit has been live game threads for various sports and that really only works with a larger user base. For instance, I follow the Seattle Mariners and I have found two different Lemmy instances for them. The one with the most subscribers (44) hasn’t had a game thread posted in 13 days despite the Mariners having played like 10 games in that stretch. The other one has 9 subscribers, although it looks like someone has set up a bot to automatically post a game thread and a post-game thread; however, every single one I looked at has 0 comments.
I’m not gonna be able to pull the plug on reddit entirely until Lemmy gets a serious increase in users.
I miss a lot of my favourite smaller subreddits too. There’s way more now popping up then there was a few weeks ago so it is getting better. It’ll take time for communities to grow, we can’t expect it to be instantly like our fave subreddits were right off the bat. We have to remember that our niche subreddits started small as well at one point. Also consider doing some posting in those slow communities yourself to get the ball rolling. I’ve noticed it takes someone else commenting and providing content before other people feel brave enough to join in too. Kind of like no one wanting to be the first or only person on the dance floor. Once a couple people get in there and begin dancing others join too.
Hi! I’m an admin of fanaticus.social. I’d like to apologize for the game bots disappearance. It’s back now! I made pinned a post about it, which you can read here.
We’re working hard to iron out the kinks in the game bots but I apologize for the inconvenience. I was on vacation last week and because of a bug, the choice was between keeping the fanaticus servers up or putting the bots to sleep.
The live game threads were some of my favorite parts of Reddit too. I can’t do anything about the small user base but porting the game bots over to lemmy and posting content is the best way I could think of to start attracting users.
Lemmy is something like .02% the size of reddit
Do you think that number would change significantly if one were to discount bots from the calculation? I swear 3/4 of comments on some subs were bots, I’d like to think that it’d take a chunk off the actual reddit user base
As a person who really gets stuck in his ways and hates having to change things if I don’t have to, here I am on Lemmy. I’m ready to settle in.
Joining this was easier since I haven’t been on Reddit since the 12th
Got past the habit stage. Now I’m onto alternatives
Yeah Digg didn’t die in a day. It takes time. I joined lemmy today, but I looked into it a few weeks ago first. It wasn’t worth the effort then, it is now. Having an Apollo-like app is a big help too.
Every previous major exodus had the problem that it was the people everyone was better off without leaving. Maybe you hated Reddit in 2015 and were pissed at their decisions, but the alternative was a place dedicated to mocking fat people and saying slurs.
Comparatively lemmy just kinda has a similar vibe to Reddit. Like I need to look for equivalents to some spaces I miss, but it’s not the people we said good riddance to
I’m in the same boat, I just joined today and I’m surprised but Lemmy already scratches the same itch that reddit did
It’s been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.
Idk if it matters what happens to reddit. It would just be nice to have something better. Its hard to see though how reddit can progress anywhere now.
As soon as the threat was made all the mods should have quit. An unmoderated reddit would collapse in hours. It would have been glorious.
This is true. I suspect for many mods the power they have to push their ideas, ideals and beliefs and punish who they see fit more than makes up or the fact that they do it for free.
Mods like that probably exist. There are also many quiet mods, particularly in smaller communities, who try to govern even handedly. I never engaged in any protests or pushed any agendas until the recent API changes, and am trying to set up an alternate space to help ensure a space exists for the content/community.
Quite honestly, I don’t like moderating or leadership and sort of fell into the role. Now that I’m here though, there’s a sense of duty/obligation that makes it hard to leave.
