Did reddit agree or compromise, or did the movement run out of steam? Just curious if anyone knows..
Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.:
https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews
https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive
https://subredditstats.com/r/videos
All of the most popular subreddits show a steady decline from 2019 to present, with a sharp drop in July 2023. Once this happens to a platform, it's rare for the platform to ever get those users back at scale. It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform, a la Slashdot -- still up and running with some users, but with flat or declining activity forever.
It's wrong for all subs I checked. For example: https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit
Just 3 comments for Nov 22, 8 for Nov 23. But how does that square with the existence of this thread from Nob 22 with 84 comments? https://old.reddit.com/r/thethickofit/comments/181d68u/ben_s...
And there's a bunch of other threads too! It's not just "a little bit wrong" it's completely wrong. That site seems about on the ball as a dead seal.
These stats claim the sub has had 10-20 comments per day in just the past month, so maybe 300-600 tops.
In reality it's had 1200+ comments just in the past week alone and probably closer to 5000 for the month. And you can see the activity with your own eyes in every thread, so I definitely trust reddit's own stats more.
Particularly the nsfw loss hits hard for those interested in niche communities. We've lost tumblr, never had any of the Meta (FB, Instagram) views, Reddit is holding on on threads, Pornhub went down in flames following their outright incompetence, and Twitter has gotten a hellscape from EM's hopeless attempts to keep the spammers away (and his other antics).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425415
You should probably also point out the big red text on the subredditstats pages. I didn't see it when I posted the links, since I'm colorblind and hues of red are entirely invisible to me. Also I have trouble counting past the number of fingers on my hands, so I didn't notice that the numbers were a bit off. If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance.
I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit comment counting serving could do the same.
Yeah it has an addictive dark side. Also most of the user comments went to shit years ago. But overall a net win for me.
Last week I clicked some link leading to reddit, I was surprised I am still logged in.
Serious question, because I’m not sure I understand. Hope it doesn’t come off as antagonistic. I too wonder if the negative things Reddit does to me outweigh the positive, but never considered it was unique to Reddit rather than being true about all anonymous online communities.
> Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing
Saying that as someone been dedicating full-time since September to a project to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy [0], the truth is that there is simply no alternative yet for all the niche communities that are established there.
About a month ago, I posted here [1] about my project to try to make it easier to sign up and automatically discover/subscribe the Lemmy communities [2], but I wasn't expecting to have such a long tail of communities that need to be mapped out. The ~150 users that signed up to alien.top led to a discovery of about 6000 different subreddits.
I was doing the work of curation and creating alternative communities by hand, but I realized that was going to be an endless task. This is why I started working on a crowdsourced solution [3], which I launched last Friday
[0]: https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007028
Platforms are heavily Pareto skewed.[1]. The top 5% of reddit users are the primary (posters, mods) and secondary (commenters) content creators who are responsible for 95% of the life on reddit.
The protest was led by this top 5%, and I presume they're also the main group that atrophied. The scale of damage is therefore underreported in simple usage statistics.
[1] I just coined the term, and I'm proud of it. Now shatter my dreams, and tell how it has already been around for decades.
> Etsy seems dominated by stores that sell nothing with a few that do rather well. It's severely Pareto skewed.
This is a relatively rare use of language, so you might deserve co-invention credit.
It shows different stats because the API changed. DAU is likely higher than ever.
It also passes the sniff test. Pick any of the largest subreddits from the list and look at its front page. r/funny, with 54m "readers", has multiple posts on its front page right now with less than a dozen comments. r/news has more activity on its posts, but still far, far less than 2019.
It's not like there's a thriving community on Reddit that makes subredditstats' numbers look wildly wrong.
Don't mistake "bad for people like us" with "bad for business" — Duolingo appears to be doing fantastically well as a corporation despite having deliberately made themselves into something I found painful to use and therefore stopped using. Facebook is rolling in money despite being your example of bad. Tabloid newspapers sell very well.
fight the power!
Instead, if you go on Subreddit Stats and read the text with the big red font, you'll see the explanation why the API changes have made such a difference:
> Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it's probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms - especially open-source/federated ones like Lemmy.
My assumption is the maintainer just hasn't edited their scraper at all, and it's now running into lots of rate limiting and missing most new comments and posts. The fact that subscriber growth has remained constant supports that thesis.
So only down by two thirds, so they still have to double down if they want to outcompete X.
That's not to say that Reddit has a great, glorious future. But by any quantifiable metrics, Reddit "won."
That's just not the reality. I'm surprised and pleased to see that big subreddits suffered a significant decline, but I notice the number of subscribers continues to grow. Also, after the the dust settled, Lemmy activity really took a downturn. Small communities just can't survive the migration en masse. Whenever I need to look up something I still eventually need to check reddit, and most communities seem alive and healthy... The truth is, major subreddits are not what keeps reddit alive.
My preferred way of viewing reddit content when I am not using the old reddit desktop version with RES is usually on "redditp.com". Reddit is not great mind you, there's plenty of room for improvement, but it's a welcome break from the ultra-repetitive and deeply psychologically manipulative ad laced feeds that TikTok and Instagram have. Redditp.com is a video and picture scroller that is also customizable by modifying the site URL, so content from specific subreddits can be viewed on it by scrolling rather than by expanding each individual post.
They really need a UI that allows subreddit titles to be selectable on it. They also need to reign in moderators that strictly control subreddits to enrich themselves and shut out others mind you...
The desktop experience on Reddit needs to be protected at all costs, everybody is trying to turn Social Media into dictatorial Cable TV with Commercials (where you have no control over what you see) everywhere now.
Please. There are many subs, which lack mods and need to throw bodies at mod queues.
If it helps, I’ve seen Reddit outreach programs to mods, and they used to respect the opinions of certain mods and subs.
Spez recently joined a mod team.
It’s enlightening, one of those “everyone should do this” kind of experiences.
Reddit modding in particular is not just modding, but also community outreach and management, typically for text.
They shut off API access to their data around the very same time. Is that a coincidence?
One of my former favorites (the one I made an account for!) went from a very good and healthy moderation to a weird form of 'If we have to go into the thread more than once we have a short fuse for harsh enforcement of rules, nonpopular threads can still be cool though'.
It will be very interesting to see what happens next year; historically election cycles tend to make SNR worse and people just break.
I have seen next to no engagement change in subreddits where the mods didn’t make it very difficult or impossible to engage (i.e either stayed neutral, or made notional changes and few posts). In fact growth as if been seen at normal rates, as if nothing happened.
The average person didn't care about what the mods wanted.
This is untrue from my pov. I see no change at all, /r/all is useless garbage memes. My custom page is mostly high signal. And the occasional tech search yields good results.
It’s kind of a relief. I think I was too “lazy” to stop on my own because Apollo was so comfortable to use.
I tried last week ( after a few months off Reddit) to install the Reddit app, and it’s appallingly bad. It’s so confusing that I’m not quite sure what sub I’m reading, what’s user generated, and what’s an ad ( I was never a prolific poster, commenter, mod or anything - just reading is difficult now )
So independently of the politics, I’ve tried to come back to the platform, but I can’t, because the new product is vastly inferior to the old one.
I'm unable to tell apart ads properly either quickly on reddit, and given the it's the same user action to collapse a comment and to click an ad that looks like a comment, I've misclicked on ads many, many times. It doesn't help that they place them at the top of the comments section and seem to be deliberately designed to look like gif comments.
As an advertiser I would not be particularly chuffed. I can say with confidence that my accidental ad click rate on reddit is 100%.
Fixed that for you ;)
Ultimately I think if anything had any impact on Reddit's traffic it would have been the killing of the defacto mobile apps. The lesson any future founders should take is to kill off third party apps sooner rather than later if you ever want to do so, before user growth on those platforms becomes an issue.
By comparison, the official Reddit app feels somewhat slower, even on my relatively new Android 12 phone from 2021, having a very noticeable lag when scrolling through articles and comments. For video and photo posts, there's no way of browsing the comments without clicking on the thumbnail and having it auto-play the videos every time, meaning I need to react fast to pause the video (there is practically no way of stopping this). And it doesn't support Android 7 anymore, meaning the only way to access it from my 2018 phone is via the browser.
It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.
https://github.com/ichitaso/ApolloPatcher/releases/latest
https://github.com/EthanArbuckle/Apollo-CustomApiCredentials
Edit: oh never mind, I've been digging into the links but it looks like it's iOS - only. So that explains why I've never come across it before.
Same and mainly because Kagi let's me rewrite the url to a private libreddit instance. Otherwise I'd have downranked it.
- Narwhal 2: https://narwhal.app/
Of course, you pay the API costs. But this is pro work, countless UX details thoughtfully made.
- Winston: https://winston.cafe/
- Winston on GitHub: https://github.com/lo-cafe/winston
In TestFlight Beta, OK on iPhone but awkward on iPad unless full screen; layout is jumbled mess in stage manager windows.
It's just bizarre to me that they didn't try to buy one of these apps to replace their own. That would've been a net win. It seems instead, as throughout their history, that their leadership is constantly trying to destroy it.
If they had external investors they'd be being hit with shareholder lawsuits constantly.
Nowadays I'm mostly on Tildes and here, neither of which has the endless inflow of content that Reddit did, it's actually possible to read "everything" on both and then go do something else.
As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators have gained a bit of a foothold.
Post quality also declined after the 2017 redesign. The old design had a sidebar where subreddits kept a FAQ and wiki. Today, the same questions get asked again and again on many subreddits. Mods can't lock those posts and direct the author to the FAQ, because most users can't even see the FAQ. Mods who try to ensure a firm hand regularly get excoriated by the community, even by regulars on the sub, as "gatekeepers".
In one of the craft based subs I moderate (5m subs - reasonably sized one), it's not so much the quality of posts has dropped, it's that the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly. This seems to directly translate to garbage posts getting a lot more visibility and sticking around for a lot longer. The good quality posts are still there, but proportionally the garbage is much more visible now.
This is enough of a problem that subscribers have been complaining about it. Not much can be done until (and only if) the number of actual contributors begins to rise again.
On the other hand, I also run a tiny local city sub (maybe 20k ppl) - the number of posts has been steadily growing. I can't work that one out.
Local subs growing despite power users vacating kind of lines up with this too — casual users seem more likely to treat Reddit like one of the bigger platforms like Facebook, seeking out subreddits that are more broadly appealing or based around locality rather than interest-based subreddits.
Mine's gone from 1-1.5k to 2-400 posts a day.
I personally wrote a userscript to wipe every post comment I've ever made, and have limited my usage to a few particular subs that I still lurk (/r/LocalLLaMA in particular) just bc Lemmy still doesn't seem to have a comparable level of activity.
Speaking of which I'm still trying to sort out the situation involving which instances federate with which, and where to actually set up a primary account, and what the interop situation with different Fediverse platforms is even like in general for that matter.
Those that replaced it with Lemmy, and those that took it as a moment to kick a habit.
I think the latter is the larger group.
Yeah, I can see the average quality has been going down. Also I've felt less enthusiastic about contributing. I just won't bother submitting articles, writing a more insightful comment, etc
Lately, they only deserve bottom of the barrel engagement
I truly believe Reddit themselves are using the bots to fake participation.
This was noticeable immediately after the blackout, with all of the “I’m sorry I’m not allowed to generate offensive content” comments .. which I’m sure they only learned to filter away.
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Nearly half the active users have disappeared again since the peak.
The official mobile app is also really persistent about pushing content it thinks you might like which has the unintended consequence of generalizing those niche subreddits to the degree that they lose that niche focus. For example, if every /r/movies user gets /r/criterion pushed to them, the content of /r/criterion will slowly transform to match the tastes of the /r/movie users.
Power vacuums filling up always lead to lower quality governance, but it seems that reddit did not have to be governed that well after all.
I entirely quit it myself, and when I do end up driving bythe more niche subreddits from typical search results, I find that it feels way more dead.
Discourse on the internet in general is becoming less open and candid as people self-censor out of fear of retribution, ostracization, and/or cancellation. Expect more people to withdraw into exclusive, closed communities and cliques where frank, quality discussion can actually be had, away from the preying eyes of the censorious authoritarians and moderator types, as well as the vapid Tweet-length, Reddit-style shitposting that the masses bring with them.
Prepare to enter a new informational dark age, far from the original ethos of the early Internet hackers and engineers who sought to democratize and maximize open access to information for all. Now information can be dangerous - it can be false, misleading, misinformative, and therefore its dissemination should be strictly controlled and moderated to prevent people from getting "the wrong idea." Moreover whatever you say online is more likely to be used against you, and so it is preferable to practice a policy of reticence and silence than speak at all.
I think, in general, people got exhausted at just shouting out to everyone. Over the past two years I've significantly drawn back my 'public' social media on favor of having more focused discussions with smaller groups of people. No one benefited (apart from advertisers) from me sharing my every waking thought and opinion to the world.
It difficult to draw much from the "early" internet to now. There's orders of magnitude more people online, with more types of people. Internet access is significantly more abundant abundant - previously you needed to "log in" to the internet. Now pretty much everyone is permantantly online by at least on device they carry on themself
But just to comment on the idea that some comments here are "low quality, like Reddit", I'd like to note that your preferred form of comment isn't necessarily "high-quality". Not in the way you probably mean. Almost all HN comments are low-quality. They're made by the inexperienced, usually sharing opinions rather than facts, with no evidence, often arguing over something banal or subjective, with an aim to correct rather than educate.
There's just not that many experts out there. When there are, and they do comment, they often get downvoted by the ignorant. Instead most people share comments which are more like opinions dusted with a little information they read once and probably don't remember completely accurately. Often comments and conversations get downvoted or flagged purely because someone doesn't like their opinion or disagrees, regardless of whether they might be right or have a genuine argument.
The big difference between Reddit and HN is a HN user believes they are superior. Intellectually, morally, behaviorally, or just in the company they keep. You keep seeing this comment all the time, "Reddit is low-quality, HN is high-quality". But it's not. "Quality" can have many different dimensions and each of those be subjectively preferred based on the person. HN encourages people to share thoughts even if they have no idea what they're talking about. And discussions often devolve into the ignorant arguing over nonsense. It's like a sewing circle for nerds who believe that believing you are smart or right is more important than actually being right. That argument for its own sake is better than making a light-hearted joke. HN is where levity goes to die, and the intellectually insecure reign.
First, you caught my attention by dropping a powerful and memorable term (eternal september). Second, you followed up with an entirely accurate indictment of the problems with this site.
However, you lost your way a little bit at the end. Is it really that hard to recognize that Reddit-tier comments are uniquely low quality content? For at least a decade, that whole site has been overrun by angry people posting comments that not only do not contribute to any sort of intelligent discussion, but actually deter more thoughtful and reasonable people from even bothering to try to contribute. How is this at all controversial for you?
Not to over complicate the comment system here but I wish one could just tag a comment as "humor" and one could then choose to just not show them if one did not care to see such things.
Reddit was useful because it kept those people contained within the reddit.com domain. Now, I fear they are loose on the Internet and we may see many sites/apps/federations quickly deteriorate into uselessness.
Many subreddit moderators protested in various ways and were removed and replaced.
Reddit never agreed or compromised and for the most part the movement seems to have run out of steam.
Maybe if Reddit squeezes more, more users will go to Lemmy and similar alternative platforms?
This is because Google is assigning more weight to user-generated content, since the rise of AI-generated content, and I believe traffic will keep growing.
oh, no worries. We have at least two looming controversies for that upcoming.
1. the contributor program (AKA, get paid to post on reddit) that replaces Reddit Gold that was datamined: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/reddit-will-start-paying-y...
2. the looming hostility towards NSFW content that will likely in the mid term (1-2 years) lead to reddit trying to cut off NSFW material.
It's a matter of being prepared for the next drama instead of if it'll ever happen again.
Personally I have essentially not used reddit since June outside of following links there from searches. It was the thing that got me to make an HN account after being a passive reader for like 7 years.
It's an entirely different medium that serves an entirely different purpose. Reddit is a message board. Discord is chat. A highly-active Discord is impossible to keep up with, whereas a highly active subreddit is still very useable. You can post a question on reddit, go to work, come home many hours later, and read the answers, and it's easy no matter how much traffic the sub gets. On Discord, if it's very active, you could find yourself scouring through hundreds of messages to see if someone replied to you and didn't use the Reply feature.
May a bit more: there were a few news stories about it, so it wasn't totally silent; but I kinda doubt the people it was meant to impact were at all distressed.
The impact was massive attention to alternatives. Tons of traffic testing on said alternatives. Tons of press to activity pub, etc etc.
It’s just like Mastodon. Every exodus was big for mastodon and activity pub. It gained traffic, interest, devs and users. Did it kill twitter? Of course not, but only fools thought it was likely to.
Killing some massive social network is near impossible. But dismissing the twitter or Reddit drama as being irrelevant because they didn’t die is missing a lot of interesting development in the FOSS ecosystem imo.
I think it's surprising because the collapse of sites like Digg and Myspace in the past, but the internet is a bigger/much different place now.
My prediction was the site is going to lose a lot of its niche communities and deep content will be diminished and the site will hollow out over time. It definitely seems like that's what is happening.
I didn't participate in the blackout. I felt the mods were wrong to take that approach.
I did go to bat for blind mods. They need better mod tools than they have.
That comment is here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36232441
Hopefully Reddit does figure out how to both foster attractive communities and make enough money.
I run a bunch of Reddits. One has 20k members and says "top 5 percent" and many have a few hundred and say "top 50 percent." There's a lot more to Reddit than the very big Reddits.
I think the relatively small number of very big Reddits get too much press. That's not all there is to Reddit and I hope they defy the expectations of people already pronouncing them "dead."
I think reddit is a wonderful idea that needs different leadership, and the only way for that to happen at this point is for reddit to die and something new and preferably harder to buy out takes its place.
If the only way people will "allow" a valuable service to live is as their bitch, the entire internet is welcome to go die in a fire while we dream up some new answer for the future of this world.
It’s difficult enough getting 8 developers on the exact same page when writing code, now imagine trying to moderate to a ruleset with a much greater degree of ambiguity.
I'm not blind. I have no idea if it's gotten harder for blind mods.
Sorry.
The site as a whole feels a bit less active - i.e. not as active as it used to be.
The soul is dead, the body is alive
I started using tildes.net which is invite only interesting community.
Look at HN - simple hierarchical discussion forums with a negligible barrier to entry and no grating artificial limitations, and we quite rightly love it.
In short, I still use Reddit, but there's nothing ideological about that choice.
Without an alternative to reddit, using the reddit app remains the way to stay informed & engaged in various niche reddit communities.
I still use reddit the same today as I have been for the last 10+ years (chrome + RES). /r/all is as bad as it's ever been, however my subbed feed hasn't changed much.
HN is a highly skewed techy community. And I imagine many are reddit vagrants as well. I see it less as "giving the right answer" and more "asking a biased audience". It's the opposite of asking people on reddit what they think of the blackout; many who stayed and never used 3rd party apps probably didn't care or even argue it was an abuse of mod power.
And of course, Reddit isn't just one website. Some places may have barely changed. Others are indeed irreparably changed. Others still are literally shut down. The question is highly sensitive to how you browse, and what you browse.
- tech topics I browse on HN for. 90+% of what I'd see on places like r/technology I'd see here with tons of discussion
- more political or otherwise touchy topics I replaced with tildes.net. And honestly I am the much better off for it. It is a lot quieter than Reddit, but there are very few times where I feel such topics devolve into the polarized turf wars you know r/politics to be.
- Don't browse it as much, but for memes/humor stuff Lemmy and KBin work well enough. still very much growing and I hope they can become more general purpose replacements, but for now non-meme stuff is a trickle unless it's that 1-2 posts that blow up (usually political stuff or more reddit drama... not what I go there for)
- lastly, a lot of gaming stuff I migrated to discord for. Definitely the worst experience when on large servers and it feels even noisier than Twitter. But the small community for niche genres or specific games are surprisingly cozy. It's a real mixed bag.
So I'd say it's 90% replaced. But I can also admit there are some few communities I reluctantly go back to that keep me from fully disconnecting to reddit (though, note that I deleted my account way back in February. I fully lurk):
- gamedev communities are a huge one. The best alternative to that is Twitter and... no, I still can't do Twitter/X/Whatever Musk fancies that day of the week. Never liked it before, and I'd rather deal with Reddit's madness than try to learn it in 2023 at its worst. maybe I'll try Bluesky one day, but I'm personally rooting for Mastodon (haven't checked it out myself, though).
- in a similar vein, I still find it easier to skim for industry news on r/games and related subs than to scour the net. This is definitely laziness on my end so I can't pretend to be immune from the path of least resistance. I can alleviate half of this with a proper RSS feed (never used one, but I am very curious about setting one up), but research into this really made me remember how many sites I used to discuss on removed their forums or comment sections. Or in some cases, the comments make reddit look like a bastion of nuance in comparison.
well, one day. I'm still searching in the meantime.
The only thing that genuinely scares companies whose primary business model is ads is content that is not considered "brand safe". Posting such content, particularly on subreddits where it doesn't belong, would have been a far more effective strategy IMO. Filling the frontpage with porn, slurs, racist memes, made up slanderous stories about the most common Reddit advertisers and other such junk would have forced Reddit's hand.
Reddit has spent a lot of time cultivating a community that would not accept that, even ironically. Any attempt at using "racist memes" to fight the admins would get shutdown by the powermods real quick.
Gotta say though.... if you make a fresh instagram or tiktok account that same material will be suggested to you while you are in the wide suggestion phase. Kids love taking pics at the beach, which is just one of many reasons not to start a UGC website.
Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return.
But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit the frontpage and attract new followers... All the Redditors looking for new hangout spots. Post quality has declined as a result, but the subs who stayed have seemingly absorbed the traffic.
------
Lemmy.world usage spiked dramatically, as has Mastodon.world. I think these alternative open source communities show lots of promise, though many decisions at Lemmy seem naiive right now.
The adults seem aware of the Lemmy problems however so I remain hopeful. If your community is text based, Lemmy is likely a good fit.
Picture based communities have a NSFW / trolling problem that is still an open question. If trolls can post CSAM to threaten the moderators / admins, what are Lemmy admins supposed to do about that?
DeFederation (and temporary DeFederation) are okay tools for this problem... But better tools need to be built into Lemmy. Random server #244 doesn't necessarily deserve to be defederated if just 20 or so trolls are posting CSAM and threatening Admins. Nominally, a tool that more selectively bans users (or new users only) instead of cutting off the whole server would be ideal.
The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky.
The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is a bit underspecified in practice, and you're gonna have to test combinations of actual running code. We've been having a bizarre time just trying to talk to Kbin reliably, i.e. software intended to do the same Reddit-alike job as Lemmy. We almost have two-way Mastodon story and comment flow working, except when the Mastodon has authorized_fetch switched on. Etc etc etc, the problems are a string of little glitches.
OTOH, it basically works well enough to sustain discussion, both local and federated. So everything else is fussing, really.
* https://awful.systems/ official refuge of SneerClub and TechTakes
Yeah.
I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and then a patch will be submitted.
The advancements from 0.17 to 0.18.0 to 0.18.5 have grossly improved Lemmy in substantial ways. There's enough bug-progress that I'm happy. There's plenty more bugs, but progress is largely all that I care about.
--------
The deeper concern of mine, and I alluded to this earlier with my "Naive" comment, is that Lemmy is very ideological right now. Ex: There was a week or two where people were against Lemmy Search Engines, worried that they'd track us. (Thankfully, someone made search-lemmy.com and life is better now).
But now we're running into a "Privacy / anti-tracking" problem, directly in relation to this new-user / trolling issue. The most direct solution to the trolling problem is to have a way to track new-users and their early posts to see if they're a bot, troll, or otherwise a fake malicious account. Reddit does this through its Karma system.
But Lemmy is fundamentally against Karma-tracking at the moment, meaning an _actual_ solution to this "trolls just create a new account from an unmoderated server" cannot rely upon karma (right now). I'm hoping that the politics shift enough that we can start talking about Karma-tracking (or other simple statistics that grossly diminish trolling behavior), but its going to be a while before everyone gets convinced IMO.
---------
I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison.
Or to get more specific: I know the Beehaw.org server wants to join everyone else in the federation. And we all know why they aren't doing so, and everyone respects everyone else's opinions and situation. Until this trolling problem is... addressable (not necessarily solved, but "addressed", so that we have tools to deal with it), it will be best for some instances to just remain de-federated (especially from open-registration servers who are prone to these coordinated trolling-assaults).
In that case, the moderators never re-opened and were replaced by scabs by the admins. But the sub remained fully dead. The userbase had moved to a discord server, which is well run and has plenty of users in the 50+ age bracket not normally associated with the platform.
I signed up for the $60/yr. Ad-free version and Reddits still great IMO.
I get it if that's your goal but it's not for me.
Zero of the top 25 posts of the last twelve months are younger than five months. Two of the top 50 posts are younger than five months.
Comments (using subredditstats from a sister comment) have gone from around 70k per day to around 12k per day.
That said, on second glance there is something weirdly fucky here. This post [0] from a day ago has 4.2k upvotes- and yet, it does not appear in the spot it should in the top of year [1]. Tf?
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/185g0tf/whats_th...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/top/?sort=top&t=year&coun...
I remember during the blackout that there was an extra push (by reddit paid mods) of pushing content to AskReddit (or maybe they made up a similar sub) and were noticeably creating topics there
lemmy is more popular than voat.co (shut down in 2020) but still far from a reddit alternative.
(I deleted my 12-year-old account and all of the posts/comments I made with it, and I use the site much less than I used to.)
those were some innocent times
I also think many reddit users moved to HN which resulted in some quality going down as they bring the old reddit culture with them, but I’m betting that won’t last.
I think it’s still early to tell. Reddit still has lots of traction and even if it’s becoming less attractive, the alternative is not quite there yet.
Previously these would get instantly downvoted and greyed out as not adding to the discussion nor showing curiosity. Now they remain, because a lot more HN users are Reddit refugees who think this type of comment is normal/good.
Traffic has since died down heavily (I'm down to 40 subscribers from a peak of 120 during the HN launch), but it still motivates me knowing there's at least a desire for something similar (and hopefully better).
Three of the biggest issues was there was an off-by-one error in the payment amount selector (which imo is unacceptable for anything paid), the subscription cancellation button didn't work, and the mobile view (which made up ~60% of the user agent requests) was broken (especially when logged out). I fixed those and started rolling out regular updates as well: https://non.io/#updates
Launched a bunch of new features since, but really what I'm waiting on before promoting and trying to get things off the ground is the iOS app. Overall it's been wild ride, but the thing I'm most proud about is the $119 I've paid out to users. It's a tiny amount in the grand scheme of things, but it proved the platform worked and that the distribution of funds worked.
In terms of outcomes, Reddit appears to have made their mobile website less user-hostile. Dismissing the "download app" modal still has to be done, but after that the experience is OK. Funnily enough, there are not that many ads on the official site, because Reddit seemingly doesn't have many advertisers to begin with.
It’s really only lacking the size of Reddit for me, there isn’t a ton of activity in niche subs, but they’re growing.
For another categories, they're still small and having struggles gaining traction to have enough users and posts to be lively. But I think it's just a matter of time if Lemmy continues polishing its features and community discoveries.
I personally tried to build an alternative back then [1] (open source [2]), but the problem even Reddit is facing now is acquiring more users and keeping high quality content.
Last time I checked Lemmy, it wasn't doing good either - but these might just be personal Interpretations of the current situation.
Most people have no idea what's behind reddit, facebook, youtube. They just see a free shiny thing and start using it. Then one day the free shiny thing has a gross ad on it, and one day it has another one, and before they know it, it's unusable.
At the same time, people are so fixated with "X killer [no, not the twitter thing]" that they can't see the small victories when a site with 1000 people grows to 10k people. 10x growth is insane but it can be swept away if all they see is a 0.02% drop in reddit traffic to achieve that.
So much better to celebrate the growths than to chant at the downfalls. downfalls are good popcorn drama, especially these days, but doesn't really solve the problem.
But after they started doing stupid stuff I also moved to Lemmy, and haven’t looked back.
Then again Reddit is doing all it can to make the site as UX hostile as possible so I guess their network effects are powerful
reddit was the place for a lot of communities (and for the most part still is) but there's a lot of places on the internet you can get generic mass-market content, that might be what drives reddit's bottom line but it's not what makes it special. The masses will go to the next popular platform, people interested in specific communities will stay as long as reddit doesn't piss them off. The beauty of reddit is that you can be interested in one or two niche communities, but you soak up the rest of the ecosystem along the way. If the masses go somewhere else and the niche communities are pushed away, there's not much left.
Also to clarify, I don't mean niche as in small, I just mean specific hobbies or interests etc, that's what reddit was good at - not needing to go to some forum to be able to talk about your thing. And by masses I mean whoever is participating in r/pics or r/funny or r/tifu or whatever else.
I haven't posted much there (at all) in awhile so I'm guilty as anyone but am not sure why. I think a chicken-and-egg thing?
My sense is the quality of posts on smaller subreddits I frequent declined perceptibly but not dramatically after the blackout. In a lot of the subreddits it seems like the diversity of topics went down and the posts got a little more superficial or something.
I personally started frequenting old-fashioned forums more often again for certain topics.
Some things are hard to beat the subreddits though, and I've noticed they have slowly started returning to their prior quality (in a qualitative, not value sense). It seems like a lot of them that attempted to migrate to other places (lemmy, kbin, etc) never quite reproduced the subreddits, although I've been surprised at the staying power of some.
It really depends on the person. Even on reddit, the number of posts and top level comments I made can be counted on my hands. I don't really "make content", I respond to others' conversation that result from it. But that's not what a new site needs in order to get off the ground.
The next result is that I noticed I became less argumentative in real life and tend to keep my opinions to myself more, all in all much appreciated by those I love. And my mental health is better.
The next result is that in going back occasionally to scroll through reddit it seems MUCH more obvious to me that almost every post is designed to incite anger, controversy or judgment. It didnt feel nearly that obvious before.
And there are some clear indications that bots are running rampant. Especially r/AITA (Am I The Asshole) where EVERY post is now almost exactly the same length, written about some situation that is quite stupid or rage inducing that its hard to believe that anyone would bother to respond. But they do. Im guessing they have an intern pounding away at ChatGPT for 10 minutes to create the next 100 AITA's
Lastly, Ive migrated to tildes.com, and much smaller community where I was/am startled to see that people can communicate politely even when they disagree and rage baiting does not exist. Its not nearly as busy as reddit was and the topics are far more limited but the quality is miles above the poor posts that now permeate reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/1853x6g/whats_your_...
Seven months ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/solotravel/comments/12iwccx/unpopul...
One year ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TravelNoPics/comments/vbcvu6/whats_...
Two years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/p71gax/whats_your_m...
The end result: if you want to karma farm or make a hot topic, just search for something that was posted 6+ months ago.
The subreddit I moderate (100k subs) saw no lasting impact on traffic. We participated in the blackout for 2 or 3 days and then carried on as normal.
To be fair, it is a sub for a TV show, so the traffic is very seasonal. The blackout happened in the off-season, and now that the show is back we have a lot of traffic again.
Anecdotally scanning the main comments in the all subreddits, I don’t see any change in number of comments anyways. Honestly without quantitative data on comment quality or comment numbers, I’d be skeptical of bias by anyone willing their pet desired outcome from api changes into existence.
The biggest problem from the blackout and API drama isn't that some clients had to shut down. It's that, as a new user or a user that only uses the platform a little, it's much harder to discover good content organically now that most subreddits are NSFW or not on the /r/all feed. Even as someone who used reddit way more than any human ever should, I find the site a lot harder to use because I have to expend a lot more effort manually curating my subreddits when previously I could exhaust my personal feed and then just switch to /r/all - and I don't think I could ever discover some niche or zany community I didn't know about beforehand since I'd have to know to look for it to find it.
Since I doubt I'm alone in this, I think it's the beginning of the end for Reddit. It'll be a lot harder for new communities to form, existing small/medium/focused communities will struggle to gain members, and new users will probably think the site is empty and leave.
Definitely worse before the API changes, feels like there's less content now. I don't have to scroll very far to find niche subreddits anymore, which is a plus I suppose.
There were only one or two occasions since then where I clicked on a reddit link when the context/topic was very compelling. Happy to report I did not feel the urge to browse away and bury myself in other reddit links and subreddits.
On desktop I have a uMatrix/uBO rule that blocks the domain completely. So inadvertent clicks before seeing the domain also get trapped.
They’ve shown they run the subs, make hire/fire decisions and have the power to supersede community manager calls.
This makes mods look more like labour, not volunteers.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
Those daily hours I used to spend on Reddit are now practically non-existent.
That has turned the flavor of that sub into a simulacrum of Nextdoor.
Recently fought for my alt account and a subreddit that was an automated, arguably better of another popular subreddit with basically the same content but without as much editorialization. Had to appeal like 10 times, and a few days after that, the account got re-banned on a faux "ban evasion" charge. Sigh.
I uninstalled the app and only check the website when I'm looking for something specific now.
That's been the only outcome.
we berated everyone that tried to bring that drama into our subreddits, it’s literally just a forum
the mods acknowledged that they have worse tools and that’s still true
Personally, I have moved to Lemmy, and I use Tildes, too.
Digg, Reddit, and more have proven: a truly public discussion board will be taken over by business behavior unless it is strictly prohibited and enforced.
A decent number of people saw the writing on the wall that they didn't own the spaces that they socialized in, and sought something more distributed, with the Fediverse. It's a step in the right direction, but the extant focus on re-posting and updoots/downdoots still retains a lot of bullshit from social media that'll carry over just fine in terms of social behavior.
Reddit burned me out on any sort of website that has scoring or other perverse incentives to mess up the intent of whatever community. Groups who are earnest and savvy will host forum software and not social media software. Though one socializes on a forum, the way that you do so and the mechanics available separate them and allow you to focus on the topicality instead of how many updoots one gets. That design decision prevents gaming the forum, and in doing so gets rid of 'fake' engagement. For instance, why do we allow up and down votes without corresponding messages/reasons? I care much less about the metrics of group sentiment and would rather see why they feel a certain way.
Take a moment to actually read a Reddit thread, or a Youtube comments page, or any other generally accessible place to chat. Most of it is trash, a lot of it repeats itself, a lot of bots, misinformation, the works.
The media itself is fake. The things that get posted on places are meant to be posted places. It's all a fake social game. At least StumbleUpon, in its early hey day, exposed me to new and fun places on the Web. That atmosphere is dead in modern social media.
Bird's eye view, not much has changed. But Reddit has removed their awards system and Premium doesn't seem to have value. The bot problem hasn't gotten any better; rate-limiting just means they need more accounts. I visit there sometimes out of old habit, but I don't find anything fun anymore.
Lemmy has potential but I feel it's basically the same norms we saw on Reddit, depending on the instance.
Sure I'm on HN and it might barely qualify as social media, but I don't exactly fit in here. This is sort of a "last earnest effort" to participate somewhere on the Internet that isn't my own self-hosted services that use open or federated protocols.
Racism or discrimination is never acceptable (unless against white people)
