When the user revolt ends—if it ever does—Reddit’s community won’t ever be the same.
  • Morningcoffee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I think the older core of reddit has always viewed itself as a bottom-up community, rather than a social media platform. Reddit won’t die for now, but this is a sobering wakeup call from that idea.

    Reddit is no freehaven, it’s now just another company, and slowly everyone on it will get squeezed into the businessmold…

    • Domriso@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I certainly never viewed it as a social media site. I joined it as a link aggregator and a way to find information on topics I thought were interesting, not make friends. It always seems odd to me when people refer to it as a social media site.

      • eee@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Everything that I liked about reddit was the fact that it was NOT social media. Everything they’ve done in the last decade (avatars and all that), I’ve religiously ignored.

    • anonionfinelyminced@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Hmmm. Maybe it’s intentional. A purge. Flush out the old crowd with their adblockers and their nonsense ideas about “free speech,” and whoever stays – out of ignorance or compliance – is left with the ad-ridden hellscape that is the new interface and the official app.

    • mrbubblesort@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Reddit *still is * a bottom-up community, that’s why all their monetization efforts never worked and there’s so much backlash against the API changes. All of the content and value on the site is created by the users and mods. Reddit the company doesn’t own that, and redditors take offense at management’s attempts to take advantage of the users’ free efforts for their own gain.

      What Huffman and Reddit should have done was think long term and set up a Wikipedia-like entity that could have ensured the health and growth of the site while only taking a modest cut. Instead they tried to pump up the value and cash out with an IPO, and when that likely fails, they’ll end up with nothing.

    • Gabbro@kbin.social
      01·
      1 year ago

      I think it’s sad. There is so much good information stored in the side bars, like for example /r/buildapc or /r/fitness, that I hope gets salvaged by the fediverse.

      Plus our spaces here need indexing so we can find answers to obscure questions again.

  • yesinmybackyard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Mir offers another business metaphor for the tension on Reddit: “If you have a really good music venue, but you break relations with every notable artist, you’re not going to be a very successful venue. You need to really prioritize the needs of the folks providing the value on your platform.”

    Honestly this sums it up pretty well

    • papertowels@lemmy.oneEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Additionally, it’s not even that good of a venue.

      I was talking to my friend about this and asked if he could point out a single improvement that reddit has made in the last decade that hadn’t been about monetization, since I exclusively use old.reddit.com and third party apps, I certainly couldn’t. We couldn’t come up with anything…

      • Lanfordr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        There’s nothing. It’s been slowly getting more and more shitty for years. It’s just been happening so slowly that there wasn’t a breaking point where most of us left until now.

        I’ve been casually looking for an alternative for years, because the content has gotten so low effort. There just hasn’t been any good alternatives. I tried Voat, but that got over run with racists and Trumpers almost from the jump.

        Lemmy is the first thing I’ve found that seems half decent and it needs to triple ot quadruple it’s engaged user base to really have a shot. Too many posts with no comments or very few. What made reddit special was the comments and interactions. I have hope lemmy can get there, it just needs way more users to do so.

        • eee@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          I agree. Lemmy is really promising but not quite at the critical mass yet. I’ve been trying to post more myself but we need consistentand sustained activity.

          • macarthur_park@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I think we’re gonna get there fairly soon. Lemmy.world only started on June 1. I joined a week ago when there were 1-2k users. Now there’s almost 30k.

        • MrVilliam@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          What made reddit special was the comments and interactions.

          And in the past few months, I found several instances of karma farmers copying a good comment that was low in the thread and pasting it as a reply to one of the top comments to get visibility and upvotes. Idk if it was bots or people with no life, but I bet shit like that was happening much more than we realized, vastly padding engagement. Personally, I’d rather have a smaller and more authentic community here than disingenuous reposts, shitposts, botposts, trollposts, and general farming like what many subreddits became. I like that this platform seems to have much more thoughtful engagement between users who feel more like people than some cardboard cutout. I think we all can learn and grow as people by sincerely engaging in real discourse in the serious communities, and have interesting OC in less serious ones that are just about memes or storytelling or whatever.

          I agree that interactions are special, and I agree that Lemmy needs more users, but I’m wary of bloating the userbase and packing garbage into here. I’d like to see a little growth, and give lurkers a reason to engage in an inviting community that isn’t hostile.

          • PointOnDot@lemmy.worldEnglish
            01·
            1 year ago

            Reddit is inauthentic. Nothing but censorship everywhere. Nobody can say anything if you’re a real person and not a bot. I made a comment comparing new and old Star Trek in a Star Trek community, and my comments got deleted and I got a punishment ban for…some reason. I asked a question about others’ experiences with gay businesses under /AskGayBros and my question along with the thread was deleted, and I was banned for 3 days…for conducting illegal transactions. Those are just two examples, but there are plenty more. I pretty much know that if I post something on Reddit - no matter where and no matter what I say, it will get deleted and I will get banned for 3 days. No matter what. Nobody can say anything over there. I don’t think there are any real people posting, just bots. Because you have to watch what you say and even then, you will likely get deleted.

            • teamevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
              11·
              1 year ago

              If I post ever my account is instantly permanently banned and I still don’t know why. AITA mods are incels

  • deejay4am@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I love how WIRED, being part of the commercialized, centralized internet itself, cannot bring themselves to mention actual Reddit alternatives like Lemmy or kbin, and end this write-up of Reddit’s folly with basically “uh so people might go back to tumblr, I dunno, maybe someone should like, give someone startup money for a like new Reddit and we can live the cycle of the good ol days again”. Yeah don’t worry guys, you’ll get us next time.

    What a wet fart.