Question: People who still frequent Reddit, has it gone back to business as usual or are the protests still having effect?
I haven’t gone back since Apollo shut down, and not planning to, but I am curious.
/r/all has top posts from very obscure subreddits now
My Frontpage has much much less churn.
As long as we keep making this place good and active, it will be attractive. With the increased spam bots and degraded moderation, people will start looking elsewhere
I've noticed this too. Posts from obscure subs with few dozens of comments on /r/all, with not that really interesting content.
That's what I've experienced as well. My home feed is stagnant and r/all has lots of subs I've never seen. I spend much less time there and I've stopped upvoting anything. I dropped Premium in June since it's clear /u/spez doesn't need the money anymore now that 3rd party apps aren't sucking him dry.
I read a post somewhere that really vibed with me. It said that they use Apollo and Reddit was just a backend. When Apollo died, Reddit did too for them.
Boost just died for me a hour ago, and Reddit with it. So now I'm here.
What infuriates me are subs that act like nothing is happening. I can understand not wanting to get involved with drama but actively supporting the devs by pretending everything is fine is vile to me.
My fav sub r/labrats is also not acting as if nothing is happening. Deleted my account but I miss labrats a bit.
Why? There are a lot of redditors who have never used third party apps and who don't have any horse in this race. Now I don't think Reddit's behavior bodes well for the future of the site but I can fully understand why some users and mods would choose to ignore all this drama. This is also very far from a high stakes "life or death" situation so I don't think there's anything akin to a moral obligation to join the protest. At the end of the day, if lemmy offers a better community people will come here.
My point rests with your last sentence. I don't care about funny vids or weird facts, what made reddit precious was the interaction within communities and "being part of it" rather than just a visitor. That for me makes this situation life or death for reddit and from what I've seen, the "core" and most invested folk who made reddit what it is think so too. Without these, reddit is just another website with pictures and text.
The inaction of some communities not so deep into the internet lore is absolutely fine however bigger subs or corrupt mods yielding to the bullying from admins/supporting them will result in dissolving of these communities and this is why I absolutely think that anyone and everyone should take some action whether it be migrating to lemmy like us or any other solution they see fit whether it be a discord server or an independent forum.
It is unavoidable that there will be losses but a fresh start is the best we have and to maintain what was created over years with blood sweat and tears, reddit is no longer a viable option. It seems a spring cleaning was in order anyhow...
Third party apps were only the tip of the iceberg. The bigger issue is the increasing monetization of data and recommendations across the site. This whole thing is ultimately about who will shape the internet: users or corporations. That's why it's silly for people to pretend there's a neutral opinion
Ah, yes, typical reddit addict having withdrawal syndrome.
Don't look back...
Is it withdrawal symptoms if I'm only curious out of spite?
Lemmy is my new Reddit addiction. With Lemmy becoming more vibrant I’m missing Reddit less and less, though Lemmy still has a ways to go.
Getting better daily though.
Tbh this is filling that void. Think I checked reddit once since Apollo died
It almost seems like business as usual, but there are definitely fewer posts, and people don't seem to be posting as often. And you can tell in some of the subs that the mods have taken a step back to some degree.
I was wondering if what reddit did was on purpose to lower their pre-IPO valuation so insiders could get a better price before it goes public. After the IPO they entice people back with reasonable API policy and then they can demonstrate huge user growth to boost stock price... Nobody working with investors on preparing for an IPO is going to do something this stupid without major pushback from the investor advisors.
Watch this space...
If that’s the strategy, is the loss of trust really worth it? How would they entice users back when all the 3rd party apps has shut down?
They destroyed trust. It will take a lot of work and time to get that trust back. If that’s their strategy, their investors need to be in it for quite a long haul!
You're making the mistake of thinking that people who care about what the admins did are the majority of reddit users.
I'd give it a month, maybe 6 weeks, until everything is back to normal.
I love the sound and view of a good trashfire, so I sometimes go look and see how hard it's burning.
So /r/madlads Mods did what madlads do: They made everyone a moderator just like /r/politicalhumor did from the beginning of the protest. I brought the idea up to the /r/pics mod just to let them know. Would be funny as hell.
Postwise, Bots started reposting content from 2-3 years ago, ChatGPT was spotted multiple times as a replying user and smaller subs returned to normal, but are slowly drowning in spambot posts or switched to approval-only due to the failing tools.
EDIT: A major antispambot on reddit closes down today by unbanning EVERY SINGLE SPAMBOT on reddit. Did I mention that I love watching things burn down?
To me it feels like the whole ordeal shook reddit quite a bit and made maybe the top 10% of the users drop out of the bucket this way, going to the Fediverse (flavors: lemmy, kbin, mastodon) as far as I can tell right now. Tildes and squabbles got some users, too, but IMHO those seem to be not doing well so far.
They didn't unban all spam bots, they just aren't adding any more to the ban list.
Jesus that's hilarious! Make everyone a mod, I'd love to see that spread.
Turning everyone into mods is a horrible idea, because reddit will hand over ownership of any sub doing any kind of protests to the first mod that contacts them and asks for it. At least one sub was taken over because of that by a person who had basically no clue about what they were doing.
It's dangerous and just asking for Reddit to take over.
You’re not wrong, but that’s also the point. Let Spaz try to run the site with sycophants and no real content creators.
I suspect that mod teams who were serious about protests from the beginning knew that they would eventually be replaced. They’re just doing as much damage as possible and dragging it out now. Spaz will win, but they can make it a Pyrrhic victory.
Since so many decent folks have left Reddit, proportionally, there are more bigots now. I never log in anymore and when I am there it's to find something specific.
My app only really stopped working yesterday.
I wouldn't say massively different, but I do find it pretty stale content wise recently. Only started using Lemmy today and worry that it's just a bit empty content wise for the moment...
Hmm, i checked out the FP and a few of the subs I used to frequent. Front page seems to have more TikTok style crap than ever, like "guy gets punched!" or "someone makes annoying food!". Relationship advice: "get divorced!!".
City subs seem about the same as before. Medical subs I used to read seem about the same and holy shit, am I glad I'm not reading those every day. Same questions and memes that have been rotating through for like 5 years, and the confounding pattern where the community consensus on issues changes from week to week or post to post. One week it's "this term is offensive and I hate it" and 50 people are "YEAH! That's right!" and then the next, "don't you know about this term, it's perfectly valid" and 30 people are "YEAH! Use your brain if you have one broo!!". And the questions like "does anyone else with this condition suffer from these extremely common effects that are listed in every medical article about it?" So anyway whether reddit has gotten worse or not, seems like I was ready for something different.
IMO the protests are having an effect. I haven't been on there for 2 days (full disclosure: was given 1 week suspension under dubious pretense while I was mass editing + deleting all my comments), but, before then there was a huge undercurrent support for the protests but a lot of outright hostile naive complaints regarding them. At this point it feels like the majority of those that are willing to leave have left, and the rest is a dumpster fire of increased hostility. Everyone is angry for seemingly ridiculous reasons. You can't post anything without somebody saying something absurdly contrarian within a day or 2. TBH I really think there's a 'instill anger' bot program (and its replicants) running amok now and the moderators can't (or are unwilling to) keep up with it.
My favorite thing over there right now is r/videos, which only allows text descriptions of the video you were going to post. It's way more entertaining than it has any right to be.
Dammit.
It was going back to normal, but now they’ve made an even bigger fuckup (removing the ENTIRE AWARDS SYSTEM) so it won’t last.
Business as usual for the subs I frequent. I wish they'd move over to Lemmy but the infertility/IVF group is a super tight knit community and likely won't move over. I've known most of the users for 5 years. If it weren't for them I'd have deleted my Reddit account but all I did was delete the official app (I had the Reddit app and RIF).
The porn is still decent, but it does feel like a lower quality overall than I’m used to.
Theres on going drama with subs going nsfw. For what I know NCD was forced to go into sfw mode, along with serveral other subs.
Good luck explaining to your advertisers why their ads are shown along side fighter jet hentai, mobnik cubes, and nuclear and dam schizoposting.
People should screenshot this stuff and send it to the advertisers asking if they support whatever exactly it's displayed next to.
Lmao this is how to cause some serious damage right here
Do it yourself then
NCD is nsfw again and they are meming about it.
Sync user & 13 yrs using Reddit pretty much daily. I've deleted my account & can't see any reason to go back to that kind of usage but there are one or 2 niche subreddits that I do still occasionally have a nosey at via a browser.
Reddit is like a museum, except they don’t pay for the art, and the staff (docents, security, etc) are all volunteers. Further, they don’t sell tickets, rather they charge people to run concessions and gift shops on the premises.
Without the art, nobody comes and the vendors all quit. Without the staff the art will get vandalized and stolen, visitors leave, and the vendors all quit.
Reddit owns a warehouse where volunteers built something valuable for them. Fighting with the volunteers is next level dumb.
What's more disgusting is the army of bots they used to slander their volunteers. Every subreddit I was actually active in was painfully obvious to see hundreds of accounts that never posted there suddenly showing up and being violently anti-moderator.
Do they seriously have 2k employees? I'd kill to know what all of their jobs are and what each of them does day to day. From what I've heard from mods and from what we've seen I can't imagine they were all doing much.
You're gonna have Devs, Support, QA testing, HR, Accounting, IT, Facilities, cleaners etc etc.
Lots of stuff behind the scenes that doesn't interact with the public.
Most subreddits are no longer private, but a lot of them are still protesting in various ways. If I were an advertiser viewing the chaos on Reddit, I'd hold off on buying ads there.
No joke there are chatgpt bots going around, even in smaller subreddits.
And there's lots of effort to "educate" people on how to identify those bots. Like, if you have to vet every message just to figure out if a human wrote it, why even bother?
Yep seen several screenshots of these being caught. I remember one was blabbering about how reddit is much better off since the changes and then someone asked it an opinion question and he got the 'as a AI language model i cant blah blah blah'
I've only been back to visit a small, private sub, but I've seen a lot of posts here saying that a high percentage of bot content is obvious. The conjecture is that there's always been a lot of bots, but they were somewhat less obvious because there was more human content. With a lot of big content creators leaving, it's more apparent when a lot of posts and comments are from bots.
Plus some people think Reddit has increased bot usage to astroturf against the protests and to give the illusion that traffic isn't down.
The small communities I look at are half of what they used to be. The bigger ones just made up for it with increased bot posting.
The bot posting will probably last long enough for their IPO so they can sucker in enough investors for them to fuck on out of there. The more casual users that are left probably don’t use the system enough to know/care until it comes crashing down.
seeing a shit ton of spam
Yes it's all ads and hate porn now. I saw people advocating for murder of delivery drivers and I had to drop out of that shat
Just stop being curious, don’t be like that weird ex gf who keeps checking up on your socials ‘just cause she’s curious’
It's an Internet community not a human being, and no one read dating it, weirdo
Noticed quite an increase in bot posts over on r/titanfall to the point where a retired mod wanted to return to their position to help deal with it. Given that I'm kinda moving away from Reddit I gave them their position back so that I can start moving on.
Welcome to your new home :)
Reddit has made it easy now that my mobile apps are gone. Also, my main account got permananned on Tuesday apparently out of comment posted 5 years ago about spez. Also, a niche sub I followed was taken over by a Nazi when the historical mod got kicked out by reddit and now that's gone too.
Reddit has slipped into being irrelevant very quickly.
I wouldn't say Reddit is irrelevant at all, not yet and maybe not for a long time. But I don't care about Reddit at all anymore. I think that when Boost for Lemmy comes out I won't even look back on Reddit
I disagree. Reddit is dead in the water. They’ve driven away their most valuable volunteer content generators and workforce who made their entire product. There’s nothing left.
It does, however, still have value. I suspect that we’re about to see what a site looks like when thousands of traditional bots and LLMs start talking to each other without human intervention.
What sucks is there's still a few very good subs with big communities that don't seem to be moving to the fediverse, which is still too geeky for a lot of people. However, now that Reddit is banning active members and moderators, it's a matter of weeks until the whole thing turns into 4chan-on-a-bad-day. At this rate we'll all get back to usenet by 2024.
One of my most frequentes subs (/r/soccer) is seemingly working as normal. No changes or differences, before and after the protest. No real replacement for it on Lemmy yet
Look up lemmy.world/c/football basically r/soccer and it's growing
Write it like this: !football@lemmy.ml and it will turn into a link that fits whatever instance you are on: !football@lemmy.ml
They updated the mobile site so it no longer hounds your to download their app!
Funny how they get desperate, no?
Content on r/all has been garbage the last few days
always was... unless you could filter it ... which you needed a third party app to do... sigh
No change there, then.
Tell us dear Redditors, is r/foodinbutt still going strong? It's the only sub I miss
Well, the (kind of) opposite is online: https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/poopfromabutt
Of course it's a German hosted website 🤣
Don't click
I am someone who posts art somewhat regularly on Reddit, and I cansay that all of the subreddits that I posted art to has been un-private, so it's business as usual for me
Consider starting posting to the fediverse as well. You lose moral rights to your artworks when you post to Reddit. Many artists are already on masto, misskey, etc.
I would check it here and there the last few weeks. It’s completely barren. Most subs are just gone and the popular page is just askreddit or food posts. It’s awful. This is my new home!
That’s just not true lol but some subs stayed down. The remaining subs are still getting 50k karma on hot posts. It’s mostly am I the asshole type posts and the small niche ones active
I'd signed up for an account here once the ridiculousness started, but didn't start frequenting until just now (first post) because Boost stopped working completely. Ah well, definitely not installing the official app. I was over there for 12 years or so too. I have a feeling lurkers won't really care and keep using the site just like there are people who still use Facebook and what-not, but it certainly won't ever be cool again.
because Boost stopped working completely.
Thanks for the heads up, I was not aware they flipped the switch for this one too.
Yeah we had a few extra days but its truly over now (first post too!)
I haven't been on for a couple days because boost is finally dying, but the front page is shit, it's 90% anime and doordash.
That door dash subreddit is the weirdest thing ever. It popped out of nowhere seemingly overnight with thousands of upvotes and activity. Seems like obvious marketing to me, but yet most of the submissions are a bad look for the company.. I guess any publicity is good publicity.
How would I even access it without rif?
You can log out of rif and it will work, though no porn
You can see a lot of communities being closed or not back to normal. My feeling is that this whole thing will leave a big scar on reddit for a long time, and it will probably never heal, because it was mostly hitting core users who were there for a long time. Maybe they calculated that most users are lurkers who use mobile, and the rest is people using old reddit?
The problem is that it's not a good idea to upset the mods, but reddit also works with content, and it's a complex chemistry between people who post new things and how the mods regulate it to make sure their sub has quality. I guess that a lot of mods don't care, or maybe they don't care now but will care later? Maybe new subreddits will open with other mods.
Eitherway, reddit is ready to sacrifice a good fraction of its quality and trust to extract money out of it, but reddit users are not instagram users.
It was more and more difficult to make reddit interesting by avoiding some subreddits and searching for subreddits that were more and more niche, but at some point you feel that something is lost after the whole "increase quantity, dilute quality" phase.
Reddit is also getting more polarized and politics have really poisoned the site to a degree never seen before, Trumpists were present there for waaaaay too long, and it attracted a lot of conservatives and right wing users who don't fit with the usual reddit crowds. It managed to survive after a looooot of drama, but after all this, maybe the core users of reddit are just tired, and might slowly quit the ship, and maybe reddit will see the same problems twitter is currently having, with conservative etc running rampant.
I wish reddit would have stood up with its core users who are mostly liberals/leftists, instead of compromising and letting fascists thrive there.
I use my country's subreddit and it seems the right wing phase is being felt more and more, I'm feeling even the mods start to get tired because of it. every month I'm surprised by the opinions of the comments I see on this sub. Maybe it also reflects world politics, but I'm not sure. Sometimes I get paranoid and I imagine that astroturfers are often around to leave a mean comment, or downvote things that doesn't fit their agenda.
The upside is that reddit still managed to hold up for much longer than digg.
Do not protest reddit. Boycott reddit for good and live in the lemmyverse.
If your lemmy instance gets unbearable, there will always be another lemmy instance to go to.
If you do use reddit, it should be to post and comment about lemmy to inform the current redditors to move to lemmyverse.
I mean, half the good subs are still gone. I can't even use my home feed anymore, its half just video game subs now. Places like r/interestingasfuck were regular features in my feed that were pretty important to it being a pleasant experience overall. I balanced that shit.
Now its all fucked. I still have my account and still go there, to poke around and participate in some of those video game subs, where reddit is still clearly dominant. But hanging out has gotten kinda lame.
Lots of bot posts, and under them, lots of lively conversations between the bots.
Genuine question, how to notice whether they’re bots or real people?
Well, exactly. Pretty sure Reddit knows, but how does any user know?
Boost for reddit is still working so I still go there. Many subs are fighting, including /r/noncredibledefense. There are a lot of subs going NSFW but reddit is forcing them to go back to being SFW. /r/NCD is genuinely NSFW at times so i'm not sure what will happen to them. Once Boost for Lemmy comes out, i'm hopping onto lemmy fulltime :)
I'm jumping between Reddit and Lemmy. Some subreddits have all of their mods booted out (r/GoCommitDie and r/OpenAI are two I can think of). Some subreddits have decided to flag their subreddit as NSFW but are being threatened by Reddit to reverse that move, and many have returned to business as usual.
Let's face it. We've lost the API protest. All we can do now is make Lemmy popular and make it attractive to other users. Give people an incentive to actually join here. Our job here is not to make Lemmy a copy of Reddit. We need to make Lemmy different (in a good way!).
And here's an unpopular opinion: we need to make Lemmy easy to use and understand. If normies find Lemmy difficult to use or understand, then we're fucked.
My personal opinion is that normies might get confused by the fediverse and might be turned away by thinking they need to make an account on every single instance in order to participate in them. I am not proposing that we get rid of federation. What I am proposing is that we somehow make it clearer to everyone that all you really need is one account and you can get access to everywhere. I don't know how we can do this, but I'm sure there is someone who knows.
For the normies, I just saw someone recommend the wefwef app on reddit and now here I am.
It's 2023, people don't need to know how the fediverse works, they just need to know which app to install.
Content is nice. It feels like reddit of old.
This is going to be great.
We didn’t lose. Reddit lost us and will continue to lose.
Reddit offers nothing without its (human) users. They can chatGPT all the posts they want to try and look busy, but people are gonna notice the lack of original thoughts and leave. It will be slow and it won’t be complete, but it is happening.
Fediverse services need to lead with the “all” feed. People don’t want to be pressured to pick a server without knowing what’s on it or where everyone else is. When you go to reddit, the first thing you see is the r/all feed. The posts and content is what gets people to join.
"People are gonna notice the lack of original thoughts"
My gamer in christ we go to reddit and redditlike sites to avoid original thoughts
I'm not really a normy, but the simple act of making an account is not obvious. With that barrier of entry, most people will simply never be able to join here.
I kinda am, and found it easy enough. Read some stuff and signed up, jumped in and figure it out as I go - am I missing something? There doesn't seem to be barrier to entry for anyone who can use a phone or computer.
Good. Its an intelligence gate.
GTFO!
Please, anyone that dumb - force them to stay on Reddit. Don't let them in!!!!!
I mean just having someone that has good real world UX skills (as in, good UX for normies) to redesign join.lemmy would probably already solve 90% of it.
I think account transfers is another thing what would help alleviate the pressure from choosing an instance.
I have good (I hope) UI skills, as in, I am good at designing good looking frontends. How do I apply to design the join.lemmy page?
I'm all for improving the user experience here on Lemmy.
But what I find not so appealing, is targeting mass adoption in a way that dumbs down the community we're building here.
As long as we just make Lemmy a great place to be, the right kind of people will keep joining.
Meta knows exactly what to do to bring a billion new users to a new social media site, and all you have to do is look at Threads to see the kind of community they are cultivating.
Lemmy does not, and never will, have the moderation power to contend with that many bad actors. I'm perfectly fine with Lemmy having a tiny learning curve to keep out the dregs.
maybe drop the word federated. That word makes little sense here.
Making cute little infographics could help. Even Reddit had them way back when people didn't really "get" what all the voting was about or why people were so into bacon.
This is the oldest one I could find with a quick Google search, but I am sure there were older ones as well.
https://i.redd.it/52zp3pfkcq841.jpg
Right now, you DO need multiple accounts. Instances are down all the time, federation either breaks or is intentionally broken through defederation even between relatively large instances, ... it gets tedious.
I usually hate this response.. But I haven't had any issues, this is bizarre to hear for me.
This isn’t my experience.
That's just growing pains from a sudden mass migration, the hug of death if you would.
User base growing organically over time will make this happen less and less.
Lemmy as a software will get more sophisticated, the people running the software will get more used to how things operate and be able to buy more/better hardware, etc..
Right now things are just a bit chaotic from thousands of people jumping ship at the same time.
What is the confusing part?
Honestly I feel like the barrier of entry for normies is a good thing. What’s the confusing part about Lemmy and the fediverse? Maybe I’m missing something
You're just being obtuse if you think that there's no confusion for the majority.
The absolute vast majority aren't techies, they aren't open to learning and they have been used to centralised simplicity.
Just trying to explain home instances, federation and defederation is more than enough to lose the interest and understanding of a vast majority.
Now the barriers do lend themselves to an entirely different feeling and community base. Whether that's good or bad is down to personal taste. But Lemmy isn't going to compete with reddit until the process is streamlined and the thinking required is mostly removed.
The best analogy I've found so far is "it's like having an email address; having a different server after the @ is not an impediment to your participation. Just know that you can only login to the server where your account is set up."
Tbh the lemmy home page that's supposed to walk you though joining needs to be cleaned up. The page kinda assumes you are somewhat tech literate, and doesn't really do a good job at explaining how to navigate the fediverse.