And I don’t mean that in a good way. In just a few years, Reddit has devolved from a place to find relevant and quirky information, to basically a platform pushing outrage porn, political divisiveness, and mindless memes, with occasional humor sprinkled in.

The outrage porn is the worst, just exhausting and tiresome. The voting mechanics are mostly to blame for this. Since outrage draws the most engagement, the more people who interact with the site, then the more this type of material will surface and thrive.

The political divisiveness germinates similarly, with the added impetus of state actors throwing fuel on the flames.

The memes are seemingly harmless, but are no substitutes for actual dialogue.

I would just like to see a platform that places a premium on meaningful social dialogue for the future betterment of all involved.

I've always been a bit of a privacy enthousiast. Have had everything blocked that Google and by extension YouTube wants to scrape off you. This means I've also blocked my view history.

Recently YouTube started giving out a warning on the homepage that you have blocked your view history, that you can change it in your privacy settings and that it helps them serve you better content. What it also means is that your homepage is just one big popup to guilt trip you into sharing your data. The homepage won't show any suggested content anymore.

While it is in their interest to do so and since they are a company wanting to make money it is understandable. Nevertheless it seems harsh from going to see content that you might like to only seeing a big warning sign right now.

What are you experiences with this?

I haven’t touched reddit since the APIcalyspe. I’m planning to delete my account but haven’t gotten around to it yet. I was a heavy Apollo user on iOS but never subscribed to it for its push notification service, instead I kept the official reddit app installed and the only thing I used it for were its notifications. I still have both apps installed.

Anyway, I was surprised to see one pop up yesterday, especially since it wasn’t connected to my user activity (a new private message or reply to an old comment of mine or something). The notification was just an ad. More specifically, it was promoting some trending post on the site that had “>12,000 upvotes.” In many many years of having the app installed I’ve never seen that before. Is it new?

Reddit’s had a mildly antagonist relationship with its users for ages, but it feels like they are REALLY intensifying things now. I’m glad I got off the train when I did. And sorry for making yet another post about reddit, I think we’re all getting tired of harping on it here.

I tried out Sync for Lemmy. Loved it, but I was not a fan of the tracking for ads and the price to get rid of that being $20. Anyone tried the free open source Lemmy apps? I used to use RedReader for Reddit, so I don't mind it being a bit worse than something like Sync.