172
votes
The Reddit blackout is breaking Reddit
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- Authors
- Boone Ashworth, Lauren Goode, Medea Giordano, Martin Cizmar, Ryan Waniata, Scott Gilbertson, Julian Chokkattu, Gear Team, Alden Wicker, Simon Hill, Adrienne So
- Published
- Jun 17 2023
- Word count
- 586 words
Personally, I'm done with reddit and am very happy to have found a place here. I might look for something else for memes and that kind of content as well, but for now I'm very much enjoying quality discussions and what feels like actual human interaction. And I feel healthier for it already.
That aside, I do think there's something to this article. If enough of the content creating users leave now, a certain amount of those that don't will realize sooner or later that there's nothing there for them anymore. It might take some time, but reddit will probably continue its slow and steady devolution into a place of nothing but memes, bots and low effort shitposting.
Edit: thanks for helping me with tags, I'm still learning.
Well put. I've been using the analogy of an ecosystem, a chaotic system where a minor shift in one area can have cascading effects throughout, but I think your garden analogy is not only more accessible and concrete, but probably more apt as well.
Keystone species here, checking in. I had over 20k post karma and 100k comment karma, and my primary type of interaction was
a) sharing OC
b) commenting on subjects I was knowledgable about
c) TV show discussions
d) moderating my local city subreddit (mostly removing spam, people trying to sell things, and doxxing/unfounded accusations)
Not only am I never participating again, I've deleted all of my posts and comments. I'm just an incredibly small part of the overall content there, but I'm not trying to provide content for free and then be insulted because the way I used to participate was threatened.
Couldn't agree more. I was already getting really sick of it when I'd receive a bunch of negativity for contributing with a hopeful opinion, or a genuine anecdote (while being clear I was sharing an anecdote)
Definitely some big "hive mind" energy there, and I say that as someone who was mostly in agreement with the hive. But even slightly off-center and you'd get ripped apart by one side or the other. I much prefer the friendly discussion I find here on Tildes - I see people disagree and they do it in a way that exhibits mutual respect for the real person on the other side of the wire.
Oh man, the downvotes for having a differing opinion are frustrating. Spent some time in Reddit this week on a particular subreddit, as a new thing just came out for that thing; I am excited about it, but Reddit is largely shitting all over it.
I expressed my excitement, but that's wrong, apparently and was downvoted for my opinion, as well all the others who shared my opinion.
At some point, I just kept reading due to schadenfreude.
I’d try to find the good in some shows and discuss what i liked about them and get downvoted into oblivion because the hive mind said the show sucked and should never have any positive discussion
I've seen users claiming that even when they are deleting their old comments and even overwriting them, reddit is restoring them after a couple hours/days. So you may have to do it continually to deprive reddit of your content.
Actually, what I've found is happening (at least from my end) is that you can only edit/delete comments from open subs. So every time a sub comes back online, so do my comments. I'm using PowerDeleteSuite to overwrite them and then delete as I notice them popping back up (keeping my user page open in the background)
FWIW, I deleted a few dozen comments with OG PDS just a few hours ago and they all remain gone.
PDS edits my comments to generic text before deleting, so it's not that either. I believe it's probably just that their servers can't handle all of the complex activity happening right now, but I don't have any real evidence to support that. Just, anecdotally, I haven't had any issues editing and then deleting hundreds of comments a day as subs reopen.
Today is the first day I've loaded my user page and not had any comments from subs re-opening. I suppose it could be because the admins have started the process of forcing reopening.
I've been running a script that's been processing my GDPR/CCPA dump from Reddit to edit and delete all of it, and the edit calls have almost universally been hitting a 5-second rate limit restriction. So I'd absolutely believe that they put in a rate limit on edits.
Ah okay! That makes sense.
Thank you for the clarification.
I see, I see. Thank you for the correction :)
I've been doing some analysis of Hacker News, which is decidedly not Reddit, over the past weeks, based on a crawl of historical front-page archives over the past 16 years.
What I find is a close fit of log-log patterns of submitters and stories. Roughly:
The total number of front-page submitters is 43,615, which is still only 5% of the active profiles reported in a 2022 study by Whaly.io: https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective.
Keep in mind that active profiles are still only a small subset (probably about 10%, based on the 90-9-1 rule) of total registered accounts.
Reddit's dismissed protesters as "a small number of users", but in all likelihood it's a large fraction of the most engaged and active accounts.
My last visit to Reddit was mostly pictures of John Oliver overtaking my feed…. I’ll revisit from time to time to catch up with the subreddits I haven’t found a replacement for yet, but, when these communities grow, I don’t see a reason to go back. However, I’m enjoying the creativity people are using to fight the system. It will likely take sweeping totalitarian measures to regain control… Which will pretty much mean the beginning of the end of Reddit. Spez broke his site. I really wonder if they knew how big of a hornets nest they were kicking.
I think they have already blacklisted /r/pics from all
Not yet, there's one from /r/pics on number 4 of /r/all, but the algorithm keeps a single sub from showing up too much. We can thank /r/TheDonald for that due to them abusing the algorithm with bots to take over the entire front page back in 2020.
Spot on. Largely lurked on Reddit for news/browsing, but the smaller communities (local subbreddit, etc) were where you could feel comfortable and give insight without getting "lost" in the noise. Seeing how abrupt and gung-ho they are with pushing changes that so many people are vocally against... A bit reminiscent of Tumblr when they pushed removing porn, though I don't think this will kill Reddit. Still though, just doesn't sit right with me. Just deleted my account
Honestly that's what 9gag used to be for reddit, back in the early days around 2012 or so. People would come to reddit with their 9gag memes and get mercilessly shamed off of the site because reddit was supposed to be a place with human discussion and not just shitposted memes. Obviously to get that mass appeal that has changed, but I remember the old reddit. Tildes emulates that pretty well so far.
I remember! Oh the nostalgia!
"[Expletive deleted] 9gag!" was once as ubiquitous in comments as "This" or "Can confirm"
Those days are gone, but this is better. There are occasional calls for media and pic posts here. That is not necessary and will just bloat the site. A reference to a safe link is all that is needed, and the discussion can still occur here.
I don't know if that's entirely accurate. I remember a big fiasco where the f7u12 people accused 9gag of stealing their content. That ultimately led to people brigading 9gag threads and placing reddit watermarks on rage comics which was like a bat signal for people to come from 9gag. I remember being mystified by how stupid it was to advertise to a site that was known for the dumbest content imaginable. Sure enough, every other thread across the site was full of comments from new accounts that spent most of their time in meme subs. I wasn't around on reddit until 09/10, so I didn't see the quality change from the digg invasion, but that meme war resulted in the first massive dip in quality that I witnessed on reddit.
Actually, it's a nice lesson for everyone here. If you are going to promote Tildes on a bunch of reddit threads - not something I would recommend, but if you absolutely have to - please be sure to do it in the right communities. The good folks over at /r/funny and the like will be okay finding a replacement elsewhere.
I'm with you, glad to find a place that feels very mid-2000s in attitude towards content.
I'm going to miss aspects of Reddit, such as local Meetup haunts for my city. But, you know what? Meetup will probably fill that gap.
You should check out squabbles.io. It's basically brand new and the developer is a single guy, so everything is pretty small right now. It has a good vibe and doesn't support NSFW content right now, so the front page is a lot of memes and animal pictures. There are some more news subs and whatnot, but if it stays small I'd guess the memes will stay and the rest will kind of die out.
Squabbles has some of the same problems as Tildes, but is worse in other aspects.
Both are walled gardens, owned by a single person.
Tildes is built with a privacy-by-design philosophy, which is amazing! Squibbles relies on Google assets and doesn't cache posted assets, so it exposes users to wherever the embedded media is hosted. Not amazing.
I like Tildes, but not as a Reddit replacement. If we're going to find and build a new home for 'the front page of the internet', let's not make the same mistakes all over again (and again). Let's make sure power isn't in the hands of any one person. Make sure it's not for profit. Make sure it's not a privacy nightmare. Make sure we can take our data and move it if and when we feel like it.
The fediverse checks off quite a few of these boxes. More than Tildes or Squabbles or all the other alternatives that aren't fedi. That means that for now, https://kbin.social and https://lemmy.world are some of the best options we've got.
I still haven't even tried the fediverse because I don't have any interest in having to put in a lot of effort for memes. Not to mention I've heard from plenty that it's not scaling well.
I don't actually know what people want from the internet. Reddit didn't add a ton of value to my life. If anything, it was probably a net-negative on my life. The basic thing that Reddit provided was a place to argue with people. Which I will readily admit is fun, but it's not like it was productive. I certainly don't think I was swayed by most arguments and I doubt I changed many minds. If I want to learn about something, there are better places to do that. If I wanted news, there are definitely better places for that. For basically everything, there is a better venue on the internet.
Reddit did centralize memes and access to enough people looking for an argument that you could have a near real-time argument instead of waiting a day for a response.
I'm also starting to move away from the whole "privacy" concern as everyone else seems to experience it. I block all the tracking IPs from my network and ad servers, so I don't see many ads and I'm sure my data is not nearly as complete as anyone else. But beyond that I don't let myself be easily swayed by every single ad I see, so I'm starting to just kind of feel like, "what do I care if they try to use my data for ad-targeting?" It's frustrating to know lots of people who are very easily swayed by ads, but I given that I know them and recognize that, I know I'm not. So. . . I am starting to think it's not really worth worrying about.
I haven't tried lemmy yet but it seems to have a lot of questionable design decisions. Like you can have a community (subreddit) that belongs on one instance. Another instance can have the same name, but its a different community? And it's not easy to move that community to another instance. And its the same thing with usernames. And if you want to use another instance, you have to go and create a new user there, so there is no global continuity. And you have Russian, Chinese, and other instances injecting questionable content. It just seems like a good idea, but badly implemented. Yeah I've heard the "it's like email" analogy, but that means it really isn't anything like reddit
From the article this process has been dubbed "Enshittification" how great is that word!?
Trying to stay away from Reddit has really showcased how addicted I was to the platform. Most of my time time on the platform wasn't spent having meaningful discussions or reading insightful content. Instead, it was doom scrolling forever, since Reddit never runs out of content. Recently I've been trying to find new ways to spend my "downtime", and its proven to be a learning experience. Even if the blackout doesn't "break" Reddit, I'm grateful it happened and I participated in it.
Addiction is a pretty fitting term for my Reddit experience. The two "main" days of the blackout in which most of the major subreddits went private, I still caught myself opening Apollo quite a few times, even knowing fully well that there was not much to expect.
In a way, I'm actually kind of looking forward to the API changes to kick in. As the official Reddit
spywareapp is a bad joke at best and the mobile site is much worse than that, I won't have access to Reddit on my phone anymore, which means that one of my two doomscrolling sources (the other being Instagram reels) will run dry essentially permanently, hopefully freeing time for more meaningful things in life.For the things on Reddit I'm actually interested in, there are other ways to discuss them or obtain news about.
Similar situation here - "addicted" is a strong word, but I can definitely say it was filling my spare moments with so much fluffy trash and I've enjoyed finding a conversation-driven alternative here.
Totally agree with this. I deleted RIF at the start of the blackout and was amazed at the muscle memory I had trying to access it every time I picked up my phone. It took me a few days to stop trying to open that app.
But I've found that Tildes has fulfilled whatever I was seeking at Reddit, but in far less time. I'm actually glad that Spez decided to be a giant asshat and ultimately taint Reddit for me to the point of quitting it, because this place fits what I'm looking for much better than Reddit did at the end..
Agreed. Towards the start of my time on reddit, I may have been on the basic subs, but I started to enjoy the discussion based subs more and more as time went on. Finding Tildes really showed me what I wanted all along was a forum lol. I'm in my early twenties so by the time I started being a reasonable thinking human that wanted to share stuff online at like 14 or 15, forums were all starting to die out and social media had really taken center stage. But I never really jelled with any of the major platforms besides reddit. Turns out Tildes fits more what I've wanted all along.
"Downtime" is a good word. In the first few days after quitting reddit, whenever I had some time for a distraction, I'd find myself going to reddit in my browser, or opening up Slack on my phone (which now sits on the position where reddit used to be). It had become such a strong habit, and I'm pretty glad that I find myself being a bit more conscious about those moments.
I resorted to blocking Reddit on my home network, helped a kill my addiction.
I'm still addicted. Browsed for over an hour today and just getting nothing out of it. Several subs I rotate through are still private, but I'd say like 2/3rds of my subs are mostly up.
Scrolling is so easy. Doesn't matter what social media platform I suppose.
I spent most of my day in /r/pics explaining to confused people why there was so much John Oliver and shaming obvious trolls.
I’m addicted but I’m trying to break it. Having this site helps a lot. But I’m still going to Reddit for one subreddit for a game I’m super excited about coming out September (starfield).
This place is good for replacing Reddit for somewhere to go for general conversation but if you’re really wanting to discuss one particular topic it is lacking (I think mostly due to its much smaller size and also just very general groups but it’s too small to get too specific on a group).
The pagination on reddit was really good for helping me not spend too much time on it. Albeit I think getting a reddit app on my phone ruined that before new reddit did.
Yeah, I removed the app from my homepage but left the space (why? Who knows, I guess I'm a masochist) and I will constantly go to click it like it's a reflex. It's been brutal to break the habit.
Me too. I was 100% addicted to the doom scrolling aspect. When the blackout run up was happening, I was a bit shocked by just how difficult deleting my account would be. But that was all the more reason to do it anyway.
I haven't found a like for like replacement, and I am glad for that. Tildes gives me some of that interaction, but not the same hit. I have used that change to crack down on my phone use, and have set an app timer on chrome to straight up stop after 2 hours have passed. My true replacement for that Reddit time was forcing myself to go out into nature without my phone, reading a book, working on my novel more, and watching movies it's honestly been great for my mental health.
What genre of novel are you writing?
Thank you for asking!
I haven't thought about it before, but technically I would say sci fi? My favourite novel ever is 1984, so it's sci fi in the same way - set in the future, in a dystopia.
It's also got some lgbt light links. The full story gets a bit longer, but the basic premise is that it's a story set in a future dystopian version of the USA, with very extreme differences in wealth - some folks are dying in poverty, the wealthy live fabulous lives with brand new tech. The lgbt link comes from the fact that this is a society were sexism and homophobia, transphobia, aren't really issues any more, and the concept of 'gender' doesn't impact on it. It's written entirely in gender neutral 'they' with gender neutral names and titles.
Sorry for the lengthy explainer - the short answer is 'dystopian sci fi'.
Lengthy explanations are good! Thanks for sharing. Best of luck in the writing! My wife has been writing a book for a looooong time, so I know how much dedication it takes.
Good luck to your wife too! I found the first drafts was easy, edits much harder. My book has two very clearly defined seperate parts, one is fully done but needs editing, the other half needs writing still. I had a loooong break of over 2 years between writing the first draft and getting back into it, but I am enjoying the editing process now. It's been so long since I last wrote it that I can look at it with 'fresh eyes' which helps.
Sounds like the moniker 'speculative fiction' applies at least as well as sci-fi. I know that's what Margaret Atwood prefers to call her work.
You can always pick up a hobby for that downtime! I recommend needlefelting.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks. Some of the "compliance" by mods is pretty hilarious: /r/pics is now a subreddit entirely for sexy images of John Oliver.
Will reddit start replacing mods that aren't running large subreddits the way they're "supposed to"?
/r/gifs and /r/art have done the same thing.
And they're doing it based on the votes of users, so they can't be accused by reddit of going against the wishes of the users.
hahahahahahaha...
These subs are like, Hey /u/spez, is this the "democracy" you wanted? Malicious compliance, I love it!
EDIT: Ok, so someone actually registered /u/spez on June 6, 2023. No posts, but I'm glad someone had the foresight to create the account.
And... that account has since been deleted. I assume @Deimos frowns on people trying to troll here, or to impersonate other people.
So much so that it’s one of the few explicit examples listed under the “Don’t act like an asshole” rule of the CoC:
https://docs.tildes.net/policies/code-of-conduct
Note to self: RTFM!
You can be forgiven for forgetting that one line. Especially since it’s in one of the few sections of the Tildes docs you didn’t write, after all. ;)
You're too kind!
Just want to jump in here and say that despite having a very similar username I am not nor do I have any relation to Spez...
Is it meant to refer to spez though? Because that's how I read it but it may just be an unfortunate coincidence
The other reading I can see is the German word for fun
Nothing to do with Spez at all actually and while I like to think I'm spaß it's only a shortened form of a username I've been going by for many years. In conversation people always shortened it to Spaz anyways so I've embraced it.
In my Aussie dialect of English, "spaz" is a fairly common and offensive insult, being short for "spastic". It's like "tard" for "retard": "spaz" for "spastic". "God, you're such a spaz!"
I assume it has a more innocent meaning for you but, every time I see your username, it's like being slapped with hate-speech.
In German, "Spatz" refers to a sparrow. If you can ignore the extra "t", and if Australian sparrows are as cute as the European ones, maybe that small factoid can alleviate the hate-slapping.
Nice try, but I didn't grow up hearing other kids regularly shout "spatz" at each other when one of them was clumsy. Our insult had the soft "zz" sound, rather than the hard "tz" sound.
And I have no idea if we have sparrows here in Australia. I assume we do, because some British settlers probably brought some with them, but I wouldn't recognise one if it stood in front of me. I know the distinctive Aussie birds, like magpies, cockatoos, galahs, rosellas, and kookaburras. But there are a lot of small brown birds around that all just look like each other.
EDIT: It turns out we do have sparrows in Australia. They're named as a pest, like many introduced species.
I apologize for any offense taken as it was truly not my intention to make anyone uncomfortable.
Noone's accusing you of anything. Like you say, this is just your nickname.
It's unfortunate that your nickname just happens to also be an offensive word for disabled people - and I thought you might want to know that, in case it causes problems for you here in future.
Agreed, it is unfortunate and if it does cause a problem in the future then I have no problem making a new account. I do very much appreciate that this is the type of community that is considerate of all people.
Deimos has changed the username for people who have politely asked him for that in the past. So you don’t necessarily need to make a new account, if you do decide to change it.
Good to know, thank you for the info. I will certainly keep it in mind.
Hey mate just letting you know, in the UK spaz is quite a nasty derogatory term for the disabled. So that's unfortunate
Sounds like something someone who was secretly Spez would say...
Well, I can't argue with that.
That's hilarious. And knowing redditors the joke will keep running for LONG after everyone has forgotten why it even started. They're burning down their own house around them.
And John noticed!
Not only that! John has posted several pictures of himself in varying levels of sexiness! Let's hope he makes a segment on his show about the Reddit protest.
The man trolls like a true pro. Go John go!
Actually, that means it's democratic and would be a good thing, as long as everyone can weigh in on the vote. It's simply election season and stops power hungry mods from abusing the joint.
You missed the obvious option: users with active paid Reddit premium subscriptions. "Want to vote for your moderators? Just sign up to Reddit Premium!"
I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a “pay 1 500 coins per extra votes!” And “Coins are 24.99USD+tax for 1 499 coins!”
I said this in one of my community discords, ill paste it here:
Voting on moderators would be a disaster of a policy.
A part of the reason mods do what they do is because they feel a sense ownership of the community space they build. Being a moderator is about having a vision for that community and gathering people that share that vision. When you find that the existing communities don't align with your vision, you create a new community.
Ownership rubs a lot of people the wrong way, particularly when mods are awful, but it is still a motivator for mods. Voting on mods changes the relationship between mods, users, and reddit. If you can be removed from a community you worked hard to build, that destroys any sense of ownership and lays bare the fact Reddit just sees moderators as unpaid labor. It would say reddit doesn't want communities, it wants topics. That it wants to become another mid tier meme site. I would be shocked if reddit goes through with the change.
Side note, I think one thing that gets conflated everywhere is topics vs communities. Mods don't own the topics they moderate, but there is some ownership over the community spaces they create. The problem is reddit conflates them. If I want cats, I go to /r/cats, which rolls in the topic and the community into one entity. Discord does better by making communities (generally) use random links. It doesn't implicitly bless any community as the final word on a topic by handing out a chunk of namespace. But this has its own problems.
It looks like that has already started to happen as they removed the top moderator of /r/piracy today: https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/14briu5/hey_rpiracy_reddit_admins_demodded_the_captain/
ngl, i’m kinda sceptical that reddit’s admins would force r/piracy of all things to be unprivated… that goes directly and completely against what their revenue sources would like them to do
I also thought it was a very odd choice of sub for them to open this way.
I agree, it’s a very interesting subreddit for admins to force back open.
Odd decision indeed. If anything that would be one of the few subs to benefit (from a legally paranoid perspective) being indefinitely private (aka soft banned). Saves what would have been a future PR disaster.
Does anyone know the “fallback forum?” Asking for a friend, for science…
It looks like https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy is where sailors are being directed.
It's even more interesting because the "supposed to" is defined by the community, and the community said that's what they wanted.
If sub names have to be taken literally, does that mean /r/trees now has to be about trees? Where does it end?
I think /r/trees (and /r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts) is a good example that the subreddit's content doesn't need to align with the subreddit name, so pivoting the subreddit theme seems to be fair game.
Exactly. So the exact content of a sub being voted on by the people should be the way it's handled and enforced, as per the way reddit wants to go about it. If everyone who interacts with /r/pics wants it to be about John Oliver, then that's what it's about despite whatever the name of the sub is.
It's genuinely a great way to protest while forcing reddit to either enact draconian rules policies or finally help out the unpaid volunteers who keep the site running.
r/superbowl is both an example and counterexample to this, depending on your point of view.
Admins never really cared about the contents of the sub as long as it followed global rules. Or at least, that was their official stance assuming the biggest subreddits towed the line.
r/animetitties is another good example of this
Except on April 1 when it actually is all about porn.
Oh my goodness! I love it!
Picking John Oliver for that is amazing, too - thanks to his own history of being a little bit of a pain in the booty when he feels it's right.
/r/steam has become its literal namesake.
Replacing mods with admin-approved puppets will ruin the reputation of those mods and by association it will affect how people see reddit mods in general. We’re already a meme - “don’t mind me I’m walking my mods” - it’s like Reddit Inc. is bent on turning that meme into a reality.
If they start reshuffling mod teams to get their mouthpiece on top, trust is obliterated.
They’re treating the mods as if we were the enemy. We helped Reddit build reddit.
But hey, this may be good for alternatives in the long run! Reddit will finally have to compete for users.
Deleted my 10 yr account for good a week ago, but I took a peek back in the last two days. Cant help but get the impression that the front page is mostly bots and rehashed posts - feels like contributions by real redditors is dropping significantly. Never seen so many AITA posts. Im really enjoying NOT being back there when I see how many posts on the page just raise my ire - which is entirely the point of reddit now. Cant say I'll be sad if it goes away completely.
AITA was one of the first subreddits I filtered out. It seemed to eventually consist only of creative writing for karma. The fact that computer generated voices started reading them out on Tik Tok probably didn't help.
Most of the text heavy subs wound up with at least one YouTube, Instagram or TikTok account that just read out posts with AI generated voices.
Yeah, Reddit has always had an issue with reposts, but the amount in /r/all has gone up a ton. It's bots. Hi Tildes (first comment).
One of Reddit's greatest strengths is (was?) the ability for anyone to build a community. I'm hoping that community building aspect can come here with more groups in time.
Same. A lot of communities I followed on Reddit were hobby oriented (Stars Without Numbers, Traveller, etc), work related, or local communities with an occasional bit of news and politics sprinkled throughout my experience. I don’t know if I’ll ever get that back on one platform but it was nice while it lasted. Tildes would be perfect for those seeking to regime that experience but it would also fundamentally change some aspects of Tildes that makes it unique in the space right now.
That would be nice, but I don't think it's going to happen.
My account on here is over five years old (though I admittedly haven't visited much until recently) and it looks like there is still just the one mod and a small few secondary co-mods, and the same couple dozen topics.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think they are going to let it scale in a way that goes beyond a handful of people manually tagging every post anytime soon.
It's risky spreading out too thin when you're too small. You lose that network effect when you have everyone in their own channel. 100 users in one big channel is much better for that network effect than 10000 users in 1000 channels (if we assume an even spread).
I’d say give it time. It’s obviously way smaller then Reddit and aplitting into small groups when you are small will end up in lots of groups with very little text.
These things don’t grow overnight. Maybe they do have a boom but I think 1 week is still way too small to tell.
Building community will absolutely happen here on Tildes. It's been happening for 5 years, and will continue to happen.
However, letting one random user spin off their own group just because they feel like it... not so much. Groups on Tildes will probably be created reactively, rather than proactively, and by collective consensus rather than individual decision.
When I first joined reddit most comments where related to the topic and normally provided context or explanations about what was actually happening. Nowadays it's all just who can come up with the best one liner/joke and you need to dig to find anything worth reading. Can't say I'm gonna miss reddit.
Mirror for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/wHVbi
I had my own problems with Reddit leading up to this, and to be completely honest, I didn’t use third party apps. I’m one of those weirdos who used the main app (I didn’t even know there was alternatives until this)
I really can’t stand the gaslighting/lying the CEO is doing though, that’s what’s caused me to leave. That and those ‘he gets us’ ad’s I was seeing every. single. time I would refresh the page. I couldn’t do anything to get rid of them, reporting them didn’t work, couldn’t block the account. I don’t mind ads that don’t take up half my screen and are low-quality, and the Reddit app was not this bad about it even just last year, but lately the company is obviously doing everything they can to make money. I stopped using Facebook for the same reasons.
I would have been okay paying for Reddit premium just to get rid of the ad’s, but the CEO has a bad attitude and can kick rocks. As long as he’s in charge, I won’t be giving Reddit my attention. I know when they announced plans for an IPO earlier this year that it was the beginning of the end.
Tildes is pretty cool so far tho!
The he gets us ads were INFURIATING. I reported every single one I saw. Even after it was clear that reporting wasn’t going to do shit. I haven’t been on Reddit once since Sunday, but I’ve definitely thought about how happy I am not to be seeing those ads on more than one occasion.
I never saw those ads, most likely because I've used a third party app for over a decade. What's the background of those ads? Who is the he that gets us?
It’s basically a Christian group implying that Jesus or god “gets us” and the ads were extremely prevalent, tonedeaf, and got so much hate that reddit removed the ability to block the account that posted those ads
It was a $100M ad push to use Jesus Christ as a mascot for organizations who say they follow his teachings. The ads were everywhere, and even if you blocked the poster you kept seeing them.
I wish I’d know about third party apps before this whole debacle! I was just rolling with the Reddit app for years like dimwit.
They were Jesus ads with oddly creepy images imo. I’m a strong atheist and it just drove me nuts having to see those day after day. I had considered quitting Reddit solely because of them.
I think this is missing the point a bit. Enshittification and the overall attitude of corporations toward people in their daily lives- as employees, as consumers and customers- has caused any kind of goodwill people has back toward corporations to go straight out the window. I've been around long enough to know that platforms will come and go. In terms of "social news sites", I started out on slashdot and fark, and after a long break from any such thing(I skipped out on sites like digg and boingboing), I found reddit. I'm glad it lasted as long as it did, but now I've basically hung it up there. I no longer use the site on mobile and I'm done commenting there. It's been in decline for a long time, most interactions in any of the larger subreddits feel saccharine and astroturfed.
All this is to say, I don't feel any loyalty to a given platform, and most people I've talked to feel the same way. We've gotten wise to the fact that corporations are quite literally only in it for the money and any motions toward a stance that they are "on our side" is a means toward that end.
This is just another step in what has been a long slide downward for reddit. The mask is slipping and more and more people are seeing reddit for what it truly is. A company, a corporation who needs to turn a profit. They had a balance that made things pretty nice for their users at the expense of some revenue on their side. Now they're being pressured to move that balance away from nice things for their users(the free API that enabled 3rd party apps) toward more(or any) profit.
I have the intuitive feeling--I may be wrong--that people don't usually much agree with me when I say this, and so if you or anyone else can show otherwise I'd love to be proven wrong, but...
You've been around for a while and have seen these services evolve. Younger people, however, seem very much pro-corporate to me these days. For the most part. They're disdainful of attitudes that disrupt their lifestyle, which is tightly integrated with these services. Caring is uncool. Monetization is vitally important and should be promoted and defended. Big tech can be entrusted with everything that they know, everything that they are. They all want to be youtubers, tiktokers and influencers--a class notoriously overworked, exploited and likely to burn out, almost always fully dependent on the goodwill and policies of one single corporate giant. So why would they behave differently as consumers?
I'm not sure an "intuitive feeling" can really be disproven per se...
But here's a piece of anecdotal evidence to add to your pile: I am Gen Z, as are most of my friends. I haven't seen any of the things you listed in my social circles. Do you actually interact with young people much or are you letting pop culture inform your view of them?
It may feel like a pile on at this point, but I want to add my own anecdotal evidence to disprove your intuition: I used to work right up to covid) with teenagers and used to manage them. I also used to work with boomers who were around for a long time. The ones getting sucked into corporatism and whatever the ads were telling them they wanted weren’t the kids. They were the ones openly discussing their commodification and how to block ads as much as they possibly could. Many even refused to download Tik tok or instagram and only used the most basic functions of their phones. The adults in the room were obsessed and addicted to their phones, raving about all of the amazing things like Tik Tok and Facebook.
I disagree. My observation of the younger generations is they perceive their world as deeply uncertain. This uncertainty is largely due to global warming brought on by the largest corporations harvesting the Earth for their own selfish benefit. Studies have shown that many young people deal with depression brought on by global warming, they feel helpless against it. Many rightfully attribute the cause to these large corporations and so engender a deep mistrust toward them. Polls have also shown that the younger generations have a more positive view of left ideologies like socialism than any other previous generations. There is a backlash against the relentless commodification of every aspect of their lives. They're sick of being the product, bought and sold by faceless corporations.
This also bears out in how the majority of Gen Z voted in the most recent election. They voted for the party that at the very least doesn't outright deny global warming, even if they only pay lip service to it.
I don't think that today's youth "all want to be youtubers, ticktokers and influencers" or believe that "caring is uncool". What have you seen to support that? How do you explain the popularity of young people like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousefzai? Malala, for her part, lost the support of the general media once she started explicitly criticizing capitalism and supporting socialism.
Just for context... which election was that, in which country (or state or province, if that's what you're talking about)?
Sorry- that's the 2022 national midterm election in the US.
I'm not really into talking politics, especially on a tech chat, and these kinds of chats are part of why.
It's wild to assert, with only two parties available, that climate change (or any other single issue) is the main driver of a group's vote.
What a silly thing to say. There are broad swaths of the population that are single issue voters, on the left and on the right. At least in the US, there are people who vote based on a candidate's position on abortion, gun control, global warming, and labor relations. To name just a few.
I don't disagree with this statement. What I disagree with is the calling out of one of the many single issues and attributing it to "majority of Gen Z."
I will also reiterate that this is supposed to be tech, and this is off topic here to begin with IMO.
well, we're talking about online communities, and the trends of communities among generations. I don't know what sentiments are correct, but I wouldn't call it off topic to suggest that generatoinal values change how they would perceive a tech company and its services.
And on that topic, I guess I'm a bit more cynical. Or maybe nihilistic? I think most people just don't think that deepy about it, regardless of the generation. It's not a huge indispensible part of their lives, so they don't care; they want a quick and easy experience that has plenty of content, and relatively few people would sacrifice their convenience for a greater good. Reddit isn't anywhere close to that critical point as of now.
But I guess that's the opinion of someone who's leaving that 18-29 demographic that we're discussing, so take that as you may.
This is one of the more hopeful things I’ve read. Unfortunately not sure they’ll get in power soon enough and the older generations aren’t letting go (I’m gen x and global warming has scared me since I was a kid, it’s not exactly been an unknown phenomenon but we at least had the impression there might still be time when I was young. I’m losing hope there is).
Reddit has taken at least $1.2 billion from venture capital investors, who are all expecting a (large) return on their investments. They need to make Reddit stock sell at a market cap significantly more than $10 billion when it does its IPO.
Fidelity has cut the valuation by 41% since then.
This could be why Steve Huffman is behaving as he is. Maybe it isn't so much that he refuses to listen, but that he feels that cannot listen. Maybe he's tried all of our arguments already to his investors, and it is those investors that are demanding this course of action.
Either way, it is self-defeating to Reddit AND to the investors. (IMO)
Reddit's best days were already behind it when Steve Huffman decided that the people that made Reddit what it is ain't worth squat. Reddit was in the long process of dying with a long tail, and Huffman has made the tail a lot less long now. He made it easy for those on the bubble of leaving to decide that now, not later, is the time to go.
The site was already in noticeable decline throughout, even in well moderated smaller groups.
Years ago, I got so tired of the karma farms, repost bots and spam that I filtered out most of the biggest users and default groups. It made the site somewhat usable again, but only for the small groups.
What's going to happen when the site is nothing but spam bots advertising t-shirts to each other with no actual users? What's the point of investing in that?
The recent actions of the admins have shown that reddit is beyond saving. They have betrayed the trust and goodwill of the users and moderators who made reddit what it is, and they have shown a complete disregard for the values and principles that reddit was founded on. They have prioritized profits over people, and they have sacrificed the quality and diversity of content for the sake of appeasing advertisers and investors. They have lied, gaslighted, and threatened anyone who dared to challenge or criticize them.
But I also feel frustrated about how hard it is to find equivalent communities to some of the niche subreddits that reddit hosts. For example, r/credibledefense is one of my favorite subreddits, a place where one can learn and discuss about military and security issues from a variety of perspectives and sources. It is a rare place where experts, enthusiasts, and laymen could interact in a civil and respectful manner, and where high-quality content and analysis are rewarded and encouraged. I have not found any other platform or website that can replicate that kind of community and experience.
I think this is one of the biggest challenges that we face as we migrate away from reddit. How do we preserve and rebuild the communities that we valued and enjoyed on reddit? How do we find or create platforms that can support and sustain those communities?
How did we do that on the platforms we were on before Reddit? We didn't. We all kinda separately moved on -- mostly before the previous platform completely died -- and created new and different communities.
Thing is - there is a reason why we all flocked to reddit.
At its best, it was a site where you could find a niche forum for ANYTHING. There is one site I can go to to talk about SEO, Artificial intelligence, Open Source Intel, being a dad, .... instead of visiting ten forums, one after the other.
The anarchy of "anyone can open a sub" leads to a lot of awesome things.
Now. Don't take me wrong, reddit has degraded and broken down over time.
The karma system made for karma whoring which made for low effort posts, and more.
The autoritarian regime now is breaking even the rest.
But there are reasons for its popularity.
We know have to divide the wheat from the chaff, but "oh, we'll just disperse into a hundredthousand sites again" is the least desirable (IMHO).
Yep. I knew it. I haven't seen many people talk about this, but it was obvious to me that this was the main motive for the recent API pricing announcement: kill off third-party apps by charging them prices they can't possibly pay, so users are forced to use Reddit's own app, where Reddit can serve them ads. Why else do this?
Well, to be honest, offering and maintaining an API costs money.
Not as much as they are asking for, though.
Oh, I know that. I've said elsewhere that Reddit had two choices when it came to charging for the API: they could charge "we need to make money, and we're passing on that cost to you" prices, or "fuck you, close down your app" prices. They chose the "fuck you" prices. That makes their motive clear.
At this point I’ve migrated the communities I care about to Discord. The only thing Reddit has that a lot of other places don’t is an incredible selection of free NSFW/Porn communities. That’s literally the only use case for Reddit I haven’t been able to replicate elsewhere.