I honestly don't even care anymore. As far as I'm concerned, I won. I broke a 10+ year old bad habit and that's never easy to do. I will not let that community's loud obnoxious toxicity leech into...
Exemplary
I honestly don't even care anymore. As far as I'm concerned, I won. I broke a 10+ year old bad habit and that's never easy to do. I will not let that community's loud obnoxious toxicity leech into my life anymore. I deeply miss a lot of the smaller communities, but I know I won't be able to avoid /r/all's BS entirely if I create another reddit account. It's all or nothing and I choose nothing.
That's basically where I'm at. I've been on Reddit since 2007, and its toxicity has been wearing on me in the past couple of years anyway. They have me an excuse to quit. It's weird, having...
That's basically where I'm at. I've been on Reddit since 2007, and its toxicity has been wearing on me in the past couple of years anyway. They have me an excuse to quit. It's weird, having basically used it for half of my life, and I miss some of the subreddits (which should by rights be separate forums, if Reddit hadn't done serious damage to the web overall), but it's probably for the best. Reddit isn't what it used to be, and that's what I miss, not what it became.
I mentioned in another topic that I'm still on reddit because there's a support community I need that is still on it. I'm actually amazed at how many subreddits I have had to unsubscribe from...
I mentioned in another topic that I'm still on reddit because there's a support community I need that is still on it. I'm actually amazed at how many subreddits I have had to unsubscribe from because of how much more toxic they had become after that whole fiasco started.
One of the last holdouts was r/frugal. I was already getting tired of it because of the constant retreading of the same subjects. I can't even count the number of times I saw threads being overwhelmed by talk about the McDonald's app. But the straw that broke the camel's back was when I responded on a thread about cheap and easy meals to a person who suggested a meal made entirely out of ground beef, pointing out that it wasn't a healthy meal, and getting backlash for it. That subreddit had long passed the point where it was worth the mental tax and had moved into painfulness.
That has been an issue I've had with many niche subreddits for a few years now, and it highlights something fundamentally broken about Reddit. It seems like every hobbyist community (especially...
the constant retreading of the same subjects
That has been an issue I've had with many niche subreddits for a few years now, and it highlights something fundamentally broken about Reddit. It seems like every hobbyist community (especially anything tangentially technological) inevitably attracts a flood of rehashed beginner/support posts that endlessly ask the same questions, get the same answers, and crowd out actually interesting discussion.
Do you find that behavior somehow more obnoxious on Reddit than on Discord? I've found that blogspam, outdated answers, and link rot have made me start asking first instead of doing my own...
Do you find that behavior somehow more obnoxious on Reddit than on Discord? I've found that blogspam, outdated answers, and link rot have made me start asking first instead of doing my own research in the hopes that someone can answer my niche question instead of having to learn 10 things from first principles to solve my problem.
I think old school forums had a better model for dealing with that. Lurkers could read through 200 page threads about popular topics at their leisure without creating new threads. The recency...
I think old school forums had a better model for dealing with that. Lurkers could read through 200 page threads about popular topics at their leisure without creating new threads. The recency model ala reddit seemed to encourage rehashing from it's core design.
IME, by the time a thread reaches 200 pages, it has been recycling the same six conversations for at least 175 of those 200 pages. It's only necessary to read the first six and final three pages...
IME, by the time a thread reaches 200 pages, it has been recycling the same six conversations for at least 175 of those 200 pages. It's only necessary to read the first six and final three pages to have a reasonably complete context for the topic.
Speaking for my own discord, we have "help" and "new-player-help" channels. The main discussion channel assumes that you are extremely familiar with the game, and if you start asking basic...
Speaking for my own discord, we have "help" and "new-player-help" channels. The main discussion channel assumes that you are extremely familiar with the game, and if you start asking basic questions, you're redirected to one of the help questions.
A lot harder to do this when "go elsewhere" is an entirely different subreddit, rather than like 4 channels up.
To be fair, search is broken on the Reddit app so if new sub members wanted to know some basic info or see frequently asked questions, they would likely not be able to search for and find those posts.
To be fair, search is broken on the Reddit app so if new sub members wanted to know some basic info or see frequently asked questions, they would likely not be able to search for and find those posts.
Never use a websites built on search if you can help it. Use a real search engine with the name of the site tacked on. Social media, news sites, university websites, you name it. They all have...
Never use a websites built on search if you can help it. Use a real search engine with the name of the site tacked on. Social media, news sites, university websites, you name it. They all have broken searches most of the time whole Google can grab the exact page right away.
Totally agree with this. I know companies want control and all that but when you see how crap search is with the roll-your-own solutions on websites my mind boggles.
Totally agree with this.
I know companies want control and all that but when you see how crap search is with the roll-your-own solutions on websites my mind boggles.
That might be true, but it is also flawed. Why should a generic search engine which indexes across all the sites it can crawl be better than something from the source. Furthermore, each community...
That might be true, but it is also flawed. Why should a generic search engine which indexes across all the sites it can crawl be better than something from the source. Furthermore, each community should have it's own index which finds the conversations most relevant for its needs. Even using search hints, Google and other search engines won't index every relevant topic and can't easily distinguish between what is the most recent or pertinent information. It might work for some of the bigger topics, but it is still going to fall short.
I have no idea why, but it almost always is. Like half the time I can type the exact head line of an article I want and the news site can't find it, but it will be the first result on google
I have no idea why, but it almost always is. Like half the time I can type the exact head line of an article I want and the news site can't find it, but it will be the first result on google
Can not agree enough. I popped onto r/malefashionadvice for the first time since evrything kicked off yesterday and it was a completely different sub. The caring, supportive community was gone and...
I'm actually amazed at how many subreddits I have had to unsubscribe from because of how much more toxic they had become after that whole fiasco started.
Can not agree enough. I popped onto r/malefashionadvice for the first time since evrything kicked off yesterday and it was a completely different sub. The caring, supportive community was gone and had been replaced by an obnoxious, trolling, aggressive community. I'm still feeling the whiplash. How do the admins completely ruin a community that had been one of the most welcoming corners of the internet for 15+ years in just 2 months?
The mods of mfa during the blackout kept the subreddit closed until about a week ago, with the "subreddit closed" page hosting a link to a discord and a substack (the discord being the...
The mods of mfa during the blackout kept the subreddit closed until about a week ago, with the "subreddit closed" page hosting a link to a discord and a substack (the discord being the replacement(?) for the subreddit, and the substack hosting guides that were previously on the subreddit's in-reddit wiki).
About a week ago it was opened up and only two mods (none including the previous ones) were present on it. There were no sticky threads, and it seemed unmoderated compared to pre-blackout. There was a post in there from one of the automoderator accounts, the admins evicted the old mods and put in new ones that weren't part of the community but had previous experience moderating other communities.
I checked a day ago or so, and one of the new mods posted a sticky thread, and had been contacting previous mods (I believe both the pre-blackout group, and older ones) asking them questions on how to serve the community (and had asked if they wanted to return).
Not a fan of the move overall, as someone who off and on used the subreddit, evicting the old mods because they had closed it. Then again, I don't think the subreddit has been that good for a while, seemed like it had lost its spark.
It was a very helpful community 6 or 7 years ago. Extremely welcoming to newcomers and able to be self-aware and joke about itself and silly fashion ideas (like always joking about capes coming...
It was a very helpful community 6 or 7 years ago. Extremely welcoming to newcomers and able to be self-aware and joke about itself and silly fashion ideas (like always joking about capes coming into style, everyone get a cape). Not to mention being very diligent about sharing sales.
It's changed so much. Frankly bad and silly fashions are being pushed and any criticism over the look or price of an item is met with backlash. r/frugalmalefashion is alright though.
I'm in the same boat. My life is materially better for not having to deal with its venomous nature. I will admit, I miss the smaller communities I lurked in like /r/electronics, but I can count...
I'm in the same boat. My life is materially better for not having to deal with its venomous nature. I will admit, I miss the smaller communities I lurked in like /r/electronics, but I can count those on one hand.
I think this is the right attitude to take. I don't like the way the whole situation is presented with a whole us vs. them / win vs. lose dichotomy. As far as I'm concerned, Reddit Inc owns the...
I think this is the right attitude to take. I don't like the way the whole situation is presented with a whole us vs. them / win vs. lose dichotomy. As far as I'm concerned, Reddit Inc owns the site and can do what they want with it. Similarly, we the users are free to use it, or not. I'm choosing not, unless I need to pull up relevant Google results on something.
Like many others, I've observed the tone of Reddit shifting over the past few years into what I can only describe as general assholery. People are constantly clambering to lazily dunk on other posts, posting low-effort content to score imaginary internet points, and trying to find the most eeyore take on a topic in the rare instance that actual good news gets posted. It's exhausting, detrimental to mental health, and provides little in the way of value.
About a year ago I replied to some rando on Reddit and pointed out a double standard. They just quoted that part of my comment back to me and said I had contradicted myself. When I read it I had...
About a year ago I replied to some rando on Reddit and pointed out a double standard. They just quoted that part of my comment back to me and said I had contradicted myself. When I read it I had this sudden understanding that this is all just word games to them. This person literally didn't try understand what I had even said, they just found enough of a vague pattern in what I was saying to compose a petty response, and then shut down. I actually could have had a better conversation with ChatGPT.
99.99% of online debates (actually debates in general) are fundamentally performative. The fact that online there is always an audience means that every discussion between two people who disagree...
99.99% of online debates (actually debates in general) are fundamentally performative. The fact that online there is always an audience means that every discussion between two people who disagree about something turns into that because both sides just want to be perceived as having won.
Hypothetically the goal of this is to change the onlookers' minds or whatever by appearing to have the victorious idea, under the assumption that someone seeing your idea prevail over another in a public space will convince neutral parties, but the reality is that like the rest of the internet, it's all just dopamine buttons. So if I can get a TKO on you by doing wordplay that works just as well.
I like the way tildes reply chains become unusable after a certain number of replies because they stop nesting and turn into that "(reply to the previous post)" thing because it (along with the culture of course) has resulted in me very, very rarely having seen a massive flamewar shitstorm like that on here.
I feel like reddit had almost less of an audience. Once you got a few comments deep it's basically a one on one conversation that no one else is going to read.
I feel like reddit had almost less of an audience. Once you got a few comments deep it's basically a one on one conversation that no one else is going to read.
Someone on Tildes (I wish I bookmarked the comment) really crystalized this concept to me. In online debate you are either talking "with someone" or only "at someone." The latter is the...
Someone on Tildes (I wish I bookmarked the comment) really crystalized this concept to me. In online debate you are either talking "with someone" or only "at someone." The latter is the performative debate where your goal is either to influence the audience or score points with them while in only the former are you actually trying to meaningfully convey ideas to your counterpart.
On reddit, I would comment in mostly a performative manner while here I'm more likely to be engaged with just that person. Part of that is community size, I'm less tempted here to play for the crowd, but also I am consciously trying harder. Of course, it's never 100% one or the other, and more like a mixture of both, but the difference is noticable in my time here.
Sidenote: The way I see Tildes handle the deep nested replies I've only seen on mobile, never on my desktop. I don't think the UI is different, but I guess I haven't come across a discussion that deep. Honestly I have pretty short conversations here (3-5 replies at the most) but they are certainly longer in word count per comment.
In the days of /r/SubredditSimulator and /r/SubredditSumGPT2, I'd constantly point out how even those rudimentary models produced better conversation than human Redditors. I assume the gap has...
I actually could have had a better conversation with ChatGPT.
In the days of /r/SubredditSimulator and /r/SubredditSumGPT2, I'd constantly point out how even those rudimentary models produced better conversation than human Redditors. I assume the gap has only grown, even if GPTs 3 & 4 had never debuted.
Every time I read about someone's experience like that or see it myself, I inevitably think of this xkcd comic about using captchas to trick AI bots into becoming more and more helpful. Man I wish...
Every time I read about someone's experience like that or see it myself, I inevitably think of this xkcd comic about using captchas to trick AI bots into becoming more and more helpful.
Man I wish that would actually work, same as the tech support code word, would make my days so much easier...
I would spend hours of my life, pretty much every day, on either the website or the RiF app (or both) - for about nine and a half years. I thought I'd never be able to leave, and it's incredible...
I would spend hours of my life, pretty much every day, on either the website or the RiF app (or both) - for about nine and a half years. I thought I'd never be able to leave, and it's incredible how okay I now feel about having almost completely stopped using it (probably down to about an hour per week or so, now?). I'm not sure I'd have been able to without the help of Tildes and Hacker News as replacements for some of the things I liked about Reddit, but I definitely feel as though the daily arrangement I have now is healthier (not healthy - but healthier!).
Yep, this is how I feel as well. I'm beyond caring. It was obvious that most of the user base didn't care about the direction Reddit was going, and I was part of the vocal minority against it. I'm...
Yep, this is how I feel as well. I'm beyond caring. It was obvious that most of the user base didn't care about the direction Reddit was going, and I was part of the vocal minority against it. I'm happy to reclaim several hours per week doing something other than scrolling through Reddit. Tildes is perfect for me, both from a quantity (much lower than Reddit) and quality (much higher than Reddit) content.
Extremely well said. For me, the lack of places to just "browse memes" after leaving reddit was a bit painful, but overall very worthwhile. When I first got to Tildes, someone had written how...
Extremely well said. For me, the lack of places to just "browse memes" after leaving reddit was a bit painful, but overall very worthwhile. When I first got to Tildes, someone had written how blissful the effect of "continued boredom" can be. When I find myself bored, instead of reaching for the phone and scrolling for dopamine, now I find myself considering what is important for me to be doing.
How can I improve the space around me? How can I find motivation in this moment to complete the things I want to? These are questions I ask myself less and less as I find ways to fill in that time with mindless content. Since I've left reddit, I've learned to embrace that. I find thoughtful content here, over less time. And the reclaimed time is used more thoughtfully than I could have known before I left.
I definitely miss having a place to browse memes. I enjoy the in-depth conversations here a lot, but I am an incredibly unserious human being with a big goofy sense of humor that craves memes....
I definitely miss having a place to browse memes. I enjoy the in-depth conversations here a lot, but I am an incredibly unserious human being with a big goofy sense of humor that craves memes. Haven't found a good source though yet. I tried imgur, but it's a lot of meta humor and massive image dumps of super hit-and-miss memes.
I'm mostly just subsisting off of memes that my wife shares with me.
Lemmy seems to have it's fair share of meme stuff. There are also a few Mastodon instances such as wetdry.world (and lethallava.land from the same admins, if you prefer Misskey/Firefish) that...
Lemmy seems to have it's fair share of meme stuff. There are also a few Mastodon instances such as wetdry.world (and lethallava.land from the same admins, if you prefer Misskey/Firefish) that seems to have their fair share of shitpost-y types (with a tech-y focus) hanging around on the local timelines.
Right there with you. I deleted everything and haven't looked back, and it's been great honestly. Reminds me of when I quit Facebook after having been with them since it was still exclusively for...
Right there with you. I deleted everything and haven't looked back, and it's been great honestly. Reminds me of when I quit Facebook after having been with them since it was still exclusively for college students. Occasionally I get an itch to have something more to read, but it no longer results in an hour of endless scrolling, hot takes for fake internet points, and superficial engagement with mostly meaningless content. I've reclaimed that time for better uses. Wish I'd done it years ago.
Haven't posted or commented anything on reddit in 2 months. 11+ year old account and previously I've probably never gone more than a week without commenting. My subreddits may still be around but...
Haven't posted or commented anything on reddit in 2 months. 11+ year old account and previously I've probably never gone more than a week without commenting. My subreddits may still be around but I'm no longer putting in free trust and safety man hours for them.
Reddit "won" but they lost hundreds of amazing community members and moderators and stomped on the good will of thousands of other users
Yeah, I haven't been back on my account since I got kicked off of RiF and I feel better for it. Nicer just checking in here a couple times a day and getting updates on news, dropping a comment...
Yeah, I haven't been back on my account since I got kicked off of RiF and I feel better for it. Nicer just checking in here a couple times a day and getting updates on news, dropping a comment here or there then getting back to other things.
I still jump on now and again as a guest to check out a few niche communities for updates and news, specifically /r/TheSmashingPumpkins, as there's really nowhere else for me (as someone who doesn't use typical social media) to get updates on new music, merch, releases and tours.
I have an email just for subscribing to newsletters. For getting updates on new music or movies, I sign up on the official website for updates. Music labels and studios typically send out an email...
I have an email just for subscribing to newsletters. For getting updates on new music or movies, I sign up on the official website for updates. Music labels and studios typically send out an email as well whenever there is news to be announced. This won't be an option for smaller artists but if news is all you need, it's a good option. Between this and RSS feeds of publications I follow, I don't feel like I'm missing out much on news without social media.
I found it pretty telling that in the early days of the API change announcement, the reaction many people had wasn't "oh no, how am I going to access Reddit after this?" but rather "thank fuck I...
I found it pretty telling that in the early days of the API change announcement, the reaction many people had wasn't "oh no, how am I going to access Reddit after this?" but rather "thank fuck I finally have an excuse to leave this hellhole once and for all" (paraphrasing here, but I'm sure you get it). I think a lot of us, myself included, stuck around out of habit even if we no longer enjoyed the site like we used to.
That whole fiasco made me revisit my Reddit usage and whether I felt it was really adding anything of value to my life or it was just a cause of stress and unnecessary distraction. I realised that, outside of a small handful of subs, it really wasn't worth it anymore. I check said handful of subs maybe once a week now, but I know the clock is ticking for Old Reddit the same way it did for third-party apps, and once that goes away then I'm just going to finally delete my account.
On reddit proper I'd say it was more skewed on "how am I gonna access reddit?". Lots of people didn't want to leave and that's probably why the protests weren't going to have that quick immediate...
On reddit proper I'd say it was more skewed on "how am I gonna access reddit?". Lots of people didn't want to leave and that's probably why the protests weren't going to have that quick immediate effect they were hoping for. It's still engaging with a website that relies on engagement.
maybe if they really leaned into it they could have done something. No, not John Oliver memes, flood reddit with porn and allow nothing else. But that scares users away, maybe even gotten Reddit in trouble with credit card conpani. And that was not the mods' intentions.
Honestly, I don't even miss a lot of the smaller communities. Even the smaller ones that I enjoyed are mostly just image posts; now that I've been using Tildes for close to two months, I find I...
Honestly, I don't even miss a lot of the smaller communities. Even the smaller ones that I enjoyed are mostly just image posts; now that I've been using Tildes for close to two months, I find I image posts are just addicting and not much more. It's entirely too easy to simply look at one for two seconds and keep scrolling; generally, what I think I was looking for was good discussion posts and even there, it was entirely too easy to be misconstrued and downvoted into oblivion.
I don't hate reddit; I'll still use it if I'm looking for something in particular and I don't intend to delete my account and post history. But the habit is broken and I'm much more content and productive without it.
That was why I originally stopped visiting facebook, then twitter and now reddit. When your blood pressure goes up every time you look at your feed because the toxicity is unavoidable, it's time...
That was why I originally stopped visiting facebook, then twitter and now reddit. When your blood pressure goes up every time you look at your feed because the toxicity is unavoidable, it's time to leave.
Ditto for me. Which I find extremely surprising. I was definitely putting in a collective hour or two a day at least just doomscrolling down and probably would not have bothered cutting down...
Ditto for me. Which I find extremely surprising. I was definitely putting in a collective hour or two a day at least just doomscrolling down and probably would not have bothered cutting down otherwise. But RIF is dead, the official app is trash, and now it feels bad to be giving Reddit traffic. Instead I've ramped up and improved my RSS usage, and am on Mastodon and Tildes. Reddit went from a daily essential to more or less dead to me.
Absolutely. I have a hefty and well organised rss library again. Active again in old forums, and obviously Tildes. Same for YouTube. Raise prices all you like, I've figured out how to open videos...
Absolutely. I have a hefty and well organised rss library again. Active again in old forums, and obviously Tildes.
Same for YouTube. Raise prices all you like, I've figured out how to open videos that I get through my rss feeds directly through NewPipe X SponsorBlock. Same for the company formerly known as Twitter. All my Ukraine sources died, but now I have an RSS feed to the daily ISW report.
They're open to keep doing their worst, and I'll continue to find my ways around their bullshit.
I don't see why you still can't visit smaller communities? While I wasn't a heavy reddit user to begin with, I did support the protesters and I walked away from reddit, but I went back to about a...
I deeply miss a lot of the smaller communities,
I don't see why you still can't visit smaller communities?
While I wasn't a heavy reddit user to begin with, I did support the protesters and I walked away from reddit, but I went back to about a dozen or so of my small communities, sub reddits. I wasn't on /r/all before this and I'm not on /r/all after all this. However, I love the dozen or so posts that show up on /r/integra ever day or even fewer posts on some even smaller subs.
My issue in the past has been that I'll create a new account and only subscribe to the niche things I enjoy. And then inevitably I start scrolling through /r/all. And then before you know it I...
My issue in the past has been that I'll create a new account and only subscribe to the niche things I enjoy. And then inevitably I start scrolling through /r/all. And then before you know it I spend more time on /r/all than I do the niche subreddits. Because it's like delicious junk food. Bad for me, but satisfying in the moment.
So all in all it's better for me to just stay away entirely. I lack the self-control needed for me to continue to use reddit in a healthy way.
I plan to visit the smaller subs for a while but the writing is on the wall. I won't use the Reddit app and I won't use the new Reddit, so eventually I'll have my methods of access removed. At...
I plan to visit the smaller subs for a while but the writing is on the wall. I won't use the Reddit app and I won't use the new Reddit, so eventually I'll have my methods of access removed. At that point, I'll be done entirely.
This is honestly how I feel. I don't post there any more and only vaguely browse it sometimes on my PC. Otherwise, I've got tildes and I actually have to do something valuable with my time. And on...
This is honestly how I feel. I don't post there any more and only vaguely browse it sometimes on my PC.
Otherwise, I've got tildes and I actually have to do something valuable with my time. And on top of that, I sure do get to sleep faster without reddit.
Mostly the same. Might have to dip into smaller communities here or there for one off things, but i've removed it from all my bookmarks/hotlinks/most of my rss so i'm not tempted to bother.
Mostly the same. Might have to dip into smaller communities here or there for one off things, but i've removed it from all my bookmarks/hotlinks/most of my rss so i'm not tempted to bother.
I really really really don't want to do a this in reddit style but... aargh... this! Although for me I've cut about 90% of the time. I really think it will continue too because the benefits have...
I really really really don't want to do a this in reddit style but... aargh... this!
Although for me I've cut about 90% of the time. I really think it will continue too because the benefits have been immense.
Same here, and in the transition between leaving Reddit and waiting for an invite to Tildes I found myself much happier not jumping down the rabbit hole that is Reddit.
Same here, and in the transition between leaving Reddit and waiting for an invite to Tildes I found myself much happier not jumping down the rabbit hole that is Reddit.
I haven't been following it recently, but I wonder how over the protest is; i.e., what their internal metrics might show wrt daily active users and engagement, especially their most prolific...
I haven't been following it recently, but I wonder how over the protest is; i.e., what their internal metrics might show wrt daily active users and engagement, especially their most prolific content creators. Most probably didn't even know there was a protest outside of /r/pics. My wife didn't know and didn't care when I told her what was going on.
Personally, though, I stopped using Reddit entirely because I didn't agree with their initial handling of the API pricing change or their response to the community. At $14/month for two accounts, my contribution (or lack of it) isn't even a blip though...
And that's why Reddit was always going to win this one. Had this been 10 years ago there's no way they would have enough apathetic (and I don't mean that in a judgemental way) users to be okay...
My wife didn't know and didn't care when I told her what was going on.
And that's why Reddit was always going to win this one. Had this been 10 years ago there's no way they would have enough apathetic (and I don't mean that in a judgemental way) users to be okay with losing those that did care, those that helped them build their empire at the start. And that's why I deleted my comments and my account, they're done with us, I'm done with them.
If Digg had waited another 5 years before implementing the changes they made that ruined them maybe Reddit would still just be a middling community of nerds and geeks.
From the start of this, I always viewed it as 2 different things: Reddit the company was always going to win. They have such a large following of users on the main subs that have only ever known...
From the start of this, I always viewed it as 2 different things:
Reddit the company was always going to win. They have such a large following of users on the main subs that have only ever known their 1st party app/new reddit that these changes meant nothing to them. Their engagement and views are hardly going to be affected.
Reddit "old guard" and quality of content was going to lose. The people that built the site up with quality comments and postings, made the site that it was, are no longer reddit's target demographic. I've noticed the community get more toxic over the years as it became more mainstream, and those are the same types of users that for the most part were going to stick around anyway.
Maybe it's because I've mostly kicked my reddit habit to the curb and only visit a few communities here and there anymore, but I have the feeling that reddit has gotten noticably shittier since...
I've noticed the community get more toxic over the years as it became more mainstream, and those are the same types of users that for the most part were going to stick around anyway.
Maybe it's because I've mostly kicked my reddit habit to the curb and only visit a few communities here and there anymore, but I have the feeling that reddit has gotten noticably shittier since the whole exodus a month or two ago. Again, maybe that's because I spend less time there so the toxicity is more jarring when I do stumble into it, but I also feel that it used to be more contained to controversial topics or shitty communities.
It's been growing more polarized for years, unfortunately. Circa 2012-2015 or so it was mostly contained to the nore obviously controversial topics, but that sort of conversation has more or less...
It's been growing more polarized for years, unfortunately. Circa 2012-2015 or so it was mostly contained to the nore obviously controversial topics, but that sort of conversation has more or less become the norm post 2016.
The pandemic was another wave that made things even more polarized. By that point it wasn't just about toxic users, it feels like every post has people questioning if everyone else is a bot (I guess reddit was ahead of the whole AI hype thing). Really hard to have a genuine conversation anymore unless you seek a very specific niche with very specific mods.
I think I could see a hint of it during/after the blackouts, but it really surged when July 1st hit, which I mostly attribute to the fact that most of the moderations tools just stopped working...
I think I could see a hint of it during/after the blackouts, but it really surged when July 1st hit, which I mostly attribute to the fact that most of the moderations tools just stopped working (note that this is my assumption, I don’t know if Reddit Inc maybe changed their minds about allowing mod tools to still access the API without charging for access?)
If you venture to any of the NSFW subreddits, there’s basically nothing but bots in the comments, and I don’t know if it was always the case but it’s overwhelming these days.
A lot of mods were using RIF or Apollo (myself included) and disappeared when their main path for access did. I did have a dedicated modding app back in the day but I think it stopped working long...
A lot of mods were using RIF or Apollo (myself included) and disappeared when their main path for access did. I did have a dedicated modding app back in the day but I think it stopped working long before the API changes.
I don't use the main subs, but I really only know Reddit through new Reddit and their app. I briefly used Reddit before new Reddit was a thing, but I didn't really understand it. It wasn't until I...
They have such a large following of users on the main subs that have only ever known their 1st party app/new reddit that these changes meant nothing to them.
I don't use the main subs, but I really only know Reddit through new Reddit and their app. I briefly used Reddit before new Reddit was a thing, but I didn't really understand it. It wasn't until I was a little bit older in 2016 that I started really heavily using it. And as far as I was concerned it was a much easier way to navigate the site.
A boycott or protest doesn’t matter as much if you can be replaced. There are potential new users who weren’t there for previous drama. (Kids for example.) There’s no picket line to cross. The...
A boycott or protest doesn’t matter as much if you can be replaced. There are potential new users who weren’t there for previous drama. (Kids for example.) There’s no picket line to cross. The question is whether they’re interested.
In this sense, becoming uncool is a bigger downside than making some existing users angry. I’m entirely out of touch with what younger Internet users want so I couldn’t really say what the effect is for Reddit, though.
I glanced at Reddit recently, after not touching it since they shut off third party apps. As far as I'm concerned, it's effectively dead. It looks like most of the subreddits I used to use have...
I glanced at Reddit recently, after not touching it since they shut off third party apps. As far as I'm concerned, it's effectively dead. It looks like most of the subreddits I used to use have evaporated or have very few comments on the posts that exist. Some larger ones, like /r/ffxiv seem active still, but other than that it's mostly the huge ones that used to be defaults.
So I guess Reddit is succeeding in becoming a Instagram 2. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think this is the main thing. The domain Reddit.com is not going to die, but Reddit as it was is, as you say, effectively dead It feels like the front page is almost all either selfie subs or...
So I guess Reddit is succeeding in becoming a Instagram 2. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think this is the main thing. The domain Reddit.com is not going to die, but Reddit as it was is, as you say, effectively dead
It feels like the front page is almost all either selfie subs or rage-bait fake story subs. Not that these type of subs didn’t exist before nor that they weren’t popular, also not saying that all those communities add no value (eg I got a lot of value from Male Fashion Advice from back in the day, which was similar to the outfits/wedding dress subs taking over the front) (I would though argue that the rage-bait fake story subs add negative value).
But the space they take up is considerably more than they used to, and the largest hive-mind (for lack of a better word to come up with) that exist on Reddit will have effects on the site in totality.
The community is just completely different than it used to be. I miss when the hive-mind was more tech/nerd-based, but communities change and Reddit that was is in the past now
That one officially moved to lemmy https://lemdro.id/c/android There's page listing communities from reddit: https://sub.rehab/ Investingly a lot moved to discord, which IMO isn't 1:1 reddit...
It isn't, but some subs tended to maintain a Discord server even before all the drama. Ultimately many people seek community over stuff like long form discussion or archival or searchability, so...
a lot moved to discord, which IMO isn't 1:1 reddit replacement
It isn't, but some subs tended to maintain a Discord server even before all the drama. Ultimately many people seek community over stuff like long form discussion or archival or searchability, so the migration makes sense in that lens.
Interesting that it's a noticeable drop, I wonder if it will cascade into neutral or negative growth with less original or interesting content posted. Instagram 2, but with OF bots.
Interesting that it's a noticeable drop, I wonder if it will cascade into neutral or negative growth with less original or interesting content posted.
So I guess Reddit is succeeding in becoming a Instagram 2.
IMO it will. But not because high quality content disappears. Reddit is simply trying to capture that Instagram/TikTok market and it won't work. You know the one thing those two platforms promise?...
IMO it will. But not because high quality content disappears. Reddit is simply trying to capture that Instagram/TikTok market and it won't work.
You know the one thing those two platforms promise? Monetization. Its like trying to draw YouTubers into some cozy Open-source alternative, it simply can't happen without being able to compensate them. And as we saw with Mixer, monetizing even the largest creators STILL doesn't guarantee you get the user base to move.
Now, there is some leaked plans about trying to monetize users, but with the current community I feel it's going to end up being the next Digg. Hell, it may even compare to MySpace's fall, but at least MySpace's decline was somewhat graceful until Tom sold. This one's gonna be ugly.
If the same cavalier approach is taken with decisions affecting this, there will be crashing, fire, sirens in the distance. In all seriousness, I absolutely agree about the monetization problem....
there is some leaked plans about trying to monetize users
If the same cavalier approach is taken with decisions affecting this, there will be crashing, fire, sirens in the distance.
In all seriousness, I absolutely agree about the monetization problem. Monetization alone doesn't do anything without a community to support it. We're not all able to spend our problems away. A carefully cultivated community built over time leads to sustainable monetization paths. Forcing a community into existence doesn't. Every major social platform has started with community and a platform where people can feel they belong, and that interaction or activity is meaningful.
EDIT ...and ruining that community is easy and possibly irrecoverable (thanks, Digg!).
This is exactly how it was. This was about two weeks ago (late july) when my wife asked me about the protest. She has several of her own subs she follows. Someone at work mentioned the protest and...
Most probably didn't even know there was a protest outside of /r/pics.
This is exactly how it was. This was about two weeks ago (late july) when my wife asked me about the protest. She has several of her own subs she follows. Someone at work mentioned the protest and after work she asked me about it. if my wife, who is a daily user, didn't even know about the protest, I doubt many people outside of the few very popular subs did.
I'm not convinced that this won't eventually hurt Reddit. The quality of moderation is going to suffer and high-quality posters, which are probably more sensitive to stuff like this, are going to...
I'm not convinced that this won't eventually hurt Reddit. The quality of moderation is going to suffer and high-quality posters, which are probably more sensitive to stuff like this, are going to frequent the platform less.
I've seen multiple complaints on /r/linux that the quality of posts has declined, which I'm pretty certain is entirely due to the moderators going for a 'quiet quitting' strategy of not bothering...
I've seen multiple complaints on /r/linux that the quality of posts has declined, which I'm pretty certain is entirely due to the moderators going for a 'quiet quitting' strategy of not bothering to curate beyond the bare minimum. That said, I don't know if the same will be true for many other subreddits, especially less technology-focused ones?
to use an ancient metaphor, reddit won the battle but will lose the war. both reddit and Twitter are dead men walking. You don't piss off your power users and survive as interesting and useful...
to use an ancient metaphor, reddit won the battle but will lose the war. both reddit and Twitter are dead men walking. You don't piss off your power users and survive as interesting and useful platforms. Lucky for the owners of reddit they don't give a shit about that.
I felt compelled to unsubscribe from several subreddits in disgust since the rexoddus. They definitely felt like worse communities to engage with and I couldn't be bothered anymore. I'm also less...
I felt compelled to unsubscribe from several subreddits in disgust since the rexoddus. They definitely felt like worse communities to engage with and I couldn't be bothered anymore. I'm also less often interested in posting overall.
I'm still engaging with the website, though, which bothers me--that I'm creating value for the people who run the website--but I also like to help people by providing answers and links to stuff, and reddit happens to be where reddit comment posters are, by definition.
I used to make posts and comments. I have moved all posting here. If I visit a sub that interests me I will still comment to help people but I am just there a lot less.
I used to make posts and comments. I have moved all posting here. If I visit a sub that interests me I will still comment to help people but I am just there a lot less.
I would have been happy to learn about Tildes years ago. I suspect there are more like me who would fit in here and appreciate what the site has to offer. . : )
I would have been happy to learn about Tildes years ago. I suspect there are more like me who would fit in here and appreciate what the site has to offer. . : )
Depends on your goal. If you want to try and fix reddit, sure. Engage and tailor the community you want. If you want it to crash and burn, the engagement is counterproductive. I've just shifted to...
Depends on your goal. If you want to try and fix reddit, sure. Engage and tailor the community you want. If you want it to crash and burn, the engagement is counterproductive.
I've just shifted to the most lazy browser: no account, browse very specific, small subs, using old.reddit + ad block. Not really a protest so much as a compromise until I can replace those last subs.
Anecdotally, the community in /r/malefashionadvice is going through the exact same thing. To the point where admin removed the historic mods, appointed new mods who reinstated what the originals...
Anecdotally, the community in /r/malefashionadvice is going through the exact same thing. To the point where admin removed the historic mods, appointed new mods who reinstated what the originals had done, and then removed the new mods. The entire community imploded and moved to a discord server. The remains are the worst attributes of the old community and a lot of shitposters.
This is absolutely going on from taking a look at some mod tools and a few backdoor conversations. I've noticed posts making it to /r/subredditdrama from subreddits that'd never let that kind of...
moderators going for a 'quiet quitting' strategy of not bothering to curate beyond the bare minimum
This is absolutely going on from taking a look at some mod tools and a few backdoor conversations. I've noticed posts making it to /r/subredditdrama from subreddits that'd never let that kind of drama boil over before. A ton of reddit's most dedicated users (including myself in the "top 1%" if reddit's year end report is to believed) have checked out.
Reddit "won", for some values of winning. It is a domain that still exists and still has lots of daily clicks and submissions sure. It outlived the protest yes. Most user never cared about the...
Reddit "won", for some values of winning.
It is a domain that still exists and still has lots of daily clicks and submissions sure. It outlived the protest yes. Most user never cared about the profest and never will, that's a win too.
But I would argue that things which gave the domain actual values have been lost forever. It's like when an organism dies, most of the cells are actually still alive and most biological processes continue for a time. But without the cellular upkeep processes, waste management, ability to process new nutrients and without the ability to heal, the still seemingly alive organism is in the process of turning into something that is totally and undeniably dead.
Whatever still lives on that domain 2 years from now will be a very different lifeform. Spez knew that. He thought the site was dead in 2009
"In hindsight it was a mistake to sell but at the time it was very exciting. I didn't think Reddit was going to keep growing – I thought it was dead. We were so dysfunctional internally. It seemed like the smartest thing to do was just to try and get some money out of it while we could."
I mean of course Reddit Corporate will claim victory. What are they going to do, threaten their own IPO by saying otherwise? With the strategic release of places I'm sure they can even have...
I mean of course Reddit Corporate will claim victory. What are they going to do, threaten their own IPO by saying otherwise? With the strategic release of places I'm sure they can even have numbers to back it up. They'lll conveniently ignore the manipulation because "numbers are numbers."
Heck, Reddit is big enough that even it's dead corpse would still have enough momentum to hide the fact that it was dead for awhile.
While Reddit isn't totally dead, it has been damaged, IMO. Besides the people unwilling to use Reddit without their 3rd party app of choice I would be willing to admit that a core group of power users and mods have either already left, are only going through the motions but aren't as active as they once were or waiting for alternatives to get enough momentum. A few here, a few there leaving after the initial larger exodus and suddenly you have an issue.
Personally, (other than search results) I only pop on once a week to catch up on squaredcircle but I'm spending less and less time there each Monday. I deleted all my comments and removed my account so I have no plans to ever post there anything again.
In my situation that's their loss since before I had been spending at least 7-10 hours a week on Reddit (while in a vehicle, killing time at work, etc) and now it's maybe 20-30 minutes once a week. Taking people at their word here and other places, I don't think I'm alone. I've certainly not heard anyone claiming to use Reddit more after this fiasco. I firmly believe that their numbers (outside of the recent r-slash-place event) surely have taken a dive.
To be clear, Reddit corporate hasn’t said anything since then. “Reddit won” is Gizmodo opining on the situation after observing the last holdouts folding or being quietly replaced.
To be clear, Reddit corporate hasn’t said anything since then. “Reddit won” is Gizmodo opining on the situation after observing the last holdouts folding or being quietly replaced.
A corporate entity that depends on the unpaid work of community moderators is doomed to suffer death by a thousand cuts. Every unpopular decision is another little cut. This fiasco cut them a lot.
A corporate entity that depends on the unpaid work of community moderators is doomed to suffer death by a thousand cuts. Every unpopular decision is another little cut.
That's exactly what some users were hoping to do by "rebelling" instead of leaving. that was doomed to fail since Reddit holds all the cards, but sometimes experience is the best teacher. But to...
What are they going to do, threaten their own IPO by saying otherwise
That's exactly what some users were hoping to do by "rebelling" instead of leaving. that was doomed to fail since Reddit holds all the cards, but sometimes experience is the best teacher.
But to be fair, Reddit sure did fumble hard in July to make it see possible.
As a former extremely active Redditor, I am also happy this curse has been lifted. I‘ve probably spent upwards of 10h per week for the last 12 years on that website. I have contributed in...
As a former extremely active Redditor, I am also happy this curse has been lifted. I‘ve probably spent upwards of 10h per week for the last 12 years on that website. I have contributed in answering questions and very actively reporting content. In the German subreddit /r/de, I have been very active. However, you can tell there‘s a big decline in discussions and quality posts. The regular chat posts used to be very frequented, now even feddit occasionally has more comments on some topics. I feel like at least that bubble has been hurt by the actions.
I also want to add that since the API disaster, I have replaced my reddit time with sports. I have been running 3-6 times a week and I am doing calisthenics 3x a week. This has all started in the first week of July. I don‘t believe it‘s a coincidence. This week, I already ran for over 30km. a couple months ago I don‘t think I could run 1k without stopping. So I am happy.
I have spent my time in a much more productive manner and I agree that I think the people leaving reddit are the real winners in this situation
I'm also happy to say that I've traded long hours of scrolling for sport. This summer has been the busiest in many years. Congratulations to you for this healthy change!
I'm also happy to say that I've traded long hours of scrolling for sport. This summer has been the busiest in many years. Congratulations to you for this healthy change!
To be clear, Reddit isn't saying this. This is an opinion from a Gizmodo writer based on the actions of reddit mods abandoning their protest. I think this encapsulates why the protest was bound to...
To be clear, Reddit isn't saying this. This is an opinion from a Gizmodo writer based on the actions of reddit mods abandoning their protest.
“More than a month has passed, and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people’s attention has shifted to other things,” an r/aww moderator wrote in a post about the rule change.
I think this encapsulates why the protest was bound to fail. The Intenet is historically very bad at the long term, which is basically a default in corporate world. A month is barely even a blink of an eye to the latter, while a month in the internet can shift entire cultures.
IMO, The post quality is the part that matters the most. Sure, the subreddits are back online but the quality of the content has taken a sharp nosedive. Posting frequency is down as well in many...
IMO, The post quality is the part that matters the most. Sure, the subreddits are back online but the quality of the content has taken a sharp nosedive. Posting frequency is down as well in many of my frequent subreddits. I stopped using it on my phone because of the lack of 3rd party apps. Now I'm losing interest in using it on my desktop whatsoever.
Yeah, I'm not going on Reddit anymore not because my 3rd party app stopped working (it's still holding on somehow), but because over the last 2 months, Reddit got noticeably shittier, and it was...
Yeah, I'm not going on Reddit anymore not because my 3rd party app stopped working (it's still holding on somehow), but because over the last 2 months, Reddit got noticeably shittier, and it was already kinda shit before. But now I open it and there's not be a single thing of interest to me on the front page. They had a good thing going but of course they had to ruin it.
To run with the topical theme for this month (last month...), it's like an evil Skrull killed and replaced Reddit, but only the people closest to it would know or care-- the long-term powerusers....
To run with the topical theme for this month (last month...), it's like an evil Skrull killed and replaced Reddit, but only the people closest to it would know or care-- the long-term powerusers.
I had no delusions of ever "winning" this protest against Reddit. Having gone through similar upheavals with Digg and Livejournal, I just packed up my stuff and left. Once they start chasing the money hard there is really no convincing them, and it was only a matter of my preferences and ideals at that point.
Reddit is... Not Quite Dead, but certainly a shadow of its former self. I daresay it's even Too Big to Fail. But let's see how things fare in a few months. It may be too big to fail on the business metric they care about, but their cultural fall from grace may be spectacular.
I spend more time browsing Tildes now then reddit, that's a win for me in my book. I gave so much to keep reddit a great place for communities, I still moderate a few that are doing well, but the...
I spend more time browsing Tildes now then reddit, that's a win for me in my book. I gave so much to keep reddit a great place for communities, I still moderate a few that are doing well, but the front page is a mess, the Random Acts of Pizza spirit is dead.
Not trying to be funny or mean, just curious, how? I can stay away from Tildes for 3 days, come back and be caught up on about 45 minutes. Whereas on reddit, if I'm gone for 3 days, I'll never...
I spend more time browsing Tildes now then reddit
Not trying to be funny or mean, just curious, how? I can stay away from Tildes for 3 days, come back and be caught up on about 45 minutes. Whereas on reddit, if I'm gone for 3 days, I'll never catch up, and I'm not even subscribed to some of the big subs.
I love Tildes, don't get me wrong, but there is just not enough content around here to spend more than a few minutes here and there.
I'm not the one you asked, but you got me thinkin'. Like @llehsadam, I spend a lot more time here than Reddit. It boiled down to two things, for me: I only keep tabs on the subs I really care...
I'm not the one you asked, but you got me thinkin'.
Like @llehsadam, I spend a lot more time here than Reddit. It boiled down to two things, for me:
I only keep tabs on the subs I really care about. My community support network needs are also met elsewhere, further reducing that to the single digits... on one hand. I pop in for recent news/happenings/events and call it a day. I've also grown accustomed to getting my meme supply elsewhere.
When I'm not just reading the comments (and the majority of them are long and thoughtful!), I'm actually engaging a lot more, too. Who knew making yourself think/write more than a smartass quip took up more time than shitposting? ;)
Simple, you spend less than 45 minutes browsing reddit. I'm not sure how a current reddit mod does that, but it's very easy for me. I probably spend less than 20 minutes a day (if that) on reddit...
Simple, you spend less than 45 minutes browsing reddit. I'm not sure how a current reddit mod does that, but it's very easy for me.
I probably spend less than 20 minutes a day (if that) on reddit just staying updated on my remaining 2-3 niches of topics. I'd say 30-45 minutes is about what I spend here on Tildes. These aren't huge subs with huge daily updates, so it's much easier to browse there. Not having an account means I can't reply to the inevitably angry comments either, which saves more time.
I have spent much more time on Hacker News late, though.
When I still could use Apollo, I definitely got lost in the amount of content on reddit. I think the trick was to refuse to use the official mobile app and just make an effort to write and read...
When I still could use Apollo, I definitely got lost in the amount of content on reddit. I think the trick was to refuse to use the official mobile app and just make an effort to write and read more on Tildes.
But we may be in different situations here, I only use Tildes and Reddit for an hour or so every few days now.
The app really made it very easy to mindlessly scroll. I think that conscious decision to stop after Apollo was killed is what helped me get used to it. I fill my extra time with other things now.
God, one of my favorite Reddit moments was when I got to help organize a massive /randomactsofpizza delivery effort in Boston right after the bombing. I was calling all sorts of hospitals and...
God, one of my favorite Reddit moments was when I got to help organize a massive /randomactsofpizza delivery effort in Boston right after the bombing. I was calling all sorts of hospitals and pizza places, coordinating where they were delivering, when, and shifting Redditors to new places when we maxed one joint out. The best of Reddit in that moment.
They lost a lot of veterans, but people join daily so it has balance. All is just a meme database of regurgitate which is horrific for an old timer like me. I had a half decent curated feed for...
They lost a lot of veterans, but people join daily so it has balance.
All is just a meme database of regurgitate which is horrific for an old timer like me. I had a half decent curated feed for the subs I wanted to see but the whole "there's a sub for everything" actually splintered content.
I stay away for a large part but unless my communities would move, it looks like I have to occasionally check in.
So yes, Reddit won the war but at what cost to the decent content? I suppose it won't matter as they have the user data, the daily user count and ads. It's all ripe for the IPO.
I think people miss that this was over the moment it started. Reddit shifted target markets. People are talking about the loss of high quality content, but don't seem to grasp that reddit's goal...
I think people miss that this was over the moment it started.
Reddit shifted target markets. People are talking about the loss of high quality content, but don't seem to grasp that reddit's goal was to shift more towards buzzfeed (or be THE buzzfeed) than it was to keep that high quality content.
As many have pointed out they're still the de-facto/only choice for smaller communities, attempts to get maybe unbiased reviews of products, and similar such things.
No doubt those content creators and moderators were a huge part of why reddit is successful, but they're betting (quite successfully so far) that they don't need them anymore. Eventually there might be a threatening alternative, but this was basically the digg transformation done right (boiling the frog and all that).
This is an insightful framing. People had long been joking about how long it would take for Buzzfeed or WatchMojo to come up with a video about whatever topic they were talking about. The goal of...
This is an insightful framing. People had long been joking about how long it would take for Buzzfeed or WatchMojo to come up with a video about whatever topic they were talking about. The goal of Reddit had switched to "make as much money as possible" over a decade ago. That's why they've never really done a lot to support the moderators. They don't care about the quality of the communities, only the quantities of people they contain. It's the same reason why they always dragged their feet on shutting down problematic subreddits.
I mean, sorry everyone because I think I'm at a fault, but there is literally no other place where I can easily read and discuss things like /r/mud, /r/wowroleplay or /r/hobbydrama at length with...
I mean, sorry everyone because I think I'm at a fault, but there is literally no other place where I can easily read and discuss things like /r/mud, /r/wowroleplay or /r/hobbydrama at length with a good amount of people. The choice is to either use Reddit or never talk about those things ever again -- Discord is not an alternative, real time chat is exhausting. And everytime someone argues that federation is actually super simple they end up writing a 2000 words essay full of caveats, edge cases, and technical details.
I feel like there is room for nuance here. In my opinion, Lemmy is still in the middle of its growing pains, and has many problems with reliability and UX. The main site seems to go down quite a...
I feel like there is room for nuance here. In my opinion, Lemmy is still in the middle of its growing pains, and has many problems with reliability and UX. The main site seems to go down quite a bit, and page loads are on the slow side on most instances I visit. The web UI has many rough edges and is also missing a few features I expect a UI to have, like default sorting settings. I also find myself crossing instance boundaries without realizing it, and sometimes I even find myself logged out of my user account on my home instance apropos of nothing.
Mastodon OTOH is where Lemmy could be in a few years. Most instances are quick to load and look nice. Reliability, while not perfect, is much much better than Lemmy, and even compares favorably to sites like Reddit. More importantly, cross-site UX in Mastodon is massively helped by its amazing ecosystem of apps, both on desktop and mobile, and the sorts of UX issues you hear about when using the default web UI are simply not a problem when using Sengi, Tusky, Toot or the half-dozen other apps that are out there.
No need to apologize. You do what's best for you and you're not single-handedly making or breaking reddit by doing that. My only long time advice would be to at least passively try seeking out...
No need to apologize. You do what's best for you and you're not single-handedly making or breaking reddit by doing that.
My only long time advice would be to at least passively try seeking out alternative communities over the years. maybe even try to cultivate some communities yourself elsewhere. They will probably be there for 1-2 years, I'm not as certain they will be the same community in 5, or even around at all to begin with
And everytime someone argues that federation is actually super simple they end up writing a 2000 words essay full of caveats, edge cases, and technical details.
to be fair, that is every community. It's just easy to forget how we naturally navigate around them overtime. e.g. think about how Reddit advertises the upvote button, but then remember how people actually tend to use it. Then remember the weird culture like upvote chains with a randomly downvoted comment, or why X user is downvoted despite making a good comment, or why some odd in-joke is upvoted.
I think it's best to simply jump in and experience the caveats firsthand when it comes to internet communities.
Honestly I am in the same boat here. I would love to use just tildes, But reddit has a huge ASOIF community there still and news on the war in Ukraine. I love it here due to the nice discourse and...
Honestly I am in the same boat here. I would love to use just tildes, But reddit has a huge ASOIF community there still and news on the war in Ukraine. I love it here due to the nice discourse and conversations I can find in the comments of posts. But for my interests, they are not big here yet. So I still use reddit to visit those subreddits.
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-quickly-depleting-fleet-warplanes-overuse-expert-ukraine-f16-worsen-2023-8?amp Here is one such article I found from the subreddit.
Thank you. I meant this megathread in ~news https://tildes.net/~news/198a/weekly_megathread_for_news_updates_discussion_of_russian_invasion_of_ukraine_august_10
I've been on Reddit for a long time (since 2005.) Reddit already became too big by 2012-ish for me to want to participate in any non-niche community on the site. (I distinctly remember the Narwhal...
I've been on Reddit for a long time (since 2005.) Reddit already became too big by 2012-ish for me to want to participate in any non-niche community on the site. (I distinctly remember the Narwhal Bacons culture heh.) Only 2 of the communities I participate in did anything for the protests (one being r/askhistorians.) Like others here, it was getting obvious to me that even medium sized communities on the site were becoming obnoxious. The site has generally been fomenting an attitude of negativity and gotchas. A lot of subreddits became circlejerks where the same set of topics got upvoted and everything else got downvoted (like r/wickededge.) A lot of the larger subs I was on were dominated by teenagers (which is just a structural property of the internet itself and who has time to post.) I also found the speed of the API pricing changes to be in pretty bad taste (though not the changes themselves which I feel they had every right to do.) None of the communities I was in moved and don't seem to have any plans to move.
That said, the overflow from the Reddit protests had a real detrimental effect on other social sites I visit. HackerNews for example had a real dip in quality from the protests and has since become a lot more Reddit-like in its comment sections, and now has a lot of the same "downvote disagreeing viewpoints with impunity" culture that lives on Reddit. (Not that HackerNews didn't have existing problems of its own.) There was also a lot of hopeful/borderline disingenuous posting in other communities on how the Fediverse's community is now sufficient to replace Reddit (which isn't true for any of the subcultures I'm into) and just a lot of emotional rhetoric that left a sour taste in my mouth.
I'm glad the culture on this site is a lot more thoughtful than the culture of Reddit and I enjoy reading and posting here quite a bit. That said, none of the Reddit communities I was on want to move, so I'll be using Reddit for the foreseeable future. I'm hoping some Fediverse Reddit-likes do end up building new, healthy, communities, but the drama I've seen on Mastodon brings me a bit of pause. On the Twitter side of things I'm really enjoying Bluesky and somewhat enjoying Threads.
Overall, a time for lots of change in the social media landscape.
When the good, 100,000-subscriber medium communities have grown to a million subscribers and they're still medium-sized, you're going to naturally get enshittification.
was getting obvious to me that even medium sized communities on the site were becoming obnoxious
When the good, 100,000-subscriber medium communities have grown to a million subscribers and they're still medium-sized, you're going to naturally get enshittification.
For the first time in 10 or more years, I don't have a reddit app on my phone after this. Reddit may have won, but they've lost a core user base that once respected them.
For the first time in 10 or more years, I don't have a reddit app on my phone after this. Reddit may have won, but they've lost a core user base that once respected them.
This is honestly the biggest factor in how much less I'm using reddit. I don't need to take some principled stance, I just only used a 3rd party app on mobile and now I can't. I didn't switch to...
This is honestly the biggest factor in how much less I'm using reddit. I don't need to take some principled stance, I just only used a 3rd party app on mobile and now I can't. I didn't switch to reddit's own app because it's shit, so now the 99% of my reddit browsing and posting that was done on my phone while I was bored just isn't happening. I browse Tildes or Tumblr instead.
Same here. Hell, it's the first time I have almost zero social media apps on my phone. Only Discord. I'm rather looking forward to when some android Tildes apps are deployed.
Same here. Hell, it's the first time I have almost zero social media apps on my phone. Only Discord.
I'm rather looking forward to when some android Tildes apps are deployed.
oh, I have. But I must have mixed it with Surfboard and thought 3 cheers was also IOS only Neat, RiF was my first app so I'm definitely interested in seeing how the creator interprets that for...
oh, I have. But I must have mixed it with Surfboard and thought 3 cheers was also IOS only
Neat, RiF was my first app so I'm definitely interested in seeing how the creator interprets that for Tildes. Thanks!
I suppose one could technically "win" a nuclear war, but it can hardly count as a real win. The damage was quite bad for their rep. I doubt they'll recover, the seeds have been sown and an...
I suppose one could technically "win" a nuclear war, but it can hardly count as a real win. The damage was quite bad for their rep. I doubt they'll recover, the seeds have been sown and an alternative will soon gain preference and push forward to take Reddit's place.
TBH most of the niche coammunities I used are back to normal with the exception of some of the really unique ones like r/askHistorians. As I've observed elsewhere before, people who didn't use...
TBH most of the niche coammunities I used are back to normal with the exception of some of the really unique ones like r/askHistorians. As I've observed elsewhere before, people who didn't use r/all or popular aren't likely to notice much of a change.
I deleted my reddit account and removed hundreds of old comments, and use the site massively less than before. I'm sure there are other users that are the same. It was inevitable that they would...
I deleted my reddit account and removed hundreds of old comments, and use the site massively less than before. I'm sure there are other users that are the same. It was inevitable that they would eventually win since it was clear nothing would make them back down, but this has probably done some significant damage to their metrics and site value. I would hope anyway. Who knows I guess.
Largely dumping Reddit has been nice for me, I spend most of my time now divided between here, Lemmy, and my RSS. It’s been nice. I do still access it for the lawyer and bar prep subreddits...
Largely dumping Reddit has been nice for me, I spend most of my time now divided between here, Lemmy, and my RSS. It’s been nice. I do still access it for the lawyer and bar prep subreddits because those groups are never going to leave Reddit, but aside from that I don’t use it. I do wish I had somewhere to go for b/s/t groups for my hobbies that are as good as what is on Reddit but that’s hard to do especially without Facebook.
Overall I'm glad it happened even if it wasn't successful. After 13 years on reddit I didn't think I'd be able to cut back my usage so easily but I've reduced my use of Reddit by like 90%+ since...
Overall I'm glad it happened even if it wasn't successful.
After 13 years on reddit I didn't think I'd be able to cut back my usage so easily but I've reduced my use of Reddit by like 90%+ since July 1st. This whole situation pushed me to go to my subscriptions and delete almost everything except for like 4 subs I actually value, one of which is my local sub (which is hard to replace for me since I don't use FB).
There was also an element of "staged" in this protest. All it did was attract even more attention and eyeballs to the subs gone private. And then it was only a matter of time before the...
There was also an element of "staged" in this protest. All it did was attract even more attention and eyeballs to the subs gone private. And then it was only a matter of time before the "establishment" mods started opening back their subs and the whole thing became a grand joke. I was wondering what were they really hoping to achieve with all this to begin with.
From the sounds of it, you weren't directly impacted by the API change. "What they hoped to achieve" was to reverse that API change, so we could all keep using RIF et al. If your reaction to this...
From the sounds of it, you weren't directly impacted by the API change. "What they hoped to achieve" was to reverse that API change, so we could all keep using RIF et al.
If your reaction to this whole deal is that it's a nothingburger and folks are just being pissy or performative, well I can tell you that isn't the case. The API change changed my life - I was a very active redditor for over a decade, but since third-party clients died I've only touched reddit when linked from search results.
It's possible there are nuances I'm missing, but by and large this reddit anger and exodus is not staged. I mean we're having this conversation on Tildes, which I would never have anticipated six months ago.
Not at all surprised by this. While I have reduced my Reddit usage nowadays, I still use it a decent amount. Some communities that I frequented there wouldn't really work on Tildes so I continue...
Not at all surprised by this. While I have reduced my Reddit usage nowadays, I still use it a decent amount. Some communities that I frequented there wouldn't really work on Tildes so I continue to be a part of the discussions there. Tildes is a great site but anytime I want to post, I feel a pressure to always have meaningful contributions to discussion here so I often just don't comment at all. While one can argue that this is a net positive, sometimes I just want to casually comment on something and move on instead of carefully crafting a mini essay. While most social media sites feel casual, Tildes feels quite formal and I'm not the biggest fan of that.
I only feel like that about top level replies. Anything there after can be noise and fair game. Just the other day I posted a puffery piece as I don't really do social media, Tildes is now my main...
I only feel like that about top level replies. Anything there after can be noise and fair game.
Just the other day I posted a puffery piece as I don't really do social media, Tildes is now my main site to hang out on. I felt comfortable posting, even though it was retagged, moved and went AWOL as it was moved to a group I do not subscribe to, so that was confusing.
Regardless, people congratulated me and were free talking. Tildes is changing and has a lot more casual speech, although the main posts do try to stay fairly formal, and as previously stated, the top levels are generally those of a formal response.
I knew this would happen the moment the protest started. Reddit knew most people would choose the familiarity and comfort of scrolling on their favorite website/app over putting their money where...
I knew this would happen the moment the protest started. Reddit knew most people would choose the familiarity and comfort of scrolling on their favorite website/app over putting their money where their mouth was, which was exactly what ended up happening. Change starts with us. I've done my part and quit my Reddit presence besides posting my illustrations and research, and I suspect many of us here are did the same. Reddit will continue to shed users if they keep making user unfriendly policies, we just need to build the communities that will absorb those people when they decide to leave.
I've taken the time I used to spend on reddit and funneled it into new avenues (learning Japanese). I'm sure I'm not the only one. But the mass of people who want a tiktok meme scroller outnumbers...
I've taken the time I used to spend on reddit and funneled it into new avenues (learning Japanese). I'm sure I'm not the only one. But the mass of people who want a tiktok meme scroller outnumbers the amount that cared for what Reddit was, so as much as me and people like me have moved on, a site called Reddit will shamble on.
Meh, I've only used Reddit like once in the whole week. Nowadays, r/Popular is mostly just fake stories about relationships, drama, and astroturfing. The quality has gone down. Most of the useful...
Meh, I've only used Reddit like once in the whole week. Nowadays, r/Popular is mostly just fake stories about relationships, drama, and astroturfing. The quality has gone down. Most of the useful answers were from months ago.
I honestly don't even care anymore. As far as I'm concerned, I won. I broke a 10+ year old bad habit and that's never easy to do. I will not let that community's loud obnoxious toxicity leech into my life anymore. I deeply miss a lot of the smaller communities, but I know I won't be able to avoid /r/all's BS entirely if I create another reddit account. It's all or nothing and I choose nothing.
That's basically where I'm at. I've been on Reddit since 2007, and its toxicity has been wearing on me in the past couple of years anyway. They have me an excuse to quit. It's weird, having basically used it for half of my life, and I miss some of the subreddits (which should by rights be separate forums, if Reddit hadn't done serious damage to the web overall), but it's probably for the best. Reddit isn't what it used to be, and that's what I miss, not what it became.
I mentioned in another topic that I'm still on reddit because there's a support community I need that is still on it. I'm actually amazed at how many subreddits I have had to unsubscribe from because of how much more toxic they had become after that whole fiasco started.
One of the last holdouts was r/frugal. I was already getting tired of it because of the constant retreading of the same subjects. I can't even count the number of times I saw threads being overwhelmed by talk about the McDonald's app. But the straw that broke the camel's back was when I responded on a thread about cheap and easy meals to a person who suggested a meal made entirely out of ground beef, pointing out that it wasn't a healthy meal, and getting backlash for it. That subreddit had long passed the point where it was worth the mental tax and had moved into painfulness.
That has been an issue I've had with many niche subreddits for a few years now, and it highlights something fundamentally broken about Reddit. It seems like every hobbyist community (especially anything tangentially technological) inevitably attracts a flood of rehashed beginner/support posts that endlessly ask the same questions, get the same answers, and crowd out actually interesting discussion.
Do you find that behavior somehow more obnoxious on Reddit than on Discord? I've found that blogspam, outdated answers, and link rot have made me start asking first instead of doing my own research in the hopes that someone can answer my niche question instead of having to learn 10 things from first principles to solve my problem.
I think old school forums had a better model for dealing with that. Lurkers could read through 200 page threads about popular topics at their leisure without creating new threads. The recency model ala reddit seemed to encourage rehashing from it's core design.
IME, by the time a thread reaches 200 pages, it has been recycling the same six conversations for at least 175 of those 200 pages. It's only necessary to read the first six and final three pages to have a reasonably complete context for the topic.
Speaking for my own discord, we have "help" and "new-player-help" channels. The main discussion channel assumes that you are extremely familiar with the game, and if you start asking basic questions, you're redirected to one of the help questions.
A lot harder to do this when "go elsewhere" is an entirely different subreddit, rather than like 4 channels up.
To be fair, search is broken on the Reddit app so if new sub members wanted to know some basic info or see frequently asked questions, they would likely not be able to search for and find those posts.
Never use a websites built on search if you can help it. Use a real search engine with the name of the site tacked on. Social media, news sites, university websites, you name it. They all have broken searches most of the time whole Google can grab the exact page right away.
Totally agree with this.
I know companies want control and all that but when you see how crap search is with the roll-your-own solutions on websites my mind boggles.
That might be true, but it is also flawed. Why should a generic search engine which indexes across all the sites it can crawl be better than something from the source. Furthermore, each community should have it's own index which finds the conversations most relevant for its needs. Even using search hints, Google and other search engines won't index every relevant topic and can't easily distinguish between what is the most recent or pertinent information. It might work for some of the bigger topics, but it is still going to fall short.
I have no idea why, but it almost always is. Like half the time I can type the exact head line of an article I want and the news site can't find it, but it will be the first result on google
Can not agree enough. I popped onto r/malefashionadvice for the first time since evrything kicked off yesterday and it was a completely different sub. The caring, supportive community was gone and had been replaced by an obnoxious, trolling, aggressive community. I'm still feeling the whiplash. How do the admins completely ruin a community that had been one of the most welcoming corners of the internet for 15+ years in just 2 months?
The mods of mfa during the blackout kept the subreddit closed until about a week ago, with the "subreddit closed" page hosting a link to a discord and a substack (the discord being the replacement(?) for the subreddit, and the substack hosting guides that were previously on the subreddit's in-reddit wiki).
About a week ago it was opened up and only two mods (none including the previous ones) were present on it. There were no sticky threads, and it seemed unmoderated compared to pre-blackout. There was a post in there from one of the automoderator accounts, the admins evicted the old mods and put in new ones that weren't part of the community but had previous experience moderating other communities.
I checked a day ago or so, and one of the new mods posted a sticky thread, and had been contacting previous mods (I believe both the pre-blackout group, and older ones) asking them questions on how to serve the community (and had asked if they wanted to return).
Not a fan of the move overall, as someone who off and on used the subreddit, evicting the old mods because they had closed it. Then again, I don't think the subreddit has been that good for a while, seemed like it had lost its spark.
It was a very helpful community 6 or 7 years ago. Extremely welcoming to newcomers and able to be self-aware and joke about itself and silly fashion ideas (like always joking about capes coming into style, everyone get a cape). Not to mention being very diligent about sharing sales.
It's changed so much. Frankly bad and silly fashions are being pushed and any criticism over the look or price of an item is met with backlash. r/frugalmalefashion is alright though.
I'm in the same boat. My life is materially better for not having to deal with its venomous nature. I will admit, I miss the smaller communities I lurked in like /r/electronics, but I can count those on one hand.
/r/electronics is now also at https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/electronics
same head mod, just less active (which is probably a good thing for me)
Oh, I'm surprised there's so many people who were on there. That's one of the only subreddits that I am still subscribed to.
I think this is the right attitude to take. I don't like the way the whole situation is presented with a whole us vs. them / win vs. lose dichotomy. As far as I'm concerned, Reddit Inc owns the site and can do what they want with it. Similarly, we the users are free to use it, or not. I'm choosing not, unless I need to pull up relevant Google results on something.
Like many others, I've observed the tone of Reddit shifting over the past few years into what I can only describe as general assholery. People are constantly clambering to lazily dunk on other posts, posting low-effort content to score imaginary internet points, and trying to find the most eeyore take on a topic in the rare instance that actual good news gets posted. It's exhausting, detrimental to mental health, and provides little in the way of value.
About a year ago I replied to some rando on Reddit and pointed out a double standard. They just quoted that part of my comment back to me and said I had contradicted myself. When I read it I had this sudden understanding that this is all just word games to them. This person literally didn't try understand what I had even said, they just found enough of a vague pattern in what I was saying to compose a petty response, and then shut down. I actually could have had a better conversation with ChatGPT.
99.99% of online debates (actually debates in general) are fundamentally performative. The fact that online there is always an audience means that every discussion between two people who disagree about something turns into that because both sides just want to be perceived as having won.
Hypothetically the goal of this is to change the onlookers' minds or whatever by appearing to have the victorious idea, under the assumption that someone seeing your idea prevail over another in a public space will convince neutral parties, but the reality is that like the rest of the internet, it's all just dopamine buttons. So if I can get a TKO on you by doing wordplay that works just as well.
I like the way tildes reply chains become unusable after a certain number of replies because they stop nesting and turn into that "(reply to the previous post)" thing because it (along with the culture of course) has resulted in me very, very rarely having seen a massive flamewar shitstorm like that on here.
I feel like reddit had almost less of an audience. Once you got a few comments deep it's basically a one on one conversation that no one else is going to read.
Someone on Tildes (I wish I bookmarked the comment) really crystalized this concept to me. In online debate you are either talking "with someone" or only "at someone." The latter is the performative debate where your goal is either to influence the audience or score points with them while in only the former are you actually trying to meaningfully convey ideas to your counterpart.
On reddit, I would comment in mostly a performative manner while here I'm more likely to be engaged with just that person. Part of that is community size, I'm less tempted here to play for the crowd, but also I am consciously trying harder. Of course, it's never 100% one or the other, and more like a mixture of both, but the difference is noticable in my time here.
Sidenote: The way I see Tildes handle the deep nested replies I've only seen on mobile, never on my desktop. I don't think the UI is different, but I guess I haven't come across a discussion that deep. Honestly I have pretty short conversations here (3-5 replies at the most) but they are certainly longer in word count per comment.
In the days of /r/SubredditSimulator and /r/SubredditSumGPT2, I'd constantly point out how even those rudimentary models produced better conversation than human Redditors. I assume the gap has only grown, even if GPTs 3 & 4 had never debuted.
Fun fact: r/SubredditSimulator and Tildes are both inventions of Deimos (and Automoderator too).
Every time I read about someone's experience like that or see it myself, I inevitably think of this xkcd comic about using captchas to trick AI bots into becoming more and more helpful.
Man I wish that would actually work, same as the tech support code word, would make my days so much easier...
...tbh that xkcd isn't that far off from part of how chatGPT was actually trained. Which is kinda amazing given how old it is.
I would spend hours of my life, pretty much every day, on either the website or the RiF app (or both) - for about nine and a half years. I thought I'd never be able to leave, and it's incredible how okay I now feel about having almost completely stopped using it (probably down to about an hour per week or so, now?). I'm not sure I'd have been able to without the help of Tildes and Hacker News as replacements for some of the things I liked about Reddit, but I definitely feel as though the daily arrangement I have now is healthier (not healthy - but healthier!).
Yep, this is how I feel as well. I'm beyond caring. It was obvious that most of the user base didn't care about the direction Reddit was going, and I was part of the vocal minority against it. I'm happy to reclaim several hours per week doing something other than scrolling through Reddit. Tildes is perfect for me, both from a quantity (much lower than Reddit) and quality (much higher than Reddit) content.
Extremely well said. For me, the lack of places to just "browse memes" after leaving reddit was a bit painful, but overall very worthwhile. When I first got to Tildes, someone had written how blissful the effect of "continued boredom" can be. When I find myself bored, instead of reaching for the phone and scrolling for dopamine, now I find myself considering what is important for me to be doing.
How can I improve the space around me? How can I find motivation in this moment to complete the things I want to? These are questions I ask myself less and less as I find ways to fill in that time with mindless content. Since I've left reddit, I've learned to embrace that. I find thoughtful content here, over less time. And the reclaimed time is used more thoughtfully than I could have known before I left.
I definitely miss having a place to browse memes. I enjoy the in-depth conversations here a lot, but I am an incredibly unserious human being with a big goofy sense of humor that craves memes. Haven't found a good source though yet. I tried imgur, but it's a lot of meta humor and massive image dumps of super hit-and-miss memes.
I'm mostly just subsisting off of memes that my wife shares with me.
Lemmy seems to have it's fair share of meme stuff. There are also a few Mastodon instances such as wetdry.world (and lethallava.land from the same admins, if you prefer Misskey/Firefish) that seems to have their fair share of shitpost-y types (with a tech-y focus) hanging around on the local timelines.
Have you tried any of the meme communities on Lemmy or kbin?
Right there with you. I deleted everything and haven't looked back, and it's been great honestly. Reminds me of when I quit Facebook after having been with them since it was still exclusively for college students. Occasionally I get an itch to have something more to read, but it no longer results in an hour of endless scrolling, hot takes for fake internet points, and superficial engagement with mostly meaningless content. I've reclaimed that time for better uses. Wish I'd done it years ago.
Haven't posted or commented anything on reddit in 2 months. 11+ year old account and previously I've probably never gone more than a week without commenting. My subreddits may still be around but I'm no longer putting in free trust and safety man hours for them.
Reddit "won" but they lost hundreds of amazing community members and moderators and stomped on the good will of thousands of other users
Yeah, I haven't been back on my account since I got kicked off of RiF and I feel better for it. Nicer just checking in here a couple times a day and getting updates on news, dropping a comment here or there then getting back to other things.
I still jump on now and again as a guest to check out a few niche communities for updates and news, specifically /r/TheSmashingPumpkins, as there's really nowhere else for me (as someone who doesn't use typical social media) to get updates on new music, merch, releases and tours.
I have an email just for subscribing to newsletters. For getting updates on new music or movies, I sign up on the official website for updates. Music labels and studios typically send out an email as well whenever there is news to be announced. This won't be an option for smaller artists but if news is all you need, it's a good option. Between this and RSS feeds of publications I follow, I don't feel like I'm missing out much on news without social media.
I found it pretty telling that in the early days of the API change announcement, the reaction many people had wasn't "oh no, how am I going to access Reddit after this?" but rather "thank fuck I finally have an excuse to leave this hellhole once and for all" (paraphrasing here, but I'm sure you get it). I think a lot of us, myself included, stuck around out of habit even if we no longer enjoyed the site like we used to.
That whole fiasco made me revisit my Reddit usage and whether I felt it was really adding anything of value to my life or it was just a cause of stress and unnecessary distraction. I realised that, outside of a small handful of subs, it really wasn't worth it anymore. I check said handful of subs maybe once a week now, but I know the clock is ticking for Old Reddit the same way it did for third-party apps, and once that goes away then I'm just going to finally delete my account.
On reddit proper I'd say it was more skewed on "how am I gonna access reddit?". Lots of people didn't want to leave and that's probably why the protests weren't going to have that quick immediate effect they were hoping for. It's still engaging with a website that relies on engagement.
maybe if they really leaned into it they could have done something. No, not John Oliver memes, flood reddit with porn and allow nothing else. But that scares users away, maybe even gotten Reddit in trouble with credit card conpani. And that was not the mods' intentions.
Honestly, I don't even miss a lot of the smaller communities. Even the smaller ones that I enjoyed are mostly just image posts; now that I've been using Tildes for close to two months, I find I image posts are just addicting and not much more. It's entirely too easy to simply look at one for two seconds and keep scrolling; generally, what I think I was looking for was good discussion posts and even there, it was entirely too easy to be misconstrued and downvoted into oblivion.
I don't hate reddit; I'll still use it if I'm looking for something in particular and I don't intend to delete my account and post history. But the habit is broken and I'm much more content and productive without it.
That was why I originally stopped visiting facebook, then twitter and now reddit. When your blood pressure goes up every time you look at your feed because the toxicity is unavoidable, it's time to leave.
Ditto for me. Which I find extremely surprising. I was definitely putting in a collective hour or two a day at least just doomscrolling down and probably would not have bothered cutting down otherwise. But RIF is dead, the official app is trash, and now it feels bad to be giving Reddit traffic. Instead I've ramped up and improved my RSS usage, and am on Mastodon and Tildes. Reddit went from a daily essential to more or less dead to me.
Absolutely. I have a hefty and well organised rss library again. Active again in old forums, and obviously Tildes.
Same for YouTube. Raise prices all you like, I've figured out how to open videos that I get through my rss feeds directly through NewPipe X SponsorBlock. Same for the company formerly known as Twitter. All my Ukraine sources died, but now I have an RSS feed to the daily ISW report.
They're open to keep doing their worst, and I'll continue to find my ways around their bullshit.
I don't see why you still can't visit smaller communities?
While I wasn't a heavy reddit user to begin with, I did support the protesters and I walked away from reddit, but I went back to about a dozen or so of my small communities, sub reddits. I wasn't on /r/all before this and I'm not on /r/all after all this. However, I love the dozen or so posts that show up on /r/integra ever day or even fewer posts on some even smaller subs.
My issue in the past has been that I'll create a new account and only subscribe to the niche things I enjoy. And then inevitably I start scrolling through /r/all. And then before you know it I spend more time on /r/all than I do the niche subreddits. Because it's like delicious junk food. Bad for me, but satisfying in the moment.
So all in all it's better for me to just stay away entirely. I lack the self-control needed for me to continue to use reddit in a healthy way.
Ah that's a fair assessment
I plan to visit the smaller subs for a while but the writing is on the wall. I won't use the Reddit app and I won't use the new Reddit, so eventually I'll have my methods of access removed. At that point, I'll be done entirely.
This is honestly how I feel. I don't post there any more and only vaguely browse it sometimes on my PC.
Otherwise, I've got tildes and I actually have to do something valuable with my time. And on top of that, I sure do get to sleep faster without reddit.
Mostly the same. Might have to dip into smaller communities here or there for one off things, but i've removed it from all my bookmarks/hotlinks/most of my rss so i'm not tempted to bother.
I really really really don't want to do a this in reddit style but... aargh... this!
Although for me I've cut about 90% of the time. I really think it will continue too because the benefits have been immense.
Same here, and in the transition between leaving Reddit and waiting for an invite to Tildes I found myself much happier not jumping down the rabbit hole that is Reddit.
I haven't been following it recently, but I wonder how over the protest is; i.e., what their internal metrics might show wrt daily active users and engagement, especially their most prolific content creators. Most probably didn't even know there was a protest outside of /r/pics. My wife didn't know and didn't care when I told her what was going on.
Personally, though, I stopped using Reddit entirely because I didn't agree with their initial handling of the API pricing change or their response to the community. At $14/month for two accounts, my contribution (or lack of it) isn't even a blip though...
And that's why Reddit was always going to win this one. Had this been 10 years ago there's no way they would have enough apathetic (and I don't mean that in a judgemental way) users to be okay with losing those that did care, those that helped them build their empire at the start. And that's why I deleted my comments and my account, they're done with us, I'm done with them.
If Digg had waited another 5 years before implementing the changes they made that ruined them maybe Reddit would still just be a middling community of nerds and geeks.
From the start of this, I always viewed it as 2 different things:
Reddit the company was always going to win. They have such a large following of users on the main subs that have only ever known their 1st party app/new reddit that these changes meant nothing to them. Their engagement and views are hardly going to be affected.
Reddit "old guard" and quality of content was going to lose. The people that built the site up with quality comments and postings, made the site that it was, are no longer reddit's target demographic. I've noticed the community get more toxic over the years as it became more mainstream, and those are the same types of users that for the most part were going to stick around anyway.
Maybe it's because I've mostly kicked my reddit habit to the curb and only visit a few communities here and there anymore, but I have the feeling that reddit has gotten noticably shittier since the whole exodus a month or two ago. Again, maybe that's because I spend less time there so the toxicity is more jarring when I do stumble into it, but I also feel that it used to be more contained to controversial topics or shitty communities.
It's been growing more polarized for years, unfortunately. Circa 2012-2015 or so it was mostly contained to the nore obviously controversial topics, but that sort of conversation has more or less become the norm post 2016.
The pandemic was another wave that made things even more polarized. By that point it wasn't just about toxic users, it feels like every post has people questioning if everyone else is a bot (I guess reddit was ahead of the whole AI hype thing). Really hard to have a genuine conversation anymore unless you seek a very specific niche with very specific mods.
I think I could see a hint of it during/after the blackouts, but it really surged when July 1st hit, which I mostly attribute to the fact that most of the moderations tools just stopped working (note that this is my assumption, I don’t know if Reddit Inc maybe changed their minds about allowing mod tools to still access the API without charging for access?)
If you venture to any of the NSFW subreddits, there’s basically nothing but bots in the comments, and I don’t know if it was always the case but it’s overwhelming these days.
A lot of mods were using RIF or Apollo (myself included) and disappeared when their main path for access did. I did have a dedicated modding app back in the day but I think it stopped working long before the API changes.
I don't use the main subs, but I really only know Reddit through new Reddit and their app. I briefly used Reddit before new Reddit was a thing, but I didn't really understand it. It wasn't until I was a little bit older in 2016 that I started really heavily using it. And as far as I was concerned it was a much easier way to navigate the site.
So, yeah, you're absolutely right with that.
A boycott or protest doesn’t matter as much if you can be replaced. There are potential new users who weren’t there for previous drama. (Kids for example.) There’s no picket line to cross. The question is whether they’re interested.
In this sense, becoming uncool is a bigger downside than making some existing users angry. I’m entirely out of touch with what younger Internet users want so I couldn’t really say what the effect is for Reddit, though.
Poor Digg, it could have been so good
I glanced at Reddit recently, after not touching it since they shut off third party apps. As far as I'm concerned, it's effectively dead. It looks like most of the subreddits I used to use have evaporated or have very few comments on the posts that exist. Some larger ones, like /r/ffxiv seem active still, but other than that it's mostly the huge ones that used to be defaults.
So I guess Reddit is succeeding in becoming a Instagram 2. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think this is the main thing. The domain Reddit.com is not going to die, but Reddit as it was is, as you say, effectively dead
It feels like the front page is almost all either selfie subs or rage-bait fake story subs. Not that these type of subs didn’t exist before nor that they weren’t popular, also not saying that all those communities add no value (eg I got a lot of value from Male Fashion Advice from back in the day, which was similar to the outfits/wedding dress subs taking over the front) (I would though argue that the rage-bait fake story subs add negative value).
But the space they take up is considerably more than they used to, and the largest hive-mind (for lack of a better word to come up with) that exist on Reddit will have effects on the site in totality.
The community is just completely different than it used to be. I miss when the hive-mind was more tech/nerd-based, but communities change and Reddit that was is in the past now
Which particular subreddits do you think are dead?
Anecdotally, when I look at /r/Android, there seems to be a significant decrease in upvotes on posts
That one officially moved to lemmy
https://lemdro.id/c/android
There's page listing communities from reddit: https://sub.rehab/
Investingly a lot moved to discord, which IMO isn't 1:1 reddit replacement
It isn't, but some subs tended to maintain a Discord server even before all the drama. Ultimately many people seek community over stuff like long form discussion or archival or searchability, so the migration makes sense in that lens.
Interesting that it's a noticeable drop, I wonder if it will cascade into neutral or negative growth with less original or interesting content posted.
Instagram 2, but with OF bots.
IMO it will. But not because high quality content disappears. Reddit is simply trying to capture that Instagram/TikTok market and it won't work.
You know the one thing those two platforms promise? Monetization. Its like trying to draw YouTubers into some cozy Open-source alternative, it simply can't happen without being able to compensate them. And as we saw with Mixer, monetizing even the largest creators STILL doesn't guarantee you get the user base to move.
Now, there is some leaked plans about trying to monetize users, but with the current community I feel it's going to end up being the next Digg. Hell, it may even compare to MySpace's fall, but at least MySpace's decline was somewhat graceful until Tom sold. This one's gonna be ugly.
If the same cavalier approach is taken with decisions affecting this, there will be crashing, fire, sirens in the distance.
In all seriousness, I absolutely agree about the monetization problem. Monetization alone doesn't do anything without a community to support it. We're not all able to spend our problems away. A carefully cultivated community built over time leads to sustainable monetization paths. Forcing a community into existence doesn't. Every major social platform has started with community and a platform where people can feel they belong, and that interaction or activity is meaningful.
EDIT ...and ruining that community is easy and possibly irrecoverable (thanks, Digg!).
So Instagram 2
This is exactly how it was. This was about two weeks ago (late july) when my wife asked me about the protest. She has several of her own subs she follows. Someone at work mentioned the protest and after work she asked me about it. if my wife, who is a daily user, didn't even know about the protest, I doubt many people outside of the few very popular subs did.
I'm not convinced that this won't eventually hurt Reddit. The quality of moderation is going to suffer and high-quality posters, which are probably more sensitive to stuff like this, are going to frequent the platform less.
I've seen multiple complaints on /r/linux that the quality of posts has declined, which I'm pretty certain is entirely due to the moderators going for a 'quiet quitting' strategy of not bothering to curate beyond the bare minimum. That said, I don't know if the same will be true for many other subreddits, especially less technology-focused ones?
to use an ancient metaphor, reddit won the battle but will lose the war. both reddit and Twitter are dead men walking. You don't piss off your power users and survive as interesting and useful platforms. Lucky for the owners of reddit they don't give a shit about that.
I felt compelled to unsubscribe from several subreddits in disgust since the rexoddus. They definitely felt like worse communities to engage with and I couldn't be bothered anymore. I'm also less often interested in posting overall.
I'm still engaging with the website, though, which bothers me--that I'm creating value for the people who run the website--but I also like to help people by providing answers and links to stuff, and reddit happens to be where reddit comment posters are, by definition.
I used to make posts and comments. I have moved all posting here. If I visit a sub that interests me I will still comment to help people but I am just there a lot less.
I see you proselytizing for Tildes on /r/redditalternatives lol. I'm surprised by how milquetoast people's opinions on Tildes are there.
I would have been happy to learn about Tildes years ago. I suspect there are more like me who would fit in here and appreciate what the site has to offer. . : )
Yeah, absolutely keep that torch going. I too wish I learned about this site years ago.
Isn't this the equivalent of voting with your wallet? You are generating revenue but only through the higher quality discussions.
Depends on your goal. If you want to try and fix reddit, sure. Engage and tailor the community you want. If you want it to crash and burn, the engagement is counterproductive.
I've just shifted to the most lazy browser: no account, browse very specific, small subs, using old.reddit + ad block. Not really a protest so much as a compromise until I can replace those last subs.
Anecdotally, the community in /r/malefashionadvice is going through the exact same thing. To the point where admin removed the historic mods, appointed new mods who reinstated what the originals had done, and then removed the new mods. The entire community imploded and moved to a discord server. The remains are the worst attributes of the old community and a lot of shitposters.
This is absolutely going on from taking a look at some mod tools and a few backdoor conversations. I've noticed posts making it to /r/subredditdrama from subreddits that'd never let that kind of drama boil over before. A ton of reddit's most dedicated users (including myself in the "top 1%" if reddit's year end report is to believed) have checked out.
Reddit "won", for some values of winning.
It is a domain that still exists and still has lots of daily clicks and submissions sure. It outlived the protest yes. Most user never cared about the profest and never will, that's a win too.
But I would argue that things which gave the domain actual values have been lost forever. It's like when an organism dies, most of the cells are actually still alive and most biological processes continue for a time. But without the cellular upkeep processes, waste management, ability to process new nutrients and without the ability to heal, the still seemingly alive organism is in the process of turning into something that is totally and undeniably dead.
Whatever still lives on that domain 2 years from now will be a very different lifeform. Spez knew that. He thought the site was dead in 2009
https://www.theage.com.au/technology/atrocious-mobile-sucks-reddit-cofounder-steve-huffman-on-what-site-has-become-20141208-122txn.html
I mean of course Reddit Corporate will claim victory. What are they going to do, threaten their own IPO by saying otherwise? With the strategic release of places I'm sure they can even have numbers to back it up. They'lll conveniently ignore the manipulation because "numbers are numbers."
Heck, Reddit is big enough that even it's dead corpse would still have enough momentum to hide the fact that it was dead for awhile.
While Reddit isn't totally dead, it has been damaged, IMO. Besides the people unwilling to use Reddit without their 3rd party app of choice I would be willing to admit that a core group of power users and mods have either already left, are only going through the motions but aren't as active as they once were or waiting for alternatives to get enough momentum. A few here, a few there leaving after the initial larger exodus and suddenly you have an issue.
Personally, (other than search results) I only pop on once a week to catch up on squaredcircle but I'm spending less and less time there each Monday. I deleted all my comments and removed my account so I have no plans to ever post there anything again.
In my situation that's their loss since before I had been spending at least 7-10 hours a week on Reddit (while in a vehicle, killing time at work, etc) and now it's maybe 20-30 minutes once a week. Taking people at their word here and other places, I don't think I'm alone. I've certainly not heard anyone claiming to use Reddit more after this fiasco. I firmly believe that their numbers (outside of the recent r-slash-place event) surely have taken a dive.
To be clear, Reddit corporate hasn’t said anything since then. “Reddit won” is Gizmodo opining on the situation after observing the last holdouts folding or being quietly replaced.
A corporate entity that depends on the unpaid work of community moderators is doomed to suffer death by a thousand cuts. Every unpopular decision is another little cut.
This fiasco cut them a lot.
That's exactly what some users were hoping to do by "rebelling" instead of leaving. that was doomed to fail since Reddit holds all the cards, but sometimes experience is the best teacher.
But to be fair, Reddit sure did fumble hard in July to make it see possible.
As a former extremely active Redditor, I am also happy this curse has been lifted. I‘ve probably spent upwards of 10h per week for the last 12 years on that website. I have contributed in answering questions and very actively reporting content. In the German subreddit /r/de, I have been very active. However, you can tell there‘s a big decline in discussions and quality posts. The regular chat posts used to be very frequented, now even feddit occasionally has more comments on some topics. I feel like at least that bubble has been hurt by the actions.
I also want to add that since the API disaster, I have replaced my reddit time with sports. I have been running 3-6 times a week and I am doing calisthenics 3x a week. This has all started in the first week of July. I don‘t believe it‘s a coincidence. This week, I already ran for over 30km. a couple months ago I don‘t think I could run 1k without stopping. So I am happy.
I have spent my time in a much more productive manner and I agree that I think the people leaving reddit are the real winners in this situation
I'm also happy to say that I've traded long hours of scrolling for sport. This summer has been the busiest in many years. Congratulations to you for this healthy change!
For replacing r/de i find feddit.de the best replacement so far. Or maybe you know about some interesting alternative?
Yes, it’s the best replacement as far as I can see
To be clear, Reddit isn't saying this. This is an opinion from a Gizmodo writer based on the actions of reddit mods abandoning their protest.
I think this encapsulates why the protest was bound to fail. The Intenet is historically very bad at the long term, which is basically a default in corporate world. A month is barely even a blink of an eye to the latter, while a month in the internet can shift entire cultures.
IMO, The post quality is the part that matters the most. Sure, the subreddits are back online but the quality of the content has taken a sharp nosedive. Posting frequency is down as well in many of my frequent subreddits. I stopped using it on my phone because of the lack of 3rd party apps. Now I'm losing interest in using it on my desktop whatsoever.
Yeah, I'm not going on Reddit anymore not because my 3rd party app stopped working (it's still holding on somehow), but because over the last 2 months, Reddit got noticeably shittier, and it was already kinda shit before. But now I open it and there's not be a single thing of interest to me on the front page. They had a good thing going but of course they had to ruin it.
To run with the topical theme for this month (last month...), it's like an evil Skrull killed and replaced Reddit, but only the people closest to it would know or care-- the long-term powerusers.
I had no delusions of ever "winning" this protest against Reddit. Having gone through similar upheavals with Digg and Livejournal, I just packed up my stuff and left. Once they start chasing the money hard there is really no convincing them, and it was only a matter of my preferences and ideals at that point.
Reddit is... Not Quite Dead, but certainly a shadow of its former self. I daresay it's even Too Big to Fail. But let's see how things fare in a few months. It may be too big to fail on the business metric they care about, but their cultural fall from grace may be spectacular.
I spend more time browsing Tildes now then reddit, that's a win for me in my book. I gave so much to keep reddit a great place for communities, I still moderate a few that are doing well, but the front page is a mess, the Random Acts of Pizza spirit is dead.
Not trying to be funny or mean, just curious, how? I can stay away from Tildes for 3 days, come back and be caught up on about 45 minutes. Whereas on reddit, if I'm gone for 3 days, I'll never catch up, and I'm not even subscribed to some of the big subs.
I love Tildes, don't get me wrong, but there is just not enough content around here to spend more than a few minutes here and there.
I'm not the one you asked, but you got me thinkin'.
Like @llehsadam, I spend a lot more time here than Reddit. It boiled down to two things, for me:
Simple, you spend less than 45 minutes browsing reddit. I'm not sure how a current reddit mod does that, but it's very easy for me.
I probably spend less than 20 minutes a day (if that) on reddit just staying updated on my remaining 2-3 niches of topics. I'd say 30-45 minutes is about what I spend here on Tildes. These aren't huge subs with huge daily updates, so it's much easier to browse there. Not having an account means I can't reply to the inevitably angry comments either, which saves more time.
I have spent much more time on Hacker News late, though.
When I still could use Apollo, I definitely got lost in the amount of content on reddit. I think the trick was to refuse to use the official mobile app and just make an effort to write and read more on Tildes.
But we may be in different situations here, I only use Tildes and Reddit for an hour or so every few days now.
The app really made it very easy to mindlessly scroll. I think that conscious decision to stop after Apollo was killed is what helped me get used to it. I fill my extra time with other things now.
God, one of my favorite Reddit moments was when I got to help organize a massive /randomactsofpizza delivery effort in Boston right after the bombing. I was calling all sorts of hospitals and pizza places, coordinating where they were delivering, when, and shifting Redditors to new places when we maxed one joint out. The best of Reddit in that moment.
That unlocked some memories. Also the secret Santa was legit a cool thing they killed.
Hey reddit did not win 100%.
After 15 years on reddit.com as a loyal user, I am here today and spend less time on reddit now.
The fact that we're talking about it and the fact that you are still a reddit user means that reddit did win.
They lost a lot of veterans, but people join daily so it has balance.
All is just a meme database of regurgitate which is horrific for an old timer like me. I had a half decent curated feed for the subs I wanted to see but the whole "there's a sub for everything" actually splintered content.
I stay away for a large part but unless my communities would move, it looks like I have to occasionally check in.
So yes, Reddit won the war but at what cost to the decent content? I suppose it won't matter as they have the user data, the daily user count and ads. It's all ripe for the IPO.
I think people miss that this was over the moment it started.
Reddit shifted target markets. People are talking about the loss of high quality content, but don't seem to grasp that reddit's goal was to shift more towards buzzfeed (or be THE buzzfeed) than it was to keep that high quality content.
As many have pointed out they're still the de-facto/only choice for smaller communities, attempts to get maybe unbiased reviews of products, and similar such things.
No doubt those content creators and moderators were a huge part of why reddit is successful, but they're betting (quite successfully so far) that they don't need them anymore. Eventually there might be a threatening alternative, but this was basically the digg transformation done right (boiling the frog and all that).
This is an insightful framing. People had long been joking about how long it would take for Buzzfeed or WatchMojo to come up with a video about whatever topic they were talking about. The goal of Reddit had switched to "make as much money as possible" over a decade ago. That's why they've never really done a lot to support the moderators. They don't care about the quality of the communities, only the quantities of people they contain. It's the same reason why they always dragged their feet on shutting down problematic subreddits.
I mean, sorry everyone because I think I'm at a fault, but there is literally no other place where I can easily read and discuss things like /r/mud, /r/wowroleplay or /r/hobbydrama at length with a good amount of people. The choice is to either use Reddit or never talk about those things ever again -- Discord is not an alternative, real time chat is exhausting. And everytime someone argues that federation is actually super simple they end up writing a 2000 words essay full of caveats, edge cases, and technical details.
I feel like there is room for nuance here. In my opinion, Lemmy is still in the middle of its growing pains, and has many problems with reliability and UX. The main site seems to go down quite a bit, and page loads are on the slow side on most instances I visit. The web UI has many rough edges and is also missing a few features I expect a UI to have, like default sorting settings. I also find myself crossing instance boundaries without realizing it, and sometimes I even find myself logged out of my user account on my home instance apropos of nothing.
Mastodon OTOH is where Lemmy could be in a few years. Most instances are quick to load and look nice. Reliability, while not perfect, is much much better than Lemmy, and even compares favorably to sites like Reddit. More importantly, cross-site UX in Mastodon is massively helped by its amazing ecosystem of apps, both on desktop and mobile, and the sorts of UX issues you hear about when using the default web UI are simply not a problem when using Sengi, Tusky, Toot or the half-dozen other apps that are out there.
No need to apologize. You do what's best for you and you're not single-handedly making or breaking reddit by doing that.
My only long time advice would be to at least passively try seeking out alternative communities over the years. maybe even try to cultivate some communities yourself elsewhere. They will probably be there for 1-2 years, I'm not as certain they will be the same community in 5, or even around at all to begin with
to be fair, that is every community. It's just easy to forget how we naturally navigate around them overtime. e.g. think about how Reddit advertises the upvote button, but then remember how people actually tend to use it. Then remember the weird culture like upvote chains with a randomly downvoted comment, or why X user is downvoted despite making a good comment, or why some odd in-joke is upvoted.
I think it's best to simply jump in and experience the caveats firsthand when it comes to internet communities.
Honestly I am in the same boat here. I would love to use just tildes, But reddit has a huge ASOIF community there still and news on the war in Ukraine. I love it here due to the nice discourse and conversations I can find in the comments of posts. But for my interests, they are not big here yet. So I still use reddit to visit those subreddits.
If you are going to that subreddit anyway, feel free to share Ukraine war news here on the megathread if you are so inclined.
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-quickly-depleting-fleet-warplanes-overuse-expert-ukraine-f16-worsen-2023-8?amp
Here is one such article I found from the subreddit.
Thank you. I meant this megathread in ~news
https://tildes.net/~news/198a/weekly_megathread_for_news_updates_discussion_of_russian_invasion_of_ukraine_august_10
Just Posted on that thread.
A last note on the API kerfuffle from Gizmodo. Interesting to read since I haven’t been following it in the last month or so.
I've been on Reddit for a long time (since 2005.) Reddit already became too big by 2012-ish for me to want to participate in any non-niche community on the site. (I distinctly remember the Narwhal Bacons culture heh.) Only 2 of the communities I participate in did anything for the protests (one being r/askhistorians.) Like others here, it was getting obvious to me that even medium sized communities on the site were becoming obnoxious. The site has generally been fomenting an attitude of negativity and gotchas. A lot of subreddits became circlejerks where the same set of topics got upvoted and everything else got downvoted (like r/wickededge.) A lot of the larger subs I was on were dominated by teenagers (which is just a structural property of the internet itself and who has time to post.) I also found the speed of the API pricing changes to be in pretty bad taste (though not the changes themselves which I feel they had every right to do.) None of the communities I was in moved and don't seem to have any plans to move.
That said, the overflow from the Reddit protests had a real detrimental effect on other social sites I visit. HackerNews for example had a real dip in quality from the protests and has since become a lot more Reddit-like in its comment sections, and now has a lot of the same "downvote disagreeing viewpoints with impunity" culture that lives on Reddit. (Not that HackerNews didn't have existing problems of its own.) There was also a lot of hopeful/borderline disingenuous posting in other communities on how the Fediverse's community is now sufficient to replace Reddit (which isn't true for any of the subcultures I'm into) and just a lot of emotional rhetoric that left a sour taste in my mouth.
I'm glad the culture on this site is a lot more thoughtful than the culture of Reddit and I enjoy reading and posting here quite a bit. That said, none of the Reddit communities I was on want to move, so I'll be using Reddit for the foreseeable future. I'm hoping some Fediverse Reddit-likes do end up building new, healthy, communities, but the drama I've seen on Mastodon brings me a bit of pause. On the Twitter side of things I'm really enjoying Bluesky and somewhat enjoying Threads.
Overall, a time for lots of change in the social media landscape.
When the good, 100,000-subscriber medium communities have grown to a million subscribers and they're still medium-sized, you're going to naturally get enshittification.
For the first time in 10 or more years, I don't have a reddit app on my phone after this. Reddit may have won, but they've lost a core user base that once respected them.
This is honestly the biggest factor in how much less I'm using reddit. I don't need to take some principled stance, I just only used a 3rd party app on mobile and now I can't. I didn't switch to reddit's own app because it's shit, so now the 99% of my reddit browsing and posting that was done on my phone while I was bored just isn't happening. I browse Tildes or Tumblr instead.
Same here. Hell, it's the first time I have almost zero social media apps on my phone. Only Discord.
I'm rather looking forward to when some android Tildes apps are deployed.
Did you catch the announcement of the alpha version of Three Cheers for Tildes? https://tildes.net/~tildes/18s2/three_cheers_for_tildes_android_version_is_open_for_alpha_testing_on_the_google_play_store
oh, I have. But I must have mixed it with Surfboard and thought 3 cheers was also IOS only
Neat, RiF was my first app so I'm definitely interested in seeing how the creator interprets that for Tildes. Thanks!
I suppose one could technically "win" a nuclear war, but it can hardly count as a real win. The damage was quite bad for their rep. I doubt they'll recover, the seeds have been sown and an alternative will soon gain preference and push forward to take Reddit's place.
TBH most of the niche coammunities I used are back to normal with the exception of some of the really unique ones like r/askHistorians. As I've observed elsewhere before, people who didn't use r/all or popular aren't likely to notice much of a change.
I deleted my reddit account and removed hundreds of old comments, and use the site massively less than before. I'm sure there are other users that are the same. It was inevitable that they would eventually win since it was clear nothing would make them back down, but this has probably done some significant damage to their metrics and site value. I would hope anyway. Who knows I guess.
Largely dumping Reddit has been nice for me, I spend most of my time now divided between here, Lemmy, and my RSS. It’s been nice. I do still access it for the lawyer and bar prep subreddits because those groups are never going to leave Reddit, but aside from that I don’t use it. I do wish I had somewhere to go for b/s/t groups for my hobbies that are as good as what is on Reddit but that’s hard to do especially without Facebook.
Overall I'm glad it happened even if it wasn't successful.
After 13 years on reddit I didn't think I'd be able to cut back my usage so easily but I've reduced my use of Reddit by like 90%+ since July 1st. This whole situation pushed me to go to my subscriptions and delete almost everything except for like 4 subs I actually value, one of which is my local sub (which is hard to replace for me since I don't use FB).
There was also an element of "staged" in this protest. All it did was attract even more attention and eyeballs to the subs gone private. And then it was only a matter of time before the "establishment" mods started opening back their subs and the whole thing became a grand joke. I was wondering what were they really hoping to achieve with all this to begin with.
From the sounds of it, you weren't directly impacted by the API change. "What they hoped to achieve" was to reverse that API change, so we could all keep using RIF et al.
If your reaction to this whole deal is that it's a nothingburger and folks are just being pissy or performative, well I can tell you that isn't the case. The API change changed my life - I was a very active redditor for over a decade, but since third-party clients died I've only touched reddit when linked from search results.
It's possible there are nuances I'm missing, but by and large this reddit anger and exodus is not staged. I mean we're having this conversation on Tildes, which I would never have anticipated six months ago.
even if we don't 'win', its important to do something when changes are made that negatively impact the community.
Not at all surprised by this. While I have reduced my Reddit usage nowadays, I still use it a decent amount. Some communities that I frequented there wouldn't really work on Tildes so I continue to be a part of the discussions there. Tildes is a great site but anytime I want to post, I feel a pressure to always have meaningful contributions to discussion here so I often just don't comment at all. While one can argue that this is a net positive, sometimes I just want to casually comment on something and move on instead of carefully crafting a mini essay. While most social media sites feel casual, Tildes feels quite formal and I'm not the biggest fan of that.
I only feel like that about top level replies. Anything there after can be noise and fair game.
Just the other day I posted a puffery piece as I don't really do social media, Tildes is now my main site to hang out on. I felt comfortable posting, even though it was retagged, moved and went AWOL as it was moved to a group I do not subscribe to, so that was confusing.
Regardless, people congratulated me and were free talking. Tildes is changing and has a lot more casual speech, although the main posts do try to stay fairly formal, and as previously stated, the top levels are generally those of a formal response.
I knew this would happen the moment the protest started. Reddit knew most people would choose the familiarity and comfort of scrolling on their favorite website/app over putting their money where their mouth was, which was exactly what ended up happening. Change starts with us. I've done my part and quit my Reddit presence besides posting my illustrations and research, and I suspect many of us here are did the same. Reddit will continue to shed users if they keep making user unfriendly policies, we just need to build the communities that will absorb those people when they decide to leave.
I've taken the time I used to spend on reddit and funneled it into new avenues (learning Japanese). I'm sure I'm not the only one. But the mass of people who want a tiktok meme scroller outnumbers the amount that cared for what Reddit was, so as much as me and people like me have moved on, a site called Reddit will shamble on.
Meh, I've only used Reddit like once in the whole week. Nowadays, r/Popular is mostly just fake stories about relationships, drama, and astroturfing. The quality has gone down. Most of the useful answers were from months ago.