Reddit isn’t dead. There’s plenty of posts and traffic, way more than here. The problem is that that quality has plummeted. Bots posting divisive political shit, bad memes, and toxic commenters
As anything with Reddit, it depends on what you subscribe.
It’s perfectly possible that this person sees the site completely dead. Personally, every time I go there it’s full of interesting comics raised by some bots that keep reposting old things, and really really bad comments, but still plentiful.
They made some algorithm changes a bunch of years ago (2015?), and migrated away from the concept of “default subs”. The front page drew from every sub with an algorithm.
TheDonald was very good at understanding and abusing that algorithm, resulting in it overrunning the front page for everyone. They had to tweak it a bunch as a result.
IMO, this resulted in a great homogenization of communities. People participate in communities without really understanding the communities. Why should they? The “community” is just “the Reddit front page”.
As soon as any community gets popular enough to hit the front page, it becomes hive-minded, predictable, and bland.
Lemmy actually has this same structural problem… Evidenced by the fact that as I write this comment, I actually have no clue what community this post is in.
I think Lemmy just hasn’t been overrun w/ bots (yet), isn’t being as heavily invested in by bad faith foreign state actors (yet), and is mostly composed of people who moved from Reddit who want to actively participate in a way to keep it from having that same Reddit “flavour”.
Just my take.
Omg a little anecdote to add on to your point. I made a post on a news article about how people blindly follow name brands. It was only after a few blindly ehh and some other comments along those lines I realized I was on a blind community thread. Real foot in mouth moment lol. It was taken well enough when I explained my mistake and apologized. Got some good info too about the community.
LMAO, thank you for sharing that story. Must have been painful, but the story gave me a good laugh!
I definitely felt like an ass, but everyone was a good sport about it. We all used it as good learning opportunity because the thought had never crossed my mind about a blind lemmy community/instance. They even invited and insisted I followed some communities. All in all it was a good experience from a dumb mistake.
As soon as any community gets popular enough to hit the front page, it becomes hive-minded, predictable, and bland.
People participate in communities without really understanding the communities.
Not against you specifically but this is why I don’t tell people about communities anymore. The quality declines the more people participate.
I don’t think the Donald was abusing the algorithm. It was literally the most popular sub, it was always on the front page because it’s posts were getting massively and constantly upvoted. Changing the algorithm instead of waiting it out or just straight banning it ruined the site.
They tried to stand impartial (my most generous interpretation of reddits in-action towards the donald) and it really fucked them.
It’s so weird how many platforms cater to harmful rhetoric in an effort to stay neutral only for them to later ban the community after the damage has been done.
If I were more conspiratorial I’d suggest the Donald survived for as long as it did on purpose and with the explicit support of the reddit admins/execs…
No shit. They didn’t have the balls to ban a sub with that many members when they should have. The damage all really came from half assing a solution.
Or alternatively, they could have done nothing at all like the orginal mission statement entailed
Again, if they just hadn’t tried to tiktokize their algorithm it never would have been a problem to begin with because it, like every other sub, would have been purely opt-in
I just went there, I also noticed that most of the posts on top of r/all are sub 10K upvotes, most sub 5K. However, when I sorted by Top/Today then I saw there were a lot of posts that were over 30K upvotes. Maybe it’s change in algorithm and how they show posts.
BUT, i went to Top All Time, and all of the posts there were at the earliest from 3 years ago, a lot from 5-7years ago too so it rules out the pandemic effect. Looks like reddit may have indeed passed its prime.
Edit: actually it’s weirder, i can’t access Top This Year. It looks like they scrubbed all the top posts from 2 years ago, so I might be wrong about the activity. But that is still Hella sus.
Yup, top posts last 2 years definitely scrubbed or just excluded from top all time display. Probably to hide all of the protest posts from last year.
As anything with Reddit, it depends on what you subscribe.
That’s likely the case. r/theoryofreddit is mostly old users, who are emotionally attached enough to the platform to discuss it, and who often stick to smaller communities. It’s practically “the” userbase that Reddit screwed the most with.
(I used to post fairly often there. I’d miss that sub if not for its moronic powerjanny godofatheism “randomly” banning people left and right because he’s an illiterate.)
You forgot about the automated dms and emails begging users to buy stock at their IPO to inflate it’s value
foreal?
elll oh el
I just got it on an old throwaway account that I forgot to delete. But not as a DM as others, but as an email.
You are receiving this email because a Reddit account, [redacted], is registered to this email address.
And you can be sure that I checked off every box that you let me, so that I wouldnt receive unsolicited mails… By the way, I’m not even eligible for the IPO and you shpuld know it, reddit.
Don’t forget reposting like crazy.
They are weird superficial sensationalized feel-good posts. It’s was a thing before, but now it feels more contrived. Front page feels hollow.
I was initially drawn to Reddit as a place that offered nuanced conversation. I even used to engage with toxic takes if nothing less than to discredit their take. It’s a complete dumpster fire of toxic ass hats now - not worth commenting within as it’s becoming more and more of a conservative echo chamber.
Bots posting divisive political shit, bad memes, and toxic commenters. Angry people spurred on by bots and no valuable discussion
To be fair, that happens here as well.
There’s a meta problem, of all the public squares being polluted by what you described, to the point where they’re not usable anymore for discussion. Something that screams for legislation, but it’s hardly spoken of.
I’m sure it’s nothing and everything is fine. Now, who wants to buy some of this Reddit stock? I’ll cut you a special deal so you don’t miss out! … Anyone?
I was interested in buying a share just to be in for the ride, but then they asked for my real name to be associated with my handle. It’s like they never understood what reddit was about at all.
Reddit has never been about privacy or anominity. Think of all the celebrity AMAs.
AMAs weren’t celebrities on Reddit originally my friend, they were real people with interesting jobs or in unusual situations at first.
the time I broke both my hands…
also the time I used a coconutGood god that broken arm kid. He played it completely straight too if i remembered right, sloowly getting worse and worse. Legend
Who were the specific individuals asking questions in those?
You can post on 4chan as anon and prove your identity too
Reddit is (or at least was) psuedo-anonymous. You can easily get identities, and they’re not linked to you
For a lot of people, I’d say most in the early years (at least in my experience), you didn’t share usernames with your friends on the platform… Irl Redditors loved to identify themselves as a Redditor, we shared communities and memes, but only two of my closest friends ever knew my main account
I kept a second account that could potentially be tied to me (more work related stuff), because on my main account I always had the freedom to discard it if I embarrassed myself enough. That knowledge makes me far more likely to hit post instead of discard
Can we please keep this about Rampart.
I got a Message offering me to buy too. In the Message it says i need to be a permanent Resident of the US.
Buddy, you had me enter my Country when i created the Account. You know full-well I’m from the EU. Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
Because that would cost their time instead of yours
Perhaps you moved from Europe to the States in the interim like I did.
“We have never made a profit and may never make a profit. Please buy our stock.”
They actually tweaked the upbote/down vote stuff back then to stop actually showing the true amount of upvotes and down votes, directly. They started fuzzing votes to supposedly help prevent manipulation.
A special deal? Doesn’t the message basically say “give us your data so you maybe have a chance at buying stock at full price, and be thankful we’re not marking it up”?
Well, at IPO price. A couple of decades ago, that used to mean it was discounted. Nowadays, it doesn’t, but not everybody knows that.
Probably part of some side grift to sell more information to data brokers
The whole idea is a grift. They are directly appealing to people who largely should not be buying shares due to their financial situation and are a lot less critical of the pretty poor numbers they published than professional
exploitersinvestors will be.Obviously this is done in hopes of selling more shares and binding users long term, though that will probably just accelerate the enshittification because suddenly the last remaining power users are turned into shareholders instead
Can I borrow some stock?
that would be called “shorting” and it totally is a thing.
Look, I’m not trying to short okay? I’m sure Reddit will do great. Just let me borrow your stock and I’ll make sure you have it back in like 6 months or so
Yeah, the big short is even a movie! One positive i got from hanging around stonks, amc and gme subs was how much i learned about how fucked the stock market is.
Waaaaay more fucked, gamified, and straight up broken than even the most cynical citizen thinks.
I like how the user claims 2016-2019 as good years. From what I remember, the 2016 election was when reddit started turning to trash with the political astroturfing and right wing trolls making bad faith arguments. When was the crazy with the totally-not-staged crazy doorbell camera videos?
2016’ish was when the The_Donald started its come up, which absolutely was a negative for the site. 2015 had FatPeopleHate, Even in 2011 they had the jailbait subreddit.
So saying it was ever particularly good is kind of… lmao
Elections over, now we can ban the_donald. Fucking assholes.
I don’t think shithead communities are an indication of quality. Lemmy has quite a few despite otherwise having early reddit feelings.
I think the quality of comments is a bigger indicator. Reddit started to feel shit when thought out comments got drowned out by the sea of low effort memes, one liners and other overused references. Lemmy also has those comments but the ratio of quality to shit is much higher.
I don’t think shithead communities are an indication of quality.
Places like The_Donald and FatPeopleHate didn’t just stay within their little communities. They shat up the rest of reddit, and because their communities were allowed to flourish, they had a base of operations to recruit more shitters from. Once those communities got banned/quarantined, the behavior diminished noticeably, as the community found they weren’t welcome and often simply left.
I remember a large influx of 4chan users around 2012 or something that seriously diluted the quality of the comments
Dear lord 2015/2016 was like the sharp decline after a long slope downward in my opinion. Might be showing my age but peak reddit to me was prior to reddit gold and vote fuzzing.
For me, the downfall was when Unidan got himself banned. Reddit has never fully recovered .
Hggggggggggggttyuuuuuuu
I eventually signed up to Reddit in 2011 when it started to become less of the “wild west.” I mean anything could pop up on the front page. 2015 I really got sick of US politics in everything, and I think after the 2016 election, I found out just how many subreddits were controlled and modded by like 4 people. Reddit had a plethora of issues well before most current users even arrived.
Honestly it was 2014 when it started going downhill. That was the year of gamergate. In retrospect it was the first battle of the culture war.
I always side stepped the whole gamergate thing while it was at it’s height. Something always stank about that affair.
I would say gamergate was the first battle, but more like a “Southern Strategy” of gaming. Previously, gaming culture was the target conservatives. I remember Jack Thompson.
As gaming went “mainstream” and gamers aged into the voting range and boomers became less and less swing voters, conservatives started using the same tactics to draw in gamers as neo-nazis used to draw in the punk scene.
Gamergate and 2016 US Politics go hand-in-hand, as Steve Bannon was an orchestrater of the former as a trial run for the latter.
I’d say I can’t believe everything is shit because of porn-addicted white people on the internet, but historically speaking that’s been the motivation behind almost every fascist movement.
We did it guys. We’ve posted everything there is to post and now we can finally rest.
Who would have thought that driving away the power users that posted and interacted with the content the most would ruin Reddit ? 🙄
Because, they don’t care about reddit, they just want to cash out and make it someone else’s problem to fix.
Yes, everything that could possibly be posted and discussed has been done. Humanity has officially run it’s course, that is the only explanation for a reduction in the amount of content on Reddit.
I knew it. Wrap it up, we’re going home
Well done everyone, it was kinda horrible
There were cat memes. It wasn’t all bad.
Don’t forget the Sugar Free Haribo reviews.
Sure, some of those would have been in a local newspaper or something and possibly collected in a book akin to “Strange Red Cow”, but that was a beautiful moment of people going “This makes you violently shit yourself? I gotta try this”.
It had its moments
Congratulations. You have reached the end of the internet.
Do we turn the tape over and now begin from side B?
Use an 8-track tape.
Suddenly I understand how non-americans feel when Americans discuss world issues.
That would be better than the extremely “interesting” future that awaits us
Yeah i feel like chicken little sometimes just watching other folks going about their business like shits not actually going down right in front of us.
Tbf our future technologically is pretty wild too, so of you’re in a developed country and rampant inflation hasnt made you homeless, there likely cool extreme changes to go alongside the horrifying ones!
*its
Monty Python’s Flying Circus!
Wow, I even hear the music playing in my head when I read that.
I almost added *Liberty Bell March starts playing*. Happy to see it wasn’t necessary.
Dead? Maybe not. Dead inside? Definitely.
Kinda feel post API killing, frontpage post comments have jumped dramatically.
Unfortunately, it’s extremely bot-like. Like AI talking to AI and chains and chains of memes/jokes. No real discussion.
Repost bots (and repost top comment bots) are pretty rampant. A lot of subs have changed pretty significantly because their entire mod team left. In general I get the sense it’s a lot more people now who consider reddit “social media” compared to before. Site isn’t dead for sure but it’s gone down in quality significantly.
Here’s a theory…
After the API implosion, so many active and posting users quit that the gap was filled with mainly bots.
Whether intentional or not, this gave the impression that Reddit was still active on paper… The numbers said there was no significant change after the exedous.
When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots, they decided to chase the money before the site tanked completely.
This led to Reddit trying to cash in on the remaining users with more ads than ever, cash in on their advertisers, and cash in on the platforms (until recent) good image. Most people have at least heard of Reddit at this point, so going for an IPO now, when almost everyone knows that it exists, and only regular Reddit users are really aware of the enshittification happening. So they can demand a high price for the IPO, and collect a bunch of money before the enshittification is more well known, and the company tanks.
IDK, but that seems to be the way of things.
Facebook has been enshitifying for years and the stock has gone to the moon.
A lot of what enshitification is, is fucking the users to increase shareholder value.
Well, with a mostly anonymous platform like Reddit, there isn’t the same user lock-in, so alternatives, like Lemmy can be shifted to more easily.
With Facebook, you’re dealing with IRL friends and loved ones. Those connections lock you to Facebook. Since you’re locked in, advertisers are locked to you through Facebook’s ad systems, and they can enshittify the whole platform without losing much engagement.
I don’t know of anyone who uses Reddit to stay in touch with friends. Sure, we’re almost all on there in some way or another, but not for that reason.
So abandoning the sinking ship that is Reddit, can be easily done, unlike Facebook where you, and your friends, and their friends, and your family, and your families friends, and your families family, all pretty much have to unanimously agreed to leave Facebook for another platform all at once. That way everyone can stay in touch.
Organizing an exedous of that scale and magnitude is essentially impossible.
With Reddit, users can kind of trickle over individually or in groups as they see fit. Not tied to Reddit for their social interactions among their friends. Most creators, even those with subreddits, can easily post on different platforms and for the most part, they do. So users can enjoy their favorite creators away from the Reddit shitstorm, if they want. So there’s a lot less user lock in on Reddit compared to other platforms, making enshittification a good reason for many to leave.
Bots can’t keep the site running and popular. That’s just not how this works. So, as people figure out that competing services (again, like Lemmy) exist and migrate away, Reddit will eventually tank and go under.
At least, that’s what I’m seeing.
Depending on how that money is (mis)managed, the death spiral could take years or longer. If there’s enough mismanagement, it may be much less. We’ll see.
Unfortunately a lot of smaller subs havent fully transitioned yet, so I’m stuck on reddit for Rimworld content like I occasionally have to log in to Facebook to keep up communication with family. I think at this point though its literally just Rimworld for me. I dont play enough Terraria anymore for the Terraria reddits to keep me there, and tbh I havent looked into Kenshi, but that might be another occasional pull based on what I fine. Sorry for the ramble, I guess the tldr is that there are a FEW pulls reddit still has even though anonymity eliminates most of them
I don’t mean to imply there’s no user lock in, it’s just significantly less than a platform like Facebook. For many it’s not a problem to migrate to another site.
Obviously it’s a thing each community will have to deal with, and honestly, that’s fair. Bluntly, once the community creates a consensus on what the next platform of choice will be, there won’t be much holding those users to Reddit.
Regardless, I’m just speculating. Who knows what will actually happen.
“When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots”
In foreign languages like in French, there was a trend, launched by the admins themselves. It was to replicate English communities by translating the posts. It was obvious that it was dumb automated translations since there were cultural references that could not be translated. I know it because I was the owner of such a community and it was sad. My small community had a spirit. After the bots, the community was bland.
When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots
Just fyi, bots use API calls. Thus, Reddit has ALWAYS known exactly what percentage of users and posts are bots, and which bots are Reddit’s own.
And it’s not the first time. You could almost say it’s what Reddit is built on. When Reddit was first launched, the founders used alts to build numbers; now it’s bots.
My own personal view is that they’ve used bots all along. More recently, they made up for drastically reduced numbers last summer with bots, and that’s when the writing was really on the wall for Reddit because at some point it becomes a serious legal liability to continue to sell ad space and accept ad money based on numbers of users and posts that simply do not exist in reality.
So the IPO has to happen sooner rather than later, and RDDT will tank as soon as it goes public, which is why they’re trying to sell the rubes as many shares as they can at a guaranteed pre-IPO price: that’s free money for them, which they will take and go while Reddit implodes.
They’ve been chasing an IPO for years, it’s not a quick process.
deleted by creator
Lemmy is not the perfect replacement but with some work it can become better. It could use some improved tooling, I want the ability to follow other users, and there’s always room for improvement with the apps.
I’m not sure what’s up with the front page algorithms too. It should be moving way faster - I see almost the same posts there day to day but if I go to each community there’s tons of new stuff.
Lemmy.world is still running Lemmy 0.18.x and will soon upgrade to 0.19.x and 0.19 has scaled sorting.
Improved Post Ranking There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes
I could do with a guide on how to start a community to try bringing over a couple of the niche subs I used to love.
I’ve never really wanted to mod, but I know I have to be the change I want to see.
I feel the same way about some of the subs that I’d like to see on here as well. I just worry about how to gain traction. Like how to get more people to engage and actually use the community. Is it just random people stumbling across it? Or is there a better way.
Like how to get more people to engage and actually use the community.
When you create it, populate it with as many posts that you can, that are original/legit, before announcing it to the public.
When someone shows up and they see a new sub and there’s no posts they just leave and never come back.
Then I would try to figure out a way of advertising it on Reddit, letting them know that the Lemmy equivalent exists. I’m not sure Reddit will allow you to get away with that, but that would be important to do.
But most importantly, you got to ‘prime the pump’, you have to make it look like it’s already got traction, it’s already got attention, before announcing it to the world.
I agree with you there. I imagine Lemmy doesn’t have it nearly so bad yet, but it was sad finding a cool-sounding subreddit that was positively littered with spam.
With like one post saying “So is there anything relevant about the topic here?”
You could tell there was an idea there but it needs gardening. I’m honestly surprised there is such a high percentage of people willing to be active, unpaid mods on some of those higher traffic subs!
I mean it’s not like Lemmy replaces Reddit for me, but like a nicotine plaster compared to a cigarette, it does quell the craving.
I only use Reddit now for a couple of very niche forums (like /samsungwatchfaces) but I never post there anymore.
Yeah same.
I only use it to follow r/ukraine, and I don’t comment or vote.Lemmy is not perfect but it scratches my itch to see what random strangers think about random topics so I don’t really miss it.
Ha ha that is the perfect way to put it! Scratches the itch to see what random strangers think about random topics, that’s hilarious! XD
Reddit became openly hostile to the people and content that made it great. It’s not exactly surprising that the good users eventually went elsewhere. You could really tell shit went downhill after they killed the third party apps.
had a vibrant sub with @ 50,000 participants, new content every day. now it’s literally full of spam, no engagement, and the ‘mod’ appears to have fled after taking Spez’s offer to take over.
so that’s satisfying :D
It’s not
aw someone misses spezdaddy :D
It’s not satisfying that it was ruined
well… I disagree.
They had it all. They had all the keys to the kingdom, all they needed to do was listen. And when they decided otherwise, they’ve lost a tremendous amount of mods and community, so… I’d rather see them humbled. If they were rewarded with success for their bad actions that would be unsatisfying. But it is sad; but the web will grow and change. There was /., then digg, then reddit, now lemmy / fediverse… imho, each step is an improvement in some senses. Hopefully it will continue to grow.
Conjuction fallacy. You only focus on your satisfaction and not on your own bigger reason for why
Seeing reddit spiral into enshittification is satisfying to me, and that’s all I assert. I never asserted it would be asserting for everyone, much less you.
I call this: the mojofrodojo conundrum: you assume I think you’re real, and can experience satisfaction. or care. life is funny that way.
You can feel satisfaction over enshittification and still understand that humanity lost something. It’s a simple fallacy nothing to cry about honestly
Smaller subreddits usually supported by a few power users are dying off. I remember it taking me a couple hours to read through the top posts at end of day. Now you’re lucky to see a week’s worth of genuine top posts.
Posts getting roasted in the comments for being too boomery, capitalist bootlicking or hive-mindish happens less and less.
In 2021 I wrote a story “The Typo which saved humanity” on Reddit and it exploded to 3000 upvotes in less than a day. A couple of years later I wrote a story “Day of the Fat Man” which got 50 upvotes. Everybody I ask considered the second one the better one.
Then I reposted those stories on Youtube and Facebook and both got around the same upvotes, around 5k+ on each.
Yes, Reddit has become quite dead.
But to be honest, my stories on Lemmy got like 50 upvotes so… meh.
50 real people is still better than botted updoots.
I don’t think its just an issue of bots.
After the '16 Trump bombing of the site, the admins got incredibly aggressive in their site-wide banning policy. You could get a site-wide ban for minor infractions, there was no appeals process, and they got fairly good at identifying and banning secondary accounts such that you really needed to want to be on the site in order to keep evading consistently.
Then they rolled out the new reddit front end, which forces you to sign in if you want to see certain channels and posts while blowing up your email with engagement bait messages that… lure people into posting in a community where you can very easily get site-wide banned. At which point you’ve got a giant red “YOU’RE NOT WELCOME HERE” banner on your front page, even if all you do is lurk.
Its just a nakedly hostile website. That’s before you get into mod-politics and people harassing one another in PMs and the general obnoxious nature of their native advertising.
sponsored posts, and having the algorithm move “super users” content to the front page is what killed Digg before Reddit, and it will be what kills Reddit.
Lemmy isn’t all about the upvotes though. It’s not reddit.
Where are you posting these stories? I’d like to check them out.
Found it! They have a page on Reddit that links to what seems like all their short stories.
Thanks. I’ll check them out.
Everybody I ask considered the second one the better one.
But which had the better title?
Reddit changed their upvote algorithm which is why it looks so much lower than it really is.
They covered this years ago…
That explains only the first part of their post, and inadequately. If reddit made (and explained) the algorithm years ago, what accounts for the recent drop M(eta)OP is seeing.
The second half isn’t about votes at all. There, they complain that there’s far less content on the site, so the algorithm theory doesn’t appy.
They changed to to massively inflate the displayed vote totals though. Old reddit was showing actual vote totals with some fuzzing. The algorithm change in 2016 or whatever was to reflect engagement and engagement velocity in the displayed post scores, which is how we got the huge 100k+ top posts. If they have changed away from that I haven’t seen anything about it.
to reflect engagement and engagement velocity in the displayed post scores
Ah, a bullshit artist! Did you bullshit last week? Did you try to bullshit last week?
Yes 😒😮💨
Comicus! Comicus!
What was the algorithm and why?
It was too “easy” for regular users to get upvotes and too hard for bots to get upvotes probably. Certain comments and posts now have downvote caps of 0 points so depending on what agenda a comment supports, it may not be possible to downvote into negative numbers.
As a rule of thumb, anything you say is getting downvoted but if someone else posts the same thing, it gets highly upvoted. Reddit is cancer.
Ew. Yeah that’s why I left. It was shocking how down voted into oblivion I was when someone literally in a comment thread after me shares a similar opinion and is positive.
Reddit is cancer! Friends don’t let Friends reddit. Remind one person today of this reddit clone!
This is not a Reddit clone. This is something better. An individual instance would be closer to a Reddit clone but even then we all know which one is open source…
A worthy distinction thank kind sir!
Before 2016 posts moved extremely fast. There used to be a joke that the entire front page was new every time you refreshed it. After The_Donald figured out how to game their algorithm to dominate the front page, reddit took advantage of the opportunity to neuter the algorithm completely so that it was more advertiser friendly. Now the front page remains static for most of the day, so sponsored advertiser posts get more exposure.
