- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Reddit updates look after rough 6 months and ahead of reported IPO::“Edit: Obligatory ‘F— Spez’ for karma.”
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reposting one of the worst things i’ve ever heard someone say:
“There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
eat my ass spez
I hope you aren’t allergic to cats, because spez is a cat lover.
I have no idea why this exists, but I had to upvote it.
You upvote it because you’re a good person. But, it exists due to spez’ perverse desire to always do the wrong thing.
I’m really happy this exists. Thank you for sharing.
You are welcome satans crackpipe. So am I, and more than happy to share.
Wtf??? Cringe! Downvote army, assemble!
Congratulations
Snowpix is confused! They hurt themselves in their confusion!
I fainted!
To be fair we did assemble, just in a different comment. Learn to recognize art noob
Y’know it’s a joke right? It’s a reference lol.
Reverse psychology
Yay explicit exploitation of the most vulnerable in a community. Lots of this is cartoonishly evil.
I knew people who needed the help of some of the subreddits he might be going on about, that is absolutely fucking disgusting.
Also I thought this was in the Ars article, but no, this was in an interview with the New York Times during the peak of the API protests!
Yeah… I don’t know if the person you’re mentioning meant productive stuff or not, but I was in a pretty niche community there. One where parents were dealing with their kids on operating tables, but not often. It was as exactly the kind of thing internet forums were made for: medical advice from doctors, venting and whatnot from strangers who’d been there. I said a lot of practical helpful things and a lot of meaningless nice platitudes at the right time.
And I was happy to do it the same way I swapped guitar tabs as a kid.
There’s honest money in making a community space.
There’s no honest money in monetizing a community.
I dont have any direct experience with reddit any longer.
What I can say, is that I think a verrrrrrry significant portion of comments and commenters are actually reddit run bots. My source for this is my experience in the daily thread of a certain degenerate gambling forum. There were maybe like 12-30 posters who would reply, engage, etc… in the daily and day after threads. However, there was a yyyyyuuuuugggge number of accounts that would just comment with no real further engagement. Like you would respond to them, but they wouldnt respond back.
I truly believe that reddits internal business model is predicted on the use of reddit run bots to create synthetic engagement in certain audiences around marketing targets that a selective group of advertisers (read, not buying reddit ads) are given access to. The basics is that reddit astroturfs synthetic engagement until organic engagement takes over. I have no way of proving this and its pure speculation.
This is why I don’t even worry about considering the user numbers on lemmy. Relying on my anectdotal experience, we’ve got about the usership/ engagement numbers from around the 2009-2011 time period, which is actually pretty amazing. Also, the overall lemmy experience is far superior, for example, just the ability to sort by a couple of different ‘hot’ options is a major improvement. I really think if the devs just keep vibing on their plan, lemmy will be more than strong enough to survive and continue for decades to come.
The fact is that reddit stole from us our faith in a ‘good internet’. The users of reddit built reddit, not the company that owns it (they suck). The users of reddit paid for the server time and made the system work. That good faith was utterly exploited by the leadership of reddit and we should never forget how they stole from and exploited their community.
It’s not just speculation on your part.
How it started:
https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/
How it’s going:
They also started handing out usernames to companies over “trademark infringement.” Someone with the username “FoodNetwork” is losing the username to the real Food Network.
I was on reddit long enough to remember how people used to run corporate stooges out with pitchforks.
“These are fan run forums,” they would say. The idea that you could have your username taken by a corporation was unheard of, because originally, it was considered really bad form to have anyone from the business running the subreddit, because then it wouldn’t be a neutral source of information.
Nope, now they can steal usernames and it’s totes okay for subreddits to be completely controlled by their corporate namesake.
Pretty sure corporations running their own subreddits has been.a thing for awhile now. Fairly certain Costco’s subreddit is fully modded by their advertising department. Threads written by employees during COVID were getting nuked constantly.
Reading what happened to the german subs, that also happened with newly created spanish subs, many got thousands of subscribers but no engagement, only one or two comments per thread and little content but a lot of subscribers.
You’re absolutely right about most of it. My only criticism is the first paragraph as I am notorious for just commenting and not responding. Literally if you reply I won’t respond lol but I can’t imagine I’m the only one. A better way to sniff them out would be profiling them and finding things like hobby subs where they would be significantly more likely to comment vs addiction subs where they may feel some shame in interacting or engaging in their addiction.
I’m pretty stupid so I could be talking out my ass but I figured input for data collection and such.
That’s what caught my eye too. I rarely, if ever, respond to someone who’s responded to a comment I’ve made, especially if they’re arguing or trying to correct me. And that’s if I’ve even bothered to go back and check it.
Not that you’ll ever see my reply to your comment…
I am not saying you are wrong, but when I was active on Reddit I rarely checked my mail. I still have like 12k unread messages.
That’s quite a weird way to use…any account.
You’d be surprised. Lots of people live like this, with all their devices and accounts. Ever piling up never read messages, whether emails, texts, or DMs. I don’t know if they’re just fine with it or if its something psychological making that many messages seem to big to approach, or because they don’t want to hear everyone’s cruel responses to what they said or I don’t know. But people do use accounts like that, for sure.
It makes more sense if it’s something like email, where you likely know most of it is junk mail advertisements.
But how can people not be curious why they have several unread messages where it’s very likely they are responses from humans who specifically responded to things they said?
It’s pretty simple:
Because a lot of those comments will be filled with abuse, and some will be garbage not worth reading.
After a certain point, you get tired of opening the inbox and sorting through it.
It makes more sense if it’s something like email, where you likely know most of it is junk mail advertisements.
What makes you think there isn’t just as much junk in your comment replies inbox? Not advertising, but just overall junk.
You’d stop checking your email, too, if there wasn’t a spam filter. Well, comment replies don’t have a filter for quality or tone or politeness. People get tired of reading trash.
I don’t read my inbox. Instead I use the same strategy I developed long ago on the forums of old: I check in later to see the responses to certain comments. After the karma system has hopefully moved the shitty or worthless ones down, and I only check the comments where I genuinely care what the responses will be.
But how can people not be curious why they have several unread messages where it’s very likely they are responses from humans who specifically responded to things they said?
I’ve been around the Internet for a long time, just over 30 years now. That curiosity is long dead. I’ve seen enough and participated in enough discussions to have a fair idea what the replies to most things will be like on the whole. Some of them I’m interested, some of them, meh
You’re saying all this like I haven’t been on the Internet long. I’m over the two decade mark myself. I base my question on this fact actually.
What makes you think there isn’t just as much junk in your comment replies inbox?
My experience with the Internet all these years…
But how can people not be curious why they have several unread messages where it’s very likely they are responses from humans who specifically responded to things they said?
I’m still waiting for @[email protected]’s response…
Yo you might’ve dropped this, King 👑. This post is the best way of putting into words my thoughts on the matter that I’m too smoothbrained to formulate into creation. Especially the last paragraph, the theft of “good Internet”. Fuckin A, m8
Oh oh… can we look forward to another wave of reddit leavers after inevitable changes to the site to please investors?
Anyone who didn’t leave when old.reddit.com stopped being the default isn’t going to leave over any other redesigns. They couldn’t possibly be worse.
The fall of Digg didn’t happen in one single wave.
Lots of people just want to stay with what they’re familiar with, and it takes loss of critical mass of content/interaction before they’ll look at the door.
It took an annoying girl in Uni, who was like 6 years younger than me, pestering me why I would still used Digg when reddit existed. I finally checked it out and never looked back. Then a couple years later everyone else I knew was on here.
I mean it really was a single wave. V4 or whatever version it was fundamentally changed the way Digg worked in a big way overnight. It wasn’t even the same thing anymore. Sure there were some holdovers but it’s tough to compare the two like this.
With the exception of third party apps, Reddit still more or less works the same for the average user as it has forever.
Yeah, Digg v4 hit like a shockwave and site traffic plummeted as users immediately flocked to Reddit by the millions. Reddit spent the next week crashing like crazy from the influx of new users and had to temporarily suspend and then limit new user creation and new sub creation for weeks after to handle the strain. It was kind of similar to what happened when everyone rushed over to Lemmy for the first time, but that happened a bit more slowly, over a longer period of time. 
I think there might be another wave when old.reddit.com stops working, a number of people still access it that way, despite it not being well known by the modern reddit audience.
I’m kind of looking forward to that. I don’t have an account there anymore, but I still check old.reddit.com because it’s quick enough scan the homepage on my phone when I’m waiting on something. Dropping old would help me break that habit very easily.
Agreed, that band-aid needs to be ripped off, because the site is really dead anyway. (It only appears alive because of bots trolling for engagement.)
It really is bad. I ask myself why I even bother every time I look at it. Looking at r/popular now feels more like what looking at r/popular/rising/ used to be, mostly reposted garbage with only the occasional interesting topic, but even those I’ve usually already seen somewhere else.
Responding to like three of your comments at once. But I used RES since like 2010. Until June I, and I imagine many others, had zero idea what “vanilla” reddit even looked like.
But yes, I only do r/NFL because I haven’t found that in fediverse yet. When I’m there and the muscle. Memory kicks in and I click the logo and go to the home it’s… Bad…
I’ve popped in once or twice in the niche communities I used to do. There’s activity, but it’s stuff I would have called filler posts two years ago. Not bad just… Not good.
Honestly, dark theme is how they got me with that one. Haven’t used the site aside from search results since the API changes went live but I like to think I’d leave if a new redesign was worse.
I mean … that’s almost certainly what’s going to happen to some degree
See, we made the holes in the d’s look like little talking bubbles. We’re not evil. We’re cuuuuuute. Money please!
Reddit: I’ve done nothing wrong, ever, in my life.
At least Spez said racism and hate speech are allowed on the platform
Which Spez claimed Reddit used to be against so character growth I guess
At least they didn’t rename themselves to “Y” I guess… Though that would be mildly hilarious.
Ironic joke to make considering reddit was spun out from … Y Combinator.
Spez is some kind of musk fanboy iirc so
Yeah that’d check out…
New look, same Reddit
I mean, yes and no. It’s the same reddit from six months ago yeah, the vultures hungry for an IPO and who don’t give a fuck about users.
The change in font actually speaks massively to a huge change in how reddit functions, and this has been a slow, gradual change.
Reddit was originally an all text site. The name fucking implies it.
“Oh did you see that link?”
“Yeah, I already read it.”
The pivot to sound and video has been going on for a few years. The logo still referenced the text-heavy nature of the site by being stylized as text you might read on a website. Now it is clearly a logo that has dropped that pretense entirely, as they have said “fuck people who like to read,” we’re here for eyeballs on screens, and video is what makes that happen!
So yeah, it screams a huge change in direction that’s been happening for years now. They’re just updating the branding to match the site direction.
Exactly. I remember going to Reddit as a minimalist alternative to Digg even before 2.0 pushed everyone out.
It was only a matter of time.
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But for remaining users, including Reddit’s own workers, some wounds haven’t healed. And there’s still a yearning for a return to the old and general site improvements over branding updates (Reddit says that the branding updates didn’t impact employees working on updating the Reddit platform).
The top comment on Acidtwist’s post announcing the branding refresh reads: “My love of old.reddit.com continues to grow.”
Anyone placing bets on how long old.reddit will continue working?
Up until day one past IPO.
And that’s the day I completely stop using the site.
I’ve still been using it for technical stuff, because there’s a absolute shitload of extremely valuable and informative content on a bunch of engineering- and tech-oriented subs, but a lot of the users who were involved with that seem to be switching here, and a lot of THOSE users have applied scripts to nuke all comments on their account, so it’s steadily becoming less valuable and more out of date. That said, it’s a bummer that that the knowledge base contained in those communities are largely going to seed.
What if we, “the users”, contributed to a decentralized platform and built that knowledge base up instead?
This allows us to place the R word as basically an archive of the time period as it shouldn’t have much more intellectual growth.
That’s exactly what I was alluding to when I said a lot of the users in those Reddit subs were migrating here
They killed .compact a while ago.
I looked at reddit today, it looks like ass. Not nice ass either.
Everyone here is on copium, not gonna lie.
Reddit isn’t going to die. Honestly it has 1000x more content than lemmy.
Lemmy has a place and so does reddit.
I still browse reddit, simply because the size of the communities I want to visit is much larger there. My browsing is however confined to the mobile page in Firefox, which is slow, clunky, and breaks frequently, which means my reddit usage is down by something like 99%. Lemmy has the sync app, and without the app I wouldn’t be here. Browsing Lemmy before it was awful.
Also, I kinda like that Lemmy is smaller. There’s much less noise, less of an algorithm feel to browsing. It feels slightly more like the internet I grew up with in the 90s and 00s, and I kinda missed that.
The throwback feel really is an intangible value add that means it might not catch on for younger folks but damn it does feel good.
honestly I think the opposite. from what a younger sibling has told me, old is new and the current trends in TikTok and stuff seem to be younger people wanting physical media, non flat design back, the old internet and etc. gives me hope at least.
I go back for sports communities because they’re still active enough on reddit for back and forth during live games, but literally yesterday on the hockey sub people were talking about how there’s less content. API changes meant less autoposted game highlights and it even seems there’s less back and forth on the game day threads. Now it depends a lot on the team these days.
Honestly it has 1000x more content than lemmy.
So steal the content and post it here. At least the good stuff.
There aren’t any laws preventing you from doing that.
It’s kinda how these sites function at all nowadays lol. Wasn’t reddit text posts only a long time ago?
Send us the text posts to replace all the people posting fuckin YouTube videos instead of articles here!
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TIL not supporting businesses you don’t agree with = being on copium.
Guess I better go buy Nestle products again.
No I think that’s fine, it’s just I see people thinking that reddit is literally dying, which is just not the case.
Everyone? Those people who say these companies are sinking ship are probably so addicted to them they have to mention it anytime anything vaguely relates to it. Normal people use both and don’t give a shit where their meme comes from.
It looks like one of those soulless Apple animoji things.
Mouth open, shadow on chin - they turned their logo into a soyjak
Seems fitting tbh
Fuck spez I used that reddit for years. However you can only be fucked over so much.
Good riddance to reddit. Haven’t been on it since the API pricing kicked in.
Since the API pricing thing happened, I’ve spent a grand total of about 10 minutes on their site.
Same, I posted something about one of my game jams a few months ago, and that was it. And that’s only bcz I realized I had my game dev account logged in on my pc.
Has he tried publicly spouting fringe fascist conspiracy theories yet? No? Give it time…
Fuck spez
i still use reddit a lot of comunities havent left and my god the amout of bots now is insane entire threads are coppied with 1 year 6 month old acounts with zero history and what i think is ai spam from simualr acounts its a mess over there now what brainless idiot is letting this happen
A friend of mine was talking about how they had blatant homophobia sent their way on an LGBT subreddit, which was upvoted. Went to check r/ApolloApp and someone critical of the dev (because he was selling merch) was being blatantly and casually homophobic with similar upvote behaviour.
I’m not an easily offended guy but, honestly, I’m glad I left that shithole.
They did kick out a lot of mods during the protests and moderation has gone to utter shit since the api change
Yeah new moderation didn’t stand a chance because the good mod tools were all 3rd party.
So many good mod bots aswell all gone
Yeah. I read an article (also on Ars Technica funnily enough) about how some moderators aren’t equipped to deal with things. I believe they singled out r/canning because of the potential for food poisoning, but r/ender3 had a sympathetic “mod” who only joined that subreddit as a moderator just to fuck with Reddit corporate when they were replacing the mods.
Reddit, predictably, did not respond, so whoever wrote that article did their job right.
Oh god canning I heard about the new mods haveing less than a clue about it christ that’s a massive fuck up
Had a brief look at r/WorldNews yesterday. Every comment was blatantly disgusting Islamaphobia that I couldn’t believe hadn’t been deleted yet. I don’t ever remember it being that bad over there
Same, I remember r/worldnews not swinging that way whatsoever.
what brainless idiot is letting this happen
I can’t begin to imagine, who could it be, there are so many Spezs* to choose from. I guess we will just never know.
*Actually the entire board is rotten. We love to blame Spez (and he’s an incessant liar who deserves every last bit of contempt he gets – all while making comments about “landed gentry” while he profits off free content and moderator labor) but he’s just the public face on the entire board, who ALL just want to push through an IPO and then cash out. They do not care at all that it has destroyed the site, and because bots use API calls, they’ve known about the bots all along, and have openly used bots themselves. Sam Altman was a board member of Reddit for a while, and oh look, Reddit is used for AI training. Or was, until Altman left the board and then decided they wanted cash for that to continue.
The entire board is shit.
