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‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren't just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or was I just so used to it before that that I'd never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself 'well, that's just reddit'. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
I'm not claiming the fediverse is perfect or free from that sort of shit but either through the practicalities of federation, or better moderation or a smaller userbase or a more mature userbase or a mix of one or more of those things it doesn't feel exclusionary to me. I often see on posts like this some people calling Lemmy a left-wing echo chamber and whilst I do agree there's more people of a left-wing bent on here I think echo chamber is a bit much and is a phrase maybe used by those who live in a country without a functioning left-wing political party. I've not encountered a communist or tankie since Hexbear fucked off back to their kindergarten.
As for the Guardian article, they've fallen into the same trap as I'm concerned the fediverse might fall into by federating with Meta - assuming high numbers equal success or victory. If you have corporate/economics based mindset I can see how that works, but to me success equals a popular, useful community site entirely free from algorithms and other forms of manipulative control. One that isn't gathering data via ads and tracking on its userbase to sell on (lets remember that reddit weren't upset that AI were scraping reddit, they were upset that the company weren't seeing any money from that). A community that grows organically, with all that that implies - sometimes growth might be very slow, it might stop entirely for awhile, maybe even reverse - but the emphasis should be on the people making the community better.
Reddit forgot somewhere along the way that it was the users who made reddit what it was. Look at the stats for r/askreddit - in particular the posts per day and comments per day - look at the trend since 2020. There may well be the same amount of users on reddit, but we all know a certain percentage of them are bots and even if they weren't, just looking at those two graphs tells you everything about people's level of interest in participating on reddit.
The only thing high user numbers guarantee sites like reddit is ad revenue. Nothing else.
Well said! I agree with almost everything, except I still want algorithms. I think I'd say "free from algorithms that serve corporate interests" instead. Algorithms that help me find content I genuinely enjoy are sorely missed.
I think algorithms can certainly be useful tools, but if they can somehow be made client-side, transparent in what they do, and customizable/replaceable, that would be ideal. In that scenario, they'd actually be working for the end user instead of the platform owner.
With Lemmy you probably can do that "fairly easily"
Wow, this stats website is interesting. I checked a number of subs I used to frequent: r/thenetherlands, r/idiotsincars and r/Europe . All of them see meteoric rice in subscribers, but number of posts goes down significantly since 2020-2021 (r/idiotisincars is the outlier here, you can clearly see the pandemic, but once it resumes the trend is downward again).
I just checked a couple old subs I used to visit. And the stats are very dramatic in the drop of actual content. So i tried to actually go to reddit to check. Something I haven't done since opening my Lemmy account 7 moths ago. Somewhat surprisingly to me the stats actually seemed to reflect reality. One of the subs hadn't had any activity for 5 months!! And it used to be reasonably active for a niche sub, with new content every day.
I also tried to look at the most popular non controversial sub I could think of. Which is r/funny by subscribers, and indeed it's ranked #1 since 2019, and that too had a dramatic drop in activity. https://subredditstats.com/r/funny
From these stats, it really seems like reddit is dying, it's going about as bad as some of the worst plausible predictions 7 months ago!
The most notable thing IMO is that content doesn't seem to be picking up again, but rather the decline continues.
Take those stats with a huge pinch of salt
You're trying to measure the effect of something that affected your measurement system.
Even if you ignore the latter half of 2023 there is a huge and consistent decline in number of posts per day.
Thanks, I wasn't sure where the data came from, but I tried to check up on a few subs, and they were definitely not doing well.
Am I taking crazy pills or something? Subs and users get put down HARD over that sort of stuff (See r/politicalcompassmemes). I haven't seen content like that unless I actively searched for that sort of stuff due to morbid curiosity. Would you mind sharing the subreddit/posts in question? Not to deny what you're saying but I find it hard to empathize without any evidence.
I also don't understand this infatuation with "old reddit" when that allowed subreddits like coontown to exist.
I'm not suggesting hateful content wasn't edited or removed, I'm saying when I went back there was a lot of it that had obviously just been posted. I've no doubt it's mostly gone now if I went back and looked (which I really don't want to do unless I absolutely have to) but my point is that it happens so much and so often that its often there for awhile if a mod or mod team is a bit slow off the mark. It's indicative of the type of user on there.
I guess when I think about 'old reddit' I mean reddit as it was before there were even subs or when subs first launched. Reddit was created by Digg users who were annoyed with Digg's direction. There was a lot of hope and effort put in to it being 'better' - not just technically but also in terms of ethos. I'm the first to admit I stupidly just ignored the influx of bad subs like the one you mention or jailbait etc. But it's become impossible to ignore to the point where it feels like its a constant drip-drip of hate content that mods are barely on top of.
And even without that outright race (or gender, or sex, or sexuality etc) based hate, reddit just feels to me like there's a constant undercurrent of aggression and sneering. Maybe, like I said before, it's always been there and I was just so used to it I became inured to it but revisiting it after several months away it was impossible to not notice.
Correct
"Old Reddit" generally refers to the design and layout of the page. You can find it by replacing the www. portion of the link with old. It's a more user friendly layout for some people.
We both know that’s not what I was talking about
Well no, that's what I thought you were referring to
On occassion I also go back there and some comments of mine felt like were downvoted way harder than I felt usually about reddit.
Granted they were bad takes but I felt like responses were way harsher.
Lemmy feels more direct in a sense that the discussions are more fact based instead of the aspects you already mentioned.