This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
I looked at reddit today, it looks like ass. Not nice ass either.
Fuck spez I used that reddit for years. However you can only be fucked over so much.
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.
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.
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.
Fuck spez
Has he tried publicly spouting fringe fascist conspiracy theories yet? No? Give it time.....
Good riddance to reddit. Haven't been on it since the API pricing kicked in.
As soon as copious amounts of money are involved, you see the change. I never even used the 3rd party Reddit apps, but when money made OG Reddit act like a dick towards them, I peaced out. Sorry Reddit, but I think you’ll eventually be Digg. And I have no interest in sticking around for that.
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
"Edit: Obligatory 'Fuck Spez' for karma."
"I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it any more!"
You can't polish a turd.
