Ask Lemmy

Reddit wants ad clicks, not community. They don't want anyone participating too much, particularly if the algorithm says they don't scroll constantly and see ads.

Reddit is run by corpos who tried to get comfy with the US government. The current US government.

Why? That question always has multiple answers. Are you asking for a historical timeline? That might be the true story, but it also might not feel compelling.

Above all else, remember that Reddit feels many sources of pressure. They want money and users, but they also need to limit spam, and they don't wanna piss off the rich stock holders, either.

I was an ultra early Reddit user, frankly it’s incredibly simple, money. Several years back Reddit really started blowing up internationally and we stopped the nerd shit several years before that, no more “because reasons” or “the condoms are under the sink” silly in-jokes, or recognizable friendly power users, I was a lesser power user but hit the front page several times. It becoming international was a little bumpy cause the grammar Nazis we’re struggling with non American users and other culture type things but in general redditors were gracious and accepted people who weren’t English as first language users. When Aaron Swartz was outed and subsequently killed himself I think it was really the beginning of the end. Once Aaron was gone, once the Trump subreddits started being pumped by Russian troll farms and the final nail in the coffin, going public for bigger profit there was no going back. They sold out to political interests then sold out for money. Greed for money and power killed Reddit. All that said, Lemmy is a lot more quiet, obviously but it feels like the Reddit from ~20 years ago and I’ve been really enjoying it.

My instance is being closed so hopefully I can find a new home here I enjoy as much, that’s the biggest downside I’ve seen so far, you can essentially just lose your account due to others.

I'm guessing it started off as some anti botting strategy, than later realized it's a nice technique to force people to interact a bit more with the product the way it wants to be used.

Since you now went out of your way to interact with Reddit, you now have a stronger emotional attachment to this newly discovered scary unknown things.

I think the answer is that it's psychological.

Yes.

Everything makes a lot more sense when you realize reddit was taken over by fascists in a deliberate (and successful) attempt to make a fascist-supporting platform that has enough progressive cover to operate without criticism.

Aaron Swartz was made a target by fascist insiders in the DoJ deliberately to remove him from control of reddit, leaving it to Huffman, a notorious nazi sympathizer and authoritarian. This led to Swartz's suicide and ever since then reddit has gone significantly downhill

I think your fundamental misunderstanding is how many people just scroll, lurk and at most comment. Let's call those passive users. They are many and therefore worth catering to. Reddit, especially the big subreddits, are engagement generators. Their point is not to answer the questions that you as an individual might have. Their point is to maximize engagement. Providing the kind of content that keeps thousands of passive users engaged in the app has more monetary value than letting you as an individual post your personal question. So it's geared towards letting users with a solid track record of creating engagement post easily, while being careful with users who don't have that track record.

You can see this in supermarkets too. Hundred different types of sweets but if I simply want nuts roasted without oil, I'm out of luck? Why? Because there's orders of magnitude more people who will buy stuff without reading the ingredients. The people who care about not having oil added to their nuts are so relatively few that they're not worth catering to by a mass-appealing supermarket.

At least those are my theories, not that I have any inside knowledge.

But to get to the main ponint of this, why is reddit run the way it is ?

For profit.

Reddit is riddled with bots and has been for years, and they don't care, so moderators went ahead and implemented Karma limits to prevent them from growing hundreds of accounts a day.

Fuck Spez.

Reddit is a platform that was plagued by its success for the longest time. It's not really a platform looking for new information. It's profiting off of the information it already has. Due to the influx of bot accounts that are on the platform, they have a bit of protection on major subs

Basically to answer your question, it's a combination of they're trying to make the platform look decent for an IPO that they've already missed their window for. And now they're desperately trying to claw every little bit of information they want and bot accounts that are just spam or don't add interest to the platform such as a lot of copy-pasting are generally automated out of the service. This is exponentially increased if you're adding competitor links or links that Reddit has decided are malicious.

Sadly, they're trying to get something which will never happen. But, because they're trying so hard to appeal to advertisers and that IPO,

This issue was multiplied about a year and a half ago when reddit decided to remove free use of their API and then had massive blowback on it they doubled down, claimed their volunteer moderators were entitled and not needed which caused a mass exodus from the platform that it never recovered from. Why does this matter? well when any labor leaves, they also take experience with them which never fully recovered. Subs in order to lessen on that locked their requirements down using karma.

these issues are dampening the future Reddit experience. So if you're not established, You end up leaving the platform again before you start trying to actually add content to it.

as a TLDR: Reddit is actively chasing financial value that no longer exists, and the users are punished for it.

That's not a reddit rule, but a rule that subreddit moderators introduce to lessen their workload. Requiring a minimum karma means less spambots and trolls to deal with.

I think the issue is you are posting too early for Reddit, you should be commenting for the first week at least.

Essentially, the coarse-grained spam-filter assumes that anyone that has a whole bunch of posts ready to go the day they sign up is a bot spammer. Even here on Lemmy, if you sign up then immediately try to copy and paste a post 10 times to different communities, you will get reported and banned for spamming.

The principle behind it is like any social space online or offline: if you are a legitimate new member, you will start on the fringes and slowly settle in, from introducing yourself to a few members, attend events, to then asking questions, before making any influential speeches or going into a leadership position. Anyone trying to fast track that will be met with suspicion from members.

Reddit and Lemmy are similar in a sense. you start as a lurker, become a commentor, then you are well-adjusted enough to post.

It's not fun the way it is. That's why we came here.

Have you found !reddit@lemmy.world that might be useful to you

Sucking the chubby of ol' capital, that's why.

It’s such a massive platform that managing the flood of spam accounts must be nearly impossible - but they’re still trying. I think it’s kind of like how AI got so good at solving captchas that they had to make them too difficult for even humans to figure out. I’m guessing the system they use is probably fully automated. Someone creating a new account likely behaves very differently from a genuine new user, so people like that get flagged. I don’t think you’re shadowbanned from the entire platform - some subs just let you post without notifying you that your posts aren’t visible to anyone.

They run it this way to create a massive smoke cloud to hide the way it's really run. Purely dictatorially, for profit, manipulation and a safe space for advertising.