Don’t underestimate the power of user experience shaping.
The front page is how most interact with the site, and helped it grow. The front page algorithm is bastardized to hell and back now, and unless you’re on old.reddit, you cant sort by Hot by default.
Reddit is strangling itself to death with how fiercely it’s trying to corral users in various directions. Every HeGetsUs post they force users to look at shoves good content one rank down.
This has an effect on the site overall.
What the hell is even a hegetsus post?
It’s a Christofacism Ad campaign
I thought it was some foot fetish cult.
Evangelical advertising, talking about Jesus’s experiences in a way that relates to what “everyday people” deal with.
Holy fucking hell
It’s important to state though that the campaign behind it is meant to funnel people into the extreme ends of evangelism, not just create more Christians.
I guess it’s kind of like how they allowed ads for crap like “what is a woman”. At the end of the day it’s all alt-right propaganda that they are putting out either to get people to join their side or to make it seem like their side is correct.
Jesus.
Are they still advertising all that “He gets us” ad crap? I left reddit almost a year ago and haven’t had the pleasure of seeing one every 5 posts anymore.
After last June, I ended up muting more and more and more weird niche subs Reddit kept trying to push in “hot” because all the actually hot Reddits were doing the whole blackout thing.
Then some small subs got rather large quite quickly due to void left by the mass exodus, and that went to the heads of the mods of those small subs.
Reddit after June -23 is hot garbage.
Like how one of the only subs that didn’t close was r/subway.
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 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?
Perhaps you moved from Europe to the States in the interim like I did.
Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
Because that would cost their time instead of yours
Free shorts?
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
Right but the whole “give us all your info and MAYBE you can buy stock” is the part that sounds like a secondary grift. If they wanted to pump they could just have some set amount and do a first come first serve right off the bat.
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.
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.
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.
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
AMAs weren’t celebrities on Reddit originally my friend, they were real people with interesting jobs or in unusual situations at first.
Some great posts back in the day, and definitely some not so great posts haha. I had to unsub after it turned into celebrities hocking their products.
The vacuum cleaner guy was one of the all time greats. I miss that era.
the time I broke both my hands…
also the time I used a coconut
Can we please keep this about Rampart.
Who were the specific individuals asking questions in those?
“We have never made a profit and may never make a profit. Please buy our stock.”
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.
*its
Monty Python’s Flying Circus!
Wow, I even hear the music playing in my head when I read that.
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 if you’re in a developed country and rampant inflation hasnt made you homeless, there likely cool extreme changes to go alongside the horrifying ones!
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.
Finally!
Suddenly I understand how non-americans feel when Americans discuss world issues.
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
Time to bring the people into Lemmy so the communities seem more alive. Sublemmy?
im sticking to calling these sublemmy’s c/'es
deleted by creator
How would I vocalize this sound?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=Gryv_Z7MSl0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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?
I couldn’t agree more. 2016 was the end of Reddit as I knew it.
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.
Before I quit, I was using RES to block the power users and their subs. Got back a lot of mental health blocking off all the ragebait/clickbait shit. Politics is unavailable, but at least I could filter out the grifters only looking to profit from it.
The most active posts are now bot-created open-ended conversation starters on r/askreddit to stir up activity and give the illusion of a thriving community. The questions are usually very redditer patronizing, and some of them are thinly veiled marketing analysis to create value for future shareholders. they’re often saturated with butt created responses.
As to why the post in question may not still exist? I suspect substantial posts about bot saturation are probably filtered out.
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.
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
I remember a large influx of 4chan users around 2012 or something that seriously diluted the quality of the comments
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.
Elections over, now we can ban the_donald. Fucking assholes.
For me, the downfall was when Unidan got himself banned. Reddit has never fully recovered .
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.
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.
“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.
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.
They’ve been chasing an IPO for years, it’s not a quick process.
Short short short short
Honestly the executive comp is outrageous for an unprofitable company, and yes, anecdotally it does seem to be shrinking, if not in sheer user activity, certainly in quality.
Didn’t they start offering cash for activity like Twitter/X?
If people aren’t posting because it’s fun and because it’s a “grind”, the quality is going to drop significantly.
I got permabanned from reddit for repeatedly trolling some ahs (probably not entirely unjustified). Whenever I create a new account and forget to only log in via a private browser window, the new account will be permabanned as well. So know I go “well, fuck it, I don’t need reddit”.
I don’t even intend to try to find out if I could somehow beg somebody to revoke my ban. After I got banned I just send a reply asking the responsible mod to kindly delete themselves.
Sidenote, but you know what has been incredibly fucking annoying? And I guess this is a combination of reddit having kind of always been shitty and oh we only find out more recently, or sort of, on aaron schwartz’s death, for early signs, and, people choosing to use it in the first place. I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments, especially since you can’t use unddit to see what it used to be because of the API business. I haven’t had to break out the wayback machine quite yet, it hasn’t gotten to that level of dire straits (not that I think the wayback machine would necessarily help for a lot of it), but there’s a shocking amount of really good technical information and advice that has been deleted off of the internet as a result of people protesting reddit. Especially because the tech-literate are more often going to be the ones who use those scripts and end up leaving.
Well thats a consequence of reddit monetizing off of the userbase’s knowledge.
Visit the tech forms. They’re just as good if not better.
I hand deleted my technical comments all off Reddit before attempting to mass delete my account. I don’t really care about people being able to find answers to engineering and physics questions on Reddit. They don’t deserve traffic from my answers.
I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments
after the whole scandal in the summer, i deleted all my comments on my 15 year old account. i realized that i was creating content (aka providing free work to reddit) and they couldn’t care less about the older users. from now on all my comments get overwritten after a few weeks
Same.
While I wasn’t some power user, I did have many comments with 1k or more votes.
Reddits decision to first destroy the UX of Reddit and then destroy the best Reddit apps made my decision to delete everything very easy.
This is annoying, there are some obscure tech questions that have possibly been answered but I’ll never know because a spam deleted script was run.
I wouldn’t mind if they just added it to the comment that they left the site it’s just that they remove it entirely.
The point of a protest is that you do mind it
Don’t be mad at us for deleting our comments, be mad at Reddit employees, admins, and Spez for turning the website to what it is right now.
You can usually find archived versions of the pages on internet Archive and Archive.today.
Fuck I feel you, it sucks but was the whole point of why they did it, cause it made Reddit less useful and more annoying. People who’ve spent years answering questions that would be referenced from the thousands to the millions were deleted. They didn’t want Reddit to continue to benefit even if it hurts everyone else to.
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.
You think the idea was to just get rid of all the users so they could be replaced by AI bots, only as an indirect way of competing against Google, with the added frustration of being just as enshitified?
Because people have either moved on or have switched to kbin, lemmy and raddle. Evrryone worthwile anyway :3
i usually use fling up more than raddle
