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.
It’s mostly bots anywway
It really is. Such drivel they are posting too.
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
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.
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
It had its moments
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”.
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.
*its
Monty Python’s Flying Circus!
Wow, I even hear the music playing in my head when I read that.
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
“Social” media is dying, these 2 or so generations will be looked upon partly curious partly estranged in the future, I’d like to believe things regulate themselves through chaos. And I’m curious how and to what it will transform. Too slow, so much is certain. It’s all so painfully slow until the celebrity voyeurs and TV substituters get it at last.
Social media is dying.
You’ve never heard of Tiktok?
Have you seen the quality of content on Tiktok?
Yeah, there’s plenty of good stuff there.
No, because I don’t have a Tiktok, but I’ve heard how shit it is. The point is that people aren’t using less social media, they’re using more. They just migrated to new ones. It doesn’t seem to be dying any time soon.
The trend I’ve read recently is that most people are moving to more private social media (private discord servers for example) and it looks like federation might be gaining some popularity with large social media companies, which I remain cautiously optimistic about
We did it guys. We’ve posted everything there is to post and now we can finally rest.
got the link? OP’s account is (suspiciously?) deleted
I just assumed that everyone with a username of word-word-number there was a bot or sockpuppet.
I think reddit gives new accounts a default username with that format.
It’s also people who create throwaways. Reddit gives a randomized username following that format.
Interesting. I wonder if there were any mod tools (before reddit broke them) that automatically banned accounts like that. I doubt serious bot creators would use that auto-name style but it might’ve gotten rid of some spam.
On the subreddits I moderated, I used a big regexp to preemptively filter their comments
Letting one through was a rare event
It’s not serious bot creators that you need to worry about. Trolls use the “adjective noun number” format on their new accounts. Restricting those users, accounts less than 3 days old, and accounts with less than zero karma will virtually eliminate trolling.
If trolls had patience and foresight, they wouldn’t be trolls.
I found this screenshot elsewhere, where people were sharing stuff about reddit feeling worse and worse.
Just did some googling and found the original post for this one, and it looks like it’s from August or September, so not that long after a significant chunk of users gave up on the site.
I can’t get over the people in the comments there complaining about reddit being a literal communist platform. Meanwhile here we have actual communist instances, reddit isn’t even lukewarm left leaning. Liberal at best.
Is anyone going to tell them?
Nope, OOP guessed it in one. Everything there is to post has already been posted. Close it down, guys, there’s nothing left to post. Internet’s done.
What is The Ory of Reddit?
Reddit changed their upvote algorithm which is why it looks so much lower than it really is.
They covered this years ago…
What was the algorithm and why?
It was too “easy” for regular users to get upvotes and too hard for bots to get upvotes probably. Certain comments and posts now have downvote caps of 0 points so depending on what agenda a comment supports, it may not be possible to downvote into negative numbers.
As a rule of thumb, anything you say is getting downvoted but if someone else posts the same thing, it gets highly upvoted. Reddit is cancer.
Reddit is cancer! Friends don’t let Friends reddit. Remind one person today of this reddit clone!
This is not a Reddit clone. This is something better. An individual instance would be closer to a Reddit clone but even then we all know which one is open source…
A worthy distinction thank kind sir!
Ew. Yeah that’s why I left. It was shocking how down voted into oblivion I was when someone literally in a comment thread after me shares a similar opinion and is positive.
Before 2016 posts moved extremely fast. There used to be a joke that the entire front page was new every time you refreshed it. After The_Donald figured out how to game their algorithm to dominate the front page, reddit took advantage of the opportunity to neuter the algorithm completely so that it was more advertiser friendly. Now the front page remains static for most of the day, so sponsored advertiser posts get more exposure.
That explains only the first part of their post, and inadequately. If reddit made (and explained) the algorithm years ago, what accounts for the recent drop M(eta)OP is seeing.
The second half isn’t about votes at all. There, they complain that there’s far less content on the site, so the algorithm theory doesn’t appy.
They changed to to massively inflate the displayed vote totals though. Old reddit was showing actual vote totals with some fuzzing. The algorithm change in 2016 or whatever was to reflect engagement and engagement velocity in the displayed post scores, which is how we got the huge 100k+ top posts. If they have changed away from that I haven’t seen anything about it.
to reflect engagement and engagement velocity in the displayed post scores
Ah, a bullshit artist! Did you bullshit last week? Did you try to bullshit last week?
Yes 😒😮💨
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
