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I’m glad to be totally off of Reddit now but I have to say, props to the mods doing this kind of stuff. It’s pretty hilarious
They’re getting no end of grief from bad/paid actors though.
The amount of whinging and bootlicking from people taking Spez’s side was insane before I left for good.
It doesn’t seem organic. Protest posts would get 95% upvotes, then suddenly 12 hours later get slammed with bootlickers and downvotes.
Reddit felt really astroturfed for years now. Start mentioning Neill Druckman in any capacity and your post immediately got flooded with copy paste hate centered on TLoU2. It seemed organic at the time, but when the TV series came out it was very sus, as if somebody had forgotten to turn off their bot army.
What a weird thing to target with bots.
Transphobes came out of the woodwork for it. And not only were they annoying for the obvious reasons, but they’ve also poisoned the well for criticism. I loathed the plot, but I have to be careful with my criticism so I don’t get lumped in with them.
I’ve talked to a few that seemed organic, but those were basically people who wanted Reddit to get back to normal and not waste time on bullshit that didn’t affect them personally.
i did check in a few communities that i was engaging with before, and honestly, it seemed organic, but it was always lurkers/semi-lurkers who don’t post and only comment like once every two months. accounts for the delay as well, because they don’t check reddit that often (before everything went to shit posts would usually be gathering views for a good 24 hours)
but reddit also started using chatgpt to prop itself up lately (which afaik is against chatgpt’s tos, so that’s nice for the future lawsuit if they wanna cash in), so idk. that does put a damper on their legitimacy.
Wasn’t it proven that majority of the positive spez posts are from bots or chatgpt or something?
At least one post defending spez in r/programming has been shown to be chatGPT, that’s for sure. If they have one bot, who’s to say they don’t have thousands?
I can’t tell you how many 1-2 year old accounts I saw with little to no post history that popped out of the woodwork to defend reddit/spez. It was crazy.
Same for spam/ shill accounts on iPhone/ Google play reviews.
They’re definitely trying to plug the holes with bubble gum instead of fixing/ addressing the problem which is spez and the 3rd party app/api ban.
I hope they don’t bend to them. Reddit fully deserves this level of overt trolling at this point.
Yup, before the 1st I was getting mass harassed by what were clearly new accounts for pointing out the responders were clearly copying/pasting from a script.
But once that was pointed out, only 12 year old accounts with little posting history showed up lol, which seemed bizarre.
I had a guy try to justify the latter type of account as “I’m just not very active on reddit”. My man, you made one post, commented on one other post a few weeks later, then complete radio silence for 9 years, just to pop up spreading anti-trans propaganda on post after post?
You just described Reddit in general
No doubt, but they’ve really ramped up lately. It’s like all the manchildren from t_D suddenly saw their chance to be assholes again without consequence.
The un-moderated right wing shit has been very pronounced on Reddit the last few weeks.
It’s almost as if making changes that are blatantly hostile to the unpaid group of people who literally keep your site from devolving into a cesspool on a daily basis isn’t the best of ideas…
Watch r/ conservative and r/ conspiracy become default subs lol
I don’t think anyone would even notice next to the garbage that’s already served by default on Reddit.
Going to the front page not logged in is like visiting YouTube outside of your account. It’s fucking trash.
… because Glorious Leader is a far right wing turd.
I’m happy that they’re keeping it up, but I’ve already moved on to the point that even if Reddit were to completely go back on the API change, I wouldn’t come back. Personally I’ve already moved the goal post to where Steve Huffman needs to go before I’d consider ever going back. Reddit is dead for all I care.
I’ve been editing and deleting 10+ year old comments to deny them that sweet sweet LLM data. No way for me to go back, and I wouldn’t anyway
Listen there’s a whole board at reddit that greenlit every decision he’s made. He’s not some mad scientist.
The way reddit has decided, as a company, to treat their users over the last 40 days or so, that’s enough for me.
Imagine if in the MySpace days we all found out that using MySpace was generating ad revenue for Tom so he could build a torture chamber for puppies. That would have been awful enough that even 20 years later, (holy shit MySpace was 20 years ago) and over a decade after Tom had left the company, we would still feel weird about going there to hang out online, and a lot of us would feel disgust every time we were served an ad on the platform.
What I’m saying, is Steve Huffman kills puppies and even accessing reddit.com is basically condoning puppy torture. Wait, no. What I’m saying is reddit has created a blemish so hideous that I wouldn’t, not even if I was like, really really drunk. Ya Digg?
It doesn’t matter if huffman goes. This is the result of wanting to make $$$$$$. That won’t ever change.
Agreed. It is funny to hear about, but they would have to roll back years of changes for me to even consider it at this point. Since there is no money in that for them it is pretty much a moot point.
I just went and looked at r/videos and I gotta admit that the text-only descriptions of videos and enforcing swearing in every post title is pretty funny.
Good that the protest keeps going. Lemmy AND Squabbles are not a fraction of what Reddit was for all my interests and hobbies. Let’s hope more and more people keep learning about the alternatives.
I wish more of the larger subs were still protesting and didn’t roll over so easily. But regardless the site has taken a massive hit to its reputation and one can only hope that recovery won’t be possible moving forward and it screws them out of their chance to go public.
Honestly, /r/all is pretty pitiful these days
I logged out of my account at the start of all this, but occasionally I go back and check out reddit as an unlogged lurker. It’s astonishing how low-quality the front page is when it’s not filtered by subjects you’re actually interested in. And good lord is new reddit ever a terrible user experience.
The article mentions r/pics, r/vids, and r/funny
These are large subs.
Don’t worry, doordash_drivers is now a recommended sub for everyone 💀
I think most of the larger ones were forced to reopen by the admins
Admin was kicking mods that didn’t approve. Absolutely forced to reopen.
The thing is, Reddit doesn’t allow subs to run unmoderated, so IIRC there were instances where they’d kick out the moderators for not re-opening and then have to close the sub again for being unmoderated.
They are already finding scabs to come in and moderate. The quality will be shitty but they don’t care.
Give it 3 months and it’s all forgotten about. New users won’t know the difference.
The difference is right here, all of us being here instead of there.
Part of me, and I think everyone else here, wants some level of vindication in the form of Reddit taking a hit. Likely most of the current users won’t notice any big changes and most of it will be back to the content they’re used to in a few months. But as someone else here pointed out it’s likely Reddit will survive as Facebook has, shitty recycled content from other platforms and zero decent discussion. Which again, 90% of their current user base won’t notice or care about. I’m just glad we’ve got a new place where the discussion seems to be a bit more on par with old Reddit
The weird thing is that my experience of Reddit probably didn’t resemble 95% of what was going on there, ever. I had my slice of subs and things I followed and that was great for me. Every so often I would view it logged out and it seemed like a different site, full of garbage viral shite. I assume it will continue to be that. Gallowboob or whatever will still post crap for eyeballs.
I honestly expected after the API changes rolled out that the backlash on Reddit would stop but I’m glad to see the shenanigans continue.
I believe the failed Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus made spez and his yesmen cocky. I hope they underestimated how much more tech savvy the average redditor is - especially the nexus poster, who keep the community afloat.
I think they overestimated how much engagement the average reditter provides. Most people are consuming content, but not contributing any or posting comments or clicking ads or anything. 90% of engagement is driven by like 20% of users or some shit like that.
I suspect twitter is similar. But a difference between Reddit and twitter is how easily power users can migrate.
On twitter, you follow people. Power users were often cautious cause they didn’t want to lose their followers and non power users wanted to be where the power users are.
But on Reddit, you follow communities. For power users, there’s few direct followers to lose and for non power users, as long as there’s enough content, it doesn’t matter much who created it.
Another important difference is that reddit concepts map better onto lemmy than twitter onto mastodon. Additionally, one important aspect of twitter is the proximity to journalists, celebrities and politicians. Reddit doesn’t really have that (except for /r/iama).
Same, as much as I hope lemmy succeeds, I simultaneously hope that the API changes get reversed. Good job to those fighting for this over there
I am afraid the two might be mutually exclusive. Lemmy is like old Reddit and still on early adopters. We get more and more newcomers only because Reddit is going downhill.
I think Lemmy’s biggest challenges are server stability, increased complexity to use (most don’t understand things like instances), and low awareness from others. I only learned about it a day or two ago. Signed up out of curiosity.
But if Lemmy gets even more popular then the various popular instances are going to be stressed. It looks unstable to newcomers who go back to Reddit.
I signed up for lemmy.world originally, constantly had gateway errors. Lemm.ee seems more stable due to lower traffic.
But others may not be able to recognize that. Even if they did, might not want to create new accounts for several instances and go back to starting from 0.
Agreed. Also joined Lemmy a couple days ago and don’t yet fully understand how everything works. I’m hoping that lemmy apps add features to make it easier for people who aren’t very tech-savvy, like automatically assigning people to a general purpose instance (one that isn’t too full preferably) unless they wish to choose a specific one.
Another thing is that I believe links to posts are somehow instance specific and you have to “convert” them to point to your instance’s version of said post, or something like that, in order to see comments and interact. That seems clunky and should probably be made easier somehow, maybe apps could automatically convert links? Or maybe there is a way to make links instance-agnostic from the get go.
Just some things I’ve noticed in my time here. Very much enjoying the experience though!
No, I figured this would go on a lot longer than just the blackout. There has been a lot of built up resentment in the mod community that the admins never really addressed. Now that the admins ripped away most mod tools, a lot of mods are pissed.
Okay, hear me out:
I get the argument that most of these protests are meaningless/if you REALLY want to change you’re going to have to do this this this. whatever (I usually stop reading there). I understand, but I don’t agree.
Sure, it’s nice when a protest can actually enact real changes but lets face it; that’s not common and sometimes not going to happen: fine. The decision to make a protest shouldn’t be decided on the basis of ‘can I win’; a much less restrictive–and very deeply fun–philosophy should be "is this worth taking time out of my day just to annoy/frustrate/irritate those who are doing this?’ If yes (it should always be yes), "So lets find out how many ways me and anyone else I can recruit can make this happen’.
In other words: every time a subreddit finds a new and interesting and stupid and ridiculous and just weird way to be irritating and embarrassing af…I am living for this.
Very refreshing take on it. The cynicism about whether the protests were ‘worth it’ because we didn’t see massive results felt like it missed all the fun of giving the greedy corporation the collective finger.
The problem is that the finger is still a form of engagement when you do it on the site you’re protesting. The admins don’t care as long as you’re still driving clicks.
Legit and I agree.
However, nothing in my experience with Reddit Admins has contradicted my impression that when they were five years old, you could give them a full screaming meltdown playing “I’m not touching you” in three minutes or less. Can I prove it if they aren’t melting down regularly over some of this where I can see it? No. But I know it’s happening, and that’s enough.
So long as it hurts Reddit, all the better.
This whole API issue is a lost cause, so the only thing that can be done now is to make Reddit lose big.
Yep the fight for Reddit is lost. All we can do is make an example of them.
Just like Reddit made an example of Digg.
Reddit is a lot less active now. Gotta love it
People on Reddit keep saying things are mostly back to normal, while tiny subs are hitting the front page of /r/all on the regular with like 2k votes.
Also, I’ve noticed a pretty significant increase in overt racism. Or rather, significant decrease in moderation of it. I shouldn’t be surprised but it keeps catching me off-guard.
Like what? I can’t say I’ve noticed much difference other than less activity overall
For myself, the quality in posts has dropped significantly. I’m always challenging myself to learn, I also learn better with things that interest me. I’ve found since Boost for Reddit went down that not even old reddit is catching my attention. I feel bored. This is for popular or r/all. If I’m on my own homepage it’s like Reddit never changed as I’m subbed to mostly all small subs.
For my frontpage the change is small but still noticeable:
/r/pcm was always holding on by a thread, it looks like all the quality posters and moderation have left/given up.
/r/chess is down about 10-20% of its normal upvotes
/r/ProgrammerHumor is down about 50%
/r/Sysadmin is surprisingly normal-ish for upvotes, but the posts aren’t great. Although that sub has been mostly off topic rants for a while now… not sure I want to purely attribute that to the API change.
Any luck with RIF or a similar app for Lemmy? Someone(s) develop that tool and Reddit is toast
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So far wefwef has been my favorite. It’s a web app and has to be downloaded through Safari or Chrome, but it was made by the developer of Apollo and is very similar the overall experience of using that. Liftoff is a close second.
- Connect
- Wefwef
- Jerboa
Those are the ones that come to mind
RiF fanatic here. Neither mirrors directly. But Jerboa wasn’t bad. And I find I like Connect the best.
Yeah former RIF user here too, and so far Connect is the best I’ve found
It’s still going on?
I know that r/Python is closed, which is big sub. I ended up there after some search.
I love it. Especially that the mods of the default subs have the balls to do it
Meanwhile redditors on /r/piracy kicked their own mod for continuing the protest. I think their Lemmy migration to lemmy.dbzer0.com is a bit too effective and now only loyal redditors left at that sub.
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Moderators are either absent or they post generic botty-sounding messages like, “Please be civil” while not actually moderating anything.
So they’re refusing to work for Reddit for free. Good for them!
It’s so weird to see all the people still fighting on Reddit when I’ve already moved on
Most importantly I think the app devs have moved on. They’d have to do something particularly amazing to lure them back. That’s the death knell.
Yes, I think the biggest mistake spez made was sending all the best devs on the platform directly to his biggest competitor.
I really dont see a point in fighting at this point. Reddit is dead for me.
The point is to trash the site so new users don’t join, if they replace the number they lost they can say “hey look, we recovered in only 6 months”
For for how much heavy handed their initial reaction was, I’m surprised that Reddit doesn’t take more aggressive actions. Spez has the loudest voice on highest pole, yet so far he only managed to anger everyone.
Fuck Spez.
It can be easily concluded from his AMA that he is a fool. Big mouth with small brain.
And he was a mod for a very disgusting sub back when it was active.
Although I dislike him as much as anyone, I read that in the early days you could add users as mods without the need for users to accept.
He was supposedly posting on the sub as well. Plus you can remove yourself as a mod, especially if you’re an admin.
Ah, yeah that makes things even worse. Jesus Christ, us sheep of reddit that hailed him when he took over as ceo after that woman who’s name I don’t remember.
Ellen Pao?
Yeah, that’s the one.
I’m not sure they can. What can they do? I doubt they’ll replace moderators with paid Reddit workers. The alternative is to replace them with other power hungry moderators who will bend a knee to the Reddit admins. That might work on some major subreddits but the PR of that might cause more damage.
I think the admins hoped it would have blown over by now. If it’s still going on by September I bet they’ll need to do something.
And the problem is that people who are power hungry and only doing it to scratch that itch can’t be trusted to maintain a valuable community. That’s not the type of people they are.
And people who create the content are moving to other platforms. I’ve deleted all of my reddit links and apps to reduce the likeyhood I’ll stumble across a reddit post. Also starting to take some of my better reddit posts and edit them to remove any valuable content, and post on Lemmy instead.
