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I'm going to press X to doubt. Reddit is infuriatingly sticky. Every time I land on a post from 10+ years ago (like this one [0] for example), I go to the auth

I'm going to press X to doubt. Reddit is infuriatingly sticky. Every time I land on a post from 10+ years ago (like this one [0] for example), I go to the author's profile page. Almost inevitably, they've written a comment within the last week. This is a remarkable property for a social website to have, and it's not one that I see exhibited in other places, like StackOverflow or ancient vBulletin forums. I'd like to think that this is finally Reddit's "Digg moment," but I am just not convinced. The boycott was over in 48 hours and everything is back to normal, but people are just complaining more. Heck, the commenter I linked to from 11 years ago also commented two hours ago, unsurprisingly, complaining about the API changes. As offensive as Steve Huffman has been throughout this saga, he doesn't seem to be wrong. Reddit could shoot a third party app on Fifth Avenue and people would still use it... [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rx9u9/til_grigori_perelman_best_known_for_resolving_the/c49gpjj/ https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rx9u9/til_gr...

tnecniv 3y ago
Eh I think this will fundamentally change the site, almost like the inverse of the Digg exodus. A lot of us old school users are angry and done. The newer users that haven’t experienced a different social cycle of Reddit are the one are the ones upset that the mods are revolting. Over the last month, the quality of the front page has significantly dropped, and the remaining subs were heavily biased towards the ones that most recently rose to prominence (and have the most repeated / bland takes in the comments). I’m not going to claim that Reddit was a bastion of intellectualism back in the day, but the mean effort put into comments on the main subs has deteriorated over time and today might very well mark a discontinuity in that
mdu02 3y ago
I have (had) a 9 year old Reddit account, that I unironically grew up with. I created it when I was 12 (sue me COPPA) to comment on a Cookie Clicker subreddit. I remember my cakeday, May 28, 2014. It really was a lifestyle app. The account had comments on all the games I played as a teenager, fitness and university subreddits, random hobbies I picked up for a few months, basically every single one of my interests for the past decade. I had a NSFW burner that received frequent use. I have to say, you're pretty accurate about how I was basically active and commenting once or more a week for the majority of my conscious life. I started using the RiF app on a god awful 2010 phone when I created my account, and have used Sync since probably 2016. I blanked then wiped all of my comments and then deleted my account two weeks ago. To be truthful, Reddit had a much different feel already, but nothing can stay constant for that long. It was already frustrating me that (my perceived) quality of discussion on the site has steadily become dumber and any mainstream news or political sub is astroturfed to hell (presumably by the Russians). I started seeing the emoji or "lol who cares" in response to perfectly normal comments. The East Palestine derailment frenzy was what made me realize that the website is definitely attacked by coordinated actors. I spent the last few months on the site browsing /r/neoliberal not because I necessarily agreed with the tenets of the ideology, but because it was one of the few reasonable political subs left, and /r/CredibleDefence for broadly pro-West but reasonable takes on the war. I slowly realized that I was reading empty content. Much of my time on the site was seeing a clearly stupid, if not false comment, and realizing that the effort I would put in debunking or arguing was going to reach two or three eyeballs. Essentially, much of Reddit is the one eyed preaching to the blind. I frequently typed up long comments (much like this one) for an hour or so, and returned to maybe 4-5 upvotes, since the post had already peaked in popularity. I had a few long posts in /r/summonerschool , a League of Legends advice subreddit that were probably 10x the detail of any other comment advice and took me an hour to watch their gameplay and give specific comments. In short, I felt I was trying to suck shit water from an Olympic sized pool through a lifestraw and hoping it would clean it up. The 3rd party app ban was a huge fucking slap to my face. Call me arrogant, but I believe I contributed more than my fair share to the running of Reddit by creating high quality discourse on the website. And in return? I get slapped with a shit UI and advertisements up my ass through the official app. And spez's response showed a complete lack of any attention to the website, to any concerns to the community that is most of the value proposition of their site. Their claims to be looking for profit now are transparent as fuck when you remember all their failed, clearly unmonetizable crap they've put dev hours and low interest money on in the past few years (NFTs, the other crypto crap, whatever RPAN was supposed to be). Coast by on institutional inertia while you piss away money, let the website decline in quality, and then aggressively try to monetize from the most loyal users (the decade long user who uses a third party app)? No thanks. So yeah, I blew up my account. To be honest, I am having some withdrawal symptoms and am trying hard not to relapse, but I see it as the only moral route to proceed. The internet is broadly really quite bad. Twitter is tolerable but has similar ethical issues and quality depends very much on topic. I am getting into Substack, but that is ultimately a newsletter publisher and not a discussion forum. Any non-reddit result on Google is unusable. Maybe the internet will agree on a replacement. Maybe it keeps on spiralling down the enshittification drain. For now, HackerNews occupies the space on my phone's home screen that Reddit used to. I hope the future isn't as crap as I anticipate. Rant over.
- kasrkin623 3y ago
  [flagged]
johnnyanmac 3y ago
Three problems with your theory: 1. Deleted users aren't going to pop up as much 2. It's going to be highly dependent on your search history. I'm sure more technically minded people will be around more often than results found on news subs or some more specific hobbies. 3. Commenting last week doesn't mean they are a regular commenter. Many of those people IME comment much less frequently later on. Maybe from a daily commenter to a weekly or monthly one. They are around, but not as active. >As offensive as Steve Huffman has been throughout this saga, he doesn't seem to be wrong. Reddit could shoot a third party app on Fifth Avenue and people would still use it... On a macro level, sure. I think anyone hoping for a sudden implosion was dreaming. But many are talking long term, a death by a million papercuts. There will be no one reason reddit dies. Also, sample of one: I did in fact leave years ago. Still lurked w/o an account, but these actions caused me to try and replace nearly every community I have. The main hole atm is a steady stream of gaming discussions. So i unfortunately may spend some 15 minutes browsing some niche gaming subs for certain news.

tnecniv 3y ago

Eh I think this will fundamentally change the site, almost like the inverse of the Digg exodus. A lot of us old school users are angry and done. The newer users that haven’t experienced a different social cycle of Reddit are the one are the ones upset that the mods are revolting. Over the last month, the quality of the front page has significantly dropped, and the remaining subs were heavily biased towards the ones that most recently rose to prominence (and have the most repeated / bland takes in the comments). I’m not going to claim that Reddit was a bastion of intellectualism back in the day, but the mean effort put into comments on the main subs has deteriorated over time and today might very well mark a discontinuity in that

mdu02 3y ago

I have (had) a 9 year old Reddit account, that I unironically grew up with. I created it when I was 12 (sue me COPPA) to comment on a Cookie Clicker subreddit. I remember my cakeday, May 28, 2014. It really was a lifestyle app. The account had comments on all the games I played as a teenager, fitness and university subreddits, random hobbies I picked up for a few months, basically every single one of my interests for the past decade. I had a NSFW burner that received frequent use. I have to say, you're pretty accurate about how I was basically active and commenting once or more a week for the majority of my conscious life. I started using the RiF app on a god awful 2010 phone when I created my account, and have used Sync since probably 2016. I blanked then wiped all of my comments and then deleted my account two weeks ago. To be truthful, Reddit had a much different feel already, but nothing can stay constant for that long. It was already frustrating me that (my perceived) quality of discussion on the site has steadily become dumber and any mainstream news or political sub is astroturfed to hell (presumably by the Russians). I started seeing the emoji or "lol who cares" in response to perfectly normal comments. The East Palestine derailment frenzy was what made me realize that the website is definitely attacked by coordinated actors. I spent the last few months on the site browsing /r/neoliberal not because I necessarily agreed with the tenets of the ideology, but because it was one of the few reasonable political subs left, and /r/CredibleDefence for broadly pro-West but reasonable takes on the war. I slowly realized that I was reading empty content. Much of my time on the site was seeing a clearly stupid, if not false comment, and realizing that the effort I would put in debunking or arguing was going to reach two or three eyeballs. Essentially, much of Reddit is the one eyed preaching to the blind. I frequently typed up long comments (much like this one) for an hour or so, and returned to maybe 4-5 upvotes, since the post had already peaked in popularity. I had a few long posts in /r/summonerschool , a League of Legends advice subreddit that were probably 10x the detail of any other comment advice and took me an hour to watch their gameplay and give specific comments. In short, I felt I was trying to suck shit water from an Olympic sized pool through a lifestraw and hoping it would clean it up. The 3rd party app ban was a huge fucking slap to my face. Call me arrogant, but I believe I contributed more than my fair share to the running of Reddit by creating high quality discourse on the website. And in return? I get slapped with a shit UI and advertisements up my ass through the official app. And spez's response showed a complete lack of any attention to the website, to any concerns to the community that is most of the value proposition of their site. Their claims to be looking for profit now are transparent as fuck when you remember all their failed, clearly unmonetizable crap they've put dev hours and low interest money on in the past few years (NFTs, the other crypto crap, whatever RPAN was supposed to be). Coast by on institutional inertia while you piss away money, let the website decline in quality, and then aggressively try to monetize from the most loyal users (the decade long user who uses a third party app)? No thanks. So yeah, I blew up my account. To be honest, I am having some withdrawal symptoms and am trying hard not to relapse, but I see it as the only moral route to proceed. The internet is broadly really quite bad. Twitter is tolerable but has similar ethical issues and quality depends very much on topic. I am getting into Substack, but that is ultimately a newsletter publisher and not a discussion forum. Any non-reddit result on Google is unusable. Maybe the internet will agree on a replacement. Maybe it keeps on spiralling down the enshittification drain. For now, HackerNews occupies the space on my phone's home screen that Reddit used to. I hope the future isn't as crap as I anticipate. Rant over.

kasrkin623 3y ago
[flagged]

johnnyanmac 3y ago

Three problems with your theory: 1. Deleted users aren't going to pop up as much 2. It's going to be highly dependent on your search history. I'm sure more technically minded people will be around more often than results found on news subs or some more specific hobbies. 3. Commenting last week doesn't mean they are a regular commenter. Many of those people IME comment much less frequently later on. Maybe from a daily commenter to a weekly or monthly one. They are around, but not as active. >As offensive as Steve Huffman has been throughout this saga, he doesn't seem to be wrong. Reddit could shoot a third party app on Fifth Avenue and people would still use it... On a macro level, sure. I think anyone hoping for a sudden implosion was dreaming. But many are talking long term, a death by a million papercuts. There will be no one reason reddit dies. Also, sample of one: I did in fact leave years ago. Still lurked w/o an account, but these actions caused me to try and replace nearly every community I have. The main hole atm is a steady stream of gaming discussions. So i unfortunately may spend some 15 minutes browsing some niche gaming subs for certain news.