7 ms·

> Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful thing that it's almost unkillable. Looking forward to see how true this is. The communities I us

by diggan 3y ago

> Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful thing that it's almost unkillable. Looking forward to see how true this is. The communities I used to frequent, have maybe 20% of the activity they used to, before the API fiasco, even though they're "back online". I also stopped using reddit on the phone after my chosen reddit client was closed down (which I'm grateful for, thanks reddit). My reddit activity probably dropped way below half compared to before, as the communities I used to be in are now shells of their former glory.

unshavedyak 3y ago
Yea, i stopped using it from mobile entirely when that happened. I expect them to kill `old.reddit` soon any that'll be the end of that for me. ATProto is far more interesting to me, if/when someone makes a link aggregator for them rather than the Twitter style UI of Bluesky. ActivityPub will do in a pinch, if needed. (i already tested this idea, for ~60 days with zero Reddit)
- mrmlz 3y ago
  Modern Reddit is such a broken experience especially on the web. And honestly the community has degraded over the last couple of years.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pixl97 3y ago
    And the number of bots is out of control. I'm guessing they are accounts that pretend to be regular users by copying other user comments on the same topic and posting them days/weeks later when the topic gets brought up again. Then I assume at some point in the future they'll be sold off to spammers or manipulators of some kind.
- WA9ACE 3y ago
  Old style interface on a development focused lemmy instance has completely replaced reddit usage for me This is the equivalent of /r/all across the lemmy world https://old.programming.dev/?sort=Active&listingType=All https://old.programming.dev/?sort=Active&listingType=All
  - europeanNyan 3y ago
    It looks like Old Reddit, but the content is New Reddit. It's just a stream of political dreck and virtue signalling. I really don't need to see Trump in every second post and read about people who hate cars, meat, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
    - Goronmon 3y ago
      I really don't need to see Trump in every second post and read about people who hate cars, meat, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Exactly. All I see online is people talking about politics, their jobs, their families, their hobbies, the environment, technology, etc.
    - piaste 3y ago
      Yeah, Lemmy is a pretty decent platform but the suggestion of browsing "All" is godawful, if one is looking for something closer to pre-smartphone internet. You need to curate your homepage a bit to get a good Lemmy experience. The tech side may be like Reddit, but the human aspect is more like a couple dozen vBulletin forums rolled into one. Some of the instances are (imo) full of straight-up insane and, worse, perpetually angry people. Some instance admins may be power-hungry and prone to drama - but you might not care if the only subreddit you follow from their instance is c/jazz and you just click on Youtube/Spotify links from it. Is it a pain? Yes. But I still prefer to deal with a couple dozen weirdos than with a single billion-dollar company.
      - dingnuts 3y ago
        >Some of the instances are (imo) full of straight-up insane and, worse, perpetually angry people This has been true for every instance of every Fedi thing I've ever tried to use or thought of using. And many instances block single-user instances so forget about running your own unless you only want to interact with the absolute fringest nutjob basement-dwellers -- because the "mainstream" Fedi is already fringe. I once had the dumb impulse to reply to someone who was mad about fluoride in drinking water with "you probably get more fluoride from your toothpaste" and I deleted my account as I started to receive arguments about brushing your teeth, as it made me realize exactly the kind of people I would be interacting with on this network. Honestly I think this is grows out of the incentives for operating a homeserver. There's a negative financial incentive so you must have some other kind of motivator, likely a desire for influence or power.
- account42 3y ago
  > I expect them to kill `old.reddit` soon They have already started to redirect direct image links to the new reddit garbage which has stopped my usage for reddit for entertainment when bored.
  - agmater 3y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/load-reddit-images-directly/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/load-reddit-i... This solved that for me, but yeah it seems inevitable that all these user hostile decisions make the site unusable.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  What kills me about old vs new reddit is feature parity is just not there. There's also a huge lack of tooling for reddit modding, but what really kills me is how long new reddit has been in development for and still no feature parity. Instead of making old reddit an archive on github, they should have made new reddits front-end open. I'm sure it would be miles ahead if the users were allowed to contribute like they once did with old reddit. I wonder how much money was spent to build new reddit. Feels like a dumpster fire.
aerhardt 3y ago
I’m on a similar boat, but for all we know, for each of us there might be ten new users who have recently flocked to the site and don’t give a damn.
- jtriangle 3y ago
  Not all users are created equal. Reddit's lost a ton of valuable contributors, via enshitification, and I only expect that to get worse.
dncornholio 3y ago
I would like to see some hard number from people that claim Reddit was hurt from the "API Fiasco". My theory is that this is a very small number of users with a very loud voice. Entitled mods were the only people that closed down subs. Most users did not even support this decision. Same is happening again now, entitled moderaters who complain about CEO pay. If anything is destroying Reddit, it's the mods IMO.
- piva00 3y ago
  At the same time, good moderation is what made reddit what it is, if there weren't mods doing free work for reddit in 2009 it would be flooded with YouTube comments style of content since that's what low friction posting without moderation achieves.
  - dncornholio 3y ago
    Yeah but Reddit doesn't owe the mods anything, the users do.
    - mostlysimilar 3y ago
      What? Reddit owes their entire platform to their volunteer moderators and users who contribute content. Reddit the company adds almost nothing of value, the tech isn't exactly special -- if anything it's so bad as to be hindrance.
    - Starman_Jones 3y ago
      The dog doesn't owe anything to the hand that feeds it, but it would still do well not to bite it.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  The hypothesis without data is that users [mods/power users] who cared about reddit, who contributed to reddit, have largely left or disengaged to an extent. I would like to see numbers myself, though. However, looking at reddit/r/all, I suspect much of that activity is botting. I mean, no one can seriously post "my gf cheated, AITAH for breaking up with her?". Come on...
spelunker 3y ago
As an opposite anecdote, I probably use it as much now as before the API stuff.
Lalabadie 3y ago
Yeah, that's an affirmation from someone who's in a very pampered US-centric group of Reddit users (if he is that at all). "My investment is very good!" In the last year, Reddit has pushed localized home pages across the world, and my own example is the default home page for Canada. It's now exclusively sports and right-wing nuttery. There were good communities, but they were molded by their good moderators, and these moderators are gone.
- concordDance 3y ago
  > In the last year, Reddit has pushed localized home pages across the world, and my own example is the default home page for Canada. I found this quite nice. A lot less American politics on the front page and some fun bits of local news.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  > and my own example is the default home page for Canada. It's now exclusively sports and right-wing nuttery. I think that’s typical for any national sub, because it will be filled with people that live in places that don’t have the critical mass for a local/regional subreddit (or just don’t fit into it).
  - Lalabadie 3y ago
    I'm not talking about the /r/Canada subreddit, I'm talking about the complete front page feed for Canadian visitors. There are several "main" Canadian subreddits, and the only ones showing up for anon Canadian guests now are the right-wing and far-right subreddits.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - VancouverMan 3y ago
      Can you be specific about these "right-wing and far-right" subreddits you're seeing on the front page? I'm not logged in (I don't have a Reddit account), I'm in Canada, and on the Reddit home page I'm currently seeing submissions associated with these Canada-specific subreddits: 6 for r/canada 2 for r/onguardforthee 2 for r/ontario 2 for r/PersonalFinanceCanada 1 for r/alberta 1 for r/vancouver None of those subreddits look "right-wing" or "far-right" to me in any way. In fact, I'm surprised at how left-leaning they tend to be, especially r/alberta. Of the current top five submissions there, four are for CBC articles, for example, and there are a few other CBC articles on the first page. r/onguardforthee seems to be overtly left wing. The other front page subreddits are broad (like r/AskReddit, r/politics, r/news), or about sports or hobbies (like r/gaming, r/baseball, r/hockey, r/FigureSkating). None the subreddits I'm seeing on the Reddit front page seem to me to even be right-of-centre, let alone "right-wing" or "far-right".
Workaccount2 3y ago
I had (have?) a twelve year account, coming on the tails of the digg fallout. Once they pulled the API I was out. Not terrible since the site's quality has been in steady decline for years. Eventually you realize you are doing the equivalent of having economics discussions in the youtube comments of a taylor swift video. But it seems that lowest common denominator user is who reddit really wants, so good luck to them.
piva00 3y ago
Quite similar experience, the communities for hobbies I used to check out almost daily are quite dead, they've become mostly a gear-showoff or beginner questions forum, the real content in longer form that some old posters used to create is mostly gone. My own activity dropped like a rock after the API changes killed Apollo, the mobile client I used (and before that reddit had already acqui-killed a previous one Alien Blue). I simply check it out of habit, and mostly for news, don't have much of the joy I had when I had started accessing it back in 2009. Probably it's just the natural cycle of profit-driven social media getting swallowed by Eternal Septembers after the initial batches of users posting interesting content and making the platform cool leave the place when the platform inevitably becomes user-hostile.
- the_af 3y ago
  > Quite similar experience, the communities for hobbies I used to check out almost daily are quite dead I've noticed some of the same for some communities, but where have they gone? Some claim to be migrating to Discord, which in my mind is even worse than Reddit, and to me is a high-stress environment (I simply cannot stand online chat, I've no patience for it, and if you're not constantly online you miss stuff). There are hobby groups in Facebook, which is also disappointing since Facebook groups have terrible UX.
  - account42 3y ago
    Discord is probably the biggest black hole sucking up all kinds of communities right now but that doesn't mean that there aren't others. Old-school forums are still a thing even if less visible these days.
  - simonmic 3y ago
    Some communities move to discourse forums.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  >I simply check it out of habit Adding *.reddit.com to my DNS-blacklist was one of the single-most-productive "lines of code" I've ever added to my personal computer. Cold-turkey, I quit. /r/Supermod, 2010-2014, "the pineapple trees guy; erryday"
1oooqooq 3y ago
shells? they are more likely crap filled boxes of their former glory. communities even remotely related to companies (e.g. r/googlepixel) are run by either fervently crazy zealot fans, or which is more likely, filtered by interns in those companies marketing dept in what seem to be reddit best revenue stream.
holoduke 3y ago
I quit last week with Reddit. I thought it might be a good idea to write a controversial opinion in a sub reddit. Received a perma ban. Well thanks. The content, the way the site works, dark patterns and its just not nice anymore. Happy to be loose.
- mderazon 3y ago
  Have you moved somewhere else?
  - holoduke 3y ago
    No not really. Its maybe also a good time to get rid of that annoying addiction. Lots of time is wasted by browsing and using reddit. At least for me.
- ralfd 3y ago
  Was it r/comics?
- omginternets 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, what was this fringe opinion? I think this is the elephant in the room when it comes to Reddit: it’s been captured by a certain kind of radical ideologue.
  - holoduke 3y ago
    It was my opinion on the Russian war in Ukraine in worldnews. My opinion was not in line with the bubble and received a ban for spreading false information.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - swarnie 3y ago
      Worldnews are pretty well known for banning anyone that looks at them funny; you're permitted exactly one correct opinion, deviation will lead to termination Comrade.
vwoolf 3y ago
I liked it better before the modern Reddit censorship machine. At least old.reddit.com still works. For now.
dogleash 3y ago
It'll shamble on forever. Look at the front page in a private tab right now. Yeah it's all dogshit content, but this is the product now. All the niche communities that made reddit good were dying a slow death well before any of the API stuff. That old product is dead, the current reddit will live forever as long as they can get costs under control.
kspacewalk2 3y ago
I don't notice this at all. Old communities die off and new ones spring up all the time, and the new ones are still springing up alright. The local subs are doing well, there are still plenty of "less popular" subs to have great discussions in. The app is not great not terrible, no biggie. They rather consciously decided that jettisoning some hard-core techies, privacy people and other "weirdos" is an acceptable price to pay for more mass appeal and more profitability. Remember, you as a user are not the client of Reddit Inc, you're the product. You or I may not like that direction, but we're not great products anyway. I block ads for Pete's sake, I am literally worthless to them.
majormajor 3y ago
"Killed"/"killable" is one of those terms that changes with age. Was GM unkillable? Well, they aren't dead, but... Was Windows unkillable? Well, it's not dead, but... Is Facebook unkillable? Well, it's not dead, but... So the old fogies who would tell you GE, GM, IBM are all unkillable aren't wrong but neither were the younger folks they were responding to. Lotta zombies hang on long after their relevance fades for the future. "X is unkillable" is a good way to reveal a limited imagination for future changes. You go from talking about disruption to talking about how things are now disruption-proof!
- FredPret 3y ago
  All the examples you mention, GM, Facebook, and Windows, pump out a ton of money on the regular. GM made ten billion in profit in the last year
  - majormajor 3y ago
    Which of them would you call unkillable? I think Graham is getting a bit sentimental and overly attached to incumbents in his network.
    - FredPret 3y ago
      Nothing is completely unkillable, but a company / tech doesn't have to be sexy, new, or fast-growing to be entirely viable or wildly profitable. See: GM, MS Excel, banks.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  You have a strange definition of dead. I would love to have a company that has 1% the success of just Windows 11 which is estimated to be on 20% of all running PCs, let alone the rest of the MS empire. Selling 6.2 million vehicles in one year (GM) is hardly a zombie company. Meta had 40 billion dollars of net revenue, and 3 billion MAUs, which is a pretty fierce zombie if you ask me. IBM measures their profit in the billions too. Even GE is still spinning off billions in profit. All of the companies you mentioned have grown in the past 10 years.
segasaturn 3y ago
The site really took a nosedive in about the last 6 months in my experience, I think a combination of the API fiasco + current world events has really done a 1-2 punch on the site. The front page of reddit is a nightmare zone, it's all ragebait, clickbait, shit political memes and posts clearly made by marketing interns and boosted by bot accounts. Every comment section feels intensely ideological and any comment that strays from the majority opinion is downvoted to hell. Also loads of those tacky "badges" on comments everywhere making for a lot of visual clutter. Just an all around unpleasant to use site. PG calls the average reddit user "curious, skeptical, ready to be amused" which feels almost like the exact opposite of my experience.
- bonton89 3y ago
  I still use some tech subs but I used to dumbscroll the main page for inane things to laugh at. What was on there changed over time and it was well past the high point, but maybe a year or six months ago I just couldn't do it. The stuff you describe was always part of the /r/all mix but now that is all there is. There's nothing fun on there anymore, at all. lemmy is probably to left leaning for my taste but at least the main page still has lots inane and funny things as well as more of a tech focus.
- omginternets 3y ago
  I’ve felt it too. I can’t fight the feeling that it happens to attract a certain kind of mentally ill person. Specifically, the preponderance of anxious, neurotic persons, often with a persecution complex and a militant ideology, is enormous. The result is a climate of unbridled vitriol and outright hate for whatever group they hold responsible for their woes. It increasingly feels like Reddit is a breeding ground for various types of extremism (usually left-leaning, with some notable exceptions).
  - hnick 3y ago
    People who seem to want to be offended. I hate the /s they've adopted. It ruins the joke by explaining it. I dislike the implication sarcasm cannot be conveyed via text. Hundreds of years of authorship and numerous popular works tell otherwise. But people do it to shield themselves from what sometimes feels like intentional misinterpretation. Showing votes is possibly a huge contributing factor. It's well known they gather momentum.
ornornor 3y ago
> I also stopped using reddit on the phone after my chosen reddit client was closed down (which I'm grateful for, thanks reddit). Same here, very grateful for Reddit’s API changes. It made me realize how little value Reddit actually provided vs time spent. I refuse to use their dumpster fire of an app so I quit altogether and deleted my very old account + comments. Good riddance after all, for each “niche” subreddit I was on, I have found very active forums and communities to replace these subreddits. And they’re independent forums that are very old (in internet terms) with lots of passionate people sharing very valuable information. Turns out I didn’t really need Reddit at all but it took their shortsighted hara-kiri for me to realize. Oh well, thanks Greeddit!
- omginternets 3y ago
  Have you found any generalizable methods for finding non-Reddit communities for niche interests?
  - ornornor 3y ago
    I search for “$topic forum” or “$topic community” and there will typically be something in the first 10 results. There is a little trial and error involved, I check which one of the forums has been around for a while (10+ years works best for me) and still has regular activity (message volume + last posted messages) Sometimes it ends up being a discord chat as this is very popular. Not ideal as I don’t love the discord walled garden but still better than Reddit. And if/when they pull a Reddit in the future, well, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I should add that in getting much better results for these queries since switching to kagi. Ddg and startpage had more spam/SEO/generated junk in the top results. It was more effort to find these communities on those but not impossible either.
    - omginternets 3y ago
      Oh wow, Kagi is a little gem -- thanks for introducing me to it!
      - 3y ago
TheIronMark 3y ago
We need something to replace it. Lemmy isn't quite there yet.
- mderazon 3y ago
  It could already but doesn't have enough users
monkeynotes 3y ago
Reddit is a cesspit of its former self. The OG reddit is far from what it used to be. It's no longer an innocent link sharing platform, it's a socio-political platform with so much slime in between the subs that I find useful. Try and use Reddit daily and ignore all the drama, political shit, and covert rage click posts. It's emotionally exhausting not to get pulled in and have to constantly triage your home feed. I have deleted my account at least half a dozen times and just tried to use it as a source of useful information, but I inevitably fall into the pit of getting another account because I can't control myself objecting to the nasty stuff on there. I know this is partly my self control problem, but social media in general is just awful. I can get rid of FB easily, there is literally no benefit for me being on there, but Reddit legit has useful content about all of my hobbies and how to do X. It is unkillable but for some pretty rotten reasons. It's a social media platform mixed in with really useful content. Come for the search result, stay for the drama is what happens to me.
- omginternets 3y ago
  > socio-political platform with so much slime in between the subs that I find useful. That’s putting it nicely! I’m increasingly seeing it as a breeding ground for fringe-left radicalization.
  - monkeynotes 3y ago
    It's all sorts of extremism, for sure. I found myself getting pulled into some of it over the Gaza war. It took me a while to realize what was happening to me, it was making me miserable, angry, anxious. I reflected on what was happening to my mental health, my reactivity, believing things without checking them before I responded. Similar on YouTube. Loads of pro-Russian stuff that started to slip in, if I watched even one they started to accumulate and take over from what I used to watch for enjoyment. I then noticed these American pundits were using hijacked accounts to game the algo and get reach. Like one account was a vietnamese women's fashion account 2 years ago, now it's Americans talking about how Putin is definitely going to win the war very soon. One day someone is going to write a history book about the 2020s propaganda and how technology was used as a psy-op, or whatever is going on. I didn't believe this was a real thing until I started questioning my own thoughts.
quatrefoil 3y ago
The API situation seemed baffling to me at the time. The timing wasn't coincidental and it was clear that they were responding to people training LLMs on the Reddit corpus. But here's the thing: prevailing HN sentiments notwithstanding, your average Redditor leans left and is fairly anti-big-tech, so Reddit could have leveraged this angle. They could've said it's a pro-user move to stop OpenAI and the likes from unfairly profiting off your work. And most users would have applauded. But Reddit didn't say that. They took a PR hit and decided to wait it out. The cynical explanation was that they were actually just trying to get some of that LLM money for themselves. And not long ago, they announced a big deal with Google to give access to user data for training purposes: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi... Frankly, I was on the fence about the API access thing until the motivation became clear.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  This doesn't track. They spent a lot of time and energy coordinating with the authors of popular mobile clients, and could easily have extended some means of letting them continue to operate given that they were clearly not harvesting content for themselves. Meanwhile, content can still be harvested for LLM training without the API (by using the HTML site). It seems like the real intent was to regain control over the surfaces users use to consume the site, especially on mobile.
  - quatrefoil 3y ago
    Scraping is a lot more dicey than using an official API. Why did Google enter that partnership? They have the data in their index. The only conceivable reason is that they prefer to pay Reddit to avoid the risk of litigating it and ending up with some unfavorable precedent.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      Avoid litigation and possibly of getting some injunction. And on other hand money can go to fund Reddit litigating others. As now they have proven someone paid so they could stop others using data. Slowing them down in process. And the sum is peanuts for Google, they waste that amount regularly...
threeio 3y ago
Stopped going to the site/app completely... they were so far off base with the API war it wasn't worth it.
bun_terminator 3y ago
> have maybe 20% of the activity they used to, before the API fiasco Is that really true? I have been on reddit since day 0 and have noticed 0 change, absolutely nothing. Some communities went through a "we're now on lemmy" phase. But even that went nowhere. Reddit is still plagued by mods and all the other things, but the userbase is as powerful as ever
- bombcar 3y ago
  I used to be a heavy user, I rarely read it now and then. I certainly never post, and my accounts are deleted or inactive. It still turns up in search results for me but it’s certainly no community I’m using. If there is a stereotypical Reddit user, then they’re stagnating.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  Anecdotal of course. I used to read for hours each day and post from time to time - I haven't even looked at it for months except a couple of days ago where I had to prep for a business meeting where reddit was relevant. I had been feeling for a long time that it was declining and also that my social media usage wasn't really adding anything positive so the API thing was just a convenient excuse to rip off the band-aid.
- diggan 3y ago
  Maybe it's because my user is "only" 12 years old, but there is definitely a big difference in quality of the discussions and the activity today compared to 2-3 years ago, at least in the communities I hang around mostly (music production, 3D, animation and adjacent creative areas).
  - rd 3y ago
    Quality discussions and activity don't drive normie usage, and that's what Reddit's optimizing for at this point. Feels like they want to be TikTok, but for links and images, and even the links part is slowly dying. I wouldn't be surprised if you ran an analysis of the makeup of hot-page content across the biggest subs, if links used to make up 90%, that that number has slowly been dropping for the past 5 years to now be mostly images.
Pokerface777 3y ago
> > Reddit the site (and now app) they have been bugging you with the app for years
gspencley 3y ago
I was very late to the Reddit party and created my first account a year or two ago. I posted a little bit and then one day had a big red banner on the top telling me that my account was suspended for violating the TOS (my posts were on a puppetry subreddit about puppets and were very "normal" posts... how I could have violated the TOS was beyond me). I immediately appealed and the suspension was lifted (without any explanation as to what caused my account to be suspended in the first place). But even though my account is able to post and do everything a non-suspended account can, there's still that red banner at the top every time I access the website telling me my account was suspended and to check my inbox messages for instructions on how to appeal. That user experience kind of killed any desire of mine to ever use Reddit again.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  I have a similarly buggy experience: My 13-year old account with zero history of problems (and incidentally 500k comment karma) was randomly shadowbanned. I used their appeal page, got a message apologizing and saying my appeal was granted... ... But it's still shadowbanned and everything I ever wrote over those years is still gone, except now the appeals page doesn't even work because it claims my account is in good standing. So I went looking for some kind of human help or support, but another old Reddit account (a resurrected job search throwaway from 5+ years ago) got immediately killed the exact same way, the lying "granted" appeal and all! It certainly revitalized my interest in using personal-blogging for information instead of contributing anything to Reddit's decaying ecosystem.
  - Max-Ganz-II 3y ago
    Rather the same here. A month or two after my main account was banned (see my other post in this thread), I logged into a second account which I'd not logged into for months. Upon logging in, I discovered the account was "permanently suspended", and the reason for this was, and I quote; "Your account has been permanently suspended for ."
    - akoboldfrying 3y ago
jeffwask 3y ago
Same thing as Twitter, they think the power of these sites is the tech. It's not. It's the community and when you turn that into an EBTIDA growth engine it's going to rebel.
jherdman 3y ago
I'm in the same boat. I only ever log in periodically to see what's going on with r/AskHistorians, and then promptly run away.
dotnet00 3y ago
Agreed, I was thinking that the API protest and the crackdown Reddit perpetrated wouldn't end up actually doing much (did still delete my account though, partly as an excuse to break the habit), and while to an extent that's true, I've noticed many more deleted or edited comments than I used to pre-crackdown. It really did drive off a lot of positive contributors.
mnky9800n 3y ago
It's a great time to do an ipo so people can cash out if they can (or just take a ridiculously sized salary). It's a terrible time to be a Reddit user. It seems like there's almost nothing left of content. And if you look at the front page then you see mostly just rage bait, relationship advice requests that can't possibly be true, and whatever video games are currently the most popular. There's almost no content more engaging then anything in a tiktok or Instagram feed. Nothing is memorable or filled with discussion. It's mostly filler. Sad really. I used to quite enjoy having discussions on various topics there. These days it's all noise.
- dogcomplex 3y ago
  Reddit sells the illusion of meaningful discussion in an online forum. Too bad that illusion is transparent, but where else can you get one - besides maybe here?
  - swed420 3y ago
    Agreed. I only tolerate reddit (for now) because it's always been better than Twitter/X and the alternatives haven't matured yet.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    It's not all illusion though, particularly in smaller communities.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      The big subs are seemingly filled to the brim with both post and comment repost bots. It's fun when they mess up and you see a few accounts post the same comments in the same thread then search and the comment was an actual users comment from days earlier.
    - mnky9800n 3y ago
      The smaller communities only seem to highlight that most of the users on reddit are bots.
vanadium 3y ago
After they killed Apollo, my usage after 15 years went from hours a day and tanked to a few minutes a month at present. They showed their hand, and I showed myself the door for the most part. When the email dropped that I was one of the early users offered entrance into the IPO, I pretty much ignored it.
headwayoldest 3y ago
I was an active and fairly early Reddit user for many years, but the brutal changes to satisfy financial goals drove me away as well. I think it’s interesting to see a flagging platform with a user base that will consistently post and upvote “fuck spez” celebrated here as a success, but I suppose the only thing that matters at this level of discussion is the almighty dollar.
smackeyacky 3y ago
How much of that is Reddit and how much of it is that all online communities have a definite lifecycle. Either they age out, or they become too popular and become useless.
bane 3y ago
I think Paul's right in the sense that reddit seems to thrive as a community when the smallest amount of effort is put into running it. The series of leadership horror shows that all mostly left the site alone demonstrates that. The recent very active moves to clean the site up and prep for this IPO have had a detrimental community effect in the sense of disgruntlement, but I would wager have been excellent in making the site more palatable as a business. Virtually none of the reddit-alternatives that all spun up in the wake of this mop job have taken off. So assuming our gut feeling is right that reddit engagement is down, then overall engagement on all reddits is down and users have entirely moved to other social media styles entirely. There's the other angle on this, that engagement is down, but it was calculated to get rid of mostly users who cost reddit things, or are of an undesirable user population (troublesome, illegal, etc.) And what's left is mostly a user class that maximizes the monetary value that can be harvested. There are huge and obvious areas where reddit can better monetize the site if they wished, and I would guess that it's going to happen. Reddit has a very long history of doing a bunch of different experiments with the site, and an influx of investment to properly analyze and then monetize the more successful ones is my guess as to what's going to happen. The recent drive to vacuum up and sell data to LLM companies is serendipitous icing right now. There's also the huge opening that's happening right now with Twitter, where with a few chess moves, Reddit could very easily turn into or pick up the population of exTwitter users who find the current ownership trends so toxic they don't want to be associated with it any longer, but don't have a platform with a built in non-friends public sphere to turn to -- which is why Facebook hasn't been able to really tap into that market gap.
- noobermin 3y ago
  >Virtually none of the reddit-alternatives that all spun up in the wake of this mop job have taken off. You forgot about random discords, which is where they went.
  - klabb3 3y ago
    Underrated observation. Discord has stayed in the shadows to the wider audience but in terms of quality content and community building, from my POV it’s already surpassed Reddit’s peak. I don’t like that it’s yet another proprietary platform, and the ownership/business side is shady to say the least. But man, the product is light years ahead in almost every respect, except (importantly) discoverability.
shufflerofrocks 3y ago
Completely agree with you. My circle & I have stopped reddit on phone almost completely. So many active posters have left reddit, that it is a shell of what it previously was. Some of my favorite subreddits have become inactive and shallower, to the point that admins are actively boosting up alternate subreddits From what I can gather, the large majority of the remaining active users in the site are people who use reddit as alternative to 9Gag & Porn sites - prolly hyperbole, but that is what the new r/all felt like
lobocinza 3y ago
Reddit greatest thing were the users but the current users are killing it.

by diggan 3y ago

unshavedyak 3y ago

Yea, i stopped using it from mobile entirely when that happened. I expect them to kill `old.reddit` soon any that'll be the end of that for me. ATProto is far more interesting to me, if/when someone makes a link aggregator for them rather than the Twitter style UI of Bluesky. ActivityPub will do in a pinch, if needed. (i already tested this idea, for ~60 days with zero Reddit)

mrmlz 3y ago
Modern Reddit is such a broken experience especially on the web. And honestly the community has degraded over the last couple of years.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pixl97 3y ago
  And the number of bots is out of control. I'm guessing they are accounts that pretend to be regular users by copying other user comments on the same topic and posting them days/weeks later when the topic gets brought up again. Then I assume at some point in the future they'll be sold off to spammers or manipulators of some kind.
WA9ACE 3y ago
Old style interface on a development focused lemmy instance has completely replaced reddit usage for me This is the equivalent of /r/all across the lemmy world https://old.programming.dev/?sort=Active&listingType=All https://old.programming.dev/?sort=Active&listingType=All
- europeanNyan 3y ago
  It looks like Old Reddit, but the content is New Reddit. It's just a stream of political dreck and virtue signalling. I really don't need to see Trump in every second post and read about people who hate cars, meat, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
  - Goronmon 3y ago
    I really don't need to see Trump in every second post and read about people who hate cars, meat, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Exactly. All I see online is people talking about politics, their jobs, their families, their hobbies, the environment, technology, etc.
  - piaste 3y ago
    Yeah, Lemmy is a pretty decent platform but the suggestion of browsing "All" is godawful, if one is looking for something closer to pre-smartphone internet. You need to curate your homepage a bit to get a good Lemmy experience. The tech side may be like Reddit, but the human aspect is more like a couple dozen vBulletin forums rolled into one. Some of the instances are (imo) full of straight-up insane and, worse, perpetually angry people. Some instance admins may be power-hungry and prone to drama - but you might not care if the only subreddit you follow from their instance is c/jazz and you just click on Youtube/Spotify links from it. Is it a pain? Yes. But I still prefer to deal with a couple dozen weirdos than with a single billion-dollar company.
    - dingnuts 3y ago
      >Some of the instances are (imo) full of straight-up insane and, worse, perpetually angry people This has been true for every instance of every Fedi thing I've ever tried to use or thought of using. And many instances block single-user instances so forget about running your own unless you only want to interact with the absolute fringest nutjob basement-dwellers -- because the "mainstream" Fedi is already fringe. I once had the dumb impulse to reply to someone who was mad about fluoride in drinking water with "you probably get more fluoride from your toothpaste" and I deleted my account as I started to receive arguments about brushing your teeth, as it made me realize exactly the kind of people I would be interacting with on this network. Honestly I think this is grows out of the incentives for operating a homeserver. There's a negative financial incentive so you must have some other kind of motivator, likely a desire for influence or power.
account42 3y ago
> I expect them to kill `old.reddit` soon They have already started to redirect direct image links to the new reddit garbage which has stopped my usage for reddit for entertainment when bored.
- agmater 3y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/load-reddit-images-directly/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/load-reddit-i... This solved that for me, but yeah it seems inevitable that all these user hostile decisions make the site unusable.
giancarlostoro 3y ago
What kills me about old vs new reddit is feature parity is just not there. There's also a huge lack of tooling for reddit modding, but what really kills me is how long new reddit has been in development for and still no feature parity. Instead of making old reddit an archive on github, they should have made new reddits front-end open. I'm sure it would be miles ahead if the users were allowed to contribute like they once did with old reddit. I wonder how much money was spent to build new reddit. Feels like a dumpster fire.

aerhardt 3y ago

I’m on a similar boat, but for all we know, for each of us there might be ten new users who have recently flocked to the site and don’t give a damn.

jtriangle 3y ago
Not all users are created equal. Reddit's lost a ton of valuable contributors, via enshitification, and I only expect that to get worse.

dncornholio 3y ago

I would like to see some hard number from people that claim Reddit was hurt from the "API Fiasco". My theory is that this is a very small number of users with a very loud voice. Entitled mods were the only people that closed down subs. Most users did not even support this decision. Same is happening again now, entitled moderaters who complain about CEO pay. If anything is destroying Reddit, it's the mods IMO.

piva00 3y ago
At the same time, good moderation is what made reddit what it is, if there weren't mods doing free work for reddit in 2009 it would be flooded with YouTube comments style of content since that's what low friction posting without moderation achieves.
- dncornholio 3y ago
  Yeah but Reddit doesn't owe the mods anything, the users do.
  - mostlysimilar 3y ago
    What? Reddit owes their entire platform to their volunteer moderators and users who contribute content. Reddit the company adds almost nothing of value, the tech isn't exactly special -- if anything it's so bad as to be hindrance.
  - Starman_Jones 3y ago
    The dog doesn't owe anything to the hand that feeds it, but it would still do well not to bite it.
nullindividual 3y ago
The hypothesis without data is that users [mods/power users] who cared about reddit, who contributed to reddit, have largely left or disengaged to an extent. I would like to see numbers myself, though. However, looking at reddit/r/all, I suspect much of that activity is botting. I mean, no one can seriously post "my gf cheated, AITAH for breaking up with her?". Come on...

spelunker 3y ago

As an opposite anecdote, I probably use it as much now as before the API stuff.

Lalabadie 3y ago

Yeah, that's an affirmation from someone who's in a very pampered US-centric group of Reddit users (if he is that at all). "My investment is very good!" In the last year, Reddit has pushed localized home pages across the world, and my own example is the default home page for Canada. It's now exclusively sports and right-wing nuttery. There were good communities, but they were molded by their good moderators, and these moderators are gone.

concordDance 3y ago
> In the last year, Reddit has pushed localized home pages across the world, and my own example is the default home page for Canada. I found this quite nice. A lot less American politics on the front page and some fun bits of local news.
Scoundreller 3y ago
> and my own example is the default home page for Canada. It's now exclusively sports and right-wing nuttery. I think that’s typical for any national sub, because it will be filled with people that live in places that don’t have the critical mass for a local/regional subreddit (or just don’t fit into it).
- Lalabadie 3y ago
  I'm not talking about the /r/Canada subreddit, I'm talking about the complete front page feed for Canadian visitors. There are several "main" Canadian subreddits, and the only ones showing up for anon Canadian guests now are the right-wing and far-right subreddits.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - VancouverMan 3y ago
    Can you be specific about these "right-wing and far-right" subreddits you're seeing on the front page? I'm not logged in (I don't have a Reddit account), I'm in Canada, and on the Reddit home page I'm currently seeing submissions associated with these Canada-specific subreddits: 6 for r/canada 2 for r/onguardforthee 2 for r/ontario 2 for r/PersonalFinanceCanada 1 for r/alberta 1 for r/vancouver None of those subreddits look "right-wing" or "far-right" to me in any way. In fact, I'm surprised at how left-leaning they tend to be, especially r/alberta. Of the current top five submissions there, four are for CBC articles, for example, and there are a few other CBC articles on the first page. r/onguardforthee seems to be overtly left wing. The other front page subreddits are broad (like r/AskReddit, r/politics, r/news), or about sports or hobbies (like r/gaming, r/baseball, r/hockey, r/FigureSkating). None the subreddits I'm seeing on the Reddit front page seem to me to even be right-of-centre, let alone "right-wing" or "far-right".

Workaccount2 3y ago

I had (have?) a twelve year account, coming on the tails of the digg fallout. Once they pulled the API I was out. Not terrible since the site's quality has been in steady decline for years. Eventually you realize you are doing the equivalent of having economics discussions in the youtube comments of a taylor swift video. But it seems that lowest common denominator user is who reddit really wants, so good luck to them.

piva00 3y ago

Quite similar experience, the communities for hobbies I used to check out almost daily are quite dead, they've become mostly a gear-showoff or beginner questions forum, the real content in longer form that some old posters used to create is mostly gone. My own activity dropped like a rock after the API changes killed Apollo, the mobile client I used (and before that reddit had already acqui-killed a previous one Alien Blue). I simply check it out of habit, and mostly for news, don't have much of the joy I had when I had started accessing it back in 2009. Probably it's just the natural cycle of profit-driven social media getting swallowed by Eternal Septembers after the initial batches of users posting interesting content and making the platform cool leave the place when the platform inevitably becomes user-hostile.

the_af 3y ago
> Quite similar experience, the communities for hobbies I used to check out almost daily are quite dead I've noticed some of the same for some communities, but where have they gone? Some claim to be migrating to Discord, which in my mind is even worse than Reddit, and to me is a high-stress environment (I simply cannot stand online chat, I've no patience for it, and if you're not constantly online you miss stuff). There are hobby groups in Facebook, which is also disappointing since Facebook groups have terrible UX.
- account42 3y ago
  Discord is probably the biggest black hole sucking up all kinds of communities right now but that doesn't mean that there aren't others. Old-school forums are still a thing even if less visible these days.
- simonmic 3y ago
  Some communities move to discourse forums.
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
>I simply check it out of habit Adding *.reddit.com to my DNS-blacklist was one of the single-most-productive "lines of code" I've ever added to my personal computer. Cold-turkey, I quit. /r/Supermod, 2010-2014, "the pineapple trees guy; erryday"

1oooqooq 3y ago

shells? they are more likely crap filled boxes of their former glory. communities even remotely related to companies (e.g. r/googlepixel) are run by either fervently crazy zealot fans, or which is more likely, filtered by interns in those companies marketing dept in what seem to be reddit best revenue stream.

holoduke 3y ago

I quit last week with Reddit. I thought it might be a good idea to write a controversial opinion in a sub reddit. Received a perma ban. Well thanks. The content, the way the site works, dark patterns and its just not nice anymore. Happy to be loose.

mderazon 3y ago
Have you moved somewhere else?
- holoduke 3y ago
  No not really. Its maybe also a good time to get rid of that annoying addiction. Lots of time is wasted by browsing and using reddit. At least for me.
ralfd 3y ago
Was it r/comics?
omginternets 3y ago
Out of curiosity, what was this fringe opinion? I think this is the elephant in the room when it comes to Reddit: it’s been captured by a certain kind of radical ideologue.
- holoduke 3y ago
  It was my opinion on the Russian war in Ukraine in worldnews. My opinion was not in line with the bubble and received a ban for spreading false information.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - swarnie 3y ago
    Worldnews are pretty well known for banning anyone that looks at them funny; you're permitted exactly one correct opinion, deviation will lead to termination Comrade.

vwoolf 3y ago

I liked it better before the modern Reddit censorship machine. At least old.reddit.com still works. For now.

dogleash 3y ago

It'll shamble on forever. Look at the front page in a private tab right now. Yeah it's all dogshit content, but this is the product now. All the niche communities that made reddit good were dying a slow death well before any of the API stuff. That old product is dead, the current reddit will live forever as long as they can get costs under control.

kspacewalk2 3y ago

I don't notice this at all. Old communities die off and new ones spring up all the time, and the new ones are still springing up alright. The local subs are doing well, there are still plenty of "less popular" subs to have great discussions in. The app is not great not terrible, no biggie. They rather consciously decided that jettisoning some hard-core techies, privacy people and other "weirdos" is an acceptable price to pay for more mass appeal and more profitability. Remember, you as a user are not the client of Reddit Inc, you're the product. You or I may not like that direction, but we're not great products anyway. I block ads for Pete's sake, I am literally worthless to them.

majormajor 3y ago

"Killed"/"killable" is one of those terms that changes with age. Was GM unkillable? Well, they aren't dead, but... Was Windows unkillable? Well, it's not dead, but... Is Facebook unkillable? Well, it's not dead, but... So the old fogies who would tell you GE, GM, IBM are all unkillable aren't wrong but neither were the younger folks they were responding to. Lotta zombies hang on long after their relevance fades for the future. "X is unkillable" is a good way to reveal a limited imagination for future changes. You go from talking about disruption to talking about how things are now disruption-proof!

FredPret 3y ago
All the examples you mention, GM, Facebook, and Windows, pump out a ton of money on the regular. GM made ten billion in profit in the last year
- majormajor 3y ago
  Which of them would you call unkillable? I think Graham is getting a bit sentimental and overly attached to incumbents in his network.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    Nothing is completely unkillable, but a company / tech doesn't have to be sexy, new, or fast-growing to be entirely viable or wildly profitable. See: GM, MS Excel, banks.
dghlsakjg 3y ago
You have a strange definition of dead. I would love to have a company that has 1% the success of just Windows 11 which is estimated to be on 20% of all running PCs, let alone the rest of the MS empire. Selling 6.2 million vehicles in one year (GM) is hardly a zombie company. Meta had 40 billion dollars of net revenue, and 3 billion MAUs, which is a pretty fierce zombie if you ask me. IBM measures their profit in the billions too. Even GE is still spinning off billions in profit. All of the companies you mentioned have grown in the past 10 years.

segasaturn 3y ago

The site really took a nosedive in about the last 6 months in my experience, I think a combination of the API fiasco + current world events has really done a 1-2 punch on the site. The front page of reddit is a nightmare zone, it's all ragebait, clickbait, shit political memes and posts clearly made by marketing interns and boosted by bot accounts. Every comment section feels intensely ideological and any comment that strays from the majority opinion is downvoted to hell. Also loads of those tacky "badges" on comments everywhere making for a lot of visual clutter. Just an all around unpleasant to use site. PG calls the average reddit user "curious, skeptical, ready to be amused" which feels almost like the exact opposite of my experience.

bonton89 3y ago
I still use some tech subs but I used to dumbscroll the main page for inane things to laugh at. What was on there changed over time and it was well past the high point, but maybe a year or six months ago I just couldn't do it. The stuff you describe was always part of the /r/all mix but now that is all there is. There's nothing fun on there anymore, at all. lemmy is probably to left leaning for my taste but at least the main page still has lots inane and funny things as well as more of a tech focus.
omginternets 3y ago
I’ve felt it too. I can’t fight the feeling that it happens to attract a certain kind of mentally ill person. Specifically, the preponderance of anxious, neurotic persons, often with a persecution complex and a militant ideology, is enormous. The result is a climate of unbridled vitriol and outright hate for whatever group they hold responsible for their woes. It increasingly feels like Reddit is a breeding ground for various types of extremism (usually left-leaning, with some notable exceptions).
- hnick 3y ago
  People who seem to want to be offended. I hate the /s they've adopted. It ruins the joke by explaining it. I dislike the implication sarcasm cannot be conveyed via text. Hundreds of years of authorship and numerous popular works tell otherwise. But people do it to shield themselves from what sometimes feels like intentional misinterpretation. Showing votes is possibly a huge contributing factor. It's well known they gather momentum.

ornornor 3y ago

> I also stopped using reddit on the phone after my chosen reddit client was closed down (which I'm grateful for, thanks reddit). Same here, very grateful for Reddit’s API changes. It made me realize how little value Reddit actually provided vs time spent. I refuse to use their dumpster fire of an app so I quit altogether and deleted my very old account + comments. Good riddance after all, for each “niche” subreddit I was on, I have found very active forums and communities to replace these subreddits. And they’re independent forums that are very old (in internet terms) with lots of passionate people sharing very valuable information. Turns out I didn’t really need Reddit at all but it took their shortsighted hara-kiri for me to realize. Oh well, thanks Greeddit!

omginternets 3y ago
Have you found any generalizable methods for finding non-Reddit communities for niche interests?
- ornornor 3y ago
  I search for “$topic forum” or “$topic community” and there will typically be something in the first 10 results. There is a little trial and error involved, I check which one of the forums has been around for a while (10+ years works best for me) and still has regular activity (message volume + last posted messages) Sometimes it ends up being a discord chat as this is very popular. Not ideal as I don’t love the discord walled garden but still better than Reddit. And if/when they pull a Reddit in the future, well, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I should add that in getting much better results for these queries since switching to kagi. Ddg and startpage had more spam/SEO/generated junk in the top results. It was more effort to find these communities on those but not impossible either.
  - omginternets 3y ago
    Oh wow, Kagi is a little gem -- thanks for introducing me to it!
    - 3y ago

TheIronMark 3y ago

We need something to replace it. Lemmy isn't quite there yet.

mderazon 3y ago
It could already but doesn't have enough users

monkeynotes 3y ago

Reddit is a cesspit of its former self. The OG reddit is far from what it used to be. It's no longer an innocent link sharing platform, it's a socio-political platform with so much slime in between the subs that I find useful. Try and use Reddit daily and ignore all the drama, political shit, and covert rage click posts. It's emotionally exhausting not to get pulled in and have to constantly triage your home feed. I have deleted my account at least half a dozen times and just tried to use it as a source of useful information, but I inevitably fall into the pit of getting another account because I can't control myself objecting to the nasty stuff on there. I know this is partly my self control problem, but social media in general is just awful. I can get rid of FB easily, there is literally no benefit for me being on there, but Reddit legit has useful content about all of my hobbies and how to do X. It is unkillable but for some pretty rotten reasons. It's a social media platform mixed in with really useful content. Come for the search result, stay for the drama is what happens to me.

omginternets 3y ago
> socio-political platform with so much slime in between the subs that I find useful. That’s putting it nicely! I’m increasingly seeing it as a breeding ground for fringe-left radicalization.
- monkeynotes 3y ago
  It's all sorts of extremism, for sure. I found myself getting pulled into some of it over the Gaza war. It took me a while to realize what was happening to me, it was making me miserable, angry, anxious. I reflected on what was happening to my mental health, my reactivity, believing things without checking them before I responded. Similar on YouTube. Loads of pro-Russian stuff that started to slip in, if I watched even one they started to accumulate and take over from what I used to watch for enjoyment. I then noticed these American pundits were using hijacked accounts to game the algo and get reach. Like one account was a vietnamese women's fashion account 2 years ago, now it's Americans talking about how Putin is definitely going to win the war very soon. One day someone is going to write a history book about the 2020s propaganda and how technology was used as a psy-op, or whatever is going on. I didn't believe this was a real thing until I started questioning my own thoughts.

quatrefoil 3y ago

The API situation seemed baffling to me at the time. The timing wasn't coincidental and it was clear that they were responding to people training LLMs on the Reddit corpus. But here's the thing: prevailing HN sentiments notwithstanding, your average Redditor leans left and is fairly anti-big-tech, so Reddit could have leveraged this angle. They could've said it's a pro-user move to stop OpenAI and the likes from unfairly profiting off your work. And most users would have applauded. But Reddit didn't say that. They took a PR hit and decided to wait it out. The cynical explanation was that they were actually just trying to get some of that LLM money for themselves. And not long ago, they announced a big deal with Google to give access to user data for training purposes: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi... Frankly, I was on the fence about the API access thing until the motivation became clear.

BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
This doesn't track. They spent a lot of time and energy coordinating with the authors of popular mobile clients, and could easily have extended some means of letting them continue to operate given that they were clearly not harvesting content for themselves. Meanwhile, content can still be harvested for LLM training without the API (by using the HTML site). It seems like the real intent was to regain control over the surfaces users use to consume the site, especially on mobile.
- quatrefoil 3y ago
  Scraping is a lot more dicey than using an official API. Why did Google enter that partnership? They have the data in their index. The only conceivable reason is that they prefer to pay Reddit to avoid the risk of litigating it and ending up with some unfavorable precedent.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Avoid litigation and possibly of getting some injunction. And on other hand money can go to fund Reddit litigating others. As now they have proven someone paid so they could stop others using data. Slowing them down in process. And the sum is peanuts for Google, they waste that amount regularly...

threeio 3y ago

Stopped going to the site/app completely... they were so far off base with the API war it wasn't worth it.

bun_terminator 3y ago

> have maybe 20% of the activity they used to, before the API fiasco Is that really true? I have been on reddit since day 0 and have noticed 0 change, absolutely nothing. Some communities went through a "we're now on lemmy" phase. But even that went nowhere. Reddit is still plagued by mods and all the other things, but the userbase is as powerful as ever

bombcar 3y ago
I used to be a heavy user, I rarely read it now and then. I certainly never post, and my accounts are deleted or inactive. It still turns up in search results for me but it’s certainly no community I’m using. If there is a stereotypical Reddit user, then they’re stagnating.
seanhunter 3y ago
Anecdotal of course. I used to read for hours each day and post from time to time - I haven't even looked at it for months except a couple of days ago where I had to prep for a business meeting where reddit was relevant. I had been feeling for a long time that it was declining and also that my social media usage wasn't really adding anything positive so the API thing was just a convenient excuse to rip off the band-aid.
diggan 3y ago
Maybe it's because my user is "only" 12 years old, but there is definitely a big difference in quality of the discussions and the activity today compared to 2-3 years ago, at least in the communities I hang around mostly (music production, 3D, animation and adjacent creative areas).
- rd 3y ago
  Quality discussions and activity don't drive normie usage, and that's what Reddit's optimizing for at this point. Feels like they want to be TikTok, but for links and images, and even the links part is slowly dying. I wouldn't be surprised if you ran an analysis of the makeup of hot-page content across the biggest subs, if links used to make up 90%, that that number has slowly been dropping for the past 5 years to now be mostly images.

Pokerface777 3y ago

> > Reddit the site (and now app) they have been bugging you with the app for years

gspencley 3y ago

I was very late to the Reddit party and created my first account a year or two ago. I posted a little bit and then one day had a big red banner on the top telling me that my account was suspended for violating the TOS (my posts were on a puppetry subreddit about puppets and were very "normal" posts... how I could have violated the TOS was beyond me). I immediately appealed and the suspension was lifted (without any explanation as to what caused my account to be suspended in the first place). But even though my account is able to post and do everything a non-suspended account can, there's still that red banner at the top every time I access the website telling me my account was suspended and to check my inbox messages for instructions on how to appeal. That user experience kind of killed any desire of mine to ever use Reddit again.

Terr_ 3y ago
I have a similarly buggy experience: My 13-year old account with zero history of problems (and incidentally 500k comment karma) was randomly shadowbanned. I used their appeal page, got a message apologizing and saying my appeal was granted... ... But it's still shadowbanned and everything I ever wrote over those years is still gone, except now the appeals page doesn't even work because it claims my account is in good standing. So I went looking for some kind of human help or support, but another old Reddit account (a resurrected job search throwaway from 5+ years ago) got immediately killed the exact same way, the lying "granted" appeal and all! It certainly revitalized my interest in using personal-blogging for information instead of contributing anything to Reddit's decaying ecosystem.
- Max-Ganz-II 3y ago
  Rather the same here. A month or two after my main account was banned (see my other post in this thread), I logged into a second account which I'd not logged into for months. Upon logging in, I discovered the account was "permanently suspended", and the reason for this was, and I quote; "Your account has been permanently suspended for ."
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago

jeffwask 3y ago

Same thing as Twitter, they think the power of these sites is the tech. It's not. It's the community and when you turn that into an EBTIDA growth engine it's going to rebel.

jherdman 3y ago

I'm in the same boat. I only ever log in periodically to see what's going on with r/AskHistorians, and then promptly run away.

dotnet00 3y ago

Agreed, I was thinking that the API protest and the crackdown Reddit perpetrated wouldn't end up actually doing much (did still delete my account though, partly as an excuse to break the habit), and while to an extent that's true, I've noticed many more deleted or edited comments than I used to pre-crackdown. It really did drive off a lot of positive contributors.

mnky9800n 3y ago

It's a great time to do an ipo so people can cash out if they can (or just take a ridiculously sized salary). It's a terrible time to be a Reddit user. It seems like there's almost nothing left of content. And if you look at the front page then you see mostly just rage bait, relationship advice requests that can't possibly be true, and whatever video games are currently the most popular. There's almost no content more engaging then anything in a tiktok or Instagram feed. Nothing is memorable or filled with discussion. It's mostly filler. Sad really. I used to quite enjoy having discussions on various topics there. These days it's all noise.

dogcomplex 3y ago
Reddit sells the illusion of meaningful discussion in an online forum. Too bad that illusion is transparent, but where else can you get one - besides maybe here?
- swed420 3y ago
  Agreed. I only tolerate reddit (for now) because it's always been better than Twitter/X and the alternatives haven't matured yet.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  It's not all illusion though, particularly in smaller communities.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    The big subs are seemingly filled to the brim with both post and comment repost bots. It's fun when they mess up and you see a few accounts post the same comments in the same thread then search and the comment was an actual users comment from days earlier.
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    The smaller communities only seem to highlight that most of the users on reddit are bots.

vanadium 3y ago

After they killed Apollo, my usage after 15 years went from hours a day and tanked to a few minutes a month at present. They showed their hand, and I showed myself the door for the most part. When the email dropped that I was one of the early users offered entrance into the IPO, I pretty much ignored it.

headwayoldest 3y ago

I was an active and fairly early Reddit user for many years, but the brutal changes to satisfy financial goals drove me away as well. I think it’s interesting to see a flagging platform with a user base that will consistently post and upvote “fuck spez” celebrated here as a success, but I suppose the only thing that matters at this level of discussion is the almighty dollar.

smackeyacky 3y ago

How much of that is Reddit and how much of it is that all online communities have a definite lifecycle. Either they age out, or they become too popular and become useless.

bane 3y ago

I think Paul's right in the sense that reddit seems to thrive as a community when the smallest amount of effort is put into running it. The series of leadership horror shows that all mostly left the site alone demonstrates that. The recent very active moves to clean the site up and prep for this IPO have had a detrimental community effect in the sense of disgruntlement, but I would wager have been excellent in making the site more palatable as a business. Virtually none of the reddit-alternatives that all spun up in the wake of this mop job have taken off. So assuming our gut feeling is right that reddit engagement is down, then overall engagement on all reddits is down and users have entirely moved to other social media styles entirely. There's the other angle on this, that engagement is down, but it was calculated to get rid of mostly users who cost reddit things, or are of an undesirable user population (troublesome, illegal, etc.) And what's left is mostly a user class that maximizes the monetary value that can be harvested. There are huge and obvious areas where reddit can better monetize the site if they wished, and I would guess that it's going to happen. Reddit has a very long history of doing a bunch of different experiments with the site, and an influx of investment to properly analyze and then monetize the more successful ones is my guess as to what's going to happen. The recent drive to vacuum up and sell data to LLM companies is serendipitous icing right now. There's also the huge opening that's happening right now with Twitter, where with a few chess moves, Reddit could very easily turn into or pick up the population of exTwitter users who find the current ownership trends so toxic they don't want to be associated with it any longer, but don't have a platform with a built in non-friends public sphere to turn to -- which is why Facebook hasn't been able to really tap into that market gap.

noobermin 3y ago
>Virtually none of the reddit-alternatives that all spun up in the wake of this mop job have taken off. You forgot about random discords, which is where they went.
- klabb3 3y ago
  Underrated observation. Discord has stayed in the shadows to the wider audience but in terms of quality content and community building, from my POV it’s already surpassed Reddit’s peak. I don’t like that it’s yet another proprietary platform, and the ownership/business side is shady to say the least. But man, the product is light years ahead in almost every respect, except (importantly) discoverability.

shufflerofrocks 3y ago

Completely agree with you. My circle & I have stopped reddit on phone almost completely. So many active posters have left reddit, that it is a shell of what it previously was. Some of my favorite subreddits have become inactive and shallower, to the point that admins are actively boosting up alternate subreddits From what I can gather, the large majority of the remaining active users in the site are people who use reddit as alternative to 9Gag & Porn sites - prolly hyperbole, but that is what the new r/all felt like

lobocinza 3y ago

Reddit greatest thing were the users but the current users are killing it.