this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 364 points 10 months ago (8 children)

"Despite these concessions, dozens of Redditors promised to stop using the site altogether "

There are dozens of us!! Lol

[–] [email protected] 217 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Fucking delusional on this writer’s part. It was far more than dozens and a lot of those people were power users with an outsized influence on the community.

I personally moderated two 150-250k user subs. Stepped down from both and wiped all my posts and comments and have not contributed a single thing since.

[–] GlitzyArmrest 54 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I modded a couple of million user subs, and ended up replacing all of my posts with the same text before never logging in again. Wonder if I've been removed from any of them yet.

Side note, my life has improved so much after not doing free work for reddit. The things I'd see everyday.. looking back I'd never do it again.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I went from multiple comments per day and posts almost every day to a couple comments a week and I think I've made one post since the protests

That place got hella toxic since the protests

[–] SwallowsDick 48 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The official Reddit app pushes "recommended" stuff into your feed constantly, and the posts and comments both seem to be even more pervasively negative than before the 3rd party apps shut down. Scrolling on Reddit is even worse for your mental health and outward perspective than it used to be.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I refuse to use the reddit app since they killed my favorite reddit app

And browsing on a mobile browser has gotten even worse recently as well so I'm only using it on my desktop

It's gotten so bad over there

[–] mondo_brondo 20 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Same. They killed Apollo, so I dipped.

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[–] thisisawayoflife 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I wish that was true for askhistorians. For some reason, there's a lot of people with a huge amount of knowledge and potential that are attached at the hip to corporate platforms.

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[–] Selmafudd 15 points 10 months ago

I tried to wipe my comments but I during the protest I couldn't access my user page, I could manually navigate to each of my comments via the posts but that would have been an impossible task. Soon after submitting a service ticket I was permabanned for a comment I'd made 2 years earlier.. and even more bizarrely they message me a few weeks later saying they'd taken action against an account I'd reported for CP 4 years ago

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[–] _number8_ 31 points 10 months ago (2 children)

i think most reluctantly have some use for it still. i only use it for gamethreads and the shittiest of shitposts, or for super niche things that don't have any equivalent on lemmy. at the end of the day, i think people would rather stay connected with their communities than abandon them, even if it means providing value for some of the stupidest and most malignant people in the world at the same time. look how many people are still using twitter

[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago

even if it means providing value for some of the stupidest and most malignant people in the world at the same time

This is so emblematic of the human condition. Poisoning ourselves to relieve stress, buying slave-made clothes to stay warm. Burning our skin to attract mates. Toxifying our own environment for convenience. Humans really are some dumb ass creatures. We are reaping what we sow.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Come to think of it, I don't think I've logged into Reddit since I started using Lenmy

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

I haven't really either. Apart from the the odd Google search results here and there, but not actually logging in.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That link linked to /modcoord at perhaps dozens of moderators promised to leave, which is far more impactful than users. I know just from watching kbin, lemmy and other sites grow from this summer on that hundreds to thousands likely left reddit. Unfortunately it's probably a drop in the bucket but Web 2.0 was always probably going to win. The only real way I can see of us getting out of that en masse if when each site inevitably kills themselves through mismanagement.

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[–] rtxn 124 points 10 months ago (2 children)

"Technical tweaks"? Did the author write this while sucking huffman's taint?

[–] homesweethomeMrL 13 points 10 months ago

Did you see spez’s senior prom picture in the article?

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

In response to such critiques, Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.

(Emphasis mine)

This is the same tone deaf response I've come to expect from Reddit for some time now, and is why I'm happy to no longer be a user of their platform.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That same quote caught my eye. It's just bullshit. Of course they're no quantitative way to measure quality on a qualitative scale. Any long time user can see there's not much going on like there used to be.

[–] Kalysta 88 points 10 months ago (5 children)

The only thing that’s changed is all the good modetators have left and the default subs have gotten worse.

God forbid you say anything mildly positive of Palestine on the main politics site. The AIPAC hired mods immediately permaban you.

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[–] foggy 75 points 10 months ago (10 children)

I am of the belief that reddit just replaced leaving users with LLM drone users to fill the void.

[–] dhork 60 points 10 months ago

The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now

[–] dhork 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now

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[–] _number8_ 60 points 10 months ago (2 children)

reposting the worst quote i heard all year - or perhaps all my life

“There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

fuck spez, fuck reddit

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

“We don’t want other AI to train on this data, only one we’re involved with.”

[–] [email protected] 49 points 10 months ago

How corporate social media's biggest user protest, and exodus, rocked reddit, acccording to corporate media - FTFY

[–] [email protected] 48 points 10 months ago

Honestly, Fuck Steve Huffman.

I'm excited to see where Lemmy, Mastodon and the Fediverse go as I believe that's what Aaron Swartz wanted Reddit to be when it merged with Infogami; a user curated platform about anything, and a great source of knowledge.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago

Haven't been on there since the event, though I do read some threads if they come up in a search. Not intending on returning, though I haven't gotten rid of my old account yet

[–] chocolateo 33 points 10 months ago

dugg their grave

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I’m surprised they didn’t mention us at all. I wonder how many people actually made the transition as a result. I think it’s fewer than many people here want to believe but surely it’s more than dozens?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (1 children)

A few tens of thousand of people. We can see that through the statistics of active monthly users since then. I think many just left Reddit though, but unfortunately not enough. But still, if I look at the content and comments through RedReader it feels all kinda different there. Even more reposts than before, much more bot comments than before, much less comments overall and /r/all just looks different because many previously big subs are not really there anymore, while a lot of more niche subs suddenly appear frequently. It sometimes also feels more toxic with al lthe disinfo and insults but that might just be because a lot of the moderate people left. So the lack of sane comments puts an extra highlight on the shit stains of Reddit.

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[–] Potatos_are_not_friends 29 points 10 months ago (3 children)

So many comments/posts look like bots.

Reddit always had a "repost" problem. But this time, not only am I feeling like I already saw this post, but also all the top comments? Just regurgitation of posts from years ago.

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[–] TheDeepState 28 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The entire "dozen" agrees!

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (1 children)

[Huffman said,] "We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private."

Really? 'Cause that's not the impression I've been getting. :scepticalThor:

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

Agreed. It didn't feel respectful when they started replacing mod teams that refused to reopen.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Slowpoke image: did you guys hear about reddit

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Whatever. Don't care. I left my account open but scrubbed twelve years of content, including hundreds (probably thousands) of answers to technical questions and dozens of posts (including guides) to which my reddit post was the only or one of the only search results.

If corporations want to profit from my knowledge, they can do so by exploiting the open source community, just like always.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Same. In the brief window when we still had the API, I deleted every thing I’ve ever posted. Every helpful comment, all the well crafted answers to technical questions. I know they are in the wayback machine somewhere but at least Reddit can’t sell them.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


In June, thousands of Reddit communities plunged into darkness – making their pages inaccessible to the public in a mass protest of corporate policy changes.

With rumors of an imminent IPO swirling, the company is under pressure to make money – and CEO Huffman has acknowledged as much, stating at the time of the change: “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”

Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota who has studied Reddit for years, echoed these sentiments.

“It bothers me that social media companies are increasingly restricting our abilities as researchers who care deeply about these sites and who believe they can provide many benefits for people,” Chancellor said.

Reddit’s corporate overlords were ultimately unmoved by the massive blackout, and most of the thousands of dark subreddits went back to normal after a few weeks.

Users who have long been dedicated to the site, some of whom have spent countless unpaid hours working to make it better, are exhausted and resentful – and many have simply left.


The original article contains 1,685 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] Potatos_are_not_friends 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Can someone message the editor and share how because of this backlash, many moved to other platforms - like lemmy?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Ever since earlier this year I've had WAY more friends, family and news articles I've seen mention or link to reddit than the past. I don't know if it's confirmation bias since I left reddit or if it just gained popularity at the same time or what. But I used reddit for ~12 years and few other people in my circle used it heavily. Now it seems like it exploded?

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