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I think the older core of reddit has always viewed itself as a bottom-up community, rather than a social media platform. Reddit won't die for now, but this is a sobering wakeup call from that idea.
Reddit is no freehaven, it's now just another company, and slowly everyone on it will get squeezed into the businessmold...
Hmmm. Maybe it's intentional. A purge. Flush out the old crowd with their adblockers and their nonsense ideas about "free speech," and whoever stays -- out of ignorance or compliance -- is left with the ad-ridden hellscape that is the new interface and the official app.
I'd certainly agree that this is at least Huffman's internal thoughts about the whole thing at this point. Stabilize their large, more easily monetizable userbase, and get to the IPO asap. The only ones who "suffer" here are the users who give a shit, and the only remedy is to move on from reddit and create that content that matters, elsewhere.
I certainly never viewed it as a social media site. I joined it as a link aggregator and a way to find information on topics I thought were interesting, not make friends. It always seems odd to me when people refer to it as a social media site.
Everything that I liked about reddit was the fact that it was NOT social media. Everything they've done in the last decade (avatars and all that), I've religiously ignored.
Lol, I told my friend to join Lemmy and he immediately asked how to friend me. Pls no
Indeed. Reddit is knowb as the site where you talk with strangers on things you care about - whereas Facebook is talking with people you know about things you don't care about.
Mir offers another business metaphor for the tension on Reddit: “If you have a really good music venue, but you break relations with every notable artist, you’re not going to be a very successful venue. You need to really prioritize the needs of the folks providing the value on your platform.”
Honestly this sums it up pretty well
Additionally, it's not even that good of a venue.
I was talking to my friend about this and asked if he could point out a single improvement that reddit has made in the last decade that hadn't been about monetization, since I exclusively use old.reddit.com and third party apps, I certainly couldn't. We couldn't come up with anything...
There's nothing. It's been slowly getting more and more shitty for years. It's just been happening so slowly that there wasn't a breaking point where most of us left until now.
I've been casually looking for an alternative for years, because the content has gotten so low effort. There just hasn't been any good alternatives. I tried Voat, but that got over run with racists and Trumpers almost from the jump.
Lemmy is the first thing I've found that seems half decent and it needs to triple ot quadruple it's engaged user base to really have a shot. Too many posts with no comments or very few. What made reddit special was the comments and interactions. I have hope lemmy can get there, it just needs way more users to do so.
What made reddit special was the comments and interactions.
And in the past few months, I found several instances of karma farmers copying a good comment that was low in the thread and pasting it as a reply to one of the top comments to get visibility and upvotes. Idk if it was bots or people with no life, but I bet shit like that was happening much more than we realized, vastly padding engagement. Personally, I'd rather have a smaller and more authentic community here than disingenuous reposts, shitposts, botposts, trollposts, and general farming like what many subreddits became. I like that this platform seems to have much more thoughtful engagement between users who feel more like people than some cardboard cutout. I think we all can learn and grow as people by sincerely engaging in real discourse in the serious communities, and have interesting OC in less serious ones that are just about memes or storytelling or whatever.
I agree that interactions are special, and I agree that Lemmy needs more users, but I'm wary of bloating the userbase and packing garbage into here. I'd like to see a little growth, and give lurkers a reason to engage in an inviting community that isn't hostile.
I agree. Lemmy is really promising but not quite at the critical mass yet. I've been trying to post more myself but we need consistentand sustained activity.
I think we’re gonna get there fairly soon. Lemmy.world only started on June 1. I joined a week ago when there were 1-2k users. Now there’s almost 30k.
I bet reddit corporate is shitting bricks over chatgpt. They want to get their IPO and be able to sell their shares before AI upends online discussion. AI Bots are going to be a big deal, not in a good way.
Its a better analogy that Reddit pissed off the roadies, ushers, ticket takers, and other crew because they wanted 300% of the concession stand's gross take.
I hate that the main issue reported is third party apps are dying. That's a side effect, not the main issue.
The main issue is the access of the reddit's data. We all built that. The volunteers who gave all of those hours to supervise that content is the real MVPs of reddit. Not the useless execs. The real founder of reddit has been gone for a while now (he was a true freedom fighter of access to knowledge).
The execs of reddit realize two main things. The first is the known idea that third party apps have the option to change how reddit looks to the user (including blocking ads). The other is that academic types and AI builders could use the content that we cultivated together in order to build datasets to train AI. The reddit execs know groups like these would be willing to pay extra for our data.
R.I.P. Aaron Swartz. It's been 10 years and these are the issues you warned about and fought against.
I love how WIRED, being part of the commercialized, centralized internet itself, cannot bring themselves to mention actual Reddit alternatives like Lemmy or kbin, and end this write-up of Reddit’s folly with basically “uh so people might go back to tumblr, I dunno, maybe someone should like, give someone startup money for a like new Reddit and we can live the cycle of the good ol days again”. Yeah don’t worry guys, you’ll get us next time.
What a wet fart.
FTA:
(Disclosure: WIRED is a publication of Conde Nast, whose parent company, Advance Publications, has an ownership stake in Reddit.)
conde naste was reddit and wired's parent company and I believe still a major shareholder so probably why
Yet another article that (knowingly or not) frames it as "people don't want to pay for the API":
Reddit charging for access to its API is also about more than just third-party clients, Bruckman says. A move like this has angered so many people on Reddit because it feels like a betrayal of the community’s trust.
No mention that several third-party app creators are fine with paying for API access, as long as they can build a business model around the pricing.
The more this drags on, the less people think this is about money, and more about controlling the platform.
A real business person finds a common ground, sets terms everyone can at least pay forward. Because, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if I have $100 lemonade, if no one is able to buy it.
I really don’t understand why reddit doesn’t just charge end uses for API access. Heck chuck it in with premium or something. They can generate an API that you use in whatever client you wanted.
I’d happily pay Reddit for a key to then use in Apollo, but bizarrely this isn’t an option. It’s not like Reddit lacks the ability to charge end users, they already have premium after all.
Because they don't want 3rd party apps to exist at all.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that all the reporting I've seen so far has failed to capture all the nuance involved. Unfortunate, but not surprising, I suppose.
at this point, even if reddit backpedals on their decision it will be just for damage control not because they care about the community.
If reddit backpedals, even just for damage control, it will cement just how much power the users and mods have over that site. As it should.
I think that's precisely why spez is going to do everything he can not to backpedal.
No, Spez is breaking Reddit. The blackout is a symptom, not a cause.
How are none of these news organizations reporting that is not about the API becoming a payed service, but rather about the amount of money they are charging for it... It's quite infuriating.
The rich control the narrative.
Anyone who has been online long enough has learned to deal with the fact that sites and communities they love almost never stay the same over enough time. Even here on the Fediverse we already have situations like Beehaw defederating.
Convenient how Wired (who is owned by Conde Nast who is owned by Advance Publications who has a stake of ownership in Reddit) mentions that "Like with Twitter, no clear alternative has emerged as a replacement." and fails to mentioned the fediverse or forums.
Not to whitewash the take, but it's a bigger issue.
The idea of success and being big meaning nearly the same as being relevant are the true villains of the story here. Every business wants to go big, every businessperson wants to make more, every platform wants to aggregate more and more content, etc. The people making the most impactful decisions in companies are plagued with these ideas and lead their businesses in the opposite direction, while staying blind to the alternatives, no matter how small, because they believe that the fact that their users are fleeing to smaller places is a joke, a temporary inconvenience, or a failure.
But it's not, truly.
Kbin and Lemmy and Mastodon and Calckey are, indeed, smaller platforms than Reddit and Twitter are, with less content and fewer people, but the fact of the matter is that is a considerable amount of people that fled both Reddit and Twitter for good in favor of smaller, to some "less relevant" platforms. The effect is the same - less traffic for Reddit and Twitter, less influence from these two, less ad revenue.
I don't want to sound like I truly believe that CEOs and other exec-level people are stupid and make decisions based on ego and simple solutions (like looking at numbers and judging nothing but the numbers), but hell, it does feel like humanity, as a whole, is not perfectly capable of properly functioning at the scale we're trying to function at right now. Smaller companies are more sensible and have higher net profit margin, smaller communities are often safer and more welcoming (on top of being more manageable, too), smaller projects are easier to keep track of and deliver with more satisfying results, etc. Execs don't seem like the type of people to even consider these simple facts, instead opting for being the bigger fish with the bigger wallet and market share.
Maybe that's just me feeling increasingly less comfortable about anything that is sized to unmanageable degrees, thus just seeing things... but then again, that's the tendencies we've seen time and time again in this late stage capitalism, with synergy becoming the same good ol' monopoly, while the common folk begrudge another "mall", its policies, and their results.
Are you surprised? The status quo does not want a new competitor. Unfortunately for us, the easiest way to keep the fediverse down is to not even acknowledge it as an option.
I mean. I'm going back and forth between Lemmy and kbin, but let's not kid ourselves. We're not at a Digg-level exodus yet. The, for lack of a better word, hardcore users are moving on, but the casual redditors aren't showing signs of going anywhere.
Not saying it might not happen, but we're not there yet IMO.
I love how WIRED, being part of the commercialized, centralized internet itself, cannot bring themselves to mention actual Reddit alternatives like Lemmy or kbin, and end this write-up of Reddit’s folly with basically “uh so people might go back to tumblr, I dunno, maybe someone should like, give someone startup money for a like new Reddit and we can live the cycle of the good ol days again”. Yeah don’t worry guys, you’ll get us next time.
What a wet fart.
Reddit won't really die. It will filter out users that (I believe) are providing value to community. Reddit will keep corporate marketers, bots and fake discussion.
Oh well 🤷♂️
Reddit is downplaying the effect, but don't believe it. The quality of posts and comments there has dropped by like 90%.
Reddit has been a terrible site since I joined it. They’re insane outages and comments just failing. Lemmy even with its bugs it much better. The future is bright.
The faster reddit dies the better for the internet as a whole.
I think it's sad. There is so much good information stored in the side bars, like for example /r/buildapc or /r/fitness, that I hope gets salvaged by the fediverse.
Plus our spaces here need indexing so we can find answers to obscure questions again.
I'll likely to exist for a while. Myspace still does. So plenty of time to migrate over a lot of that useful information.
Indexing is happening already, so just a matter of time.
Well, spez and the company's policy changes over time and particularly now have been destroying Reddit. These are just the latest results. Exodus will continue.