Asklemmy

It was based on principal. And Apollo RIP

main reason is the app changes of course, but I've been getting sick of the site for quite awhile.

powermods that run hundreds of subreddits abusing their authority, everyone is snarky and rude, only approved stances are allowed and anything deviating from them get dogpiled/censored, the annoying redditisms (edit: Thank you kind stranger! Wow I didn't expect this to blow up! obvious fake stories in AITA/Relationships, etc).

the entire site was just getting really stale.

the upside was that it had an active forum for almost every niche interest, but that's also a negative as it really killed many of the small special interest communities.

When I first learned that Reddit would be pricing out third-party apps I was angry and upset, but I still entertained the notion of maybe continuing to use old.reddit on the desktop (until they inevitably killed that). I like many of the communities there and didn't want to give them up.

But then came the AMA and the leaked memo and the crushing of the protests with threats and strongarm tactics. Everything spez wrote dripped with contempt for the community and the moderators that had made the site what it was through their unpaid labor. The message became clear: "Let the little users cry it out. They'll have their little tantrum and then they'll settle down and accept that the reality is that we can do anything we want to them and they have to just accept it. Their communities, their conversations, their culture, it all belongs to us, not to them. We have everything and they have nothing".

I'm not going back to that.

Same reason as everyone else, I reckon.

Apollo is the only way I’ve used reddit for about 6 years.

I don’t want ads, and I don’t want my data serving as an asset to capitalist pigs!

the fediverse was/is quite a daunting platform. I’m here for the long run (hopefully), but I worry that it will either continue to be a relatively vacant space compared to other media, or crumble under the weight of unexpected operating costs.

To anyone who has been here for quite some time, I ask you: what are some useful tricks to make the most out of the service?

Seeing the way Reddit handled the protests. It’s one thing to have a business goal of getting everybody off of 3rd party apps (which was obviously the case). It’s another to lie about it, slander developers, threaten mods, etc.

The CEO basically said fuck you to like 15% of users, and hes doubling down on lies about it.

The CEO is a total scumbag and Apollo closing down.

Honestly? Because fuck spez. He treated the community like assets.

I'd been a redditor for about 14 years, if not longer (I was a sophomore in high school, I believe, and I'm 30 now). I've been using 3rd party apps for about as long as they've been around. I tried the official app once a few years ago and really disliked it compared to the experience from things like Baconreader and AlienBlue.

The fact that the apps are dead is obviously shitty, but I decided to quit Reddit because of what the API changes represent - the inevitable descent of a capitalist enterprise into full-bore profit extraction. In my view, that's not going to work for Reddit, which seems like an inherently unprofitable enterprise. Any changes that will drive revenue will also substantially hurt the things that makes Reddit useful and fun in the first place.

More ads? That actively degrades the experience. More monetization of little digital badges? That's not going to be enough to generate the revenue they want, and it's incredibly stupid anyway. Paywalling subreddits? That will kill the entire site in a heartbeat.

Ultimately I just don't think Reddit even can be profitable to the degree that corporate overlords want it to be. Either it's going to die quickly, or it's going to gradually get even worse, dying slowly.

My main reason? The administration team, I can understand needing money and wanting to charge for the API services, and while they were higher than normal I would have probably been okay with paying a subscription to help keep the third party app I was using running.

That was until I saw the CEOs response to the development community and anyone who remotely asked about it. That was before he absolutely butchered the ama, and before he slandered one of the largest third-party developers in the community, and then when being called with evidence the bull crap he was spreading instead decided to attack said Community member saying that he didn't realize that it was recorded and that he stands by what he said. That was before he decided to threaten the moderator teams on the platform who may I remind you was working for free as volunteers comparing them to a landed gentry.

It is very clear that what he says publicly is polar opposite of how he administrates, he may say that Reddit is an open Community where the community has final say, but his actions say completely otherwise; it's his way or the highway. And since he is the CEO of the platform I'm choosing the highway and clearly I'm not the only one.

At this point even if he decided to do a complete 180, and made a formal apology to the site and reversed the actions of the API changes(which I personally think financially wise would be unwise they should have funneled it into Reddit Gold somehow) I wouldn't go back, it's clear how the leadership is on the site and quite frankly that's not something I want to contribute to.

To be honest I'm still winding down there.

But for me, once the blind moderators said they can't work with the new system, that's pretty definitive for me. When people with disabilities have found and built their own ways to exercise equal power with others and protect their communities, and then those ways are wantonly taken away from them — yeah, that's bad.

Losing Apollo for one.

But what really actually disgusted me was how Spez is throwing people like Christian under the bus.

I would’ve gladly paid for Apollo and given Reddit a fair cut. Not anymore. Lemmy seems pretty great so far.

The tone shift, mainly. I mean, I knew it was going downhill, but I didn't realize it'd happen so quickly until the huge shift in tone after the protests. Then it kinda clicked that "whoa this place is turning into a shithole fast".

It's good old cancer. The influx people don't really know how to use the community, they don't "get it", and now there are enough of them to resist being driven away. It's unstoppable now. Every sub slowly turns into a shitpost sub, bit by bit, as the negatively creeps in subtly.

A single mod team can't hold it back, trolls are too smart for that, and trolling mods is too fun. It takes a larger community culture to keep them at bay. Lose that ... and watch for yourself. Should take a year or two, off the top of my head. Not even r/humansbeingbros with a mod army could withstand the coming times of darkness and despair. It would merely be the Rivendell among Sauron's endless hordes. lol

I gotta admit, I thought reddit was immune. The karma system. But a critical mass of users is capable of undermining and subverting it, and then spez came. While he could backtrack and possibly cure the cancer by inspiring some decency again, I don't think that's very likely. No profit in that.

I was on the fence about it until the Spez AMA. Then, I decided I'd be leaving on the 30th.

Then, I had a user call me "fucking stupid" for supporting a sub shutting down, and that was the final straw for me. I had seen how friendly people on Lemmy are and this showed me how toxic Reddit is by comparison. So I immediately nuked all my comments & posts and deleted my account. This was around two weeks ago and I've been much happier here.

I had been using Apollo for 6 years. I couldn't go back to their miserable app. Still can't stand their desktop mode either

Part of it was the platform getting worse, sure. All the reasons others said, the algorithm getting worse, the API, etc.

A big part of it is the people. The more people from Facebook and Tumblr and other big apps came to reddit the worse it got. It also happened at a time that subreddits and the algorithms and rules were creating stronger echo chambers. What it created was incredibly toxic braindead circlejerks.

I'm so tired of the braindead circlejerks. Basically everything was. I'm so tired of seeing copy pasted musk threads where everyone tells everyone else how much they hate musk saying the same lines over and over, for example. Or repeating the same misinformation about topics they're fired up about because it fits their bias, while also complaining about misinformation. Pushing the dawn project videos for Tesla circlejerks or literally anything related to crypto for example.

I hope one of these new forums or social media sites popping up creates good communities and somehow avoids creating these echo chambers and reinforcing them with their algorithms, moderation, general design, etc.

I miss old reddit and old forums and IRC so much these days. They weren't perfect but they weren't as bad as modern social media.

I'd been looking for a good reason to leave reddit for a while.

Lately I've been growing tired of the push towards reddit mobile app. I only use the desktop app, even on mobile, and slowly but surely reddit has been hiding things behind their app or requiring you to sign in. I don't want to sign in, I don't want a mobile app.

Despite how big it is, it's very easy to not actually engage with anyone. I miss forums, so I didn't like that.

Opening up popular posts and scrolling down pages of witty one liners.

General rudeness, brigading, and the all or nothing mentality concerning many topics.

Reading pretty much any comment in /r/worldnews is discouraging.

I know people like googling with 'reddit' at the end, but marketers also know this and I've become suspect of 'reddit recommended' products. In general, reddit is turning into a product and not a place of knowledge and discussion.

I know this is probably my own reddit settings, but I don't like how comments have been collapsing. So I open a post with 9000 comments, I see like 3 top comments and have to click to open the children, which can take a second to load. If I reload the page then I lose my place. Clunky. (I've never used any app to access reddit).

I left Reddit because I gave them so many years of dedication (and $ via Reddit premium), not even considering the fact I bought coins on multiple accounts.

1. Reddit became way too focused on Karma. Karma is great in concept, but more than half of the users are only posting for internet points at this point. It takes away from the validity of posts imo. How many "I stopped drinking for 30 days!" posts did you see on there with like 70k upvotes and thousands of karma?

2. The amount of not genuine posts is alarming. People have become addicted to the upvote/downvote system moreso than boomers on Facebook have become attached to their pages.

3. The amount of hate speech, misinformation and blatant lies the site actively promotes is insane.

4. They literally made everyone NFT wallets...???????

5. NFT wallets?? Why the fuck was this ever approved? Oh yeah, more $, and something else for Spez to add to his IPO rubbish. Hey look at us we have some NFTs too type beat.

6. The userbase is pretty shit and Spez has even admitted to not caring about the people who made his site what it is.

Why would anyone ever stay on a site where the literal CEO says he doesn't need nor care about you?

I was a mod on Reddit so I was personally aware that for years Reddit's mod tools have been totally inadequate for the job, that Reddit has been promising to give us something better, and that Reddit has failed to deliver. Honestly, it was even worse than just not delivering: we'd get new tools that didn't solve the main problems, were only available on the iOS app, coming to Android eventually, and coming to the websites never. Third party API tools were the only thing that made modding vaguely functional, even on a small sub.

I'm also a supporter of accessibility in apps, which is also something Reddit has been promising for years and Reddit has failed to deliver. Again, third party API tools are the only thing that makes Reddit vaguely accessible right now.

Reddit's API changes are not realistic to implement in a single month. This was made clear early on and Reddit has refused to budge. So at this point Reddit is knowingly upending an ecosystem that makes their site usable by groups of users with no first-party replacements ready. And given their history of failing to deliver these very tools, I have no confidence that they will ever do so.

And THEN the Spez AMA happened. I was hoping he'd listen to the community, engage with our concerns, or at the very least actually do an AMA. Instead he got caught lying, he got caught astroturfing, and he inadvertently made it clear that the real issue was that he was butthurt over these third party apps being better at business than Reddit was. Oh, and later we found out the Reddit CEO really admired Elon Musk's handling of Twitter, a platform I left for all the reasons Spez seems to like it.

Even if none of these issues affected me personally (which they do), Reddit has made it clear that I just can't trust them to run a fair and functional platform. They do not take their obligations to their users, mods, and business partners seriously. If they don't like the way the game is going, they'll change the rules without warning. They will promise features they will not deliver even when those features are essential to their site working for the users who keep it alive.

I don't want to help Reddit build what Reddit wants to make anymore.

1. API bullshit

2. Steve Huffman’s behavior

3. (Final straw) Spez said that he spoke with Elon Musk and looked up to his “cost saving” measures. It is apparent he wants Reddit to be like Twitter so I said fuck it I’m out

That one article that coined the term 'enshittification' and made me realise centralised, for-profit social media will always turn garbage after awhile. I'm tired of changing sites every few years. Time to use something that'll stay good this time.

It became very focused towards the 18 year old mindset and if you didn't always adhere to the same ideology, you'd get trolled and/or downvoted.

The fact that a huge portion of the big subs were controlled by a small contingent of mods.

The API was the nail in the coffin. I stopped contributing the week of the 12th and only logged in to look at the general state. It was a little painful (and still is to some effect), but cutting something off after 14 years wouldn't go unnoticed to most people.

I'm acclimating fast and enjoy the feel of this place. Thanks to those of you making it what it is.

RiF shutting down, deleted my account on the 12th and cited it in the "why are you doing this?" Section. I doubt it even saw human eyes but if you want something to change you have to be willing to give it up 100%. Anything less and u/spez has already won.

Lemmy.world is a nice place and it's getting pretty big. I hope other instances keep up. I'd enjoy seeing four or five main instances with dozens of smaller ones for specific use cases propping up the content aggregation side of the fediverse into a viable option. Mastodon already has the community size they need to be self sustaining IMO.

Hell if YouTube dumpsters it soon it might actually get the web 3 we really want to see off the ground.

RIF shut down and told me to come here. I'm a simple man.

I was looking for an alternative during the blackout. I knew that I wouldn't use it after the blackout since it would only be delaying the time of the switch. I always used RIF and I definitely wouldn't switch to the official app.

Up with Sync, Down With Spez

Spez

Been on Mastodon for about two years now and honestly just found out about Lemmy. My primary app for Reddit was Bacon Reader and, now that it's gone dark, I don't really have a desire to continue to use that platform.

Losing Apollo was the main reason.

However this whole saga unveiled other disturbing things such as how Reddit is leveraging its communities for advertising in this post: https://lemmy.world/post/837198

For me 90% of it was how badly they handled the paid API transition.

• If they had given more than 30 days notice so Christian and the others could have actually handled the changes financially and logistically I would have stayed
• If they had just mandated Reddit Premium to be able to use the API instead of weighing the cost on third party apps I would have stayed
• If that AMA wasn’t an absolute fucking train wreck I would have stayed
• If their official app wasn’t a enshittified mess of advertising dark patterns, user tracking and useless avatar bullshit I would have stayed

It was obvious the writing was on the wall for third party apps and they really didn’t care about fucking them over.

Also - whilst I miss some of the communities greatly (webdev, bluey and formulae being the prime candidates) when I step back and looking at it my feed is a mess of the same reposts, karma farming, doom-scrolling and negativity.

It isn’t the same place it was when I migrated from Digg all those years ago, which is sad but understandable.

Just couldn't trust them anymore. Stuff like that always turns into a slippery slope. Besides the fediverse feels like the old internet with web rings. But better. It's nostalgic in a good way.

I haven't completely quit reddit yet but the third party apps shutting down and the way reddit handled the whole thing led to me looking for an alternative because fuck using the official app or mobile browser version, when old.reddit goes that'll be the end of any use of reddit for me but hopefully Lemmy can build enough of a community to keep me away sooner because it definitely feels like reddit is circling the drain in terms of quality.

I came here to watch something new grow...and be a part of it. For me it's become clear that reddit is on the 'our investors demand monitization' path and I have yet to see a single good outcome of that.

Spez and his API changes.

How they handled the third party thing and the I don't give fuck attitude in the whole context. To me reddit is the baconreader and without it I won't use it. I'm happy that I managed to get on board of this new thing here and I like it very much.

Their gross treatment of mods and developers.

I used to mostly lurk, occasionally comment and infrequently post, but I understand and appreciate the work mods and developers do.

Reddit is just another big company that's trying to get rich off free labour with no regard for the people it hurts along the way. Fuck em.

I've been noticing the quality of posts just dropping. Nothing interesting or useful or insightful. Just junk food. The API thing, although not directly affecting me was just badly handled and considering how many people were screwed over by it it didn't feel right to continue. I definitely miss older Reddit. 10 year account here. So here I am. Better username though, my Reddit handle was cringe lol

Reddit, like Digg before it, was a gathering place, where people could post or consume content, and interact with other users. It was much like a town square, where people can set up their soapbox and bark, or where a person could go and listen, interact, and enjoy.

Reddit is now like the Home Owners Association for that particular town square, and are actively trying to control the entire experience, by acting like they own the soapboxes, and as though the barkers are now obligated to ensure that content is HOA approved.

That kind of neighborhood holds no appeal for me.

I left when Reddit started effectively taking over subreddits by forcing them to open or change their content to what Reddit thought it should be. I was planning on paying for Reddit premium so I could keep using it ad-free. I am sympathetic to Reddit’s desire to make a profit. But when they started effectively taking over subreddits it stopped being the Reddit I like and I’ll never return.

Honestly I was using reddit app on all my devices, but I kinda despise big ass tech companies who think they are too big to fail no matter what they do...

So, here I am.

Their own client on Android is incredibly poor and riddled with ads. I strive to filter all advertisement (using adguard) on my phone so this is a no go.

Losing RiF, I can't use the official app it's trash.

Put simply, I'm tired of being the product, and it's obvious that Reddit wanted to implement more data harvesting and more advertising to their platform. Couple that with the outrageous cost to use their API, and it's bye, bye Reddit.

I can understand that u/spez has the power to whatever he wants to with his platform. I don't agree with his decision to ice out clients like boost for reddit and other clients with out providing some sort of transition plan. That really rocks my confidence in reddit which I have been a member of for 10+ years. With this change I feel the days of smarter than the average bear organic content on reddit will take a turn to favor the everyday idiot echo chambers of other social media platforms. It felt that is has been a long time comming for reddit, and the api fee put the nail in the coffin.

Spez and getting rid of 3rd party