Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
I migrated entirely to Lemmy and I don’t regret it. I do miss the amount of content on Reddit, but at least I know I’m not supporting them anymore.
I’ll be honest I have spent the last couple months laughing my ass off at /c/risa since I jumped ship.
Yes lemmy is rough as a badgers arse but I’ll take this over endless streams of how fucked we all are or wall to wall yank politics.
Removed by mod
When I say rough ideas qol stuff not stability. I have a couple instance accounts for the hiccups. Things like blocking communities I am not interested not being fed wide. Its kinda like plying wakamole.
My biggest issue is that community discovery is difficult. I browse through the Memmy app and joining communities that are new or niche is really hard. Often times links just don’t work, it might be because I’m on a smaller instance, but it’s difficult to find communities targeting my interests because of this.
If your instance doesn’t know about a community yet, you need to try loading it twice. First time it’ll give an error, second time will work.
How do I search a community that my instance doesn’t know about to try and find it in the first place, I must apologize for my ignorance, but I’ve never found a good explainer on the finer details of federation.
Personally, I use Lemmyverse explorer and check @tcbot_uam@feddit.uk’s trending communities.
Removed by mod
Try browsing by top six hour!
Removed by mod
Ive been using memmy and do not notice any significant problems, it feels roughly like RIF did before it got shut down. Yeah there’s some small things that need to be fixed but it’s scratching the exact same itch.
What app are you using?
Not OP but for me Memmy for Lemmy does a good job replacing the Reddit experience I had in the past.
I’ve been using Memmy for a while and am thinking of switching to something else. It’s still a bit unpolished and buggy. It’s solid as a lemmy app but I suspect there are better things out there like sync.
Voyager’s new app is great and extremely solid. Avelon and Bean are great, but they might be iOS only - not sure.
Bean requires a subscription or a pricey lifetime purchase for full features, like Sync for Android, but it’s very smooth and polished and it has community grouping.
Avelon’s community browser is 🤌.
Lots of great devs still coming through with new apps for Lemmy.
I experimented with a bunch of Lemmy clients and came to the conclusion that Bean is the best app for me. Thunder comes second, Voyager second, Lifoff third and so on.
Memmy, Lemmios and Mlem still need so much work that I was surprised to find that some people find any of those apps adequate. Apparently personal preferences and needs play a significant role here.
Voyager is so much like Apollo, but I use Lemmy to share images since Voyager only shares links for now.
Thunder is my favorite so far. The heavy focus on gestures took some getting used to for me but I’m on board with it now.
(Also, not OP)
2nd for Thunder, but I turned off swipe and gestures and turned on the buttons in General.
Thunder is fantastic though i bet the team hates hearing from me. I test absolutely everything for screen reader accessibility and have submitted many many bugs. Thunder may very possibly bevthe most screen reader accessible lemmy app out their and that would be because of my reports and the fantastic coders.
… really? I looked hard (I thought) when I started and didn’t find the settings to disable the gestures. Maybe I was drunk. I just updated so I’ll take another look.
EDIT: there’s an entire setting category named “gestures”. Either I was drunk or blind or both last time I searched for those settings. Thanks
Removed by mod
I know fuck all about trek, never really watched it, but I’ve been finding some of the memes there quite amusing
To be honest there’s an annoying about of cynical politics here too, I’d debate these people, but I often don’t have the energy.
Sincerely -a yank
c/Risa is hands down my fav community! And very active.
Lemmy is kind of rough, but I’ve started to love it. I definitely think that I get the same content satisfaction I had at reddit – I think it’s more true of niche communities on Lemmy at the moment.
!fuckcars would like a word.
I’d rather they didn’t.
My country is old enough that alot of places aren’t built for cars at all
I’m not sure what you’ve been looking at but the “we’re fucked” politics is just as bad if not worse here. Its just WAY further left.
I already said c/risa
14 year redditor and I go back and forth (only for 2 subreddits) but majority of reddit, including the news portions are completely dead. RIP r/pbsnews. I vow not to comment or submit any new links for them.
Same. I will say though, my phone usage overall has gone wayyyyy down. So. Thanks, Reddit?
I do a lot more reading books when I want stimulation now. I still browse lemmy if I’ve only got a few minutes, like waiting for a build to finish in Visual Studio, but I’ll grab my ereader for anything longer than that.
Ditto. Lemmy could see more content, but the current amount is enough to keep me entertained.
Frankly the only two situations nowadays when I open Reddit is 1) cross-checking stuff posted in this comm, and 2) copypasting stuff from Reddit to Lemmy to avoid giving it more pageviews.
I moved the Reddit content I wanted into an RSS feed by putting the subreddit URL followed by /.rss into the feed URL and it works
I never knew this. I tried with https://www.reddit.com/r/watercolour/.rss as a test. I can the the images are in the feed. But, my readers are not showing them. Do you have any suggestions on getting image previews to work?
I’m not real sure what the issue is but I can confirm that’s the same URL format that I use. I use Feeder on Android if that helps
that’s what I use yes. Do you get images for that URL? If you don’t mind a quick check? Then at least I can dig into feeder.
Huh. Yeah I’m not getting them either, and after looking into my other feeds that do have images it looks like those are either video preview images or links to articles, so I guess it doesn’t support native reddit image uploads maybe?
thanks for testing, I do appreciate that. Thats a shame, but it is what it is.
Same, but I justify it to myself by the fact that I spend significantly less time doomscrolling.
I wish I could but there’s not much of a sports community in here yet. Trying to sub and contribute where I can to change that tho.
I’m not much into sports, but I’ll be cheering you and your efforts on! Go team go! I try to post occasionally myself things that might spur discussion.
Same, except I do go back browse occasionally…no voting/commenting tho.
Lemmy can feel slow at times but the byproduct is that I find myself searching for new communities, not just replacements for my old reddit favorites.
Because the most active contributing users left. I used to comment a lot on reddit, but I’ve been exclusively on Lemmy since my 3rd party app was axed.
And I’ve been very active here. Like, even on this alt account that I made 16 days ago, my app says my post “karma” is already higher than my reddit comment karma was from over a decade.
I feel more willing to contribute because there’s a sense of community, and I’m not just providing free entertainment for a company to profit off of.
Between you and @RandalThor must cover 50% of stuff I see
I’ve been having fun doing it. I just post a few memes throughout the day whenever I think about it, and I also try to spread it out among some smaller communities that I want to help grow.
So, memes and a handful of communities that I’m personally interested in.
I feel like I see you a lot, too. I don’t remember where, but it’s probably because I always notice the great username :)
Awwww :)
There are five lights.
There’s another Rand? I must meet this man over at Wheeloftime!
I win again, Lews Therin.
Hell yeah another place to subscribe to!! Thanks for linking it
I’ve commented more on lemmy in 3 months than the last 10 years on Reddit
Glad you’re here, nutbiggums!
Shit. I think it took me 5 years on reddit to comment once. Now I have alts! Alts!
I used to comment a lot on reddit
Same. I had a 15 year account with a couple hundred thousand karma and commented and posted a lot. If you piss off the people who actually use the site you will reap what you sow. Reddit should have known that since the exact scenario happened fir Digg when everyone migrated to reddit.
They looked at the leaves, and failed to see the forest, thinking that simply not killing old.reddit was enough to avoid Digg-ing the grave. Because from their view that’s how Digg died - v4 happened, users couldn’t go back, they got pissy, and they left.
@megane_kun@lemm.ee is also right when he says that they compared Reddit with other social media platforms and took the wrong conclusions. What keeps people in Facebook aren’t “content creators” or what have you, but their relatives and friends; in Reddit there’s no such thing, people weren’t there because of more people but because of the content that those people created, so their connection with the platform is considerably weaker.
I also think that the trust thermocline played a role. It wasn’t the first time that the platform pissed its own users.
Agreed on the reasons why FB stayed relatively strong despite its reputation going down the drain. What kept many people from leaving FB for good is actually network effects: that one’s friends and family, coworkers and colleagues, are more likely to be in FB than not in it. Huffman’s site? Not so much. I don’t care if someone I know IRL is in it, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want them to know I used it.
The platform formerly known as Twitter is a more apt comparison, to be honest, but it’s still way too early to tell if it has actually weathered the storm, or has become so rotten on the inside that it’d spectacularly fail in the near future.
Perhaps Twitter is a third can of worms, it’s neither about content (as Reddit) nor the users’ social circles (as FB), more like a few anchor people keeping the others there. Due to that Musk’s idea (to pay creators to stay there) might actually help.
I still think that it’ll fail due to other decisions Musk took, but less spectacularly than Reddit. Musk is at least trying to think by himself, Spez is simply following others.
I think Steve Huffman is only after the possible profits he’d make on the IPO. He doesn’t care if his reputation would be sullied amongst the proles like us, nor does he care if he’s being original and ground-breaking. He just cares about the money.
Will it work though? I want to bet on the possibility that his IPO will fail due to all the bad news about his site as of recent, but given that the world in general has been disappointing recently, I’ll just keep my money to myself, lol!
He is after the IPO money but Dunning-Kruger is the hell of a drug, Spez is simply not a good CEO and he doesn’t know how to maximise pre-IPO numbers. So odds are that he thought “who’s in the same situation as me? Ah, The Iron Man¹! He’s a cool guy, has lots of money and a platform like mine. I assume that he knows what he is doing², so I’ll ape what he did!”. Musk killed 3PAs and got rid of the people criticising his platform, so did Spez.
And killing 3PAs pre-IPO does actually have some merit. They created value³ for Reddit, but detracted from the immediate profit; but if you’re selling the company you don’t care about the value, you care about the immediate profit to show your potential buyers “see? This company is profitable, gib lotsa moni”. However odds are that things happened faster than Spez predicted, odds are that he assumed that the protests would last a bit and die, not that people would say “enough of this shit”. And now odds are that he lost that “magical” window of opportunity to maximise Reddit’s price to the potential new buyers.
- I cringed writing this.
- Spoilers: Musk does not know what he’s doing.
- By “value” here I mean the potential of a company to generate profit over time.
Hahahaha~ If it’s any consolation to you, I also cringed reading the part that made you cringe while writing it. More than enough cringe for all of us to share around!
Yeah, you actually said out loud what I was just thinking to myself when I wrote my previous reply. Not exactly what you wrote, but I was thinking that if it worked for others, it’s good enough for himself. Why think of a good idea when you can just copy others’? Something along those lines. However, copying ideas actually does take some work as well. It’s not enough to just copy what they did and apply it to your situation. You’ve also got to think about whether or not what you’re copying is a good fit for your circumstances.
About the third point though, the way I see it is that Huffman tried his best (the key word is ‘tried’) to increase the profitability of his site to entice potential buyers, which even though it’d detract from immediate profitability, would add to the money he’d cash out at the IPO in the end—or so he imagines. Agreed with how things didn’t happen according to how Steve anticipated them though. And in fairness to Huffman, other flareups have ended in a similar way. What he didn’t anticipate is how these changes (the API changes) will affect how a lot of people (and the ones that contribute a lot of content) would interact with his site. So, yeah!
I’m always happy to see a Teft post pop up in my feed.
Life before death, Radiant.
It’s easy to argue why they thought it’s not going to happen to them. They saw Facebook shrug off all of its scandals, and thought that being in a similar position, network effects are going to help them weather any storm. And it can be argued that Steve Huffman and his site did weather this particular storm. But like Facebook, trust in Huffman’s site have taken a blow, and in the demographic that they would ill afford to antagonize.
That we’re starting to see its effects as early as now should scare any sane person in Huffman Inc.
Wow I was on there longer than you and I don’t think I broke 10k haha
I know the ways of karma farming. It ain’t much but it’s an honest living.
I had over 300k comment karma, on the site every single day for about 10 years. Comparing the comments here vs there it’s crazy I hung around so long. It’s like getting out of an abusive relationship, you don’t realize how much you’re being mistreated until you’re out from under them.
Yeah. Lemmy users aren’t saints but there’s a lot more friendly, cool and deep discussion than on Reddit. In the last year before I left, I had felt it’s gone so shallow.
Same. Thing is, I would usually get gold like once or twice a month. I would post well sourced, long and often highly upvoted comments. Try to be genuinely helpful or insightful. I used to be a journalist, it was an outlet for me.
Not that they were that great, redditers upvoting stuff doesn’t make a comment right or interesting, and wasting too much time there was really not something to be proud of, but if just ten thousand users like you and me quit reddit, that leaves mainly teenagers, bots and ‘comedians’ rehashing the same tired puns.
It can effectively kill smaller subreddits, as has quite obviously happened in some cases.
We weren’t just customers, we also produced a disproportionate amount of the content on reddit. More than our relatively small numbers would suggest. IRC the 1% rule states that only 1% of users actively post/comment. If you’re posting relatively coherent or thought out comments, you’re the 1% of that 1%.
I’m sure the notifications are annoying you by now, but I’d like to borrow the moment to agree with everyone else. You’re one of the users who have ended up becoming this place’s lifeblood somehow, and I pretty much always enjoy whatever you post. Or at least, a ton of what I enjoy ends up having your name on it.
I heavily appreciate seeing you around and while you are allowed to slow down for the sake of your sanity, I would notice and miss it.
Not an annoyance at all! I don’t have push notifications on, so I just check whenever I open the app next.
And I really appreciate the kind words. I’m just happy to support lemmy growing, one dumb meme at a time.
I’ve been very active here
I’ve noticed your posts almost every day and appreciate them
Thank you, 🍝
No offense I thought you were a bot given how often I see your username haha. Good on you! You are helping to make this a better place
Beep boop, I like sharing memes
(Thanks!)
I’ve been noticing your username a lot lately. Solid memes, thank you for your service🫡
🫡
I’ve definitely seen you around a lot lately. 😁 Thanks for the joy and memes.
I was never famous on Reddit but I was a prolific commenter for six years. I gradually phased out from Reddit as I got into Lemmy until July, when I pledged not to comment or vote on Reddit ever again. I’ve since kept my word.
Thanks!
And yeah, I’ve checked reddit a few times for niche things, but it would just feel dirty to contribute there now.
how do you know how much karma you have in total?
For Lemmy?
Some apps add it up for you. One of the apps I use frequently is Voyager (on Android), and it shows it on the profile page.
For example, here’s yours: (I assume I can’t see 100% of the votes though, in case your instance is federated with any that mine’s not"
I wrote an extension for firefox that shows your collective karma so I was wondering if you were using it, this is cool as well
Oh that’s cool. I may have to check that out on desktop.
I’m going to update it to show youe comment/post karma separately when I get my computer fixed
Well definitely make a post when you do! I bet a lot of people would be interested in it.
I made a post, they hated it man 😭 I got like the same number of downvotes as upvotes
Yeah I already seem to be somewhere among the 1% top posters on Lemmy and I bet users like me were much more valuable to reddit than 10 lurkers. I’m sure a relatively tiny fraction of the users created 90% of the content on reddit and those most likely are also the people most annoyed by the death of 3rd party apps and I’m sure there’s a ton of others like me who switched. That’ll definitely show in the activity even though it might not be much in absolute numbers.
You’re not alone. Just check https://subredditstats.com/r/technology or any other sub you used to visit and you’ll see a clear drop in comments/day. After the APIcalypse, so many people just left and never came back.
Is this data really accurate? The difference is insane for every subreddit I checked.
I think so, all the older data points make sense (you can clearly make out the begin of COVID and the Ukraine war). It’s really insane, 50-90% less activity is no exaggeration.
Well, the site says it shouldn’t be used for serious purposes, but I would say it’s still safe to consider it semi-quantitative. If you see a drop like that, there really is a drop. What the exact value was before or after might not be that reliable, but it’s not even important in this case.
Wow, this is really interesting! I checked a few, and you can see a severe drop in activity.
Every sub I cheked got totally nuked to oblivion. No wonder why people are complaining about the quality. Hardly anyone is there to comment or vote.
I opened reddit on desktop yesterday for the first time in a while, and I had received a survey from the Admins.
I’ve never received something like that before. The questions made it seem like they’re trying to figure out why people are unhappy.
Sounds like an easy question. RIP RIF (and all the other apps), therefore Reddit is nolonger fun.
Wow, that’s a serious drop off! I looked at a few of my old fave subreddits and they’re all the same. It’s like one of those old towns in the US that was once on a main highway before a new route was built. Once bustling, now dead.
They don’t call it the APIcalypse for nothing. Reddit got totally nuked and it hasn’t recovered.
I feel like this is by design. Reddit never wanted to be a discussion board. It wants users to keep scrolling so they see more ads.
Oh, that is a good point actually. However, drop in comments is probably also associated with a drop in quality posts and the number of people who upvote them.
Because the most active contributing users left.
could have fooled me; my biggest issue with the fediverse is the lack of content and reddit’s content just keeps getting bigger and bigger by the day.
fortunately it works for me since i want to detox myself from all social media and the fediverse has so little content to i’m done after 30/45mins per day; in fact, i can still spend hours on reddit unregistered lurker and get more content every day than the entirety of the fediverse since its creation, combined.
I never thought it would be so easy to stop going on Reddit, but this place is good enough
good enough
IMO the users here are way more pleasant to spend time with than those on Reddit. The level of hostility in some areas of Reddit was off the charts and it seems the trolls are staying put. This definitely /mademesmile.
I really avoided unpleasant subreddits. There were many smaller subreddits that were genuinely fun to be in. I miss those communities here. One that comes to mind is r/gintama. That sub was a great source of joy for me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one here.
If you build it they will come…
Can you create your own?
There is a bit of a hiccup with hexbear and lemmygrad but besides that, I feel it’s a very welcoming place here
Yeah I’ve had some really good conversations here, I had a lot of great little friend groups on Reddit over the years but being here made me realise I haven’t had a really good chat with someone that I genuinely enjoy talking to on there for about five years. I’d honestly just assumed it was me but here I’ve had so many great conversations, I don’t know why but possibly it’s that the good interesting people aren’t drowned out and beaten down by a sea of hostility.
Eh, many brought their reddit habits over here
My blocklist grew daily for about a week, and now my lemmy experience has improved drastically.
I only dislike the quantity of anti musk/anti reddit posts
i think most apps have a word filter that you could use.
if you generally want the content but not the spam way you are experiencing you could have another app without filters.
Totally agree. And I’m now using more of my time to relearn all the Spanish I’ve forgotten over the last 20 years and even improve beyond my previous level.
I also made the decision to try to use my social media/YouTube/web-browsing time on learning new things. When I’m in the mood for more mindless activities, I generally opt for watching videos where people bring positivity into the world in some way or another.
I pop on here once a day or every couple of days to fart around a very short while and then I’m back to doing my thing.
I occasionally end up on Reddit because a web search had results from there that were intriguing for whatever I was looking up. I never go in as a registered user anymore and those few times I do end up there, I’m in and out without going any farther than the thread that came up in the search results.
Thanks, Spez, for helping me take back my life!
Good enough, that’s our motto.
We have a saying im German that encapsulates that notion: Ein gutes Pferd springt nur so hoch, wie es muss (A good horse only jumps as high as it has to.)
🤣
We’re a pretty darn good minor league baseball team if you ask me
Agreed, and it seems to be evolving over time.
Only thing I miss from reddit is the r/SamHarris subreddit. It was pretty much the only place on the internet, that I know of, where one could have serious, intellectually honest discussions and disagreements.
I like Lemmy but the content here is, for the most part, focused on certain popular topics and even though there’s still a lot to discuss there the issue is that people have quite strong opinions and generally aren’t willing to entertain alternative views on those subjects but rather have already made their mind and the replies are generally based on emotions but not always facts.
I was on reddit for 11 or 12 years. Commented several times a day. Voted 100 times or more per day. Left mid June and haven’t been back once. Now I do that shit here instead.
Turns out that Reddit is a lot easier to quit than most people claim or realize. I still end up there from web searches occasionally, because some communities just don’t exist in lemmy (also lemmy frankly sucks as a place for finding niche communities due to fragmentation and shitty search tools). But besides that, there’s nothing particularly compelling about reddit anymore.
I wonder where people are going though? They’re definitely not coming here unless they’re an adult male technology/linux nerd.
I’m a woman who has never used linux
Still post here. Gotta get those niche communities some use.
I know I’ve won when my fetish communities are here
Yes, fetish good.
I’m a bit lost there too.
Um excuse me we also have knitters .
I’m a woman, and although some technological things are interesting I’m not quite a tech nerd and definitely not a Linux one. Linux seems cool but I’m too lazy to make the jump. MacOS and/or Windows serve well enough for me.
I also have several different Threadiverse accounts and try to post frequently in niche communities I’m interested in, although not so frequently I become the only contributor and it feels spammy.
I’ll be the first to say that if they rolled back the changes I’d return in a heartbeat.
I miss reddit a lot, but I decided to leave if they went through with the API changes and I stand by that decision. But I definitely miss it and Tildes and Lemmy simply don’t replace it.
The only reason I ever see reddit anymore is for archived info. It’s only a matter of time before that’s all here anyway
I wanted to call bullshit
but they’re entirely right.* Comments per day took a nosedive. Now if only more hobby communities would lift off, I’d be able to abandon Reddit entirely. I’m up to my tits in Linux and privacy guides but I still know nothing of mushroom picking. Nothing!Edit: *some users pointed out that subredditstats is no longer capable of accurately tracking comment numbers. I was wrong.
And that’s exactly why lemmy needs to grow its userbase significantly before it can ever become mainstream.
grow sounded nice until you said mainstream.
The beauty of a federated social network, is that even if it becomes mainstream as a whole, there will always be smaller niche instances for us to get away from the big ones on.
I’m up to my tits in Linux and privacy guides
omg I’m seriously loling rn 😆 there’s so much fucking linux on this site. ive been using linux for ~14 years (exclusively for 2), and i have no idea what most linux posts are going on about, nor do i know anyone with a linux pc in my real life. us on lemmy have somehow managed to find each other.
i give it a few months until i have my own instance, a pi hole (whatever tf that is), and completely blocked google from tracking me in any way.
I still love seeing them despite lying outside my interests. Seeing someone’s passion project or troubleshooting session from the outside is interesting, if only thanks to their enthusiasm inspiring novel approaches and clever workarounds.
yeah, it’s engaging and entertaining. i spent half an hour yesterday going through a thread where OP argued for the use of linux in business settings and the comments were reaming OP for his arguments. i was like, “jeez. dont make a mistake on this site. people will let you have it.” OP should wait a few weeks, make an alternate account, and argue for the use of Win over linux in business settings to get the other end covered. 😆
Pi hole is brilliant
I like a good project. Pi-Hole actually frustrated me with how easy and straightforward it was to set up. Maybe like- ten minutes total. You won’t regret it.
see‽ im already getting sucked in
Pi-hole isn’t a complicated tech thing!
It’s just a raspberry pi with a piece of software that you attach to your router and set up block lists that…
Well shit, maybe it is.
Thanks for the giggle. Coffee wasn’t helping that much but the thought of someone just standing near some mushrooms and dramatically throwing their hands in the air pepped me right up
How about mushroom growing?
We have mycology and a few shrooms communities. Just browse my history for the exact links and some neeto grow pics.
Do you think they’re better than MushroomGrowers?
Personally, since it isn’t Reddit, yes.
The communities here are small, unfortunately. Once more people migrate over here, it has the potential to be much better. Without a doubt, the communities aren’t large enough to have a ton of accurate knowledge sharing.
Until then, we should just keep contributing! While I am likely a “top poster” on the shroom communities, I do have some good conversations in the comments. Many people are just lurking and that is totally cool!
I have actually learned a bit about growing here, but I’m infinitely more interested in foraging and identifying. It’s like geotagging, but edible.
Yeah, the myco communities are coming to life for sure.
You could always try some of the AI content:
!fungusid@mander.xyz needs some love… pick random mushrooms you find, say you’re thinking of eating it and wait for a lot of "NONOONOOOOOO"s in the comments. Next step is ???, then profit!
Shit you’re right. I never imagined it was this massive a phenomenon. I guess there’s even more lurkers than posters now.
How accurate is that site, though? I checked one sub and it seems to heavily undercount the number of threads and comments.
Hmm, you’re right. The site missed 75% of the comments on the subreddit I checked.
Yep.
Hopefully it always misses 75%, but that’s tough to check.
Is Subredditstats still working after reddit api changes?
My guess is that they are also rate limited, so that information may not be valid.
Another user and I checked and it seems not to be accurate anymore, you’re right.
Content creators left.
You lose those, you’re fucked. A full fckin 80-90% of any given user base are consumers / commenters and they follow content. Creators are a keystone species.
Well I contribute to the 90% of lurkers. I upvote posts and comments. It ain’t much but it’s honest work.
Removed by mod
Do you think there is something inherent to the reddit-format that promotes toilet scrolling? I think so.
Removed by mod
I contribute a lot here (on different accounts) as an extrovert who just also happens to not care about celebrities. I used to be on Instagram because I care about my friends who use it, but the platform got enshittified enough to drive me off. Yes, maybe I won’t know that you went on vacation so I won’t be able to bring that up as a conversation topic, you’ll have to remember that yourself and bring it up in conversation. But that’s not exactly a great loss and neither is having one fewer person viewing your pictures and tapping “like” on it. A big part of my extroversion is that I like discussing things. Kbin and Lemmy are places to do that.
I toilet scroll these because it’s something short and engaging I can do instead of just doing nothing while waiting for the human waste disposal process to finish.
Much more than the old school forums it “replaced”
Man, if I could blow my own horn as well as you blow yours I too would need a whole lot of privacy!
Removed by mod
Woooosh
I wasn’t one of the 1% on Reddit, not even remotely close, but I suspect I might be close on lemmy (excluding repost/mirror/auto bots). I really wanted lemmy to succeed and knew that some people, almost any people, had to step up and help get the ball rolling initially. So I started 5 Reddit subs I missed, posted content every day for a few weeks and they’ve been reasonably successful. !badrealestate has 5k subscribers and that feels like a decent contribution.
Removed by mod
If you open Reddit without an account on a browser, it will automatically create a username for you when you are on site now. Hopped on to look at a post on a semi active subreddit and saw I was somehow logged in, but it was an auto generated account name. Wonder if they are trying to boost numbers that way as well
Just tried it and that did not happen. There was a pop-up asking me to sign in via Google though so I’m going to guess you accidentally clicked yes on that at some point.
It was actually on a work computer using chrome that absolutely no one uses, I’m not even logged in on that machine nor is chrome. This happened a few days ago now, let me see if it will do it again.
Here’s what popped up
Is this where all those auto-generated-ass names were coming from when I was arguing with anti-protesters?
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
It’s the birthplace of all the quality memes after all. Reddit clearly saw that as more of an opportunity rather than a risk.
That seems like a GDPR and CCPA nightmare.
Honestly, I’ve enjoyed Lemmy far more since joining than I had been enjoying reddit for at least a couple years.
Same. The meme overload on the /all/ sort can be kind of obnoxious but it’s so easy to block communities that it’s a minor nuisance.
lemmy has become much tolerable after i blocked all the meme communities.
i also block hexbear and beehaw for separate reasons.
The problem is - on reddit, the userbase is large enough that I can decide what I want to talk about. If i want to discuss underwater basket weaving, there will be communities talking about that. lemmy is nowhere near big enough - there’s traction on /all/ but not on the smaller communities.
I think we’re still a ways away from that… there’s still many technical, moderation, and social feature hurdles we need to get over.
I’m pretty happy we’re even as lively as we are.
technical and moderation features are factors within the admns’ control. growth isn’t
deleted by creator
You have to remember that APIs were used massively by third party apps users.
I don’t see a reason to attribute the API related drop more to automation than users stopping browsing reddit because third party app ban.
If you’re trying to sneakily manipulate karma and content, you don’t want to be doing it through the API, you want it to look like legitimate users so it doesn’t get blocked. This usually means some kind of browser automation.
Of course, reddit does so little to combat it, maybe there really were sleazy astro-turfing botnets just accessing the site through the API.
Back in like 2018, reddit posted some user stats, including a list of “most addicted cities”. They forgot to scrub the results and Eglin Airforce Base was the top rank.
The fact that it wasn’t blocked implies reddit admins are OK with the airforce’s botfarm, and would allow them to use the API.
deleted by creator
If I recall correctly (I might be wrong), July/11 was when the 3PAs stopped working. Regardless of that I don’t think that those karma farms relied on the API, because as @PoliticalAgitator said they want to avoid shadowbanning.
However, if we follow your reasoning, it’s still a fucking dumb move from Reddit Inc. to kill what made the place active. The issue with bots was never their usage, but rather that they went unmarked, pretending to be human beings [re]posting stuff.
We did it Lemmy!
I would probably still post on reddit if I could do it from my phone in an app that actually works instead of being a glorified ad platform. They killed 3rd party apps to bully users to switch to the official app to boost the usage stats to have a better angle to haggle for their IPO. Problem is that the official app is just excruciatingly painful to use if you are accustomed to a proper reddit browsing tool.
The backhanded, sneaky way they did it with all the denial and lies was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Instead of being upfront and calling a spade a spade, they commited to a hostile takeover and removed all doubt that reddit is going to stay a platform for the people.
If they would have been honest from the get-go I might have continued posting.
Yeah I went to subredditstats.com and checked out a few of the subreddits with a lot of subscribers. They all show a huge drop both in number of comments and number of posts per day. This is the first time I saw some hard evidence that people have moved away, and it’s a lot more than I thought.
I never participated on Reddit, but I used it to check in on tech stuff and other various interests. I didn’t spend a lotta time on it, but it was definitely the platform that I spent time on the most.
When all the third-party stuff started happening, I decided to take the principled stand and quit using it, but I was worried it was gonna be difficult.
I was wrong. It was super easy ditching it.
Even though it was the “social” platform I was spending the most time on, it also felt like the easiest to replace—mostly because that content could be found elsewhere. This kinda made me realize that Reddit doesn’t have a moat, and it confirmed what I knew all along—the value of the platform is derived from its users. So when there’s enough collective will to do something (in this case, fight against network effects), it’s incredibly powerful.
So I used this free tool I built called Reddit Account Manager to gather all my subscriptions, bookmarks, etc., and then Power Delete Suite to delete all my accounts.
I noticed that my time spent online in general had also decreased.
10/10 would recommend.
I used to use reddit everyday. Now it’s like once a week, same as lemmy too. Now I just surf FB MP in my spare time and watch YouTube…
A lot more tiktok for me. Say what you will of the platform, it’s at the beginning of the enshittification spectrum and has a ton of original and interesting content.
I do use Lemmy every day too tho.
I feel like the vast majority of tiktok haters never tried it. The algorithm works really well, and it’s no where near as addictive as people claim. Could it be bad for children, sure. But you could say the same for a lot of other social media.
It’s also the only major platform that has limiting features built into it, if you do have a social media problem.
Way more YouTube for me, a Bit more of Twitch, a bit more Discord, and even a bit more of Instagram than I thought I would, but still, way way more Lemmy than anything else
Way more grass touching for me. Down on YouTube activity, Discord, Lemmy, all of it. Turns out picking up a botany hobby can be INCREDIBLY ADDICTIVE and every waking moment will be spent wading through prairies and forests hunting for rare Asclepias species.
