I left reddit on june 12th last year in protest of spez’s decision to change the reddit api from being free as in free beer to an unbelievably expensive cost. That same day, I joined lemmy on a now abandoned account.
At first, I had a hard time adapting to lemmy’s significantly smaller community, but I got used to it and learned to embrace it. However, recently I started missing reddit a lot more, and after some consideration, made an account on the (demonic) website.
But I don’t think it felt the same way as before, sure, there was more posts, but they lacked a heart and soul, they were all so generic, as if it lost it’s spark.
Has anyone else that’s been on there noticed anything similar??
I go back to Reddit now from time to time. Mostly to ask specific questions in communities that are niche and don’t exist on here. They are the only good interactions I see that are just as good as here. Elsewhere it’s just different. I’ve not been able to put my finger on why, myself like. But it’s definitely not the same.
Before I do that I usually try to ask the question here to generate some content and interaction. If it’s for some niche community that doesn’t exist I ask the question in a more general community. Usually works out pretty well.
Edit: good to well
works out pretty well*
thanks
If there was a relevant one here I’d post here for sure. Reddit is a last resort or if I really need a response from someone sooner than later, cause there’s still more eyes on Reddit.
Facebookification should be a term. I think every platform that tries to grow at any cost will attract a certain audience that will ultimately make the platform less desirable. Like those spamming pins in facebook comments to get updates on the post instead of turning on updates in a context menu.
No need to create a word for something that falls within the definition of another word or turn of phrase. Reddit has certainly followed Facebook down the inevitable march of the Enshitification of the Internet.
I would say enshitification is more specifically about a product or service getting worse itself, whereas they were talking more about the audience. The enshitification had very much likely caused the “facebookification” of Reddit but i would say by their definition they are not one and the same. They can happen independently as well as because of one another.
Touché good man.
I refer to it as the social graph. When a site starts using metadata to map how users are related on a social platform. And then implementing features based on that. It’s not a buzzword but that’s the technical root that stems everything that makes an enshittified Facebookified site.
Unfortunately when reddit started becoming a social graph based site, the technical literacy of the user base also plummet. So nobody knew wtf a graph structure is.
Some things cannot be replaced. Spez destroyed something wonderful. There’s no going back.
08 reddit was vastly different than 12 reddit which was vastly different than 16 reddit which was vastly different than 20 reddit which was vastly different than 24 reddit.
For what it’s worth, they’re all terrible in their own unique ways. Aside from a brief window some time after 16 but before 20, during which bots and hate speech were both heavily moderated. Except in conservative spaces, but there’s no polishing those turds.
Reddit has been generic for several years now. It’s, mostly, addictive trash content. I miss individual subs but the algorithm for popular / front page posts is doing the same thing every other social platform is doing. If that’s your jam, go for it. I value my time enough that I don’t need to be entertained by an algorithm. I hate it. A lot.
Edit:
I mean, I just went to reddit.com and the top post is a 21 year old married woman asking how to tell their 18 year old cousin they stink because they only shower every 3-4 days. THIS is engaging content? WTF is wrong with you people? This is why I’m thrilled to have left that dumbass platform.I see more racism, sexism and other bigotry than before. Although there certainly was a lot of that back then as well. Also bots.
The quality of Reddit has been declining for the last ~5 years. Even if you ignore all the shady shit Reddit themselves have done, the platform has been declining due to simple popularity. Simple-brained people joining and upvoting memes and reposts and fucking TikToks. There’s also just the toxicity of society in general. There used to be honest discussions and nuance and input from industry experts. Now it’s incredibly corporate, and hardcore liberal, and full of the same toxicity as Twitter.
It used to be mostly Libertarians and Atheists, kinda like how Lemmy is all sysadmins and Linux enthusiasts.
But Linux enthusiasts could be Atheists, too. Oh wait, I forgot about the church of GNU and TempleOS.
I can’t even use Reddit anymore wince they don’t allow VPN users in. (I won’t turn it off for them)
there’s still some great subreddits, but many of the mainstream ones have devolved into right wing cesspools
The other day I was on one of those cloned threads where all the top starter responses were old copied responses posted by bots with numbers at the ends of their names and no one in the organically new comments even noticed. Just a few minutes ago I followed a link from the vanilla reddit homepage (I refuse to sign in to reddit but I keep going back anyway like a little baby brain) and there was a thread about a pride parade which was disrupted by a pro-Palestinian protest. All the pro-Palestinian comments were downvoted and all the highest voted comments were mocking “leftists.” In summary, fuck reddit, and this was the perfect moment for me to read your post.
The Zionist propaganda on Reddit is inescapable.
Reddit hasn’t felt the same for me since around 2021/22.
At some point it stopped being a platform for niche communities to come together and became a cesspool of corporate/government astroturfing and karma farm bots with a side of real people.
It really depends on what sub(s) you visit. Some subs didn’t have a lot of mobile users to begin with, so they didn’t see much change in their core active members.
The default sort/filter for the front page there is trash now. I typically see the same things hovering there for days.
Yeah, if I go to Reddit I go for something specific, e.g. discussion about certain sci-fi series, which is definitely more lively there than here, simply because of higher user count.
I was active - and I mean ACTIVE - on reddit for well over a decade. When the API fiasco happened, I deleted my mobile apps, and stuck to desktop. When ‘opt out of selling your data’ became impossible, I logged out for good.
Lemmy is both better and worse than reddit ever was. It will likely never reach the same activity level, but will also not reach the same toxicity.
Same here, I was a super user back in the days, posted multiple posts and dozens of comments every day at the minimum. With the API fiascos I deleted all my posts, all my comments. Fuck reddit.
I don’t care about toxicity, it’s the same everywhere, you wade through that. Toxic users is a thing, toxic management and platform is a whole other thing.
I wasn’t active there before that. To me Reddit just got more and more and more annoying over the last few years.
“Recreational” communities were banned, technical communities were flooded with only slightly related nonsense, meme and fun communities felt just dumb. A lot of communities als felt unfriendly and unwelcoming. Not within two days, but it eroded over the years.
At one point it felt like a burden to go through my subscribed communities feed. So I stopped using Reddit entirely during the protests and disabled my account (and it wasn’t re-enabled by Reddit to prevent loss of users) and I do not miss it one single second.
During web research I sometimes get a Reddit result. I change to
old.reddit.com
URL (I have a strict ruleset regarding cookies and JS and the normal Reddit is just shows an error message and I am not willing to change my configuration) to get the information, but that’s it. Neither do I interact with anything nor do I use any type of account.Same; if I find the answer to a technical question in a Reddit thread by searching Google I may leave a comment for others but that’s the only amount of interaction I have with the platform anymore. And I’m posting my questions to Lemmy exclusively.
its all bots now. like its been getting worse and worse and i’m not surprised if theres now a much higher percentage of bots in there compared to that time.
Curiously I’m not a bot, but I keep getting banned.
only bots allowed
have you tried digging out your morality centre and posting nothing but propaganda for corporations?
That’s good advice
The only places there that haven’t changed are the tiny game subs, to my limited willingness to use the site. I have checked the niche subs I used to moderate, and all but one is swamped with bullshit. Even that one has changed some. The only ones of those unchanged are the ones I had set to private ages before spez threw his little hissy-fit. The ones that were public are either dead, botted, or just unchecked insanity with bad moderation. Spam everywhere.