After all the BS from /u/spez?
Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they’re there to stay.
All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:
- Bugs (I love lemmy, but gosh, have you seen how buggy and sometimes unresponsive it is?)
- The complexity of “servers” (don’t get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
- Lack of content
- Lack of users
Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn’t happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.
The complexity of “servers” (don’t get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
I’ll admit the technical stuff is probably the most off-putting. Most major social media got where it is by being idiot proof. The whole set-up will need to be much more streamlined if they want to really dip into Reddits user base.
I think the solution is a central registration which selects a random server from https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
For example, join-lemmy.org should do this, IMHO, without any technicality. Just transparently register to random server, with a curated cross-servers pre-selected list of subscriptions. Once users are distributed across servers, people will just recommend friends/family to join their own server, then the centralization of join-lemmy.org won’t become an issue. But I might be utopian.
I have zero hope for Reddit. I had no idea there were much better 3rd party apps available for Reddit on phones, so the API changes don’t impact me. But I’ve noticed over the years more and more, astro turfing by bots, bots reposting popular things to karma farm, as to sell the bot to entities looking to influence reddit via the aforementioned astro turfing.
It’s all very gross, I started to feel like a duck sitting in a pond surrounded by ducks, but not really, they’re all decoys, fakes, mean to give the impression of a big crowd. I don’t like that trend, and on top of that, the idea of Reddit going public, and trying to push our content as their value makes me sick. The owners of reddit haven’t done the heavy lifting, we the users, the mods all did the work and built up content. The idea that some chucklefuck was going to profit big from our effort isn’t something I want to be part of any more. So here I am, and I gotta say, Lemmy feels like a 2000’s forum by comparison, and I hope its very nature makes it harder to fall into the same pit falls as reddit and digg did.
Because Reddit has been our online home for years. It’s where our communities are, where are online friends are, it’s become home. People have spent thousands of hours building communities there, as a labor of love.
Unfortunately I agree with you- the home is on fucking fire and unless a monsoon spontaneously erupts we should get the hell out before it burns to the ground.
The vast majority of reddits userbase are consumers. They are already using the official app and don’t care about the politics of the platform. These people are only there to get their content fix.
I realised this when I saw a post on a subreddit where someone shared on how to turn off some kind of notification in the official app. So many other people thanked this person… Reddit has become another mainstream social media site like FB, Instagram and so on.
And that’s why I left. No more social media for me
There are about 5 years of my life on there, for some users 15+. Now, if you dropped your laptop with 15 years worth of memories on it, you damn sure would have hope you could still save the data, even if it’s obviously done for.
I think a lot of the general reddit user base is still out of the loop on it or just doesn’t care about the drama enough to make any kind of change.
Many users don’t log in every day, and might just sign in to look up answers to specific questions or to read individual subs. Those folks are a lot less likely to have been following all the updates through last month and before since so much was announced across a variety of subs.
At this point I just want the place to burn.
They are just following the reactionary social media norms these days. The lack of proper passing of information and just humoured by the subreddit protests such as in r/pics. Some people are not actually on Reddit for information.
You’re on the Fediverse where the more “extreme” people moving away from Reddit are. Hence, there is a strong bias toward experiencing the Reddit fiasco in a way that makes one think, that it’s already a sinking ship. For many, Lemmy isn’t as easily useable and mature as Reddit is.
Its the sane reason people still play old mmos. Theyve already sunk so much time into it and they are used to it, its were their community is and something new is uncomfortabke and scary.
Reddit will survive and thrive but that’s not hope, it:s the opposite. The site is massive and sucks up all.yhe oxygen in the room, plus the majority of users don’t care about API changes, they just want to scroll through some memes while having a crap.
Reddit is like the restaurant you’ve been going to for several years that was a mom & pop operation with awesome food and atmosphere. It got popular, and the owners made it a chain, so you could get the same food in a lot of different areas. The quality started to go down as they expanded, but it was already very popular. Then the owners started raising the prices, and the atmosphere started to get way less awesome. At some point, you realized that it’s not the restaurant you fell in love with, and it wasn’t a good value anymore, so you started looking for a similar kind of restaurant that was more like that one was early on. But the chain is still really popular, and a lot of people just keep going because it’s what they’re familiar with and they know the menu - they don’t want to go to the work of finding a new place and they’re content with what they’re getting there. The people who have left are a drop in the bucket so far, and the chain restaurant is likely to continue operating for the foreseeable future.
Because Reddit is familiar and people like to stick with what they’re used to and comfortable with.
Honestly, apathy. It is not like people have to start paying for the app or website explicitly
- Facebook/ Meta stole and continues to steal millions of users’ data, the vast majority of the users do not care
- Twitter hacked most third-party apps, but people still use it because it doesn’t affect them personally. They still use it for free, so why not?
- Reddit killed third party APIs? People will grumble, but they will recalibrate their mind and continue using the official app.
I completely agree, and I think another major factor is a function of when you started using Reddit.
I’ve noticed a trend that many of the people who’ve moved on from Reddit (or at least the ones who are posting here and in places like Hacker News) joined Reddit 8+ years ago.
I started using Reddit about 14 years ago, and I’ve definitely noticed a change in the overall vibe of Reddit over those years. There were obvious changes (like cracking down/banning specific subreddits) and there were more subtle changes (like communities growing so large that the comments turned to shit) and there was a departure from a text-heavy, original-content focused haven for like-minded people to a feed full of gifs and inflammatory comment (not to mention ads-that-are-pretending-to-be-posts).
People who have been using it for so many years notice this change, but it was so gradual and over so long a time that they were used to it – essentially the change was slow enough that we were lulled into accepting the new reality of Reddit.
But then this whole kerfuffle has shaken us out of it and made us realize that it’s only going to get worse. So here we are, onto greener pastures.
Now, on the other hand, we have the (many, many) people who started using Reddit more recently. They only know the “new” Reddit. And so they don’t get what the big deal is. They think the mods are throwing a fit and the power users are just whiny and “why the hell can’t I see my memes?”.
They don’t understand what we miss about Reddit.
As a fairly ‘new’ user of Reddit, I think you’re pretty spot on. I’ve been using Reddit for around 5 years or so now (and their mobile app, I know, burn me right now) and as you said, for users like me, it’s not that obvious how much Reddit has changed for the worst. Sure, a few things were changed for the worst, but compared to other social medias, Reddit still seemed like the better option to me.
The think is, this protest has shed light on a lot of issues I ignored, and the way Reddit Corp. has handled it just straight up made me sick and wanting to dissosiate myself from Reddit as a whole. But I’ve a strong political background, strong beliefs and I am french so… I’m clearly not the ‘common user’. Those, I get why they see the protest as an inconveniance at best, and just want to keep using the website conveniantly as they usually do. They don’t know about 3rd Party Apps, they don’t care about useful bots, they don’t understand forums and old internet culture. They just want their daily dose of content.
EDIT: Also my very first comment on Lemmy, as I’m trying to fly away from Reddit.
I think this really hits the spot. Corporate and Gov can eat people liberties step by step as long as they don’t touch their wallet and really few people will react.
I had hope until yesterday. I was a mod and all my users turned on me and said some really hurtful things. I’m gonna give a mod position to someone else on a smaller sub I’m a part of or two and step down from the rest. I’m guessing I’ll still lurk, but I’m done with it.
