Something I’d like to share:
I’ve been periodically checking reddit in my Browser to see what’s going on. I commented last week about noticing a sharp decrease in posts on “my” front page. Since then I’ve observed a few more interesting things.
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Late last week, I noticed that multiple subreddits (BORU and PICS in particular) had like 2-4 posts when sorted by “top, 24 hours.” It wasn’t a case of having to click “next” (I really miss rifs endless scrolling feature…) to navigate to a second page of posts; there was no 2nd page. That was it.
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I also noticed that on the mobile website, ads are designed to look nearly identical to posts (imo it was more obvious that they were ads on rif), and most of the time the website would only have 1 or 2 posts before one of these fake ad posts, so your user experience is immediately impacted.
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The ads don’t seem to be as targeted as they used to be. I used to get ads that seemed to be geared toward me, my searches, and interests. Creepy, but I found it way less annoying than the alternative. Which is apparently a lot of “He Gets Us” and ads for complicated electronics or unnecessary services. Like a mobile vet clinic that isn’t even available in my area, lol.
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The bot posts are getting obvious and WEIRD. I took screenshots last weekend because just about every other post had a robotic, overly formal, and/or downright confusing title. Here are some examples:
56.3k, front page: “A brain tumour changed her life Her nerves are badly damaged! But today she opened a car door…walked…opened a gym door…walked and sat down …BY HERSELF what a lady”
[Quotation marks, format, and ellipses are original]
40.5k, front page: The trapped dog doesn’t wait a bit to hug the rescuer after being freed…
Same weird ellipses, and the way it’s phrased is like a “correct the mistakes” worksheet for 2nd graders.
I think Reddit is in the “find out” stage of their fucking around, even if it’s a quiet or subtle change to the casual observer.
I also tried going to ModCoord [I’m not a mod it just felt like a good place to find updates] and, on my end, it looks like almost everything has been deleted. The same day I took screenshots, /r/PICS posted a public response to reddit’s threats, which weren’t even acknowledged on modcoord. The most recent post I could see was something from GallowBoob? It was really odd.
Is the website being glitchy? Probably. That is, after all, part of the root of this problem. But if anything, I’d say it’s pretty clear that the content has decreased in both quality and depth in the last 10 days. Even if a lot of users are still signing in, I don’t think they’re posting, commenting, or voting as much as they used to. That may be a reflection of the quality of posts, or of users displeasure at the situation, but regardless of where it came from, at least it’s something.
One sub I’m quite a lurker on has 6 million subscribers, and top posts for the day had like 1.5k upvotes, and there was a massive shortage of new/interesting posts.
The change in reddit over the last few weeks has been dramatic.
Yeah, BORU is back to showing only 2-4 posts when sorted by top:day AND top:week.
It’s really weird and makes reddit feel very hollow.
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Making reddit go back to their own ways is not victory. We need to get redditors onto Lemmy. It is up to us to use Lemmy and spread its awareness to redditors.
I wrote about migrating to Lemmy and got banned from some subreddit…
Not surprised, i messaged many moderators about a community in lemmy and many seem to care less. However I got a few moderators over from reddit onto lemmy.
Some mods may be concerned about losing their mod status if they go to Lemmy.
Not their precious janitorial powers!
They need to create the communities they mod on lemmy and there are plenty of instances to choose from.
I’ll do my part to welcome anyone who joins here, but there are plenty of knuckleheads on reddit who will give you shit for having any kind of principles that take a long term view or make life anything other than blissfully convenient. I have no motivation to try to convince those people.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this? What sort of views did you get shit for?
The Witcher subreddit mods put up a poll about whether or not they should extend their protest (Every post from the start of the protest had been about The Hexer an old poor adaptation of the witcher). I commented that I supported the continued protests, because charging exorbitant prices is unfair to moderators that do what they do for free, and unfair to the 3rd party app developers who gain no income from developing their apps. Someone came at me with this argument;
buddy i work 48 hours a fucking week i’m just trying to enjoy and discuss things about fandoms i enjoy while i’m taking a shit. i could care less about these protests, all it’s doing is fucking up my potty time
Like, from a self-centered point of view, how dense do you have to be to not understand that moderators not having access to their tools is going to “fuck up your potty time”.
well I called him;
Self centered, selfish and uncaring.
I mean seriously, have some common decency to fight for the platform you browse daily. I just don’t get some people, really. Well regardless, Lemmy has been a much better place, though I can’t imagine that’ll last forever.
Like, from a self-centered point of view, how dense do you have to be to not understand that moderators not having access to their tools is going to “fuck up your potty time”.
this is the summary of 60% of reddit now
pissy white boys mad that their entertainment driven by free labor was interrupted
mad that their entertainment driven by free labor was interrupted
Exactly, my point. These people have such a shallow view point that they can’t stand to have their content interrupted for a few weeks to fight for better online rights. That’s why your platform is currently a burning garbage fire. Enjoy your “potty time” now.
Honestly I imagine a lot of the people fighting against the protests were people paid for by reddit admins to try and sow discourse amongst users. Well, I wonder how that went for them considering the drop in content, and the rising migrations to Lemmy. It sucks because in losing Reddit - the information super highway that it has become - we as a species lose a lot of important information, and a lot of niche questions that wouldn’t be answered otherwise. But that doesn’t mean we can’t ask them again here on Lemmy. 🙂
Losing the info highway sucks but I wouldn’t say it’s a loss as a species. The majority of users are in North America and then the broader anglosphere. So it’s definitely a loss in that cultural space. But the majority of the world, like India China Korea, doesn’t give a fuck about Reddit.
fair enough.
this is the summary of 60% of reddit now
Likely because that’s who is left on the platfrom. 60% who actively don’t care, and the other 40% who either haven’t realised what’s happening or have no idea what’s going on.
Every post from the start of the protest had been about The Hexer an old poor adaptation of the witcher
The quality was shite, but at least it respected the source material.
Like, from a self-centered point of view, how dense do you have to be to not understand that moderators not having access to their tools is going to “fuck up your potty time”.
A friend of mine said that his opinion is, that the end user is the one being shat on by those protests. Pal, the end user is being shat on, that’s true, but that’s why the protests started. According to him, the official app is not that add ridden and it’s no big deal. That was June 30 afternoon. He won’t be able to compare those apps now and I do hope, when whatever lovely communities he missed so much during the protests go down in quality under new moderation, I can say “I told you so”.
The quality was shite, but at least it respected the source material.
Yeah fair enough, in some aspects, it’s leagues better than the Netflix one haha
But regardless, the way the Admins were pushing the Moderators around by the end of it is something I just can’t support. I hate bullies.
As someone who thinks like said user, they fucked up my potty time because I used RIF. I couldn’t care less about protests and other shit, but I won’t install Reddit official app because it’s bad and I need an android app. I don’t want to browse from Firefox. Therefore, here I am. Most people aren’t too invested into reddit and creating too many barriers will drive the away. The reason I don’t use reddit is the same reason I don’t use Twitter, Facebook, and hardly ever open Instagram: their apps/sites are just too inconvenient to use due to little things such as forcing logins, ads, pushing internal browsers, pushing their own image/video hosting…
I like Tiktok, on the other hand, despite doing a lot of the same shit, and YouTube haven’t annoyed me enough to leave yet.
Caring about how large internet companies or corporations in general treat their users, and putting my money where my mouth is when I disagree with them. To some people, this is a reason to rethink your life.
Someone said to me (paraphrasing), “you aren’t going to leave. I’m going to keep an eye on your account to see. You’re all making a big deal out of nothing. The official app is fine and you’re just being crybabies. “Waaa my app!” You aren’t going anywhere and I’ll call you out if I see you comment or post.”
I haven’t commented or posted since Apollo shut down and I don’t intend to.
Ahh, the internet blooms with summer children in July.
Making reddit go back only shows they have the motive, means, and now another opportunity to try again.
Kill it. Leave their corpse at the gates so others know not to alienate all the cattle.
Oh, it would be a victory. But only until they try it again. And again, and again…
Not to worry, we will be still flying half a social network
I genuinely don’t care. Lemmy has completely replaced reddit for me. I was a hardcore RIF user for over ten years. Connect is amazing and content had been like 90% there but with half the bullshit filler that reddit had. I honestly love it. Fuck protesting, just drop them hoes.
I don’t know where to ask this, but I’ve tried several lemmy apps and I always run into a weird “not logged in” glitch where the app thinks I’m logged in but I’m actually not. My subscriptions show up, but I can’t comment, etc. If I find a way to log out then in again it’s broken again, then refresh, then it’s fine. Am I the only one with this bug? I also seem to get booted out on lemmy.world in a browser every so often too.
I’ve gotten the same thing. Chalking it up to growing pains.
Yeah I’ve been using Sync for 12 years and Lemmy has already replaced 90% of what I actually liked about reddit.
The only thing I’m missing is team-specific pro sports communities. I think those will come as userbase increases though.
Shout out to Sync, I think my OG play store receipt for pro was in 2012.
Same, loving Lemmy. Only thing I’m conflicted on is when I’m trying to get that super specific search result and can’t find it anywhere else. Can’t wait until Lemmy develops that same degree of information.
I only care in so far as I want to hear every little detail about it falling apart because seeing greedy people losing everything due to their hubris is peak fucking comedy.
R/ videos got clever, I love it. Thier new rule is
Only text posts describing videos are permitted, and must describe a video in detail. Video links are permitted in the comments only.
That must be interesting haha
When a subreddit accidentally does more to help blind redditors than Spez does.
As someone who primarily used reddit with accessibility apps (RedReader) this would have been awesome.
Sadly, reddit doesn’t find me valuable enough to even let me try to use the site in a way that is comfortable for me
Didn’t they actually doubled down and accessibility apps are exempt from the API pricing and can be used for free?
Although, if I was developing such app, I’d probably just stop doing it for free after how they’re treating the rest of the userbase, so there’s that…
I was an Apollo user when I had an iPhone, then moved to Android and was a Boost user to finally move to Sync, now all of these 3 are dead, do you really think I’d want to keep being active on that “community”?
These devs deserved better, luckily both Android devs moved here, and they will receive the support of their followers, and Apollo already has numerous spiritual successors, Wefwef/Voyager being an awesome PWA and some iOS apps like Memmy and Artemis!
Sync for lemmy should be up in a few weeks time. I’m pretty stoked about it.
Mostly excited for Boost for lemmy myself, having a big dev putting that up will be of great help.
I really want Infinity for Lemmy
Have you tried Infinity for Everything?
How exactly do I download this. Also, seems like it’s still in Alpha
It is still in Alpha. Currently viewing communities, users, posts and comments of Lemmy instances mostly works.
Download links can be found here: https://sopuli.xyz/post/1103776
On that point: there is a Boost for Lemmy app in development
Same with Sync for Lemmy!
I was a Reddit is Fun user, and I’m hoping for a Lemmy is Fun app that is nearly identical.
Im pretty sure the rif dev is making a tildes app.
lol call me when tildes finishes their years-long closed alpha
Yeah, I’m not holding my breath
I don’t know what to chose, Boost or Sync for Lemmy or keep trying all the existent apps, I think I’ll use the latter plus Boost and Sync LMAO.
I really liked boost on Reddit, but it probably comes to personal preference. Haven’t tried anything else (besides the official app years ago) and never felt the need to try anything else.
I’m using Jerboa now and is a little similar in my opinion. I just downloaded it today so I’m still playing with it.
New here, I miss using RIF but Connect seems pretty good.
Connect is the most usable of the bunch, well, I might need to check Liftoff further, but I am not a fan of its interface.
I’ve been having a lot of trouble with Liftoff tbh, not sure how much of it is my shitty internet or just user error but I swapped to Jerboa a couple days ago and it is much better.
But when Sync comes along that’s gonna be the best for sure
I’m using Liftoff and have 0 issues besides some buttons being too small for my fat fingers.
I can relate, I just collapsed your comment accidentally while trying to upvote it
Every touch screen program I use on all my touch screen devices, you swipe right to go back. On wefwef, it’s a downvote. I’ve erroneously downvoted so many people while trying to go back a page because I tend to use my phone one handed and can’t reach the top right corner with my stubby thumb.
I cut ties today. I had been a mod in a sub of over 3 million users for years. All reasonable folk on the mod team were gone and a huge fight broke out because I suggested that we “Try to be decent to each other” as if it was the most offensive statement they had ever heard. I have zero regrets leaving that kind of toxicity behind.
This is the real result. Yeah subs will open back up, but the mods who are left are just weird keyboard warriors who think being a mod is like being a cop (I mean obviously this is a generalization, but it’s mostly true) The quality of individual subs is going to suffer and therefore the overall user experience will suffer.
Yeah, if that place dies it’ll be a wither on the vine situation with a somewhat slow negative feedback loop rather than anything overnight. Or it might limp along a wounded and lesser animal ala twiiter.
I’m kind of starting to think that may be what Reddit wants anyway. Just look at the kind of content that floats around on TikTok and Instagram. The tech nerds will leave, but that will leave space for scrollable junk content for an entirely different - and a lot larger - audience.
What sub was it?
I didn’t plan on naming names, but it was r/games
I hope the games communities here take off, I’m fiending for news lol
Oh God as long as we can like Harry Potter games again I’m good
Trueee
I haven’t been terribly active on r/games. I’d there something wrong with Harry Potter games?
Just the usual business of the author being a tosser and people not wanting to support her.
Any reason you didn’t follow Deimos?
I’m sure it was hard to step away from being so involved with such an incredibly huge community. Good on you though.
Thanks, sadly it was a lot easier than you may think. Unless they make major changes there I can’t see them lasting.
Lemmy.zip has a pretty solid gaming community that’s starting to grow
I’ll have to go check them out, thanks
Games was my favorite sub. :(
Compare the mod list today to from say January, or some time last year via the internet wayback machine. It’s quite sad. Also, for obvious reasons I’m using a different username here.
I’m enjoying Lemmy more and more each day. From the moment I loaded Wefwef, I knew I had a new home. It’s not perfect, but it was reminiscent enough of Apollo for me to know that Lemmy is a contender. I still mainly use desktop access, but having a mobile app I can pull up and scroll made me feel much better about leaving Reddit.
These kinds of posts remind me exactly of my first few days on reddit post Digg Great Migration. There was a great multipage webcomic made then too.
So you have lived two apocalypses? I bet this is a good story for your descendants!
God damn us internet vets have seen the rise and fall of many a digital empire. Refugees moving from 1 shell to the next,
IRC/AIM->Skype/vent/mumble->discord/signal/telegram,
netscape->IE->Firefox/Chrome/Chromium,
message boards/use groups->digg/reddit->Lemmy,
Search engines like ask jeeves->Google/yahoo->google.
Napster->kazaa/limewire->torrents/magnet links->Sonarr/Streaming Sites
I could go on but yeah it was insane.
Dropped Reddit a month ago after 12 years of daily use and while it was tough in the initial days Lemmy/Kbin activity has really picked up and is beginning to absolutely fill the gap. Just need the apps and a bit more stability and think it’s going to be a proper successor.
When the protest started I poked around the Fediverse and it was a ghost town and was a little concerned that Reddit might not have any competition. But since the end of June posts and content have been going way up, and the quality of the posts is way better than Reddit, even before spez fucked things up.
Same here.
There are a few (very few) communities I am still waiting to become active and useful here but Reddit has been moved to page 4 or my social media folder and I rarely ever scroll to it.
Good riddance too. The move to Lemmy/Kbin also pushed me back onto Mastodon and I could not be happier.
Is there a 101 for dummies about lemmy/kbin/mastodon? I dont know what any of those words mean
Edit: just realized kbin isnt on there. Kbin is another Lemmy-affiliated site, but it also lets you see mastodon posts. You need a seperate kbin login to use it, but the site looks similar and behaves similarly to any Lemmy instance.
The decisions that Reddit made allowed Lemmy and Kbin to grow faster.
I’ve been wanting to cut down on social media/Reddit for ages. Reddit making it a huge inconvenience to look at the site on mobile has been great for me honestly
Lemmy is a god send for me. It doesn’t have endless content, so after a few minutes and a few comments, I just close it.
I genuinely enjoy NOT having access to the endless dopamine
If everything is a dopamine fix, then nothing is.
I think it’s all had a bigger impact on Lemmy than it has had on Reddit. The lasting impact might be that Reddit now has viable competition for the first time since Digg, which is a good thing.
*pre-2010 Digg
Digg after that was no longer competition. It was an ad-riddled trash-fire which drove a massive number of its users away to places like reddit… including myself… who just kinda did something similar with reddit.
Yeah. They do not realize that despite “their traffic being back to normal” they destroyed their monopoly status. It’s a slow rot. But a rot that will kill their value eventually. And I am here for it.
On the bright side for them, they still have a commercial monopoly. The number of ads might go up while the quality of the content goes down.
Inertia will keep a train going for a while, as the engine dies.
The people that are now on lemmy were the heaviest users. The ones that bought 5 different apps to improve their experience and figure out which one they preferred : the mods, the creators, etc.
Have they all left Reddit completely? Probably not, but now they split their time. And stats say the proportion on Lemmy is increasing.
We now have an opportunity not only replace but contribute in the creation of something new - new mechanics, new rules and more.
Reddit is tired and has been for a while, Lemmy developers are building the Reddit they always wanted, and are innovating at breakneck speed.
Simple things like Top by 1, 6, 12 hours which we now have here, was badly needed in Reddit but they were too busy trying to shoehorn video and flairs.
I’m okay with this. As long as Lemmy is thriving with good content, that’s all I care about.
I hate to see the content we created help fund the pockets of spez and his fellow crooks, but at the same time I’d also hate to see tonnes of possibly the most valuable information on the internet going down the drain. I’ll be happier to see Lemmy get to the point where people can say “there’s a community for everything” more than seeing the collapse of Reddit.
Yeah. I don’t expect Reddit to necessarily collapse immediately, or Lemmy to replace Reddit for all Reddit users. I’m just happy if Lemmy becomes at least a medium-sized social network. That means that it would have moved from a niche platform into a large enough ecosystem to sustain itself, and become a viable alternative to Reddit, like you said.
With a huge platform like Reddit, the impact of the current events might not be instantly obvious. But with everything going on recently with Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Lemmy, and even Threads, I think it’s clear that there’s some kind of transformation of the social media landscape going on. But how long it will take, and what the end result will look like, is anybody’s guess. Maybe it’s the fall of the old giants and a rise of new, more democratic platforms. Maybe the giants keep standing, but significantly weakened, with a bunch of new, smaller, more open platforms becoming real alternatives. Or maybe it’s something else.
Be it as it may, I’m glad that the status quo is being shaken up a bit.
What really helps is the power users and moderators moved over too this time. Hopefully with this type of userbase Lemmy will be able to self-moderate and won’t end up like Voat.
I’d be happy if Lemmy becomes like what Reddit was when it started and never grew beyond that. I don’t need tons of clickbait outrage trash to doomscroll though every day.
The only thing I really miss from Reddit is a few of the smaller, niche subreddits that had small but active userbases. But that will come with time as the Lemmy userbase grows.
This. Some of the users in my favorite niche communities have migrated over, but overall, it’s still a bit of a ghost town compared to the same niches on Reddit.
Reddit was at its best when you stuck to the smaller subs where people were primarily positive and cheering on newbies, which really makes for active, welcoming communities that I truly miss. Having a bigger user base in those smaller communities is invaluable, because having a place to come and get advice from people who’ve been around the block is way different than the blank canvas you find in the same communities on Lemmy. My personal favorites were subs that specialized in “you like this? Have you tried that?”-type threads, and one of the coolest community norms I ever saw was in r/doommetal, where instead of blacklisting bands that got posted too often, they had the “Green List,” and anyone who posted anything from the Green List was cheered on and inundated by suggestions for more bands similar to the OP.
I found many of my favorite small bands and content creators in subs like r/doommetal, r/OSR, and r/boardgames, and the amount of good advice I got in subs like r/professors, r/luthier, and r/chempros is impossible to overstate.
I’ll miss my reddit niches, and I just hope the Lemmy niches eventually grow up to be a real replacement for those communities.
Now that I think about it, what if someone created a Lemmy instance that just… Mirrors chosen Reddit subreddits 1:1 via a scraping bot? So that if you wanted content from a subreddit, you could just subscribe to it on that instance, or ignore it if bot content isn’t what you want. It could work for smaller more niche subreddits (because I suppose that you would quickly run into a throttling problem or bot detection otherwise), but it may kickstart a few communities.
Without Apollo on my iPhone and Sync on my android, I’m not using Reddit. Lemmy filled that void. The only thing missing are niche communities. That will come with time.
Have barely been on there since it started besides to visit subs that havent even attempted to move yet, from what I have heard Reddit is definitely worse now with how many people have left, is that everyone elses perspective as well.
I was under the impression not much had changed because a small minority used 3rd party apps tbh.
Traffic impacts will be clearer in coming months. But in my view, the amount of noise is higher.
Looking at the popular posts and even my front page, the quality has subjectively gone down. Small subs are virtually the same, but that’s not where Reddit wants to make their money.
I have found that it is actually the small subs that are the most important. The big subs were very easily replaced as it was easy to build a new community from scratch. It’s the small ones that are difficult, and also the ones that pop up in search engines the most.
So many used the excuse to not participate or reopen with the explanation of we are too small to matter, but it is because the community is small to begin with that it is the ones that has the biggest pull back to reddit. Like for example if you search how to play taiko no tatsujin on pc it’s many hits of reddit that just pop up. Especially if you are looking for how to set up custom songs.
Agreed. The large subs content you can get anywhere. News, memes, made up stories, random questions with the same set of answer. Sure once you are already on reddit you might aswell consume it there for convenience, but that isn’t that special.
The small niche subs are what makes it unique. There is a reason why many people have come to add “reddit” to their google searches to find solutions to their problems.
Yeah, I had already unsubscribed from all the default subs long ago. That starts making me curious what type of subs long time reddit users who ended up leaving had avoided themselves and how long their list of filters blocking subs from showing up on /r/all were.
I can’t speak for others, but I literally never looked at r/all. I went directly to specific subs, mostly small and/or specialized. I had been on the site for something like ten years, and while I wasn’t online every day, when I was online, I was talking to people rather than lurking. For me, the whole reason I had to leave is that I went there to engage, and now that the company has made the “business decision “ to become a shithole, I no longer want to engage. So I have taken my 100% of my engagement here. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a link between being an active participant and feeling upset enough to leave. If I had been a lurker, it wouldn’t have mattered as much to me that I no longer feel comfortable contributing to spez’s data hoard.
[edit: also, as someone who was there as much to connect with cool people as I was to talk about particular topics, I am not missing specific subs nearly as much as I expected. I am getting more or less the same emotional payoff here as I did from Reddit at its best.]
Speed at which some communities have grown over few weeks has been pretty impressive that some of the subs that never migrated I’m not missing anymore. Of course there are a few that doesn’t have much people or any activity, but it’s been better than I expected.
Vocal minority though, surely?
I’ve visited a few times on Desktop (old.reddit) since the shutdown and the rate of new content seems to have slowed down quite drastically.Twitter metrics used to point to 90% of the content coming from 10% of the users.
If Reddit is similar, it makes sense to assume that many of the very active users were on 3rd party apps (to improve the basic experience, moderation etc.) so those being unavailable could put them off entirely (I know I’m using Reddit a fraction of what I once was).I believe the rule of thumb is the 90:9:1 ratio:
- 1% of users create original content
- 9% of users interact with that content - voting/commenting on it, sharing it, etc.
- 90% of users are essentially just in read-only mode
Ribbit
Is that right? I was under the impression majority opened back up.
Tbh I don’t really care either way, I haven’t been on reddit for 3 weeks now.
