My reason is that Reddit has opened a representative office in Turkey. This means the government can hand over IP addresses whenever it wants. In short, I came to Lemmy because freedom is gone. Fuck Reddit.
My reason is that Reddit has opened a representative office in Turkey. This means the government can hand over IP addresses whenever it wants. In short, I came to Lemmy because freedom is gone. Fuck Reddit.
Shutting down third-party apps through unreasonable API pricing with extremely little notice, then actively lying about their conversations with Apollo’s developer about it even though he had recordings of the calls.
I think there was even more BS at that time that made it against my personal values to stay, but those were the nails in the coffin for me.
It was hard. I spent over ten years on reddit, and I’d been active in some meetup groups over the years, so a lot of my real-life friends came from there. It felt like ending a part of my identity.
But hearing what kinds of nonsense they’ve continued to pull, I know I made the right decision and I’m glad I moved.
They forcibly replaced moderation teams on tons of major subreddits that went dark in protest too. No hesitation, tossed out the old teams entirely and replaced them with randoms, even on the former default subs. It was fucking chaos.
There was very obvious botting happening to push opinions in favor of the api-pocalypse in certain big subs, to the point where you could reply to the bots with some of the most basic ass prompt redirection/escape and get them to spit out cooking recipes.
People were getting banned for even mentioning lemmy. Reddit was reverting people editing their comments to try and scrub their history on the site, and banning the accounts, which is arguably a violation of GDPR’s right to be forgotten.
It was an absolute shit show.
I had already made a lemmy account by that point. If it had just been the api lockdown, I probably would have went back in at least a limited capacity using one of the patched third party clients (use your own api key) or the patched official official one (removes the ads).
But all of that shit together broadcast loud and clear that Reddit’s owners weren’t just passively stupid about what actually made the site worthwhile, they were actively antagonistic towards it.
It was no secret that Reddit had no fucking clue why Reddit “worked” and couldn’t be trusted to make good decisions. But all this shit demonstrated that the only thing they were interested in doing was intentionally killing it in a delusional attempt to maximize short term gains.
And every time I had even a smidgen of desire to go back, they pulled more bullshit.
Auto-generated language specific copies of popular subreddits, utilizing poor quality machine translation and literally stealing the top posts from the original subs with no attribution. Reddit disavowed that it was done by Reddit admins themselves, but there’s no way it could have happened at the speed and scale it did otherwise.
Mods still don’t have anything remotely equivalent to the old tools from before the api bullshit.
People getting permabanned over the most basic word filters imaginable (discussing the game Luigi’s Mansion after the CEO-cide), then getting IP banned when they created a new account to try and get in touch with support.
I still browse some of the subs related to my work passively (sysadmin, powershell, azure, etc) but the drop in quality and amount of bots is unignorable. Half the sysadmin sub posts are the most thinly veiled product ad setups.