- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
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The fact that I’ve been a Reddit user for 17 years and I’m reading this on Lemmy says a lot about what Reddit has become.
I’ve been there for 16 years, but I have the same observation.
I was a reddit user for 15+ years… I got perma banned a bit ago. Part of me misses it. But… Whatever.
I got perma banned after Roe v Wade for criticizing the security theater surrounding SCOTUS. My account was primarily D&D homebrew. I can’t even go back to delete my posts…
I don’t know how many years I was on there but I was pretty active. The combo of killing 3rd party apps and selling everyone’s comments to AI was what made me nuke my account.
I had my first account in 2006 I believe. By even 2010 Reddit was becoming kind of shit.
Honestly, I don’t want to blame reddit entirely. The entirety of the internet has gotten progressively worse and worse and worse over the past 20 years. At this point I’m ready to nuke the whole experiment.
I wish we could go back to the web of the 2000s.
Golden age for sure. It was the wild West but so fucking fun. Every web page was creative and unique. Every community felt special. Now we’re all just funneled into these prefab “experiences” on these billionaire owned corpo platforms. It’s so dystopian.
You can’t open a damn thing without getting bombarded by ads. Corporations own the internet now.
“We value your privacy and security, but please provide every tiny piece of personal data, including when you had your last shit”.
Im lying if I said I wouldnt still be commenting there if the automod hadnt bugged out on me and created an unwarranted ban evasion death loop but the rage-engagement algorithm on reddit is becoming more and more apparent. I was never seeing actually good content from the subs I liked, i was only ever getting posts from the same handful of subreddits and only the shit that got the most comments.
Like not even good posts from those popular ones, ONLY the ones that were baiting people… and every municipal sub feels like a fuckiny psyop now. Any hot button issues and you get inundated by insane takes from obviously fake accounts that (before they removed viewable history) would just be coasting from sub to sub posting on the same topics (homelessness, trans rights, womens rights, immigration, etc)
Considering my first ever account years ago got banned for “report abuse” for reporting a comment about alleged jewish space lazers causing the hawaii fires… I think theyre relying hard on AI tools in the background that arent doing what theyre supposed to.
Yep, my account was 14 years old and I got banned for the most innocuous post that I thought that it was a joke. Don’t miss Reddit at all. It’s like getting kicked out of a fire.
I created my Reddit account in 2011, I deleted all my posts and stopped posting/commenting when they blocked 3rd party apps from using the free APIs and I am considering of setting up some sort of filtering to block it out of my search results since it doesn’t work without being signed in.
Reddit is dead for me
I got permabanned for saying something bad about Elon and now I’m here. Don’t really miss reddit much. In a way they did me a favor.
Google licensed Reddit’s content to improve AI-generated search summaries. Those summaries frequently answer users’ questions by drawing from Reddit discussions without requiring users to click through to Reddit itself. The arrangement generates licensing revenue, but it may also reduce opportunities to convert casual visitors into engaged, logged-in users who ultimately become more valuable advertising customers.
lol, yeah, that was a predictable outcome.
All reddit ever needed to do was leave it’s users alone and build a functional in house search…
Like, there was a solid decade when I needed to figure something out, I’d search Google and tell it to only provide results from reddit.
If they had licensed a search engine like Google, they’d really have been “the front page of the internet”.
It was that fucking easy, instead they did the opposite and let Google use their data without anyone going to reddit or probably understanding the info came from reddit.
Now the only difference is you use duckduckgo with reddit appended
You might…
We must cannibalise long term sustainability for short tern quarterly growth! It is the only way.
Spez thought he could make it relevant on its own before the clock ran out on the deal.
Short-term profits were great tho! Who cares about the future? Certainly not the asshole called spez
I may seem full of myself but requiring a login drastically reduces educated people existing in reddits ecosystem. I’m completely done with it and have moved back to forums for most things. This shift is the final nail in reddits decade old coffin imo.
If spez would’ve started an askreddit thread about the pros and cons of licensing user content to google he probably would’ve gotten a preview of how much he’d be on the short end of the stick
To be fair the other options was Google just using reddit content without there permission, like every other service, and not getting payed at all.
I dunno, we already knew the reddit answer without clicking in and it was “why don’t you google this yourself”.
Those summaries frequently give wrong answers.
Oh ya, rant time.
I was a Reddit user since 2006. It was my place to be. Endless posts on everything, every niche hobby you can think of, global and often even local news, learning about cool new things… I loved it. It was always crazy to me to decide to read a news paper and find that pretty much everything in it I’d already knew from Reddit, often finding out days or weeks earlier.
It started out an amazing place, it really did seem like a global town square where we could all get together and talk about everything and anything. But like all the cool online and tech companies the focus became more and more on money, which meant controlling what people say and see and harvesting as much data as possible from them. Large companies need income, and if you aren’t the one paying then you always end up the product. So they started pushing more and more ads and fake posts and instead of being controlled by the people it became controlled by whoever throw the most money at any and every topic. Since going public they’ve ramped up the user fucking big time.
Trying to force mobile users to use their app so they can harvest more data? It’s a fucking website. The program you use to look at websites is a web browser. Having 1,000 apps on a phone that are virtually all to use websites is not ease of use, or user friendly, or sane. They seem to have toned this down due to backlash, but for a while you literally weren’t allowed to browse Reddit using mobile mode. If you tried it had a popup telling you to get the app and that was all. But if you switched the same browser window on the same device to desktop mode everything worked just fine. That’s nothing but saying “fuck you” so your user base.
Getting rid of /r/all so that everything everyone sees on their home page is controlled entirely by the algorithms instead of having any potential of it by being what was most interesting or talked about (even though the insane amount of bot up/down votes and comments was already wrecking that? Fuck you. I’ve seen people say you can still see /r/all if you use old reddit… but it’s fake. It’s not actually /r/all as it used to be. When you can click through a handful of pages and get told that there’s nothing else that’s very definitely not “all.” As a formerly socially awkward fat kid I’m certain I’ve gone hundreds of pages of deep before.
For years we had genuine news reports on different groups and companies using giant cell phone farms to spam up/down votes on the posts they’re paid to boost or kill off and actually paying rooms of people to work to control the public opinion/narrative on their product/company/political party/country/etc. Shilling went from mostly a conspiracy to something warping everything on the place.
AI has only made it worse since along with corporate/govt approved or disliked posts notably having thousands of up/down votes with only a handful of comments they can now spam comments as well. Humans are a social species. There is always pressure to fit in. When we see that pretty much everyone is saying a certain thing or has a certain opinion we’re far more likely to decide the same.
If someone makes a post saying “Israel killing tons of kids seems bad” it can be well thought out and link tons of evidence, but if it quickly has several comments about Israel having the right to defend itself and the constant child murder being fake news propaganda and antisemitism and making fun of the OP then the people who open it and check the comments will be more inclined to feel that way.
A post on “It’s crazy that the US did all this awful stuff to Iran” with lots of links to blowing up lots of little girls in school and sending a delayed second hit so anyone trying to help them dies too, actively causing a shortage of USD there to destroy the value of their currency and push people to protest, etc, and it quickly has many replies are all calling the OP a conspiracy nut and saying the US was trying to bring justice and freedom 'cause the evil Iranian leaders killed 100 million protestors… then most people who read glancingly without checking and considering all the evidence (most people) and who don’t have strong opinions on the matter already will be likely to jump in making fun of OP for supporting middle eastern governments 'cause they’re all terrorists.
It’s something pretty much all big companies and governments do now. They nearly all have large ‘social media’ or ‘PR’ departments that focus on controlling the public opinion on topics. For a lot of companies it started out as customer service, helping people out and trying to convince the public they’re awesome by doing cool shit. But it warped over time into more like just trying to convince everyone that shitty things about them don’t really exist. Loads of subs main mods or full mod teams are employees, and in a lot of places dissent and complaints are quickly deleted.
And finally… the site-wide AI powered “moderation.” Posts/comments can be near instantly automatically deleted and the user banned for a while for pretty much anything. It’s not something the sub mods can control or do anything about even though the threshold for causing it changes based on the sub and the topic. You can be auto deleted and banned for posting a dark joke in a sub dedicated to doing that. You can spend a month talking about guillotines everywhere with no issues, but be deleted and banned for simply using the word in a post about US politics. Saying that you hope people in the US are exercising their 2nd amendment rights so they can defend themselves if the worst happens or suggesting capital punishment for federal agents who murder innocent civilians is “threatening violence.”
Reddit is no longer a social platform for people to communicate with each other. That Reddit died a long, slow death, but it’s gone now. Reddit today exists to collect user data, train AI, sell products, and control public opinion and narratives, and it does that by selling out every topic to the highest bidder.
Sadly most people keep using it instead of coming here because it’s what they know and they miss what it was. I miss the days when I could browse endless new things just refreshing /r/all there too. It sucks that Lemmy moves so much slower, and the decentralized concept does make it more work to use and more difficult to navigate. But Reddit moves way slower now too. If you try to use their default “home” feed or the new /r/all you typically see mostly the same shit all day. Instead of constantly fresh it’s always stale. Hopefully more people notice that and get tired of the bullshit, and we can make Lemmy the new place where conversation is always fresh and there’s a home for every niche you can think of.
Ya, I ditched when the api thing went down. Coming to lemmy was a breath of fresh air tho. I hadn’t realized just how much capitalism had creeped into reddit.
I still need to learn how to post to and find communities that exist on other instances and such… 6 months into using it. I’ve hit the age where things that are new and different are scary and bad, which is super lame for a huge computer nerd.
On the auto banning thing, the last time I posted there I got banned because I was arguing that Rorschach from watchmen isn’t actually a good guy because he’s racist and homophobic. that the movies just cut that all out to make him more likeable and to flatten the morality of the story.
To make my point I put a few Rorschach quotes down. I got banned for the language that Rorschach used. It wasn’t even slurs, it was just him blaming the decay of the city on “the backs, commies, and gays” basically.
This is the inherent problem with censorship. It actually does very little too protect anyone vulnerable, but does very much to protect against talking about those who are racist or homophobic or what have you.
Auto mod basically white washed Rorschach.
Yup. My last autoban that made me give up on the place after trying to come back to it lat year was in the WizardPosting sub. I decided to post as a necromancer and encourage everyone to convert the people they come across into handy undead slaves or something and was instantly banned for encouraging violence. I just said fuck it and deleted my account. When you’re not allowed to tell a dumb joke the AI decides it doesn’t like in a dumb joke sub then there’s not much point in me being there.
Reddit today exists to collect user data, train AI, sell products, and control public opinion and narratives, and it does that by selling out every topic to the highest bidder.
As a fellow sub 2010’s redditor also, fuck man I miss the ol’ times. But fuck reddit and what it stands for today. I cannot deal with the constant banning of accounts for engaging in a topic. Can’t stand that shit anymore.
If you tried to post a lot it became kind of clear that there was generally a pattern in the things they decided to ban people for.
I try not to be all conspiracy theory, but sometimes it seems like the super rich who own all the media and governments and judges and routinely break all the laws with no punishment also try their best to make everyone feel like even saying maybe we should band together and do something about that is being an evil violent terrorist.
Yep. Pretty much.
And you didn’t even really ouch on the insane toxicity that’s festered there x_x
They are SO friendly toward racism and bigotry as long as you don’t actually say a slur, but then their moderation is such a mess that you can get perma-banned for a sarcastic joke.
It’s weird as hell to me how many people there jumped on the chance to call things “clankers/clankas”, “wireback”, “tinskin”, etc. So many don’t even try to hide it, lots of comments about using the “hard r” in “clanker.”
It seems like a lot of people who generally seem like they’re not awful racists were just waiting for something they felt it was socially acceptable to throw slurs at, and a lot of those people seem to be the most fond of just making a tiny change to an existing slur against a group of people. I think AI is a terrible thing that will keep making the world worse and think we should get rid of it and all the AI labs, but zero part of me wants to write about how my daughter will never marry a clanker, coping the same racist tones and words that have been used against people forever. Like… they’re not doing that on accident. It’s not a cool nerdy star wars thing. It definitely makes loads of people who have heard very similar things directed at themselves uncomfortable.
It’s a Three-Card-Monte trick. At least that’s the best way I can describe it. One account presents an idea or rebuttal. All the stooge accounts reply in support of it.
The marks (the real human beings) are gaslit into thinking they’re crazy for not buying into the game.
It’s trickier than that too. I’m sure. They don’t all dog pile with the same narrative. Some will have an “okay, but” that generally agrees with the premise but isn’t too suspiciously on the nose.
We’re social creatures. Not being accepted as part of the group is some evolutionary terror we’re not even usually conscious of, but if you open a post, read, and agree with it but then see tons of replies laughing and making fun of the OP and calling them an idiot and a conspiracy theorist it’s suddenly going to be way harder for you to voice that agreement. It’s way easier to join the group pointing and laughing to try to fit in with the crowd or to just stay silent than it is to join up with someone being publicly mocked.
The one step further that I didn’t see - the getting rid of /all and use of the algorithm to direct you to what they want you to see also offers the opportunity to direct you to what’s most profitable, and also to what suits Reddit’s owner’s narrative.
It’s in there, you probably just forgot by the time you got to the end of the book. :P
I really hate that they destroyed what used to be an endless stream of new ideas and conversation to make more monies.
The narwhal bacons at midnight. France is bacon. I also miss the early days, though there is a bit of that feeling here. You can actually respond to comments without feeling like it’s already too late and will get buried.
Nyancat was a delicious poptart… but I guess beans are nice too.
Here’s your ), you lost it about halfway through
Thanks. Good thing you don’t need to debug typos and using the wrong words. I’m dyslexic so pretty much every time I read through something I wrote I’ll notice a few words that don’t make any sense at all. :)
… Enclosure Of The Commons…
I call bullshit. AI didn’t eat their user growth.
They sold out the users, making the experience objectively worse. They turned the screws until many of the positive, helpful users left. They became hyper-toxic; now, no one wants to be there, even for the niche communities. They’re moderating like they’re at war with any half-decent human being, and now they’ve locked down the free/easy access, ruining the one remaining marketing trick they had (google search results)
Honestly I’m done with the moderation more than anything, I got so fed up with the blatant manipulation on one of the subs I’ve frequented for over a decade I wrote a script to see what was going on with all the silent removals and so much was just vanishing. Capture all the comments every minute and diff them, you’ll see what I mean.
Realised the reddit most of us knew was as good as dead then to be honest. Powermods are a cancer and the only chemo is to leave the place altogether.
I read the writing on the wall when they started clawing back free mobile access.
The first time a ‘free’ platform makes a desperate move, it’s time to relocate. I wiped all my posts and left my accounts open. Then, I went back and wiped them again every time they magically reappeared.
I only left my posts in the sub that helped people understand Fediverse and Lemmy.
I didn’t know they put posts back. I went in and wiped all my stuff around then too but I didn’t look back.
I spent time over several months hand deleting my post one by one, and they don’t show up for me.
But one time after deleting them, someone replied to one of those deleted posts, so I think they’re visible to others, but not to me anymore.
I left all my accounts to this day because I don’t trust them
I have a serious question can I see like the evidence which you were able to gather from the use of this script? Its ok of you dont want to share cause I dont even know what a script is to be honest lol. Because I always try to archive something that these natsees do and this would just be another peice of evidence for me.
To be honest it was only ever a proof of concept, I ran it for a week or so and left it a sqlite database on my laptop. If you wanted to make a statistical case for manipulation you’d want to gather a more substantial dataset together, and you’d also want to label the data using NLP techniques.
The damn admins are right wingers, who TF wants to discuss anything under their rule
Insane braindead take
literally the correct take. EVERY single major website , YES INCLUDING THIS ONE , is very much run or funded by right-wingers.
I can actually EASILY prove this. Suppose that I were to suggest that one of the current left-wing groups in existence right now were ’ supposedly correct’ for using tactics that are ‘supposedly not the most peaceful of tactics’ because the members of these groups tend to be the victims of initial, needless, malicious ‘not peaceful tactics’ from right wingers and/or capitalists - so therefore two wrongs make a right…supposedly of course.
How fast do you think I would be banned from twitter, lemmy, youtube, reddit, instagram, fascbook, or any of these other major websites where human to human interaction is common?
Drivel. I lost brain cells reading this
They gave their user
basegrowth to AI and AI ate itEdit: I thought it over and user growth actually makes sense here
I love eating userbases. Just like how I eat a couple small rocks every day.
there are only three things I love in this world eating my family and never using punctuations… (and eating userbases)
Idk. Normies just talk to chatgpt these days. They don’t need to ask reddit
the problem with chatgpt is that it cant answer your complex questions.
Like suppose you have a question related to your cureent relationship with your friend or your lover or an acquaintance of yours or to one of their acquaintances and you and that person are ’ stuck ’ in an awkward situation or misunderstanding that is a one in a trillion situation and has probably only ever happened to you two or to another duo of people in history…what kind of answer could chatgpt give you that would be more specific than a human who can read the situation, compare it to their own past awkward situation and then give you a specific answer as to how they handled a similar scenario ? And lets just say its a situation that you should talk over or resolve between you and that person VERY soon.
I will admit Ive only used chatgpt once so I have no idea how it handles complex scenarios involving actual emotional and sentient humans with each of our own lives, traumas, journeys, destinations, routines, and every other thing that usually comes with being a human.
Am I right or wrong about this? Has chatgpt been able to do such complex analysis and complex suggestions to such situations?
You’d be surprised i guess
… because? …
Well, maybe AI can read the site and advertisers can sell their ads to the AI.
They made it so you can’t even browse the site without signing up. They’re idiots. Fucking morons.
The nail in the coffin for me was the mobile site becoming completely unusable. That pop-up completely disables scrolling and swiping to go back.
Their decision to abruptly remove third party API access is what drove me here. I wiped all my posts shortly after they started offering that stock buy in bullshit. Definitely made the right decision after seeing them become what they are now.
same experience here
Same but the straw that broke the camel’s back for me was their decision to hide user history and modify the algorithm that made it hard to identify if post is real or astro turfed
I spent 5 years off Reddit and everything then tried to come back like a year ago. I found that even if someone hides their history since Reddit is selling all it’s users out all you had to do was go to a search engine and type “reddit /u/theirusername” and you’d find loads of things.
Eventually I realized instead of spending my time researching assholes so I could comment linking all their posts where they made contradicting claims to be a doctor, historian, velociraptor tamer, gay black woman, transgender Danish leprechaun, 15 years old, 40, and retired so I could point out their bullshit and win at the internet… maybe I’d be happier just going somewhere with a smaller shit pile.
Oh wow, so they don’t even have button to hide this pop-up?
FYI you can browse in private mode to get around that
Wow, no kidding. I just tried it out. I’ve just been using it for porn.
My huge comment started as a reply to you on all the dumb shit Reddit’s done to fuck it’s users over lately. Thanks for making an old man want to yell at the cloud. :D
ruin Reddit
everyone leaves
Why is our stock down? :(
Waiting for the lawsuits to claim users leaving is illegal.
Block users without an account
Shocked pikachu
oh no, anyways
They’re also banning all comments to Lemmy.
Nice Reddit. Really terrified of the competition.
The fact that they do this and actually banned r/Lemmy shows that they perceive Lemmy as a viable threat.
deadass? LOL
It’s probably because they shadowbanned most of their users
Fo sho. It’s weird as fuck to realize someone you’re trying to help out with some problem never replied because they can’t see your messages. I was the mod of a sub. I had people message me asking why posts/comments were deleted or still up but not there if they logged out, and I couldn’t even find them.
I started asking for screenshots and they were posted on the sub from the user’s point of view, but whether they said they were deleted by moderators or seemed like a shadow ban even the sub mods couldn’t even see the damn things. There were no restrictions on our end on the users. Reddit admin was just deciding some people should be randomly shadow banned in only some subs. Or only some posts they made.
I tested a new account I made using a VPN and had the same issue. Some comments I made in a few big subs like /r/law showed up for all accounts and logged out, but some only showed up when looking as that user. Seemingly random selective shadow banning of only some comments that had to be being done by AI.
Could also be they’re flagging certain browser privacy configurations as signs that a user is a bot.
I actually installed a few different browsers and tried to make sure I was keeping the same accounts to the same fingerprints and IP or VPN history as much as I could. It could be two comments I posted with in minutes in the same sub on the same account, one visible to everyone and the other in shadowban land. It was super weird.
Reddit is probably a CIA social manipulation tool by now.
You can barely talk about reality there.
It reminds me of Facebook now, I see posts and it’s like a whole other world. Like a zoo of people that don’t understand they are pets.
No. People care about their pets. I think a better metaphor would be livestock.
Maybe…a menagerie?
Or the real reason Reddit stock is collapsing is due to autobans and users switching to Lemmy instead.
Damn germans and their autobans
Reddit is a shit show… can I say that!?
I got banned and I see weird posts and replies that is obviously Ai slop.
My friend and I got shadow banned. We have no idea why!?
It used to be good… the future is not reddit.
Ps: I apologize for farting while typing this comment.
So, basically they did all the things their users said would kill the site and it [checks notes] killed the site.
just came to this site after getting banned off reddit… it has some nice features… BUT idk if i understand it correctly or not. i’m on lemmy.zip, if a subreddit on here isn’t bundled with together with my lemmy server will i not see it? will i still be able to interact with it? curious how it works.
All the different lemmys (by default) will show up for all the others. Though some lemmy servers block specific other ones from syncing with their instance. Notably the tanky-heavy lemmy instances tend to get blocked.
If you go over to hexbear (a lemmy instance), you will hear significantly more people tell you Russia invading their neighbors in wars of conquest is good, actually.
interesting. thank you. when i was on reddit i would go to r/debate r/changemyview and subreddits like that where i could have discussions. are there lemmy subreddits for debates cause i’m not really finding any. thanks for the reply. on the plus side, of the two comments i left on lemmy they both got replies, so i was glad it wasn’t like twitter where you leave a comment on a large post and nobody interacts with 99% of your comments there. that’s nice and part of what i liked about reddit. good to know lemmy has people replying to each other here too.
Sure, you might be better on Lemmy.world as it’s kinda everything. I believe zip is more tech and stuff.
View all, not local. Keep in mind that if your admin is a nutter, they will defederate instances and you wont see them.
If you don’t want to see a instance or community or user you can personally block them. Dont rely on your admin to curate your feed IMO, do it yourself. but you do you.
Youre in charge of your own account. Welcome fellow lemminator. Peace.
leminator
I thought we were lemmings
are there ELI5 videos for all this stuff that you said about curating and admins cause Im super new too and am curious about all this. Please suggest something if you can.
