Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
Don’t be fooled. Most went back.
Quantity is not quality.
That works in both directions. Don’t assume that the few that didn’t return are the ones that would have saved Reddit via incredible content.
More important is originality…
Lots of people/bots would just take an existing post from Reddit, and repost it. Sometimes to a different sub, sometimes to the same sub.
For most users, it was still “new” because they hadn’t seen it before.
Those accounts are still reposting. There’s more than few that do it here too.
But that OC has been drastically cut down, there’s just a delay in users noticing that there’s fewer and fewer “new” reposts going around.
So reddit doesn’t see a huge decrease in users immediately, but time on site and daily users will continue to decrease
More important is originality…
Is it, though? I left Reddit for here, so don’t take this as being in their defense, but if originality and ad revenue were meaningfully correlated, Facebook and Instagram would be bastions of original content.
Hell, some of the most profitable YouTubers only post reaction content.
I was active nearly every day for 13 years, and I didn’t return. Granted, I don’t come here much either, but what Reddit did disgusted me too much.
My reddit account is 15 years old. I removed myself as a mod from the communities I took care of before signing out.
If they want to shit on the mods, they can handle the job themselves.
I already had inactive subs removed from me. Not like anyone would ever recreate them. It’s weird.
I was transitioning out, but it just felt disgusting to even open the site so I stopped doing it. I probably have a bunch of unread messages because of that.
As 10+ year vet, I still go back for certain things. Mostly communities that have not been recreated here yet in any meaningful sense, and there are a lot of those. There are people here, yes, but the niches, the non-general topics, are lacking a true community. That will come with time, but I still can’t substitute Lemmy for reddit 100% yet, much as I might want to. Unless I only want to talk technology, news, and politics all day.
But I will say Boost for Lemmy has taken the spot RIF once had on my mobile home screen. Lemmy is what I open reflexively now. I only go back to reddit when I need to see something specific, I’m not browsing there. Partially because it’s very tedious to navigate old.reddit on mobile, but partially because I just don’t want to spend too much time there anymore.
I had a reply to a four year ago comment I made. Up until that moment I had thought everything was archived.
For me it was a sub I participated in for years whose mod suddenly accused me of advocating for the abuse of children, told me I had mental health issues, and permanently banned and muted me. It was weird and I haven’t been back since.
16 years and agreed.
same here, since 2008. Pretty much every user of the site was on the same standard default subreddits. I don’t like what Reddit has become but I don’t blame them like a lot of people here.
Honestly they were a corporation from the get-go, out to make money once it became popular. They built something no one else did.
But going forward, the little reddit escapade from their corporate suite shows that freedom of speech can only thrive when there is no driving profit motive.
Spez wanted to be Zuck and just like Zuck, he allowed bad people to abuse the site in order to hurt others.
They weren’t a corporation from the get-go though? They were a Y-Combinator project that became successful, and were eventually bought by Conde Nast (when the “sell-out” began, btw).
I think profit was always the end goal, except for Aaron Swartz. They might not have been incorporated but the intent always seemed like profit.
Same except I was at about 10 years. I don’t even find it useful to include “reddit” in my Google searches as many communities are locked down unless you sign in to an account. Can’t say I feel too bad for them.
I didn’t return either… to be fair, it’s because I was one of the ones who got a bullshit permaban
Did they? I had one of the top non-porn accounts actually run by a person (most high karma accounts use bots, I didn’t out of ironic laziness) and I haven’t posted or commented since whenever Day 0 was for rif is fun. I’ve been back a couple times for very specific things but not logged in or participating in any active way. Of course, I’m just one (high karma) data point, but I really don’t think I’m unique in this. I also have no real desire to contribute to Reddit again in the future. Getting off of it has been pretty nice.
Look, it’s not that people aren’t still posting, the site obviously still has content, but it really is just “content.” The quality of discussion I’ve seen has gone down pretty steep. Modding appears to be almost nonexistent in big subs or very agenda-driven otherwise. I think a lot of contributors who treated Reddit like old school forums have left and it’s slowly turning into a weird combo of Facebook and 4chan if that makes sense. If that’s what the userbase wants, go for it, I guess. But that’s not my jam.
Why not delete the account ?
My old one? It’s a good question and I have actually thought about it. I have a lot of inanity on there but some (I think) decent replies to people trying to be “reasonable” fascists, racists, misogynists, etc. if that makes sense. I’ll admit I mostly posted news articles I thought were interesting, though I would regularly participate in the discussions for those articles, but those articles frequently got a lot of traffic. So I guess there’s two problems with nuking the account:
(1) If I delete all my comments, you end up in some cases with what looks like someone deleting their response to a bad actor, leaving that bad actor not only unchallenged, but looking like they “won” the argument, and
(2) If I delete all my posts, I remove from public view the comments of (at this point) likely tens of thousands of people, if not more given how many high karma and high participation posts I submitted, many of whom might not have wanted me to do so.
I have so many of both that it’d be a massive pain to go through and selectively delete stuff. Easier to just leave the account be and never use it again. Deleting the account just means it’s anonymized, which can also invite bad faith.
A lot of search results still take me to Reddit. It is still a source of knowledge.
I tell myself that landing on Reddit, because of a search result is different than logging in on Reddit and subsequently browsing Reddit.
Using their app is on another level.
It is, there’s a lot of highly specific knowledge on Reddit. It’s still a resource.
I’ll be honest. I want to believe in the Fediverse and Lemmy, really really hard.
It’s ideals (rather, the gestalt of the best of what everyone says is the best of Federation) appeals strongly.
But sometimes, it’s instance after instance of complaining about this or that. Double points when it’s all reddit complaining.
I dunno if being a heavy content creator necessitates an air of misguided superiority but there’s no more nuance here than anywhere else, and the content can’t seem to form precisely because everyone decides to take their toys away and do their own thing at the smallest provocation.
I don’t use them on my phone because fuck their app, but I’ve found no choice but to join up with an alias and as much extensions to make their job harder as Firefox allows, just to have genuine discussions on hyper specific topics from a PC.
Really? No choice?
Take control of your life, goddamn.
But after cementing lemmy as a viable alternative. I actually find fun content on lemmy. Reddit feed for me ends up turning into a left vs right garbage.
When I’ve gone back for a look I’ve found just the opposite. It’s just bots and trolls.
What’s your basis for this statement? Any evidence to back it up?
But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That’s devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.
I go back for a couple niche communities that haven’t escaped yet. And occasional search results for advice, but that tends to be 3-5+ years old on average.
Never going back.
?
Me, going back to that cesspool. I left quite the account behind as well.
This became an instant classic lol, do we know who the artist is?
Do you have any data to support that? My feeling is that not much changed after that. I feel like there is business as usual there. At least when I talk to my peers.
Subs I followed (and still rarely visit) became much harsher with moderation, to the point of being very difficult for new visitors to use; in a sub that is mostly for helping people adopt a very low carb diet
Some communities were unaffected. Some are still shut down. Some replaced mods who wouldn’t play by spez’s rules.
I’m not sure what the data would look like or how one would obtain it. Number of active moderators per day? Moderator satisfaction survey? Change in posting habits of top 1% posters?
I am speaking purely anecdotally from communities I know that shut down entirely and moderators who left. I have no way to estimate the scale of the exodus.
deleted by creator
Reddit’s value as a social media platform drops as it’s value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that’s was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
deleted by creator
Yes, I agree. In the end, Reddit lives off its reputation, just like every social media platform. Seriously, is there an effect that when you’re long enough the CEO of a company, you begin making decisions where it is obvious that they will negatively impact the user base and thus long-term survivability of a company? Is there a term for that?
I imagine your priorities become different.
You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.
Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.
Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.
Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”
I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.
I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.
You make some good points. I’d agree if it wasn’t for the API changes that fucked all the 3rd party apps and 3rd party tools like automod.
Even if it was priced well it still somehow filtered NSFW content out.
They clearly wanted more market share for the reddit app by any means necessary. It’s sad for all the mods that were ignored.
Sounds like Enshittification.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking. Examples of alleged enshittification have included Amazon, Bandcamp, Facebook, Google Search, Quora, Reddit, and Twitter.Thanks :)
You mean hubris?
Thanks, yes! Well, another word learned :)
More like stupris, amirite
I reached the same conclusion and posted it to reddit over a decade ago, asking people to try to come up with a better solution, long before I even knew open source software was a thing.
Well, took 15 years, but lemmy exists now so hooray!
Honestly feels like a scam for rich people. Spez just has to convince some suckers that Reddit would be profitable as he cashes out. Then they’re left with a dead platform as they kill it with ads and astroturfing.
This is honestly what I feel like most businesses are these days, just scams to convince other rich people to invest, so they can cash out early on. Basically the same stuff all the crypto currencies were doing.
as its* value to advertisers rises
It’s kinda funny on Reddit, you would have had to pay for your picture comment. I’m happy to donate to lemmy, but putting features like this behind paywalls is silly.
You have to pay to post pics? When did that happen?
It was recent.
I’m going to have to trust you because I’m not going back there to check.
being able to post inline images was a reddit premium feature in the official app only, iirc. you could still link images to text like we had always done in ye olden days and use an inline image opener to get the same results… but grifters gonna grift.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
I will say, though, anything that disincentives people to spam useless images and gifs in the comments, kind of like the next comment down, has its merits.
If there’s one thing I miss about Reddit, it’s that there was a lot less of this Discord-esc image spam over there than there is over here
Yeah. I agree that it’s bad to put the feature behind a paywall, but I also just wish it wasn’t a feature in the first place. Meme picture comments are attention grabbing and take up a lot of space. They can end up dominating the thread; making people just kind of skim over the text comments and just look at the highly prominent pictures, as though they are a kind of super-comment.
So even though sometimes the images are great and funny / interesting / clever or whatever - I think it can degrade the conversation on the platform. I’m at least thankful that not many people are using them on lemmy; currently.
Dear fucking god, THAT explains why I couldn’t do that.
Its always the same with online services/platforms looking to make money. Offer a free or cheap online service/platform, then advertisements, then more advertisements, then start removing features and hiding them behind paywalls, then more advertisements, then death.
Or, like Facebook and Insta, you get so big that the world itself warps around your platform because no one can remember the before times.
Sounds very familiar. I think I’ve heard pretty much the same thing before when discussing paying for streaming services as opposed to sailing the high seas.
Someone needs to redo this with the answer being “s p e z”
Is he Australian?
No idea
Weren’t these assholes supposed to IPO like 6 months ago? lol
They were totally lined up to IPO. I think somebody told him to go all musk on it. I’m still not exactly sure how taking a big fat shit on the user communities face was supposed to impress the investors.
Anyone else posted this yet?
Nope and I really wish nobody had still.
This reminds me… we need an “I’m sorry Garfield” community on Lemmy.
You mean “I’m sorry John”?
Fuck. You’re right.
Stick to your guns. I’m sorry John has been done. Now is the time for Garfield’s comeuppance.
No, i want ‘im sorry garfield’.
Be the change you want to see in the world, TacoButtPlug.
You’re right.
!imsorryjon@lemmy.world seems to exist
Edit: not exactly active, though
why does garfield have preposterously large bazongas
Too much lasagna.
You spelled “magnificently” wrong.
The origin story:
* basagnas
Does this represent some higher meaning or is it just Garfield fucking spez?
Yes
What a terrible day to have eyes
Looks like someone’s got a case of the Mondays
So many questions about this
It’s referencing this meme.
Ohhh thank you!
No problem, I know it can be hard to figure out the context.
Well yeah, I’m probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together… after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought this on themselves.
Same, but only a few years user. Sync for lemmy is so much better.
I loved Sync for Reddit as an app. But I already was seeing Reddit go downhill even before they killed the apps, that just sealed the deal for me. I was a digg refugee so sadly I’ve been through this before already.
Does your user name mean that you’re a lover of misspelling ready?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Critical hit to my self esteem.
Thank you for building up the community.
Ya do realize that internet access is pretty much universal, dudes well within the acceptable posting amout id expect. It aint 20010 no more, everyone has a pocket computer and can do it damn near everywhere. Fuck the mountains near me are now scattershot on signal rather than completely worthless like they were back in 2014.
Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.
They feel like they get shorted because many of those users don’t contribute to ad revenue from 3rd party apps but instead of improving their app to lure users in they instead tell those users to fuck off.
A user is a user, even if they don’t contribute directly to ad revenue they contribute content to make the site more alluring for those who will contribute to ad revenue. As well they help spread the word about reddit to those who don’t use it regularly yet by sharing that content outside of reddit.
They were pretty short sighted by doing what they did.
It’s just many power users and mods were power users and mods thanks to tools in these apps, and Reddit still didn’t provide anything comparable. Many small communities I still care about have a lot less posts if they don’t have bots. It’s not like Fediverse won Reddit, but something changed in them. NSFW OC subs are still good, but idk if they make the image spez wants from that platfom. The only thing we def should do is to stay online and be welcome for stray redditors to join.
A bunch of subs that I like and that are niche had the mods say “fuck it bye” and they are no more. Some migrated here, some on discord, but the fragmentation means less users overall, so less content. It’s a shitty situation.
I would have been happy to pay to get API access for 3rd party apps on my account. Maybe 1 or 2 dollars per account and month would have been reasonable to cover the costs without ad revenue. Double it to please greedy shareholders.
Instead they asked for such ludicrous amounts from 3rd party developers, basically telling them to fuck off.
Either they were mad for control or got greedy over their „golden data“ for AI training. Or both. In any case, they never were interested in finding a user friendly solution so fuck them.
The phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” comes to mind.
I believe it’s “spider-face.”
Edit: lol, guess we don’t have a lot of fans of The Office around here.
Some app dev mentioned they wanted to work with them to introduce ads that Reddit would have made profit from in the free version of the app and it’s Reddit that said “Nah it’s ok”…
deleted by creator
Do you have a citation on that 25% figure?
Remember, the reason I ditched Reddit wasn’t the ads per se, it was the constant data selling, and the official app just getting worse and worse with unwanted “features” pushed on everyone. They kept getting greedier and greedier so when they disabled 3rd party apps I ditched Reddit.
Let’s for a second take stock of what’s happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn’t lose a dime they just didn’t make as much as they wanted to.
The difference with Facebook is that it is a public company, so it does have to grow every year to have value for investors.
Reddit doesn’t. It’s existing private investors can splot the profit and be just fine. They just want a huge payout that will only come from an IPO.
And the issue with consistent growth in billion dollar companies is that it’s not sustainable. We can’t just keep pilling on profits on top of profits to sate investors insecurities.
These morons will try though, their strategy invariably seems to be building the Jenga tower as high as possible, thinking they’ll be “quick” or “smart” enough to sell their shares before it tumbles.
It’s gambling, but with people’s livelihoods.
I can’t wait for all the news articles about the massive layoffs at Reddit, though it will be sad to see the massive droves of employees shuffling out the door with their personal effects like they did when the Enron scandal broke.
I can’t wait for all the news articles about the massive layoffs at Reddit, though it will be sad to see the massive droves of employees shuffling out the door with their personal effects like they did when the Enron scandal broke.
Are you not aware that public companies split the profits too? They do not need to grow to have value for investors.
Not all of them do that. There are growth stocks and dividend stocks. Growth stocks typically don’t pay dividends, but instead reinvest the dividend back into the company. Amazon, Alphabet and Berkshire Hathaway don’t pay dividends.
Of course not. But they can, whenever they choose to. Parent comment said they have to grow since they are public, unlike private companies like Reddit.
Yeah tell it to the shareholders
so it does have to grow every year to have value for investors
This gets said a lot but it is not true for a couple reasons.
1: With an IPO you’re not as dependent upon individual investors, and as your value grows - which often has nothing to do with your company’s performance, you obtain additional funding.
2: private or large-scale investors will literally have you sign contracts stating X% return on investment is what you owe them - once you surpass your return on investment, unless you seek additional funding, significant growth pressure is gone. Most companies immediately seek additional funding, which is how this gets interpreted as “requires perpetual growth.”
If this includes % of revenue, then yeah, your investor will want you to make wise choices, but they own that percentage in perpetuity, so there is generally not the pressure related to seeking new investment - they’re already priced in and getting their returns.
You can literally find examples of these contracts online by searching for “investor agreement sample.”
People usually only care about your growth as a function of how it correlates to a rise in your value. Most stock growth is entirely based on feels - it’s closer to social media than it is to any sort of accounting.
Fuck spez
We did it, Lemmy!
I’m doing my part, fuck spez
Just make sure to use protection. He fucked so many people that you never know what he might carry.
Do you want to know more?
Yes
It’s such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn’t corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word “Reddit” to the end of the search.
As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there’s a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.
Edit: /oblig fuck you spez. Slimy little arsehole sold everyone out and thinks he deserves to be rich because his shitty site isn’t absolutely irredeemable.
Reddit was like the StackOverflow for life
…sometimes coding too We’re like regressing to friend’s or known in person people’s opinions, because Internet will be full of bot and sponsored content and opinions. Either way, double money for corporations, sponsored content ->more sales; people not trusting reviews and trying out stuff just to find out it’s rubbish ->more sales
11 year old account on Reddit too and I left it during TPA too. Had nearly 2 million karma. Same username as this one.
I wish Elon would scare away Reddit’s advertisers instead of twitter’s.
