I found Reddit about 6 years ago, took a little while to understand what it was about but when I finally got it, I felt like I had found the best place on the internet. Somewhere I could be my true self without being myself. Every time I logged in, I felt free. Like solo roaming the streets of a new city in a foreign country for the first time. Intellectual conversation, assistance on vague problems, sharing life experiences, advice, watching porn you didn’t know existed, and then slipping out the back door when you were done.
As many here already know, those days are gone. The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall. The entire personality of Reddit has changed and will never come back, it even shows in the users. The community is broken, unauthentic and the Truth has left the conversation. Freedom is dead over there. What a shame. It’s like my favorite bar burnt down.
But the thing that really gets me is that it didn’t just change, it became the exact opposite. It has become the exact reason why someone built it, in the first place.
I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps. Best performing app, which means the end is near. Soon it will just be a limb of the pretend society that we used to hide from behind the walls of Reddit. And for some reason, I just want to see it burn.
By now, predicting the end of reddit is akin to putting a date to the end of the world.
And who cares? This is not a competition, these are not teams, and there’s more internet than some famous url.
everything you said is correct, except replace communist regime with christofasism/capatilism. The rich are tired of the poors again.
It was a sign the moment they suppressed Luigi news in December, just one week after CEO"s death
You never lived in a totalitarian communist country, did you?
I just got a three day account ban, for threatening violence, by commenting that I hope someone got charged for running a red light. This is the second time this has happened in two months, all thanks to maniacs on our community subs.
It took me awhile to go back to that shit hole, and I’m getting a good reminder why. I just wish Lemmy would get a bit more active, and I can finally put Reddit to bed.
Try doing more posts yourself! I do multiple a day they all get interaction, everyone is just sat round waiting for others to post
Yeah, very rarely do I not get replies, if there are no replies, its on like an art post that still gets votes just doesn’t need a discussion (on other accounts, this ones new)
Mainstream social media is ridiculously censored now. I called a bunch of racists a single word: “gross”.
My comment was removed while the overt racism stayed up. the digital world ain’t it.
It is. It’s also melted all our brains though, like some people need to be parented, but I mean the absolute garbage shit. That’s morphed from people cleaning that up and the spam, to mods trying to enforce a whole bunch of unwritten rules and arbitrarily deciding what people can post or comment based on their own opinions. Those people are mostly neckbeards too, so that don’t help.
A handful of lemmy mods are now just as bad as reddit mods. It didnt used to be that way.
The great thing with Lemmy though, is you can leave instances. I could get banned into the 6th dimension and I just have to start a different account on a different instance. Often can find whatever kind of sub I’m looking for on different instances too.
The cost of this will be less users but I mean if you can get a couple hundred, that largely eliminates that issue. Lemmy will keep getting bigger, we’ll have to deal with the nutsack mods at some point, but there’s no big daddy reddit for them to hide behind here. They are on their own.
If you haven’t noticed they have been permabanning accounts after the temp bans expire on users. Their filters automatically flag account as ban evasion regardless if the bans have resolved. Additionally, this might be still going on. If you multiple accounts, getting a temp can trigger site wide ban on all accounts.
That’s what happened to me.
lets not get to the part where currently people are getting shadowbanned soon after creating account, or posting on a sub with arbitrary requirements.
smal niche subs have less moderation, large subs have the most: eg more likely to ban.
and some in the middle have low-traffic but enough moderaiton where the MOds can nitpick.
This scenario basically sums it all up.
The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall.
Much like the current American hellscape, you’re thinking of fascism, not communism.
Fascism and communism both lead to a major loss in freedom.
Hehe thanks I’m not to clued up on my ‘isms but I know it’s something I don’t like! I am watching the American story with an outsiders perspective and it’s doesn’t look good. I’ve never been deep into data, but I have seldom gone wrong by reading the people. And the people are spelling downfall, I think it’s further down the slope than people realise and the opposition smell blood. Just like Reddit.
Hehe thanks I’m not to clued up on my ‘isms but I know it’s something I don’t like!
What an incredibly moronic and dangerous way to go about life
Words driven by fear. Learn all the words in the world, my bet is you freeze in the face of opportunity. I wish you, happiness and sorry that they took if from you.
Go back to reddit please.
So where is everyone going because it’s not Lemmy. And Reddit still is huge. I don’t understand the “it’s so bad, everyone is getting banned” but also the site keeps growing.
Bots. I swear its all bots reposting content from 10 years ago that people might not have seen yet or rewording old posts/comments. Check the account history and posts if something seems suspicious. Usually those people have lived all over the place, are different genders and have lives different time lines… Unless reddit is now all whovians… im calling bots
Twitter had a suspiciously convenient massive uptick in bots that conveniently hid the shrinking user base from investors. I expect Reddit to conveniently have the same “problem”.
Xitter is a given, considered its owned by nazi musk. and REDDIT is owned by a nazi lover, spez who loves musks. and the bots make up half of reddit, im not surprised, if it only increased, and its not the good kind of bots, because reddit has been aggressively banning normal users and non-propaganda bots.
yes, when musk bought twitter it was well over half bots already and trending badly-- and traffic in general was going down as well. It cant have gotten better when he gutted the moderation and security teams. Its basically worthless.
I have been off reddit since the api thing so I’m way out of touch with the current content and status.
It just seems odd all these posts about Reddit dying and it makes me think of the people that loved reddit aren’t all here on Lemmy, so did they quit all of it or went somewhere else?
No one I know in person switched away, technical or not, they still use reddit. The whole situation is just not adding up.
Reddit trained us not to post/comment as much with the frequent deletions, especially post, always get removed for no reason so I get anxiety when posting
Rejection sensitive disphoria, however its spelled
also getting reported/banned from subs for a misunderstood comment. or if reported something that the mod doesnt like, and they ban you because you reported about a comment.
So fucking true. Every time I post shit online I’m rereading it over and over and I’m like “people aren’t going to react about X right? Because I did Y to make it clear.” Then I post, and people are still mad about X. It fucking drives me wild.
Reddit and Stack Overflow both drilled this into me and I’ve been off those sites for a while and now they are dying, I couldn’t be happier
most of the people here were part of the ban purges done by reddit, and particular over-agressive purge than normal.
I wasn’t banned. I deleted my comment history with a script during the API fiasco.
They are going back to Reddit. They either A- make a ton of new accounts that all get instabanned (increasing the number of people “signing up” or B- just don’t post anymore and simply consume
Eh, give it time. Lots more people came here after Elon went after Reddit, and given the situation in the U.S it’ll probably only get more censored.
The most vocal does not necessarily represent the majority
prob digg, need paid moderation and more ppl, it looks like a decent reddit clone, will prob have a higher population than lemmy just going off early adopters, reddit just needs competition, once ppl try one alternative theyll be open to trying more like lemmy
i went to another forum about social media/evasion it was quite interesting insight how they are doing it, and how they have increased thier bans.
Ingot banned for saying Albertans where stupid and if there was an election today the UCP would win. I really have no idea why they got me banned. It was only for a month but just decided to close account.
I was warned for posting threats when I said Smith should stand on her head to get some blood to her brain.
I received a 3 day ban for calling for violence when I said Vance will be President of the US after an arterial blockage takes out Trump.
I’ve been on there for 12 years and it’s been a pretty steady decline since then. It was actually even worse before I joined, like a free range cesspool of edgelords, bigots, and adults wanting to fuck teenagers. There was a period where a lot of the shit was chased off before it started heading towards the corporate direction; that was probably when Reddit was at its best
I was there from day one.
When Spez implemented user registration, I was like the 5th sign up and I ended up mailing him his own source code because he had his server misconfigured to report verbose errors.
All this to say, the site has always sucked. From day one it has sucked. It has never not sucked.
Edit
I feel like Reddit in general is remembered far more fondly than it ever has a right to.
For those that believe Reddit was some bastion of intellectual discourse, it never was! The very first or second conversation I was involved in (remember it didn’t even have users or comments at one point) immediately devolved into people calling each other robots and morons.
It just immediately cast my mind back to the BBS days where there was some cool techy people but lots of people that were just… there… And bored… And stupid.
I didn’t never really changed from that formula. Reddit grew somewhat in tandem with overall NA society’s ability to just get on the Internet. And it was always just a slice of society, never really any special qualifications or commonalities generally speaking. It’s very naive and myopic to think that it was a Tech community. It’s every dingbat you’ve ever met in your life and all the cool people as well in a giant heap. Please don’t kid yourself.
Politics immediately took over the site. And as most people know, the dialogue surrounding American politics is most dignified by taking place within a monkey house at the zoo.
Politics was immediately quarantined into its own special sub thingy.
Spez being the absolute moron that he was, implemented communities instead of tags which is what the fking site actually needed. It was very obvious he had bananas in his ears at that point, and he did not want to give selective content control to the users. He didn’t even want to implement communities, he was that against it.
They refused to show at the outset that giving users the ability to categorize content mattered. They wanted it to be a fire hose of content right from day one.
Later, they did an amazing public relations job of faking community and faking community spirit, while they had secretly embedded social media managers from outside agencies plugging most of the content onto the front page.
I can’t remember the first time Reddit lost its virginity or perhaps had its heart broken, maybe first coming of age… when we collectively rooted out that one of the biggest community builders and participants was actually a plant! I might be wrong but somewhere in the back of my mind I remember the username Sahadra(?).
It was a bad sign when they started purging subreddits in '17 of certain questionable topics.
I don’t know dude, they’ve been boiling the frog, so to speak, on us users since day one.
It’s been such a gradual contortion from what it started to what it’s become. But it’s finally come to what Spez wanted it to be in the first place. Aaron would want no part of this piece of shit.
I made my first account which I forgot like 11 years ago. I only realized it was there, when I received multiple ban messages out of the blue on my emails. This when I first realized they were massively purging accts early this year, after visiting a completely non lemmy forum about evading reddit bansm
all adults are banned lol, its just a fresh pool of teenagers every year woth just enough karma to start commenting/posting
The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall.
OP,. you’re not thinking of communism. You’re thinking of authoritarianism and hierarchy. This is what happens to all hierarchies. Go to almost any for-profit corporation, and the same stifling of freedom will be on display. Marxist-Leninist regimes are hierarchical and authoritarian, which is why they act the same as any corpo, but that’s not due to “communism”
Please scroll up to read my acceptance of failure to correctly identify the name of the crappy thing that Reddit is doing. Thanks for the correction, and I’m glad you could still figure out what I meant dispite my use of correct terminology 🤝 I’m really good at other things though haha
Exactly. Not communist though, fascist. Communism is something entirely different.
But its also clear that this happened because to thrive in the capitalfascist system, you need to adhere to the rules:
- strong hierarchy
- ideologically homogenous
- strictly controlled ingress
- constant fear of being excluded
- pushing individualism and competition
Its the same everywhere and it is scary.
Exactly. Not communist though, fascist.
Was going to say this, lol.
Completely agree otherwise with the op.
Hahaha I should have listened more in history class. I’m being corrected all over the place, but you can be sure I will go read about it and accept my shame and embarrassment for about an hour or so. It’s the “something entirely different “ that is spotlight on my miseducation 🤣 but you know what I meant though!
I don’t think anyone is going to survive Reddit, at some point the rules will get you, regardless of your contributions, age on the platform or any other credibility you have gained. It’s gonna eat itself.
Well, actually that is pretty much what you learn in history class. Its just not true. If you read anything about communism that is not western education, you get an accurate picture. Marx for example.
The idea of communism (and anarchism btw) is to have a classless, stateless society. Both are left wing extremists and incredibly dangerous in their constant, violent fight for human rights, equality and against discrimination. (/s)
Jokes aside. Especially german government owned media and state documentation portrays both as dangerous which is hilarious.
also reddits going the low hanging fruits of bots/spammers, of fans and link farmers. while doing nothing against propagand abots.
And we arent even allowed to delete our content it stays up forever lol
When I left reddit two or three years ago I used the Chrome extension to delete everything I uploaded to Reddit as best as I could. I’m still using the same username, I use this username everywhere and sometimes I can still find mentions of my old Reddit account.
Forever could online be a few more years for them. And good, l hope they enjoy my tales of 7 day coke benders.
Ive been around long enough to know its an inevitable cycle, hopefully federation saves lemmy from the same fate.
That was my next question… is it inevitable? Like the fall of every major power in human history. At some point they break.
Expect some (additonal) really nice privately owned Federated instances to launch after Reddit finally dies. (Embrace - Twitter and Mastodon are far enough along that Bluesky exists, already.)
They will have all the usual features, but also a few surprisingly nice additonal (closed source, added by corporate sponsors) features. It will cost some mild annoyance when visiting from an open source truly free federated instance. (Extend)
Eventually the new features will result in lost compatibility with the rest of the fediverse. Users on the new platform can enjoy the rest of the fediverse, but other fediverse users cannot reach any content contributed by users of the new platform. So everyone needs an account on the new platform, to enjoy it. (Extinguish)
Then the new platform enshitifies. (Enshitify)
This prediction is primarily based on how Google managed “Google Talk” when it joined XMPP. Many feel XMPP did not survive it. I still use XMPP, but many folks I talked to on XMPP do not.
The recipe is: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Enshitify.
I’m not sure about this, but does defederation or blocking work both ways? I.e can an instance stop federating their own content to another instance? I would think so. It seems like corporate instances be pretty effectively boycotted like that.
I’m not sure about this, but does defederation or blocking work both ways?
I think it’s by choice in each direction? I’m not sure.
I.e can an instance stop federating their own content to another instance? I would think so.
Yes. And I think that’s our best defense against what happened to XMPP. Opinions vary, of course. I guess it’ll be up to each instance owner how they handle it.
It seems like corporate instances be pretty effectively boycotted like that.
I hope so. I worry because they say “history usually rhymes”.
At the very least, the fediverse was designed with knowledge of lessons learned from XMPP. And I’m certainly, myself, less naive than I was when I fell for Google Talk. Hopefully others are too.
Almost certainly yes, once lemmy gets big enough and people in power actually give a shit about it.
The nature of the internet is something has to be hosted somewhere, no matter how obscure eventually there’s a source and assholes can apply pressure on the source / host.
Most people running an instance don’t have the money nor will to fight governments and mega corps when they uncorck their bullshit attacks
Fuck u/spez
Took away Apollo, so I left
Same but Relay. The writing was on the wall after the API fiasco.
Agreed.
By 2015 it was already a hollow shell of what it had once been, and by 2020 it was spiritually completely dead. Now it’s just shocking how far it’s continued to decline, far past what I’d come to think of as rock bottom
I really feel like it peaked in 2012 or 2013. Hot on the heels of the “rally to restore the sanity” (which proved the true power of Reddit, but was co-opted and defanged)
Lots of big AMAs but they could be very chaotic.
Allowed content wasn’t quite as wild as two years previous but it was still possible to find some real taboo/NSFL/disturbing/subversive communities of all sorts.
The userbase was large but still most of your friends would make fun of you for going there, and your parents didn’t even know it existed.
The admin team was still pretty small and they even would make a point to hire users who understood the culture and spirit of the site.
I’d agree that it peaked a long time ago. I joined in 2008 or so because my teenage sons had joined. We didn’t know each other’s IDs, I wanted to know what they were interested in and found a couple communities I liked for myself. Every year it got less inclusive and the toxicity that was contained to some communities started to spill over. I had already left when the corporatization started in earnest.
it peaked right before ellen pao was used as a scapegoat
lol ppl were treating her being fired like reddit was saved but it was all downhill from there
vividly remember ppl dickriding spez
I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps
Most of those are not real users and never have been.
By reddits own admission 50% we’re all bots. I think it was reported in the tech sub like years back. Reddit wants to be a Facebook clone.
And for some reason, I just want to see it burn.
Technology under capitalism will be used first and foremost for the violent enforcement of capitalism. While extreme censorship is a relatively mild form of “enforcement”, it’s still a fundamental tool. The hegemonic narrative must be defended at all costs. Just look at the media, politicians, corporations, etc. It’s all the same tales.
