Thousands of subreddits chose to go dark in an ongoing protest over the company's plan to start charging certain third-party developers to access the site’s data.
Wow. Front page of huffpost.com right now. Interesting…
This exactly.
I’ve been a redditor on one account or another for over a decade. For a very long time, read it was 100% of my social media and online community time. That seemed safe because Reddit had always been run in a user-friendly manner.
But then somebody gave Spez a microphone and he managed to destroy 10+ years of community trust and good will in like 3 weeks. Every single thing he says doubles down, reiterates that he doesn’t give a shit what the users want.
So it’s time to diversify. This right here is my very first post on Lemmy, never would have bothered with it if not for Spez. But now I am more carefully considering where I invest my time and discussion, and what networks I want to see grow.
With any luck, this decentralized stuff is going to be the answer to enshittification.
Starting this comment a bit flamebatey: I think reddit will stay around and I’m very very grateful to u/spez for keeping his position in spite of all the opposition.
Because he single-handedly seeded lemmy and kbin with enough users to take these platforms out of a niche and make them viable.
Now in the future we wil still have reddit (with a lot worse moderation and a lot more annoying ads) but we suddenly also have an alternative.
Yes, the fediverse already was there before, but when I check out the old content I find it very hard to find something I’d have been interested in - which suddenly changed in the last few days.
It’s like the musk twitter/mastodon. moment all over again. And with federation it at the same time more annoying and feels much more like the old world again, when individual people not huge companies would own the web.
(Btw this is my very first comment ever on lemmy, too - and it suddenly doesn’t feel like it transfer ownership of my words to a corporate giant, anymore)
Reddit will remain but it’ll be just a meme page, I doubt if any of the more specialised, specialist communities will stay. It’ll be just another 9gag.
I’ve been on it since 2010, I watched it grow and evolve and it honestly looked very reasonable the whole time, progress was for the better.
then spez decided to kill it in a few weeks. Over a decade of progress will be gone.
spez decided to kill it in a few weeks. Over a decade of progress will be gone.
Let’s be fair- Spez has been killing Reddit for much longer than a few weeks. Look at the features that get developed and those that don’t- users are screaming for better mod tools and better mobile app and we get chat and avatars and NFTs. Look at how Reddit bought alienblue and then wrecked it, look at the whole ‘new reddit’ site design and the feed stuffed full of ‘engagement algorithm’ garbage from subs you’ve never visited. This is the same shit that’s been going on for the last few years.
If you’re like me, it never bothered you much because you could always work around it- old.reddit.com on desktop, i.reddit.com or 3rd party app on mobile, RES plugin. And that’s what they said- they’d always let users use Reddit as they wanted.
But suddenly i.reddit.com dies and 3rd party apps die a month later (no way that’s a coincidence) and now there’s no way for a mobile user to effectively use the site. So users draw a hard line in the sand and say ‘this far, no further, the line must be drawn HERE’. But things were going downhill long before this API mess.
I’ve been on Reddit since before the Digg migration, it’s been my home for like 12 years. In its heyday it was a truly beautiful community. ‘The narwhal bacons at midnight’ may have been the cheeziest line ever, but I think that was around the peak of Reddit’s greatness.
But I don’t think progress is gone. I think those of us that protest the API mess, those of us who don’t use the official apps or new reddit, I think we all now understand exactly what we want and don’t. In a sense, I think we’re collectively growing up- realizing that being the product for advertisers isn’t a recipe for success, that if we want to have good communities we have to build them ourselves rather than going the lazy way and letting Big Tech build them for us in exchange for tracking us.
FWIW- I agree Spez deserves a thanks for seeding this platform up to critical mass. And I also think he may deserve a thanks for continuing to turn Reddit into a meme scroller- that will keep a lot of the idiots from making the jump. Very sad to see the platform I loved and spent many years on turn into little more than a filter for idiots, but if the answer is that the fediverse becomes what Internet forums once were, and Reddit was for a long time, then change comes as the world turns.
feels much more like the old world again, when individual people not huge companies would own the web.
I miss that era- when it wasn’t all big tech platforms for everything, when your online friend group would more likely be a forum or an IRC, and where experimentation was encouraged. Where if you had a spare laptop and a cable modem that meant you could run your community’s IRC bot or Shoutcast server or TeamSpeak relay or whatever. And where nobody gave a flying fuck what was acceptable content to advertisers- some places took that too far, but it meant the Internet as a whole wasn’t sanitized to be advertiser-friendly.
I don’t know if it will last, but for now, all this fediverse stuff feels like that did. The tech isn’t 100% perfect, hasn’t been through 15 UX committees to ensure Grandma can figure it out, but it’s accessible to everyone and if you want to fuck with it or help build it or run it on your old laptop, you’re welcomed rather than ignored.
This exactly. I’ve been a redditor on one account or another for over a decade. For a very long time, read it was 100% of my social media and online community time. That seemed safe because Reddit had always been run in a user-friendly manner.
But then somebody gave Spez a microphone and he managed to destroy 10+ years of community trust and good will in like 3 weeks. Every single thing he says doubles down, reiterates that he doesn’t give a shit what the users want.
So it’s time to diversify. This right here is my very first post on Lemmy, never would have bothered with it if not for Spez. But now I am more carefully considering where I invest my time and discussion, and what networks I want to see grow.
With any luck, this decentralized stuff is going to be the answer to enshittification.
Starting this comment a bit flamebatey: I think reddit will stay around and I’m very very grateful to u/spez for keeping his position in spite of all the opposition.
Because he single-handedly seeded lemmy and kbin with enough users to take these platforms out of a niche and make them viable.
Now in the future we wil still have reddit (with a lot worse moderation and a lot more annoying ads) but we suddenly also have an alternative.
Yes, the fediverse already was there before, but when I check out the old content I find it very hard to find something I’d have been interested in - which suddenly changed in the last few days.
It’s like the musk twitter/mastodon. moment all over again. And with federation it at the same time more annoying and feels much more like the old world again, when individual people not huge companies would own the web.
(Btw this is my very first comment ever on lemmy, too - and it suddenly doesn’t feel like it transfer ownership of my words to a corporate giant, anymore)
Reddit will remain but it’ll be just a meme page, I doubt if any of the more specialised, specialist communities will stay. It’ll be just another 9gag. I’ve been on it since 2010, I watched it grow and evolve and it honestly looked very reasonable the whole time, progress was for the better. then spez decided to kill it in a few weeks. Over a decade of progress will be gone.
Let’s be fair- Spez has been killing Reddit for much longer than a few weeks. Look at the features that get developed and those that don’t- users are screaming for better mod tools and better mobile app and we get chat and avatars and NFTs. Look at how Reddit bought alienblue and then wrecked it, look at the whole ‘new reddit’ site design and the feed stuffed full of ‘engagement algorithm’ garbage from subs you’ve never visited. This is the same shit that’s been going on for the last few years.
If you’re like me, it never bothered you much because you could always work around it- old.reddit.com on desktop, i.reddit.com or 3rd party app on mobile, RES plugin. And that’s what they said- they’d always let users use Reddit as they wanted.
But suddenly i.reddit.com dies and 3rd party apps die a month later (no way that’s a coincidence) and now there’s no way for a mobile user to effectively use the site. So users draw a hard line in the sand and say ‘this far, no further, the line must be drawn HERE’. But things were going downhill long before this API mess.
I’ve been on Reddit since before the Digg migration, it’s been my home for like 12 years. In its heyday it was a truly beautiful community. ‘The narwhal bacons at midnight’ may have been the cheeziest line ever, but I think that was around the peak of Reddit’s greatness.
But I don’t think progress is gone. I think those of us that protest the API mess, those of us who don’t use the official apps or new reddit, I think we all now understand exactly what we want and don’t. In a sense, I think we’re collectively growing up- realizing that being the product for advertisers isn’t a recipe for success, that if we want to have good communities we have to build them ourselves rather than going the lazy way and letting Big Tech build them for us in exchange for tracking us.
Welcome!
FWIW- I agree Spez deserves a thanks for seeding this platform up to critical mass. And I also think he may deserve a thanks for continuing to turn Reddit into a meme scroller- that will keep a lot of the idiots from making the jump. Very sad to see the platform I loved and spent many years on turn into little more than a filter for idiots, but if the answer is that the fediverse becomes what Internet forums once were, and Reddit was for a long time, then change comes as the world turns.
I miss that era- when it wasn’t all big tech platforms for everything, when your online friend group would more likely be a forum or an IRC, and where experimentation was encouraged. Where if you had a spare laptop and a cable modem that meant you could run your community’s IRC bot or Shoutcast server or TeamSpeak relay or whatever. And where nobody gave a flying fuck what was acceptable content to advertisers- some places took that too far, but it meant the Internet as a whole wasn’t sanitized to be advertiser-friendly.
I don’t know if it will last, but for now, all this fediverse stuff feels like that did. The tech isn’t 100% perfect, hasn’t been through 15 UX committees to ensure Grandma can figure it out, but it’s accessible to everyone and if you want to fuck with it or help build it or run it on your old laptop, you’re welcomed rather than ignored.
Totally agree !