The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
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For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
I’m glad Reddit is feeling something from this, however, at the same time. I kinda don’t care. It’s a shame it went the way that it did. But spez can’t take back his terrible attitude and decision making on what happened. Most people were sympathetic and wanting Reddit to be profitable and rooting for Reddit. However, spez just decided to come out swinging from nowhere hitting his allies in the face.
Yeh I’m in the same boat. The day the internal memo came out about how everything will blow over, I deleted Apollo. I haven’t been back to reddit since and after the first week, I don’t even miss it now.
I wish lemmy was a bit busier, but outside of that the general atmosphere and quality here is better. Even if everything was reversed and Spez was booted, I won’t return now.
Just wait till the third party apps shut down tomorrow, loads of people will be rolling in here. Then when the RIF and Sync developers release their Lemmy apps (with the same names) even more people will come. If you want there to be content right now though just keep contributing to posts you see. The more content we make right now, the more likely it is for new users to stay,
I can’t wait for Slide for Lemmy. Always loved that app!
But it’s awesome to see so many developers already working on stuff for Lemmy. It’s simply bonkers to me that reddit looked at all these people who created so much for them and basically told them to go fuck themselves.
I have accounts on a bunch of instances, just in case the traffic takes some down.
You should check out lemmy.dbzer0.com if you haven’t already. It’s pretty useful;)
What’s different about it? I’m on mobile, can someone explain?
It’s the home of the online piracy community. Dbzer0 is the founding mod of r/piracy.
Sorry, another newbie here, what’s the point of having accounts on different instances? Can’t I post on any instance with the same account?
Where did you see an announcement about RIF for Lemmy? That’s awesome!
As far as I know, talklittle is focused on making a Tildes app called Three Cheers for now, and had been working it even before the announcement from Reddit. As much as it would be nice to have a Lemmy successor to RIF, the closest we’ll probably get any time soon is an app that’s just inspired by the RIF design.
Just FYI, the app Connect for Lemmy can be configured to look pretty similar to RIF by just toggling a few options.
Jerboa is also remarkably close to how rif looks/looked right out of the box
Thanks for the info!
While I want to it be a little bit busier, I’m pleased that we’re not at the low-effort comment point e.g. every other comment being a pun or a shitpost or “this”
I’m old enough to remember the Eternal September on Usenet when AOL allowed their users to access it and there was a huge influx of people just posting “me too,” often in replies to replies to replies to replies of someone saying “me too.”
Let’s hope Lemmy never reaches that level.
^^^ THIS X 10000000 xDDD
🤣
“Came here to say this”
Indeed. Honestly, what I’m missing is the high effort posts in slightly less active communities, especially things like r/nosleep or r/bestofredditorupdates.
Actually, I like the small community vibe of Lemmy. It’s the dead sub vibe I have a problem with. There are lots of really interesting communities, but you don’t see people posting anything yet.
I like a lot of the tiny vibe but I miss girl Reddit. It was such a unique social media atmosphere and I haven’t managed to find it here. I hope more of the women from Reddit come here
Took a long time for that to become a thing.
It’ll come here though for sure. I think most people are trying to filter into whatever communities exist right now to get a feel of how federation works but once everyone has a decent idea I think you’ll see an explosion of communities.
Yeah that’s where I am. Also its important to remember that the apps are nice but very beta, and what we have now are early adopters. Like part of why I’m here is that I oppose the increasing corporatization of the internet enough to sacrifice a better experience for it. We need the people who care but not that much so we can get the people who don’t care but think this is a better space.
It’s a long and slow process and if lemmy gains steam like we hope the real competition may start pushing centralized communities to quit their bullshit.
I was talking to my wife about me joining here and she pointed out that Lemmy really is the best use case for the fediverse. Forums were hard to centralize unlike Microblogging and other more social media-y social media. It’s less individual user dependent of a format
very well stated
I miss GirlGamers, honestly. It was such a refreshing perspective compared to the constantly angry/circlejerky dudebro vibe of 90% of gaming communities
Yeah! It, trollx and witchesvspatriarchy were some of my favorite subs.
I’ve seen a couple of witchy communities pop up here, apologies I can’t link because I’m on mobile but try searching at lemmyverse.net and it should turn up some stuff.
We’ve found each other again! Those were my top subs as well.
Yeah, this isn’t the same account name I used on them but I loved those subs. I’m so glad it looks like there are a lot of women on here
Yeah, this isn’t the same account name I used on them but I loved those subs. I’m so glad it looks like there are a lot of women on here
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I really hope witchesvspatriarchy moves to the Fediverse; one of my faves
My girl subreddits are my big miss too. Even my silly pop culture ones. Actually especially those.
It’s not silly. It’s community and shared interests. And the response I’m seeing to my comment is assuring me that we’ll have these communities back before too long
That’s the one area that’s missing for me as well, there is a general lesbian community that was just started yesterday, sapphics on lemmy.world, yesterday I found it and was like “neat! I need to post to help this grow, errrr… what do I post?”
Hmm maybe I’ll just have to post something silly about loving my wife on there
Are you looking for more girly communities? Maybe consider starting one if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
Am girl, excited to help build a community here!
Using this to plug my community [email protected] for League of Legends stuff. Trying to make it a bit more popular but it seems like there’s only one other person posting so far
Keep on posting. As long as there’s something, other people won’t think it’s completely dead. Eventually others will start posting too.
lemmy.ml is defederated from all kbin instances, right? that might make it a harder place for a community to congregate. Just going off what I was reading in this reddit thread
I was apprehensive of moving over to Lemmy, but I’m starting to get the feel of the fediverse and finally made the switch over.
I think the community can grow over time. It honestly feels like early Reddit, I’m quite enjoying Lemmy!
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It’s worth mentioning the article said prior to the blackout ads saw ~14,500 clicks so they’re currently down 40-50%
It’ll be interesting to see which advertisers are the ones which think the current state of affairs provides a good ad platform for their orgs.
That’s significant, and it doesn’t surprise me. Even if I wanted to keep using reddit, the content has taken a nose-dive and the mood sucks now, so I bet people have cut their usage down.
The only thing reddit can do is improve the first party app and mod tools. The rest is lost.
That being said I doubt the protests are reddits biggest priority. Even if reddit ipo’s perfectly and gets a injection of capitol (which might itself be difficult since investors don’t seem to care about userbase growth anymore) they are going to need to find ways to increase profits each year (like every other publicly traded tech company).
Advertising revenue is also limited given trend to cut “unnecessary expenses”.
However, Similarweb told Gizmodo traffic to the ads.reddit.com portal, where advertisers can buy ads and measure their impact, has dipped. Before the first blackout began, the ads site averaged about 14,900 visits per day. Beginning on June 13, though, the ads site averaged about 11,800 visits per day, a 20% decrease.
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
This is the only metric that matters to Reddit, so it’s nice to see!
So they really are following Twitter’s example. Twitter’s lost 59% of ad revenue since Elon took over, now Reddit ad revenue is plummetting. It’s stunning how stupid companies can be.
Just noticed today that Twitter requires one to log-in to read posts. It’s like these two platforms are competing on which one can destroy their reputation first.
Same here because of a Lemmy post. Truly 2023 is the year of rapid enshittification for the large websites that have dominated the internet for the past decade or so.
Google right there alongside, going from useful results to sponsored ads and replacing the useful basic sections in their nav bar (i.e. “News”) to whatever random categories their algorithm thinks fit your query.
Honestly, I’m worried that people will be put off by extra level of complexity but I really hope the fediverse takes off, this feels like the only part of the internet moving the right direction at the moment.
My 2¢
Lemmy will never be ‘reddit’. The simple act of having to choose an instance (and taking the time to understand instances + how they interact with one another, something even I’m not crystal clear on) is not something your average Joe Schmo will be willing to spend the time on. Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc are all one massive endlessly scrolling feeds of ‘content’ whereas lemmy asks you to dedicate your account to one instance. You can make another account of course, but even the process of choosing an instance will be enough to stifle growth and keep lemmy smaller in the long run, in my estimation.
Wether that’s a good or bad thing depends on how you view the internet and what you want from it, to me it’s a little of both because I bet I won’t see any of the niche communities I subbed to on reddit pop up here for a good long while (ex a community for the model of car I own, smaller videogames, hobby work, etc). But also it means that there will be less low-effort content - theoretically. You win some you lose some, I’m interested to see the state of both Reddit and Lemmy in a year from now.
Also hey its my first comment ever
I agree that the extra step of having to choose an instance is a hurdle that will turn some people away. In my own experience with it I had to apply to the first one I tried to join (never got a reply), had a timeout on the second one, and didn’t successfully create an account until my third attempt. That’s more effort than some would be willing to put forth.
However I really don’t think the confusing nature of the Fediverse is that big of a deal. I don’t think I understand it at all, and it doesn’t seem like I need to for now. Download Jerboa, make account, switch feed from ‘Local’ to ‘All’, and oh look it’s basically my RIF experience again.
Over and over on Reddit I saw people say “Lemmy will never take off because it’s too confusing for average users,” but I just don’t think that’s the case.
Also hey it’s also my first comment ever
Yeah this shit is easy. I made an account and also use jerboa. No problem.
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Welcome!!
I agree the instance are a little hard to wrap your head around but I hope it takes off. A centralized signup process that randomly assigned accounts to servers would be better imo. Also defaulting the communities search and feed to ALL would make it so people don’t need to learn all about the inner workings to get started.
It’s early days. Who knows? Maybe in a year or two, when the Federation aspect is a bit more developed, we’ll have a seamless, less fragmented experience.
In my case, whenever I tell one of my friends about Lemmy, they feel like they’re going to be isolated on their own little island (instance), and that they’ll probably be missing out on a livelier community somewhere else. This misconception is probably the result of relying on centralized platforms for decades. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but Reddit is the perfect example of what can go wrong when you put all your eggs in one basket.
I had better luck showing them the Memmy app in action. Hope they join the community soon.
Once people come around to it being reddit but the accounts look and feel more like email, it’s going to take off (or continue to). It’s not such a great feat that it’ll be insurmountable for average internet users.
Ultimately, if the content is here, people will follow.
Sure it will put off some users, but those are the lowest effort type of users anyway. I think most people who were online enough to be heavy reddit posters will not have much of an issue grasping how Lemmy works
It needs everyone to be part of it. I’m no idiot (arguably), but I still don’t quite get why I need an account for Kbin and for Lemmy and… just to use it properly. The concept was that I needed one account which linked to everything, yet that’s not the case. I’m in the process of deleting all my reddit posts with Power Delete Suite and it’s taking a while, but this needs to be better if it wants to get people like myself (and those who aren’t so tech-savvy) across.
Hate to break it to you, it’s already better.
People have had no problem choosing email providers.
A few dominant servers will emerge, just like with Gmail, and there may even be an ebb and flow of what the dominant ones are (remember @aol emails?). But it seems to already be hitting the magical critical mass of adoption. Will be interesting to see if it continues
I don’t think one need a good idea of what an instance is to use lemmy. It js just like reddit but without reddit mods and decentralized.
By easing the access through abstracting some of the more complicated ideas like instance but focus on the aggregated part, it is possible for your regular people to access.
You can start that car group on your own maybe.
There will be apps to make it simple for the average user.
Honestly feels kinda like the pre 00’s internet. Barely any bells and whistles.
Reminds me of Usenet. In a good way.
Agreed, which was also why I used RIF and old.reddit in the first place. This is how i like my feeds anyway
Kind of like how reddit used to feel
I totally agree regarding Google. I work in IT and the entire reason I got into my career is because I grew up with Google and I was good at it.
Google’s search results suck now. It’s actually incredible how much clutter and algorithmic nonsense it shovels at you now instead of legitimate results. Once there became companies that specialized in SEO, it was just a race to the bottom and now it’s all bots fighting for the search rankings instead of real content.
enshittification
That needs to be the word of the year.
Wiktionary calls it a hot word
It’s like they never learn. They’re trying to turn the internet into cable TV… I guess they didn’t get the hint when a lot of us said “Fuck TV”
Also, Youtube and Twitch have been fucking up a lot lately, helping out sites like Rumble and Twitch.
I think you meant Rumble and Kick. Unless twitch is helping itself somehow. 🤔 /s
Edit: also this is my 1st comment on this site, hello everyone. 👋 Lol
Unfortunate that kick.com is getting more traction, since it’s basically just meant to draw people into gambling on stake
Tbh I kind of.understand ads: you have server costs that needs to be paid. What I absolutely do not understand is charging ridiculous api prices when they could send those ads like the desktop website does. It makes me really think that the main issue here was to kill 3rd party apps more than monetization
Different takes I’ve heard was the API was setup in such a way it was going to a massive legal liability in the near future especially for EU regions. They no longer have the know how to fix it and close the gaps, they needed a way to cut off the API. And since legal terms of how that API was setup they can’t simply turn it off, they instead resorted to unrealistic demands and costs on the third party to get everyone to stop using it so they can quietly turn it off.
Discord…
Well the silver lining is that we will move to better platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, Revolt, Signal… well whatsapp hasn’t enshittified itself that much recently has it?
What’s happening with discord?
Discord has been introducing new monitisation platforms for “servers” which help them capture revenue.
enshittification
Now there’s a lovely new word to add to my vocabulary.
I first saw “enshitification” used in a blog post by Cory Doctorow about TikTok. Love the term. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys.
nitter.net is a good mirror, I have an extension called LibRedirect that sends me there automatically instead of twitter. no need to login just to read a single tweet or something that way 🙂edit: sorry for the misinformation, I’d just woken up at the time and definitely misread - I didn’t realize twitter had made the change today from needing an account to click around to needing one to view anything at all. Nitter doesn’t seem to work anymore 🙁
How does nitter work? Does it scrap the data, or use an API?
Web scraping and/or private API. It does not use the paid API.
It uses some undocumented API endpoints currently I believe :) not sure how this twitter fuckery is/will affect it
Nitter no longer works because sign in is required now.
hm, do edits not propagate through federated instances? I edited that comment an hour or two after posting when I realized, but I’ve had several replies today that seem to be based on the original version, all from users on different instances.
nitter.net is a good mirror, I have an extension called LibRedirect that sends me there automatically instead of twitter. no need to login just to read a single tweet or something that way 🙂edit: sorry for the misinformation, I’d just woken up at the time and definitely misread - I didn’t realize twitter had made the change today from needing an account to click around to needing one to view anything at all. Nitter doesn’t seem to work anymore 🙁
Edits, comments, etc can take a bit to shuffle through
No worries though, thank you for the clarification
Does nitter still work after the change with the forced login?
Is it still working today? Can’t seem to find anything. Not that it matters much to me, I only went for vgdunkey’s tweets for the most part.
Twitter requires one to log-in to read posts
I’m actually kinda liking this. Maybe it’ll encourage people to stop reposting “Tweets”. Folks need to think about Twitter the way most of us think about Digg: Rarely.
Just noticed that today too, fucking bullshit.
They hope to monetize the content by selling it to AI companies.
To be honest, if this field really picks up, they(Reddit, twitter) might not even need the users anymore. That level of classified content is the real good mine
They’ll need the users if they hope to keep generating new content though.
Scraping the data becomes less relevant the older the data gets
I don’t think that matters much if the purpose is LLM. Not for years anyway. Sure, the information might be stale, but the language part remains the same
Here’s hoping spez keeps following in his idol Elon’s footsteps!
Imagine that once upon a time (5-15 years ago), I actually had addblocker disabled on reddit, because I considered it worth supporting. lol
Proof that people will gladly support a good product.
These guys aren’t happy with some support. They want all the support i.e. money. Feels like no tech corporation thinks about its products long term anymore. Just the most readily available cash grabs possible, even if it means possibly losing future revenue.
Well, as other people have said, it looks like they were preparing to sell Reddit, or take it public, or whatever, and they wanted to make it look as profitable and purchaseable as possible.
The end result is the same, but the reasoning is a bit different.
Anyhow, if that’s true, I dare say they’ve achieved the opposite result now.
Spez explicitly said in his AMA that third party apps were profitable while reddit wasn’t.
Which isn’t mutually exclusive, plus he can’t really talk about any planned sales before they are actually announced anyway.
So, shall we start calling this ‘the Reddit Effect?’ We haven’t had anything new to supplant the Streisand Effect for awhile, I feel like something like this is overdue
So the Reddit Effect would be a company trying to do something to raise it’s value or make it look good that has the opposite effect?
I don’t think there’s another name for that, so sure, why not?
Might be the digg effect ;)
Yeah, at this point, they could completely reverse course and it still wouldn’t make a difference to me. I’m glad they took it this far actually because I didn’t like the way the site was going long before this but there weren’t any decent alternatives that I was aware of. My addiction kept me there, but this has made it pretty easy to leave with the glances back just being curiosity about whether the whole thing is on fire or becoming a steaming pile of shit.
It’s not just tech companies. It’s any company with greedy owners.
Corporations gunna… corporate?
Same curve with Netflix. Pirating went down when they started. They themselves, but all the other Streamers as well have gone so greedy that the good product is no longer supported. Reputation ruined, war with customers ensues.
I was a paying premium member with ads enabled until recently.
Dude, I paid for Reddit Premium or Gold or whatever the fuck it’s called for 5+ years just to support. I wish I could claw it all back.
We even used to run “thanks for not using adblock” ads in rotation, when there were no other ads to run. I had a picture of a squirrel that was in rotation there
Yes, that was funny and kind of endearing. Back then it also seemed like the goal was more to stay as kind of a community service, but of course the servers needed to be paid. Now it seems like they want it to return huge profits like Facebook and YouTube. It seems like a completely different mentality, where the ideals have vanished. And this is very clearly reflected in the userbase IMO.
During a part of that, reddit was a loss-leader subsidiary of Condé Nast. The magazine side took care of all the “corporate” stuff (legal, hr, marketing), letting reddit itself be lean and fast; it was all engineers more or less, and they all used reddit all the time.
11 year account…makes it pretty easy to imagine. It was a very different site back then.
I literally made a reddit account a few days before the hullabaloo started, specifically to buy advertising on reddit.
- The ad interface is terrible. Most of my experience is with Google Ads, but in general, platforms try to be super-nice to their advertisers and give them a good experience. Not reddit. The same overall shittiness the infests the rest of the site is also in their ad portal.
- Most of the clicks were fairly poor quality (high bounce rate).
- Whatever I tried to configure to limit geographic reach to US+Canada either wasn’t set up right or was just ignored. I got plenty of clicks from all over world.
I stopped advertising on blackout day for moral reasons regardless, but it also seemed like it just overall wasn’t worth it in general. And, my observation of the ads I see as a user has been that they aren’t at all tuned to what I would be likely to want, or constructed so I’d be likely to click on them. Some platforms I have to consciously avoid clicking on ads or scroll past them deliberately when my natural tendency is to click on them. On reddit it’s just weird nonsense that I want to scroll past anyway.
In short, my brief experience with reddit ads made me conclude that it’s probably a waste of money anyway.
Personally the redditbusiness page marketing to advertisers reads like wishful thinking or something straight from /r/boringdystopia.
“Look there’s places where people come to discuss flashlight options and other users/google results trust them! Pay us money to look like you’re part of that! It’s not creepy to try and co-opt at all!”
I’m not surprised that their interface isn’t great, they haven’t paid for developers to do anything other than try to look more like twitter/facebook in a long time.
I had no idea about this. This is the weirdest goddamned thing. I found so much that I made a whole separate post. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I had no idea.
Amazing how much bullshit people produce and then also sell.
Hey, I loved watching people nerd out on their flashlights! Actually, I was there to get insight on how they were building their own awesome lights, and trying to understand what the difference between lights was.
Exactly, that is a useful resource. It came to mind because I used it to figure out what was worth it when I needed to buy a new one. A flashlight company pretending to be part of it makes it less useful.
IIRC the vendors were obligated to identify themselves. Some of the vendors were just people making hardware mods, too.
I would assume that almost all clicks are from people on the mobile app accidentally tapping ads while they try to scroll past them, because they’re in the main feed. So click quality being garbage doesn’t surprise me.
Holy smokes – I think you’re right. I’ve definitely done that. That would explain this mystifying thing I saw in ad traffic from Facebook and reddit specifically, where 90+% of people stay for literally just a few seconds. If it’s pretty much all accidental clicks and then people hitting “back” right away (which is exactly what I do when I do that), then that makes it make perfect sense.
This was my experience. Almost every ad I clicked on was a mistake; either I thought it was a real post and wasn’t paying close attention, only to navigate away in disgust, or I clicked on it purely by accident. I had like 50k+ karma (to give you some idea of much I used reddit) and might have honestly clicked an ad once.
Reddit ad targeting is a joke and I dont even understand how. How can they not tell what my interests are when I’ve literally subbed to them? It’s the easiest targeting set up in the world and they still can’t make it work.
(1) Because the more irrelevant ads they show, the more accidental clicks they can collect, and the more ad revenue. There will be individual clients (e.g. Adobe) who probably have some measurable results, but my guess is that most of their advertisers show pretty good metrics in terms of “cost per click” etc, and aren’t paying close enough attention to realize that their real return on ad spend is extremely low.
(2) Reddit’s just as incapable / uncaring about writing good ad targeting as they are about constructing the rest of the site.
Pick one. Aaron Schwartz would be furious at the current state of reddit.
Too many people ad block everything on Reddit in any decent category that you might want to target.
The real way to do it is an army of paid shills making posts and comments by a third party.
I agree with your comment while I enjoy this piping hot Dominos Cheesey-Cheese Delux Pizza, delivered hot and fresh right to my door.
Eating the DominosTM Cheessey-CheeseTM DeluxTM PizzaTM is better than orgasming and I can’t wait to have another one tonight.
Another pizza, right? … right?
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The cheese on this pizza I’m enjoying right now isn’t the only cheese in this room.
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So I generally agree with you on (a), but I do like to just try stuff and measure how well it works, and sometimes I get surprised. I did try (b) also, and I actually had a pretty hard time sorting out where to post where my promotional posts wouldn’t instantly be removed, how to post in a way that made it clear I’m here to sell my stuff without being overbearing about it, etc. I actually did figure it out eventually and had some level of success with it in terms of people engaging with my stuff, but it didn’t lead to any sales (for the short time I did it). I mean, it makes sense. Most people don’t read a post and come away from it with the idea “I gotta run out and buy that thing!”
Some subreddits actually specifically say that if you want to advertise your stuff, that’s what ads are for. I’ve got no problem with either paying for advertising or just being honest about what I’m there for; mostly I just care that it works, which is far as I can tell reddit’s ads didn’t for me.
To be a good shill on Reddit you have to use the “Look at this cool thing my girlfriend made” post formula and then wait for the replies asking where to buy it.
Why wait? They’re already posting those comments themselves from other accounts.
Honestly, advertising on the internet is a big cluster fuck. It isn’t like how cable was where it used to he organic and clever. It’s just shoved into people’s faces wherever, whenever and however the advertisers possibly can. Of course no one wants to see ads and uses ad blockers. I dont care how interested I was in an article if I go to read it and the page is littered with ads I’m leaving and never visiting the site again.
What’re you selling? You seem genuine enough that I’ll at least listen to your ad pitch.
Sure! I’m selling RPG tokens. If you play DND or any tabletop game, they are to me way superior to (a) minis and (b) just using pennies or something.
Hey thanks man! I look forward to the day I can start playing Cyberpunk in person and can make use of this!
Sounds good. If you do wind up playing in person and you’re interested, reach out to me + I’ll see if I can knock up a set of sci-fi-themed ones. I actually thought about doing that already, but it’s just one of any number of “I could do such-and-such” ideas floating around, and I was focused on getting traction with the DND-themed ones first.
I feel like old af now that I’ve watched two huge sites implode due to mismanagement. I was a Digg refuge way back, and now here I am on lemmy…
3 sites if you include Twitter . Twitter and Reddit seem to be in a mismanagement competition right now. Not sure who’s winning
We’re all losing, sadly.
Tumblr also kind of got ruined a few years ago too for some people if you were into that platform.
I was in art school when Tumblr was at its peak. Looking back it was dumb, just resharing pictures and gifs but I had so much fun. I met so many people through Tumblr that I’m still in contact with.
I really enjoyed tumblr in a way I don’t really understand now. I think I enjoyed creating something to share of my own out of bits and pieces of everyone else. Idk.
Ironically, I use Twitter more now than ever, but just bc it has more relevant medical news content
I remember the day that Slashdot sold out.
What happened to Slashdot? There wasn’t really one particular event that made me stop using that site, I just sort of drifted away. Was there an “enshittification” moment there, too?
1999, Malda & Bates sold it to Andover.net. It didn’t become terrible, but there was a sense that it went corporate. It’s been sold and resold since then.
I guess I mostly used it after the sale, then. I started in 1998 or 1999 (when the hype for The Phantom Menace was building up) and used it until the early 2010s.
Now this is the real nerd cred here lol. Yea. Same. We’re old now. Has its benefits and disadvantages.
I rarely go to slashdot anymore, but still do occasionally. What did they do?
They were independent then they weren’t. I don’t recall any deeply controversial scandal beyond that. But the content and vibe was never the same after they “sold out”. They are a shell of their former self… they used to be “the thing”. Now they’re just something some people know about.
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Exactly. It started feeling corporate.
Heh, I go back to Usenet. Architecturally, Lemmy is closer to Usenet, but Usenet did not have an authentication mechanism.
Yes. At the end of the day it is always corporate greed and shortsightedness that does them in.
Crazy that even Google seems to be realizing that it’s search really leaned on Reddit for decent results nowadays… I’m curious to see if a bunch more things start to implode over time
Google basically monetized user-generated content and discussion (those obscure FAQs and technical discussions), now Reddit wants to get it on it, too. The only ones getting truly shafted is the average user.
Myspace, digg, tumblr, reddit, twitch, could maybe count 9gag and places like gfycat
Same.
That’s how I got my username…
I went Slashdot -> Digg -> Newsvine -> Reddit -> Lemmy
I spent the most time on Reddit, but I think I had the “best” time on Newsvine. Their website was extremely slick, and the fact that they encouraged long-form articles from their users was awesome
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yIlop! wa’IeS chaq maHegh!
Outnerd me! I dare you!
01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110010 01100100 01100101 01100100 00100001
Q’plah!
Estas pli nerdaj lingvoj ol klingono.
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Let them die.
I think moderation and community will be much better on Lemmy. On Reddit you got some power tripping mods because they’d control the only sub with a clean name that got all the subscribers. There’s no such monopoly on Lemmy so it will be the best communities that win. Monopolies corrupt in all their forms.
Agreed. I deleted my 15 year account. Mods should just leave.
Reddit can’t exist without the free labor.
Other side is I don’t know what the mods that stick it out get. I’m guessing there is some monetary benefit to the bigger community mods I don’t know about.
It’s too late for you, but I’d suggest anybody who wants to delete their account consider first editing all of their comments to overwrite the data, there are lots of reports of deleted comments being restored, I’ve not heard of reverted edits though. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
A few weeks ago I used PDS to edit my comments - using the fork with the 5 second delay. Random pockets of older comments started reappearing after few days. I’ve been checking all 45 pages of my history every few days and editing the random comments that have reverted from the edited message. It seems like it has mostly stuck now.
I guessing there’s probably some broken code/process somewhere that isn’t always able to commit changes and once caches expire the comment returns.
I manually overwrote my post about 2 weeks ago and have been checking as subs came back online. a few reverted but most didnt. I deleted my 9 year old account last night and checked and its stills gone
Did this nearly a month ago. Just went back and checked and it has not been reverted. Hooray!
I just tried Power Delete Suite about an hour ago. I beleive reddit has slowed down the allowable edit rate, something like one every 5 seconds. PDS runs through as fast as it can, meaning it’s a 1 in 10 success at best. I tried Redact as well, but that just blanks out white after giving it permission. I’m not having much success. But Shreddit seems to work OK? Though that doesn’t address the undeletion possobility
use the PDS fork with the 5 second delay. it’ll take forever but it’ll get the job done!
Try the fork in this comment. It has the 5 second delay put in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerDeleteSuite/comments/mgshmh/a_heads_up_for_those_who_are_using_the_edit/jpkpdhq/
Been telling everyone to purge their old content. You can always view Reddit just to lurk, there’s no need to let them monetize your old content. Into the bin it goes
PowerDeleteSuite screwed me over around 6 months ago. I got 2 replies to comments it was supposed to delete but they were still there, user name, content and all, they were just not linked to my account. If I search my username + reddit I still get results. My name is not attached anymore because I deleted my account.
Thankfully I started manually editing and deleting my comments after using PowerDeleteSuite, and those remain gone as far as I know.
I heard they revert to the original data? Didnyou check?
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I was a mod, deleted my 14 year old account after having rewritten all my comments and posts
It isn’t even about the API drive out anymore of why I’m not going back to Reddit. It’s the CEO though and though
Because the goal was never to get some kind of fair price for using the API. That’s why they priced it at “Fuck You.”
Ultimately what they want is for people to stop using 3rd party apps entirely because 3rd party apps either don’t show advertisements, or they show advertisements that give ad revenue to the developer.
They want everyone using their app because the valuation of tech companies directly correlates to the number of eyeballs they can serve ads to. Old.reddit will be next, and I bet they’ll try to start blocking ad blockers after that.
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Imgur has fair API prices and they serve images and video. Reddit serves goddamn text (or at least that’s their core business and if they can’t afford picture and video they shouldn’t do it).
Sure users would have had to pay some money and/or the 3rd party devs would have had to funnel some of their ad revenue to reddit. But if it was a reasonable amount, I doubt many people would have complained about it (there are always some). Everybody knows Reddit has to make money somehow.
This wasn’t designed to make money though. This was designed to kill all third party apps. I don’t even see the upside from a business perspective. This seems like a petulent manchild move by Spez, just like his idol Elon would make it…
The only thing stopping 3rd party apps from showing reddits adds though was reddit never including them into the api. They actually HAD an agreememt with the rif author to take a cut of rif’s ad revenue but as soon as spez took over as ceo he quietly axed that.
Investors wanted to see “app growth” for multiple quarters not underatanding that the app isn’t what maked reddit, and so
spezspaz is doing what he is in a desperate and stupid attempt to claw up some numbers so he can cash out when the ipo hits.Reddit app use DID see some grown during the pandemic, but can’t sustain that because its app is shit. They haven’t improved it ever. It began as a 3rd party app and they purchased it from the original dev. The only changes were to add that pathic coin shop and some sticker/avatar crap to sell you.
Yeah I was trying to convey this feeling to my wife the other night. It’s not just that I won’t be able to use my favorite app (rif) anymore, it’s that the CEO has been lying and gaslighting about what they’ve said. In that AMA thread where he said they want to work with devs who want to work with them and like three devs were like “hey we’re fine with paying but you haven’t answered our attempts to contact you” (not to even mention Apollo’s Dev’s bombshell recordings lol) really shows they don’t give a shit.
I feel like they want that AI money and are furious all these models scraped their content. I get it but it’s not even their content. Regardless of how you feel about artists being mad about their art being used to train models I think we can all agree that a site that merely hosts content being mad that the content was used is laughable.
And the NY Times article that among other silly things just forgot to mention Aaron Swartz as a primary founder of the site, who would be right there at the gates telling us all to fight this bullshit. Guarantee spez specifically told them not to mention him as the optics here would be completely terrible.
Reddit used to have values, but it’s been turned on its head.
thoroughly agree that the api stuff is just one symptom of a broader underlying issue
Absolutely. I was waiting it out to see how it would pan out, but after spez’s AMA I dropped Reddit immediately. That was before I even found Lemmy as a replacement. Now that I’m here I’m not missing Reddit in the slightest.
Sure is funny how reddit wasn’t concerned with with mods having to much power or enforcing any code till it affected the snowflake admin
Not just “not concerned”, it was literally their formal position that mods owned the subs that they modded. You couldn’t remove a mod for anything except breaking TOS or for being inactive. If the mod was active and not actively breaking TOS then reddits response has ALWAYS been “if you don’t like the way the sub is being handled, make your own sub and let the free market sort out whether yours or theirs is better”.
They held that position since the founding of reddit and it was as fundamental to the platform as the ability to create your own instance with your own rules is here on Lemmy. Right up until it was starting to get in the way of the CEOs big IPO payday.
And that is exactly why I am here now. I didn’t care that much for the API protests at all. Thought they were pointless. But this behavior meant that they were violating the very thing the made reddit, reddit. If subs weren’t spaces that anyone could use to try to carve out their own communities, then what is the point?
Furthermore, they aren’t even violating the code of conduct they are using to do this, so clearly all of Reddit’s promises are now worthless.
You couldn’t remove a mod for anything except breaking TOS or for being inactive.
Reddits definition of inactive has seemingly changed to benefit them as well.
A sub I was in fought for 2 years to get rid of our derelict landlord and every time, reddit would alert him and he’d show up nuke any dissent and then vanish again after having been missing and unresponsive for months. The ONLY moderation the guy did was to remove anyone that tried to direct people to a sub that had actual moderators and only after one of us made a request to take the sub that he abandoned, and reddit did not care.
Now suddenly having your sub private is enough and mods who were active the day before spez got angry about it are removed because they’d been away for a couple weeks prior. Horse crap.
This is why all the “fuck the mods I’m with the admins” folks are so short sighted. The only reason bad mods can exist is because the admins won’t remove them. They’re fine with bigotry and power abuse. The current mods are just a sacrificial lamb
I am glad that this happened because Lemmy is very interesting platform.
I’ve barely been back to Reddit recently and with Apollo gone, I’ll only ever duck my head in when I really have to. I find it a lot easier to leave Reddit behind than Facebook. On FB I’m connected to real world relatives and friends who I just would lose contact with otherwise. On Reddit I converse with strangers and that’s easy to replace. Lemmy has already done it. Is there anything unique about the hobby forums on Reddit? No. They can be reassembled or restarted elsewhere. In some ways it’s probably good to dump the old structures and shake things up. Some subs were better managed and some really just coasted on their name.
I totally agree. I’m on Android and never used Apollo, but I’m using the wefwef web app and it’s fantastic. People are saying it feels like Apollo!
wefwef is changing my mind about how good webapps can be. The UI is a copy of Apollo but the execution in web tech is absolutely top notch.
Try
phanpy.localphanpy.social for Mastodon! It blew my mind on how well designed, fast and efficient it is. It’s better than the Mastodon local apps - at least on the basic functions.Do you mean phanpy.social?
I did! Thank you.
Same, I just miss some of the interest based communities I was in, but they’re growing well on Lemmy right now. Optimistic for the future.
I was an early adopter of Reddit back during the digg days and I had over a decade of post history there and to see that go… I couldn’t care less. It was all ephemeral bullshit.
Same here. Liking Lemmy like I liked Reddit at the beginning.
16 years and almost 300K comment karma here…
The only thing that had me back on Reddit was searching for something on DDG and getting 99% Reddit results. I see why they are un-deleting people’s comments and posts when they close their accounts. Hopefully other forums take those spots.
Well said. Couldn’t agree more.
The beatings aren’t improving morale, you say? I guess we just need to increase the beatings then.
It is basically “if you refuse to work for free, then we won’t let you work for free. Ha, that’ll teach them”
You can’t quit! YOU’RE FIRED!!
I don’t understand why the CEO thinks this is some 4D business move. This is not the first time most of us have transitioned like this regarding social outlets. There must be records and archives proving that it is unwise to treat a community as negatively as it has … because it’s too easy for internet folk to just up and move to a new place of interest. Time is wrought with soo many examples:
For those of you who are ancient, there were the bad days of AOL and Yahoo, and then time moved on with ideas like social networks and board systems like 4chan. But how did they not know? Just look at what is in store for future Reddit by heading to the front page of Digg.
For one, I mean, look at this sad, sad, sad thing! Further, have you wandered to see Myspace… not sure who that audience is, but hey, to each their own. Hell, I can assure you that most of us only keep FB to keep some contact with family and old friends. I suppose the root of what I am saying is
I doubt spez cares about reddit. He cares about money. If he has to throw the site under a bus to make some more money he will gladly do it
If investors have any memory at all though, they aren’t going to give him tons of money, because he triggered the Reddit collapse before he sold out.
The Online Ad Game is not a long one. It’s about getting people to show up to your site when the ad is shown. No one is paying Reddit to grow brand recognition.
IPOs are all pump and dumps. No exceptions.
I worked at reddit during the Digg transition. We all were amazed at how utterly tone-deaf Digg was, how they had already taken some of their problematic features (higher karma users votes being stronger, votes being public, etc) to the extreme (letting companies literally purchase front-page space that wasn’t marked as an ad, etc).
Fast forward 12 years and reddit is somehow upping the ante and being even worse. At least Digg 4 ran well on the browsers of the time. new.reddit can kick up the CPU on an M2 Max fully loaded with RAM
This is not the first time most of us have transitioned like this regarding social outlets.
Some of us were there when Digg died, ended up on Reddit. This whole scenario is not feeling too different. I think it’ll take a little longer, the IPO might be the real catalyst, or the monetisation and cannibalisation of the platform that comes from new owners afterwards. But it’s going to come.
Reddit sat for a very long time in the shadow of Digg until it made its final blunder. Lemmy’s communities will do the same, a dual-power in the wings waiting for a catalyst to come.
I was there and felt the same way about digg. My accounts on these platforms are not connected to my real life so I don’t care about abandoning them.
But I’m really excited about Lemmy because it’s not just a new site, it’s a protocol and standard so no one instance can control it all and you can switch instances without being locked out of the platform.
Lemmy has a different kind of potential compared to Mastodon and some of the other fediverse projects too. In my opinion Twitter’s rise was created by corporations and media jumping on board with it. It was directly promoted in the media promoting hashtags and the like for the things they were doing. The issue is that these corporate entities and their supporters in the media won’t jump on board with Mastodon as it’s an anti-corporate project.
Lemmy on the other hand? A platform for communities? Communities existed before reddit in the form of forums and it was reddit that disrupted that market, killing off forums. There is no requirement for corporate involvement in the success of Lemmy and communities can emerge and succeed entirely on their own. As long as people dual-use it for long enough for reddit to repeatedly create catalysts that send users here there is an inevitable future.
In the meantime it’s very important for people to make it good here on its own merit.
Out of all the platforms to leave, leaving Reddit was ridiculously easy. There’s zero lock in. I don’t care about preserving my post history. My account is not connected to my real life. My conversations were with strangers. Deleting my account meant nothing to me and I was using Reddit since the very beginning.
It’s not like Facebook where some events are only there and there are some people I can only contact there, and it’s not like email where I have all my accounts connected to it and all my contacts have that address. Reddit had literally zero lock in for me. I’m not missing it one bit. Lemmy has fulfilled everything I got from Reddit. Only issues is that it’s unstable from all the new load but so was Reddit when I first switched to that.
The hardest part of leaving reddit is the niche communities it fostered. If you could think of a topic there’s probably a fairly active subreddit (or two) following it. But that existed before reddit in the form of BBBs and lemmy looks to have a great path to recreate that.
The only thing reddit has ATM is users. Losing them is a huge blow to their value.
Omg I just popped into dig for 10 seconds and it’s so bad.
I was an avid user of yahoo chats. Those were my peak ‘get influenced by strangers’ period. Was 10 or something in those and on basic neopets. Yup we move on.
They’re trying hard to make it like this is some issue about moderators, but they’re just the most vocal group complaining about reddit trying to lock down its entire service for monetization and harming all users (and especially vulnerable users) in the process. Always be mindful of people trying to shift the focus like that.
They’re ramping up bots to cover the loss of users.
Very very few people actually post, and a little more comment. But as bot posts became the majority, lurkers are going to start leaving as quality dips.
Maybe just me, but I totally want to see a Reddit where everyone actually is a bot.
There used to be a subreddit like that. Haven’t seen it in years. Not sure if it still exists.
Subredditsimulator…
The creator said they were shutting down the server that ran it and wasn’t interested in rebuilding.
Can’t just have bots posting to each other over and over forever, either. Bots need to pull from what they’re trying to imitate, and LLMs learning from themselves are already showing to be problematic.
At the end of the day, Reddit is just a message board. The absolute hubris to think that one could seriously go public with a message board website… It’s baffling.
Honestly, Reddit missed the ship to IPO. They should have done it a decade ago if at all.
Without mods, Reddit will become overrun with bots, rendering the precious data Reddit so desparately tries to monetize practically useless.
So traffic is back to normal but ad clicking is way down? Have they not figured out how to make their bots click the ads?
Traffic to the page for people to buy ads is down. This has been the trend for the past week or so. People are still using reddit, but companies aren’t looking to advertise on it.
