I see a lot of comments from bootlickers on how the protests are dumb and stupid and dont work and engagement metrics are still holding but the quality of posts and comments has noticeably depreciated imo. So much so that whenever I visit the site Im actually shocked at how bad it is.
I’ve stayed off it since the blackout started, but I did visit a sub yesterday that I used to read regularly about a topic I haven’t seen covered here. I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say, but maybe I’ve forgotten just how much crap I used to scroll through before landing on something decent. Either way, I’m OK with not going back.
I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say
Reddit has always been that way to an extent. Half of the time it’s just people making bad jokes and quirky references that border on derailing the thread to get that sweet karma dopamine boost.
I stayed off of it for a bit after the first 48, because I needed one of the support subs there. Then the Titan news was going on and the wealth of shitty remarks about the people in the sub was too much for me. I get the whole ‘eat the rich’ mentality, but the sheer vitriol people had against someone they didn’t know didn’t exactly paint the commenters in a favourable light.
Hoping that such opinion is tempered somewhat over here.
What’s goes around, comes around… That sentiment is not coming from a no where. Note how people didn’t say similar staff about refugee boat sinking and actually calling media out for lopsided coverage.
These views only get more extreme as social fabric and economic conditions of the working people degrade.
These people spent more than most people will ever save up in their lifetime for a one time ride in a tube. Money that could go to feeding people, planting trees, etc. They had the US Coast Guard and Navy looking for them with helicopters and sonar buoys. One of them was a billionaire who could have done it right like Victor Vascovo, but instead chose to pinch pennies and ride in the Home Depot special.
They cost society massively, they won’t pay shit for inheritance tax, their families will remain wealthier than I can ever dream of being. I make decent money and I drive past houses with river views and hot tubs and pools and boats and all sorts of rich people stuff I know I’ll never have, those people can’t dream of the amount of money these people have. I feel bad for the kid, that’s about it.
Not to mention the fact that they are thrill-seeking at a mass grave where a horrific tragedy occurred. Similar circumstances, too. The first class survivor ratio compared to the “steerage” survivors… Kind of like how we pulled out all the stops for these rich fucks but can’t be bothered by a boat full of refugees. It’s a sign of the times and people have a right to be livid about it.
I get the whole ‘eat the rich’ mentality
these are the same morons who like to send everyone under the guillotine… don’t ever try to direct them to history book to find out how the guillotine proponents actually ended in real life. trying to have discussion with someone who is 12 yo (mentally at least) is just a waste of time.
I agree. It’s pretty clear that trying to set any record straight (I looked up the philanthropic efforts of that one gent who went with his son) in these situations is a pyrrhic victory. At best you may have offered clarification on some inaccurate talking point they picked up that now someone else might not repeat further, but it only pokes the bear.
It’s taking some time to get over the withdrawal, but despite the fact I really liked some subreddits, staying off has become the best internet habit-related choice I’ve ever made. The low signal-to-noise ratio you mention is one big factor. The other is I needed some obstacles to ease of use to make my choices more deliberate. I have found alternatives, sure. But now I spend maybe a tenth of the time on social media that I used to when I was redditing every day.
I think its more likely that the posts on reddit are the same, and we are simply starting to become accustomed to the posts\quality of comments on the fediverse.
Our eyes are finally starting to open.
Our eyes are finally starting to open.
Do not ever believe this. This is an intellectual trap that once you dig in to it it’s hard to dig out. People like Elon Musk are the type of people who think they see the world for what it really is, and look how stupid they are. Some truths are clearer than others, but you will always be chained down by your own perspective, unconscious biases, and way of thinking. Always keep your mind partially open to new perspectives and do your best to practice intellectual humility.
I think this is really what it is. I’ve spent a lot of my time here enamored with the quality of conversation, and when I joined it reminded me of the sort of discussion I used to scroll through on forums when I was a kid.
I hadn’t seen it since, and I’d gotten so used to the bullshit that I barely remembered the difference. I’d really just chalked up the civility to the forum in question being several dozen regulars who knew each other too well to be dicks.
We need more content, but it’s making me kind of averse to pushing so hard to get the rest over here, lest they just bring the shit behavior with them
shit behaviour is one thing the mods are another. I’ve seen plenty of communities on reddit where the users hated the mods and eventually left and formed their own sub. the fediverse already encourages multiple parallel communities for the same topic. so i hope we can get around the worst of reddit by seeking out and creating healthier communities. Leave the power mods behind.
the fediverse already encourages multiple parallel communities
this is first thing fediverse has to fix if it wants to get somewhere. for a community to be useful, you need people interested in the topic concentrated at one place, so you can profit from that crowd wisdom. 100 people spread over 80 communities is not going to be much useful.
100 people spread across 80 communities isn’t useful, but neither is 100,000 in 1. It just creates an overwhelming amount of noise. Comments get filled with jackasses jockeying for attention, and niche posts get buried in floods of other posts.
Just because people have become used to it doesn’t mean it’s been good. It just means people have been blind to what they’ve lost, all because we have biases toward big numbers.
Niche interests won’t be spread out. That’s not how they worked before Reddit, and it’s not how they’ll work after it. Big popular groups will splinter, and it’ll be a good thing.
We need more content
I spun up an instance because I dislike what Reddit is doing and I want to support this community and help it grow.
Regarding the content you are talking about: https://fediverse.boo/magazines
I’ve set up automatic news feeds from the BBC, NPR, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and CNN so far to their own magazines. That way you can subscribe to a specific magazine to get articles from the publishers you like. (I’m also still tweaking how much content gets pulled in so its not too much or too little). I also have a catch-all news magazine that I manually curate news article links for.
I plan on adding additional magazines that aggregate links from other websites (not just news) but I am waiting to hear from the community on what content they would like to see.
Ok, thats my like 30 second elevator spiel about my instance and my magazines. Definitely drop me some feedback if there is any additional content I should automatically add to dedicated magazines. Hope to see some new people jumping into discussions on posts over there!
Will you be adding The Guardian?
We need more content, but it’s making me kind of averse to pushing so hard to get the rest over here, lest they just bring the shit behavior with them
All places eventually trend towards their Eternal September. In the meantime just push back against it as much you can and enjoy what you got.
People are going to wring their hands over admin-level, permiable serve blocks forever, but one of the things you can do with them as an admin is disconnect from Eternal September.
Obviously, general interest servers aren’t going to want to do that, but more niche ones should be able to get away with it. And with some careful consideration for how blocks work, we can probably have environments where the good stuff reaches smaller, disconnected sites through intermediaries via cross-posting.
With some careful planning, we could have it all.
anyone with a brain is protesting. ask yourself who is even left posting. do you know anyone IRL that posts on reddit by the way? I’m telling you it’s the age of fake content, shills, influencers, karma bots, scammers, culture war mongers. makes >90% of the content on reddit now
Just feds, bots, shills and me
Honestly
Who checks reddit anymore? I don’t check the site at all. even if they did let third party apps back u/spez could always go back on his word. lemmy and the #fediverse where here to catch us when we became stranded!
The quality has been declining for years now. This last thing has only made it worse, but you’re likely now noticing how bad it is because you spend less time on it.
The protest won’t work. It’s failed in crippling reddit. Reddit will keep going, but as a shadow of its former self, with increasingly shallow discussions and increasingly crappy/old/unoriginal comment.
The protest may not have crippled Reddit, but funding may yet do so. Word is, spez did what he did because interest rates went up, the venture capitalists demand an actual return on their investment for once, they want it now, and this is spez’s desperate attempt to make that happen.
This is almost certain to fail. Lurkers, bots, and trolls aren’t going to pay for flashy avatars or whatever silly gimmick he comes up with next. Advertisers aren’t going to want their advertisements to appear next to trolls (see Twitter for evidence). Reddit will run out of money and collapse.
Spez may yet have the last laugh, if he manages to IPO and sell out before the music stops. Time will tell. But every non-shareholder who works for Reddit would be well advised to GTFO ASAP.
I’d say the protest did work. A lot of good users and mods left Reddit, the admins massively overplayed their hand and showed their true colors, probably hurting their IPO, the fediverse got enough of an influx of users to get a good kickstart and the next migration wave is just around the corner.
The protest didn’t succeed, but that just means a lot of people who were already disillusioned with Reddit and basically just trying to ignore most of the bad decisions by the admins decided that there was no point in sticking around because it clearly won’t get better.
I was a mod of a moderately sized subreddit under a different username, and a lot of the other mods I talked to said that they’re done after the 30th. Some of them, like me, already left. And while I know a lot of people like to hate on mods, in most subreddits the mods are doing a ton of work behind the scenes that keeps things on track. Without them, you’re completely correct- Reddit will get worse and worse.
We’d need an objective way to measure lameness and then review a large set of posts (on a particular sub?) from a couple of months ago vs now. Criteria have to be pre-determined to avoid the post hoc fallacy.
Average words or characters per comment? Number of insults directed at other commenters (measured by someone blinded to which group they came from)? Number of “controversial” comments judged by large numbers of up and downvoted?
I dunno. I’m not doing it. Not a social scientist. Just suggesting an interesting experiment.
how about a number of crying laughing emoji per thread?
😅😂 OMG this is so accurate 😅😂
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Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are made of letters.
I have checked 1,599,379,698 comments, and only 302,533 of them were made of letters.
I felt Reddit’s quality started going downhill around 2021, which is not long after
they introduced the official app andstarted allowing Google logins.EDIT: Looks like the official app’s been around longer than I thought. :O
Is the official app really that new??? I thought it was around since way before.
It turns out it came out in 2016. I was thinking 2018, but I was wrong. https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/official-reddit-app/
In a way, it’s been even longer than that, since they bought out Alien Blue in 2014, according to Wikipedia
Oh, that timing makes more sense haha all this time and the app still sucks balls.
reddit has been going down hill for over a decade at this point. if something better was a available it would have died a long time ago
I started to slowly realize this with the blackout. I tried using twitter and Deviant Art more, and found them to be a lot better since I could see more cool fan art.
While I still like my reddit home feed, popular and all just suck. Its mostly all rage posts made to generate outrage. I see so much negative stuff from /r/Antiwork or /r/Politics. I signed up for cat photos. I’m not here to listen to how our world is so garbage for the 100th time.
Whatever blackout/boycott/migration happens with Reddit, this should go double for Twitter, that’s another place I silently dropped like a rock and have never visited again.
When something happens with Ukraine and I feel compelled to dive into it, I’ve used Nitter, which mirrors the Twitter content but Musk and his right-wing idiocy gets no goddamned clicks and traffic from me anymore.
I think Reddit quality has been declining for some time.
There are two factors at work I believe. One, once something goes mainstream, you get a much broader set of the population on the platform, and much like real life, the idiots seem to be louder. More importantly though, updates to the platform deprioritized serious conversation in favor of mindless scrolling. Look at the new website, or at the official app. They are not conducive to in-depth conversation. They keep trying to distract you with posts from other communities that you don’t even subscribe to, the goal is obviously to get you to keep clicking clicking clicking rather than spending a bunch of time on one page composing a well thought out reply.
And that shows. Really high quality in-depth conversations on issues of importance used to be far more common for me on Reddit. Today they are much less frequent, fewer people seem interested in real discussion or debate. And there’s much more of the attitude of ‘you disagree with me there for you’re wrong fuck you’.
I think the recent protest and beginning of migration are going to make that even more prevalent. I think many of the smarter people who enjoy in-depth discussion and post quality comments are going to migrate to Lemmy or Kbin leaving Reddit full of idiots. I think that will actually be good for Reddit as a company, at least in the short-term, because idiots don’t use ad blockers and they install the official app without thinking. It is of course killing their golden goose, but their actions suggest they have decided they prefer to do without that goose’s continued services.
As long as the people there now are able to cash out, they don’t care about a sustainable future. They’ll squeeze until out dies and then move on.
Honestly I think that’s probably part of it. Spez and Kn0thing cashed out when they sold Reddit to Conde Nast for like 10 million. Now of course it’s worth billions. So I think Spez really wants his due, and is only interested in a payday.
Before this controversy, the account /u/spez was last active like 10 months ago. That speaks volumes- if you supposedly love the community but won’t interact with them on a direct level for almost a year, that suggests maybe you don’t actually love the community.And when you come out of your hidey hole, you do an AMA, answer like 6 questions with non-answers (after starting late) and then return to your hidey hole.
Or I guess with his prepper ways, its more of a bunker
I ended up checking a few times via teddit and I noticed the exact same thing. It seems a lot of the non-mod quality contributors have already left.
Those who stayed are probably power users using 3rd party apps. So expect another big drop in quality on July 1st.
I noticed the same thing. I was on Reddit for a good 12 years and the quality was getting worse for years, but it’s really dropped off since May 30. There are noticeably fewer big posts on r/all and there’s hardly any new or interesting stuff. It’s reposts, Twitter screenshots, stuff from Tiktok and Discord, complaints (think mildlyinfuriating, AITA, Doordash), and rate me requests. And Facebook type things, like “here’s what my kids did today.” The bright spots in the sea of trash are gone.
Kbin, Lemmy, and Tildes have been filling up with the good stuff I missed from Reddit. A month ago, it was a little slow here, but not anymore.
@yunggwailo IMO it’s bad on big subs but for niche subs that can’t/won’t move to the Fediverse it’s the same. It’s incredibly frustrating because there’s almost nowhere else to have a decent conversation about these topics in a non-discord, forum-like fashion.
I frequently lurk on r/worldbuilding and it is still pretty active, though I’ve yet to find a solid equivalent of that sub on kbin/lemmy
