‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit::A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever
“We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private,” he said.
They respect it so much they forcibly remove mods to make them public again. That’s so respectful.
“We will teach them our respectful ways. By force.”
Come on now, give him some credit. He waited a whole few days before completely going back on his words.
Not one mention of where said moderators who left went to…
I started an entire instance - https://lemdro.id - to provide a home to Reddit subreddits such as r/Android and r/Google Pixel (and other technical stuff)
Reddit had a good run for over a decade, but as always with the internet, now a better thing will take its place.
Completely stopped using Reddit since they blocked third party apps in July 2023. I never accessed Reddit through other channels than smartphone.
That’s why I’m here too 🤝
I’ve been slowly getting back into reddit lately. While I want Lemmy to thrive and will keep contributing to help it do so it’s still hardly a replacement for reddit. Compared to it, Lemmy is basically a single moderately active subreddit. If I had to name a type of person Lemmy at its current state is ideal for I’d say a left-wing activist type whose into tech and politics. While that has some overlap with what I’m interested about it still leaves out all my deepest passions and to be honest I feel really uncomfortable knowingly being in such an obvious echo chamber. I’d really wish there was more of the kind of users here that most of you probably dont want. Just to even things out a bit.
Front page of the Ai bots.Not even feeling real some comments.
Yep; other then forgetting blind people exist, that was one of my main reasons for leaving. There were all these weird numbered accounts that were probably definitely just bots regurgitating someone else’s comment or post. I’m disappointed that wasn’t mentioned in the article.
For those in the thread who say it is hard not to go back for specific content, if you want to go back to browse but limit the ad revenue and clicks, you can still reach it with some front ends like teddit.
Here is a good link: http://farside.link/teddit.com
Or, for example, you can directly access subreddits by appending /r/yoursubreddit to the end http://farside.link/teddit.com/r/memes
Sometimes an instance will be down. If so, try it again in a few minutes or in a new browser or tab or clear the cache so another loads.
Completely quit Reddit. It’s a shame that the article fails to mention the fediverse as a new rising alternative in response to enshittification.
2024 will have mentions of ActivityPub and Fediverse.
Deleted my account but make another just for … (work-safe material, if you work in it). Maybe it actually hasn’t changed due to the protest but it seems worse. Maybe it’s just changed as those people moved to … (if you don’t use water cooling in your computer you would use)
While traffic has not changed substantially, many users report the quality of content and the kinds of posts that are surfaced on user homepages now seem different. RamsesThePigeon said the content on some of Reddit’s most-followed pages, which he moderates, had “gone sharply downhill”.
This has been a long term process. I was on reddit since 2012 or so. In the early days I used it to help me change careers and grow as a developer, and keep track of tech and space news and other topics that mattered to me. But the reality is it wasn’t even the API stuff that drove me away. The first thing that really got to me was when I couldn’t get rid of r/all as a subscribed sub, and that was full of quick dopamine hits and clickbait. Then every sub seemed to go downhill in terms of content, filled with outrage and pictures of tweets as if I would use twitter if it only used images of text instead of raw text. By the time the blackout happened reddit had become a net negative time sink in my life and I figured it was time to cut it off for good.
It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren’t just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or was I just so used to it before that that I’d never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself ‘well, that’s just reddit’. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
I’m not claiming the fediverse is perfect or free from that sort of shit but either through the practicalities of federation, or better moderation or a smaller userbase or a more mature userbase or a mix of one or more of those things it doesn’t feel exclusionary to me. I often see on posts like this some people calling Lemmy a left-wing echo chamber and whilst I do agree there’s more people of a left-wing bent on here I think echo chamber is a bit much and is a phrase maybe used by those who live in a country without a functioning left-wing political party. I’ve not encountered a communist or tankie since Hexbear fucked off back to their kindergarten.
As for the Guardian article, they’ve fallen into the same trap as I’m concerned the fediverse might fall into by federating with Meta - assuming high numbers equal success or victory. If you have corporate/economics based mindset I can see how that works, but to me success equals a popular, useful community site entirely free from algorithms and other forms of manipulative control. One that isn’t gathering data via ads and tracking on its userbase to sell on (lets remember that reddit weren’t upset that AI were scraping reddit, they were upset that the company weren’t seeing any money from that). A community that grows organically, with all that that implies - sometimes growth might be very slow, it might stop entirely for awhile, maybe even reverse - but the emphasis should be on the people making the community better.
Reddit forgot somewhere along the way that it was the users who made reddit what it was. Look at the stats for r/askreddit - in particular the posts per day and comments per day - look at the trend since 2020. There may well be the same amount of users on reddit, but we all know a certain percentage of them are bots and even if they weren’t, just looking at those two graphs tells you everything about people’s level of interest in participating on reddit.
The only thing high user numbers guarantee sites like reddit is ad revenue. Nothing else.
You say, “I’ve not encountered a communist…”, like that is a good thing. Let me fix that for you
I’m a communist. Companies would be better off if they were owned by workers rather than rich people. You know, workers owning the means of production, instead of capitalists?
Hopefully this hasn’t ruined your Lemmy experience!
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I’ve cut down on my Reddit use by a lot since the protests. I only occasionally browse the site, and I don’t comment on any subreddits save one niche one that hasn’t moved over to any other site.
If you find you want to go back to browse but limit the ad revenue, you can still reach it with some front ends like teddit.
Here is a good link: http://farside.link/teddit.com
Or, for example, you can directly access subreddits by appending /r/yoursubreddit to the end http://farside.link/teddit.com/r/memes
Sometimes an instance will be down. If so, try it again in a few minutes or in a new browser or tab.
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While traffic has not changed substantially, many users report the quality of content and the kinds of posts that are surfaced on user homepages now seem different.
While traffic has not changed substantially
has not changed
It’s long write up with a misguiding title. No numbers to back anything after a protest phase. And with problems with API access, there won’t be any from unaffilated sources.
I did found my favorite communities dropped some in activity and I myself access it just like once in a week or two from a desktop, signed off. But it didn’t die. Default subs can’t care and most NSFW posters are still there.
The important thing though is that Lemmy grew a lot. And it’s now enough to have a hit of that reddit poison. And, arguably, it feels a little bit more personal.
It feels a lot more like Reddit used to be, back in the old days. It feels less like social media and more like actual people are here.
This. While yeah at times it certainly feels a bit empty, Lemmy feels like old Reddit or maybe even the days of Forums before. Interesting, engaged discussions, rather than vapid one-liners that reddit ultimately became.
Yeah and it even hits that wierd hardcore nerd vibe that reddit used to where it was like 50% programmers and IT people and you’d see computer geek in-jokes everywhere
Eh it failed in the most reddit way imaginable: Most of the users are too addicted to astroturf accounts posting heckin puppers and epic memes to organise a boycott beyond a few days. Reddit ownership knew how pathetic the “protest” was going to be from the outset and didn’t even bother trying to disrupt it beyond nudging out a few of the remaining holdouts on subs too small to matter in the grand scheme.
All the mods who thought they were irreplaceable just discovered their users are all the more happy to digest low quality slop moderated by amateurs who are more interested in the title than doing anything to protect the quality of said content.
People are even relenting and PAYING for access to the API to use previously-free apps.
The pathetic-ness of the system stems within the fact that Moderators and Subreddit Creators cannot delete the Subreddits they created. I don’t know how we didn’t see this as a red flag.
/HFY did. A ton of authors including Hambone stopped posting there at all around 2018 or 2019 because we found out that Reddit was claiming that they owned our work, since we had posted it to Reddit, or something like that
What is /HFY and who is Hambone? Sorry for my ignorance.
Humanity, Fuck Yeah! It was a subreddit that focused on a subsection of Science Fiction, where humanity is frequently not the underdog at all.
Hambone is the author of The Deathworlders series, also referred to as The Jenkinsverse.
https://deathworlders.com/books/deathworlders/chapter-00-kevin-jenkins-experience/
That “chapter” got posted and Hambone forgot about it for five years, then came back and posted a chapter a month for seven(?) years to turn it into a book. It’s a long book.
He did this because at least three other authors wrote their own stories in the universe he created.
Salvage (this one is only canon until Adrian attempts to “blow up” a black hole. Something like chapter 73 or so. Jennifer Delaney, the main female protagonist, makes an appearance in The Deathworlders)
Humans Don’t make good pets ( Canon, but we never meet the unnamed main protagonist in The Deathworlders)
The Xiu Chang Saga (Totally canon, and Xiu becomes one of the main characters in The Deathworlders)
All of these can also be found as audiobooks, in varying degrees of completion, on YouTube. There’s also a guide somewhere as to when all this stuff takes place. A large amount of it takes place between chapters 0 and 1 of The Deathworlders.