I think they’re all part of the same issue - Reddit only cares about it’s IPO and financial status, not it’s users or communities. This will get worse when they IPO as Reddit will then care about the share price and nothing else.
We saw this with other Social media - look at Tumblr; it imploded as it started banning NSFW content because of bizarre moralising by Verizon when it took over Yahoo (and Yahoo already had been restricting content since it bought Tumblr). Twitter is imploding since it came under the whims of a billionaire egomaniac owner. Facebook has been in a long slow decline as it focuses on advertising above all else.
Reddit is going the same way. It has already started censorship - it closed lots of communities already in the past few years. This wasn’t too controversial as it generally went for the obviously “extreme” communities or communities without any moderation which were therefore high risk. But it’ll get more controversial as it moves towards its IPO - it’ll do whatever maximises it’s share price, and in the US in particular that also comes with a lot of reactivity to the general media. It’ll just need one controversy for it to start banning other communities, and the NSFW communiteis are the obvious first targets. But also targetting communities based on being “hateful” or “trolling” - the problem is the how “bad” something is is largely in the eye of the beholder. Once you go down the road of banning anything you don’t agree with you end up in censorship hell.
For most users issues around censorship, 3rd party access to APIs, and even privacy mean little as they don’t feel the impact. But Reddit is on an inexorable path of decline and users will start moving as community quality falls (moderators working for free for their love of the community only is a huge asset; users will leave communities when they become filled with rubbish or trolling users), and faster when content they want gets banned.
Social media is littered with failed sites that either failed to move with the times or went off the rails ignoring users: MySpace, Tumblr, Digg, Twitter. Reddit is next up.
One thing that’ll be nice here in Fediverse land: NSFW stuff now has a place again. Of course, within reason, but not just porn. The weed subreddits have been getting decimated, all of them got NSFW’d and a lot of them got banned, and the ones that haven’t have had Reddit admins crawling up their asses for the pettiest shit. For talking about smoking a plant. Because apparently the suit-and-tie caste that wants Reddit to go IPO want it to be as G-rated as Disneyland.
Guy is acting more and more musk-like, that’s enough for me to bolt. But I did exclusively use RIF app for last ~13 yrs. Whenever a Google search took me to native page I was shocked at how unusable it was on mobile
I have always used the official reddit website - I didnt even know 3rd party apps existed. But still, trying to kill 3rd party apps that way is unacceotable to me. Signed up for Lemmy instead, this is my first post over here.
Welcome onboard!
Yes! Very much so. They’ve become increasingly authoritarian over the years. These days just saying the word “trans” can get one banned from dozens of subreddits and even from the entire website. So far kbin.social has been pretty good, but there are a lot of users who want a safe space and don’t like opposing political views. Let’s hope either the owner believes in free speech, or I find an instance which does :)
There’s always been a tonne of censorship on Reddit, tho? Admin and to a lesser extent Mods have unchecked power to delete and even edit whatever they so please. user and subreddits get banned, shadowbanned.
My problem is different from everybody else’s here. I’m not bitter towards Reddit, I can watch it thrive in different hands from the sidelines, I don’t need it to crash and burn. But it’s a repository of information that’s almost second-to-none and my fear is embittered redditors scorching the earth before they bail.
Anecdotally, this evening I had an issue with my Plex server (HEVC main 10 videos maxing out CPU usage for transcodes, I digress) and searched my problem. Lo and behold 95% of qwant searches returned reddit threads, and the plex subreddit is still set to private.
I defend people’s rights to do what they want with their data and delete their histories on their way out—but damn if it isn’t going to hurt a little in the short term. reddit has helped me problem solve a million things, I’d hate to think that someone after me searching the same problem couldn’t find a solution.
I can see why people who volunteered their own time to put together informational posts and tutorials don’t want Reddit to benefit from them. I just hope they copy those threads into a new post on one of these Lemmy/kbin sites, but sadly that probably won’t happen.
The loss of information like this is nothing new. When Geocities shut down, a lot of Web 1.0 era sites were lost forever. Various internet forums have shut down over the years taking all of their old posts with them. Link rot is another issue with sites like Imgur deleting old content. This is why sites like the Internet Archive are so important. They are the library of the internet.
I put a lot of effort into my communities on reddit. Watching the platform make efforts to be more palatable to investors pre-IPO made it feel less of a community-based platform with ads to a clearly for-profit entity. I cleared my history and left.
If you also wish to, I wrote a quick HOWTO: https://sh.itjust.works/post/114629
I think reddit has just continued making more and more moves down their path towards the IPO, and all of those moves together have shown a lot of us that we’re not interested in staying on for the rest of the ride. Complicity towards corrupt or powerhungry mods of massive communities with tangible effects on the world (e.g. r/politics), censorship, revenue-focused anti-user actions, ignoring the community, downplaying the value of volunteer mods and threatening to replace them… Yeah, thanks, no. I’m good over here in the fediverse now.
I’ve left it behind so what Reddit does doesn’t really affect me directly, but I encourage the behavior I’m hearing about for one reason only. To further fan the flames past the simpler 3rd app argument and show what Reddit really was about in the end. People who went back or stayed because it wasn’t a big deal to them and the blackout was just whining might think differently when their content and usage gets hurt by the infighting and damage. Let it burn.
I’ve been wanting to boycott Reddit for a long time, and the list of problems I had with it was very long. It took this API issue to finally get some community action.
But in short, Reddit is moving away from genuine community, and more towards fake astroturfed corporate content with manipulated comments and unabashed bot activity.
I’ve also seen people saying their deleted posts/comments/and accounts are being been restored.
What I think has happened is that Reddit performed a rollback after the crash happened during the blackout. I’ve had comments from 2021-22 being restored and which ones did get restored were pretty random. Twitter had a similar situation a while ago.
Bots
IMHO, the big challenge with what’s happening at Reddit and Twitter is that sensible people with reasonable asks are leaving the platform.
The only people that are left are people that believe the CEO’s disinformation, or just don’t care. So now you have a more extreme echo chamber.
For those of us who are happy to watch Reddit die, this is best case scenario. As the #enshitification continues, Reddit will accelerate the departure of sane users out to alternatives.
I’m seeing a lot of worrying trends.
The whole idea of Reddit is changing. It used to be the front page of the internet and that encompassed basically everything. Now it seems like there’s a lot of focus on making it advertiser friendly
Then we see Spez basically spitting in the face of the community. Mocking them, calling the unpaid mods “entitled” and just showcasing that he actively seems to despise the users.
Now we’re seeing Reddit do shady stuff like undelete comments. Destroying any trust the community may have had in the website.
The 3rd party app issue was just the kindling that ignited all the other issues
His open anger has been pretty surprising, I feel like the past year has seen more and more of the owner class going totally masks off with anger when the peasants don’t just get in line to follow orders.
Apart from Spez and Musk, what other examples are there?
Those are probably the highest profile examples.
Everything else is way smaller scale, and often more about the tone than even what is being said. There’s a general “how dare anyone push back” or a complete failure to understand what life is like (some of this overlaps with the “ok boomer” stuff).
I’d point to:
- Martha Stewart’s rant about RTO
- Many many of the “nobody wants to work anymore” rants we’ve seen
- The tenor of Starbuck’s anti-union actions
- The communications I’ve seen from my (large) company and those at friends’ (obviously not going to list which)
It’s not like I’ve been keeping a list but those are what come to mind first.
Probably it’s all linked to the post-virus epiphanies about working conditions that have lead to things like the great resignation, the concept of quiet quitting (which is a bullshit term for me) and in general a bigger conscience of how work affects life
Oooh I consume these types of anti-labour news a lot, so I can provide at least a few examples of open disdain for unions (or those they represent).
https://www.wcbi.com/barstool-sports-co-founder-settles-over-anti-union-rant/
Me too. Just so I can crush it and reassert my dominance.
Mask off indeed, more clearly it couldn‘t have been said. Authority and dominance seems to be the root of this struggle of CEOs against those lower in the hierarchy.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/20/business/nightcap-ceos-behaving-badly/index.html
An article detailing a few more such cases, which a few of them I had heard about on Reddit before. I doubt we‘ll hear of it as much in the future. I would highlight this nugget:
Her response was, more or less: Shut up about the dang bonuses and focus on your jobs. (She later apologized in an email to staff, saying she was sorry her message “seemed insensitive.” (A sentiment that would probably go a bit further if she’d subbed “was” for “seemed,” but whatever.))
https://fortune.com/2022/12/29/bernie-marcus-home-depot-woke-people-socialism-labor-shortage/
"People just hate capitalism now. Because of “socialism,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times published Thursday, “nobody works. Nobody gives a damn. ‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work—I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid.’’
Great view he has of the working class huh? How nice of him to put it all out there so nobody has to wonder.
If you continue the article, you can find even more shining examples of this condescending mentality right out in the open:
Last year, online mortgage company Better.com fired more than 900 employees after CEO Vishal Gard publicly accused hundreds of staffers of being unproductive, not working long or hard enough, and therefore “stealing” from the company and its clients. Much of the criticism has been aimed at younger members of the workforce, who earlier this year were referred to as a “very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice” by BlackRock President Robert Kapito.
Cryptobros are gross too (I even like using Monero and before that Bitcoin but fuck me do I hate these Crypto CEOs with a passion!)
https://cryptoslate.com/kraken-ceo-lashes-out-against-some-employees-for-being-bad-fit/
If you look at his tweets, he entertained debate for a bit because he is openminded, but then “back to dictatorship it is” since they need to “help billions of people” … by making billions off scamming people with shitcoins I guess.
“It’s like a social movement,” said the 40-something, who struck a resemblance to his online identity: a cartoon brown-haired guy in a sweater vest. “Our next generation is very against going to the office. It’s a big issue that’s a lot bigger than a lot of us realize.”
Oh no, a social movement!! Scary! Workers have opinion and say them on Twitter! He had to stop tweeting at them that WFH sucks cause they said mean words. :(
Funny to me is how many of those articles are on websites you‘d think of as serving business interests, and yet they seem critical of CEOs anyway, maybe because there is no way you can twist their actions or words to the positive. At least not for me.
See another one which is less about words and more about perceptions: https://www.business.com/articles/broken-pedestals-the-dark-sides-of-popular-ceos/
I went for that cause it‘s got one quote by Fuckerberg that fits nicely with what I am presenting in this comment:
“You can be unethical and still be legal; that’s the way I live my life.”
How well put! That is exactly it, no ethics or ethics they do have and actively choose to ignore. Our leaders, ladies and gentlemen.
I could go further here and give examples in German too since I am aware of those as well, and politicians jump on it too to appease their sponsors I guess, but at least here our unions are representing workers too so it‘s less unipolar torrent of shit falling down, we can sling it right back up.
The thing is, when reddit does it there are millions of users ready to make noise about it and investigate what is happening, as we’re seeing right now. Even some large media outlets are getting in on the story.
If an adminstrator of some small instance starts abusing his power, like… what are you gonna do but take it or leave? Nobody else is going to care.
So I dunno, I’m conflicted. I feel despite everything it’s harder to abuse power that much on reddit because it is kinda obvious with so many eyes on you, but then again - I prefer that power being split around so you can just leave elsewhere if you don’t like it.
But if the mod of a small instance starts abusing their power and you leave to a different instance, you’ll still be able to interact with the communities you had.
While true, just leave your instance in that case. I left lemmy.ml cause the owner was reportedly removing and editing posts that don’t align with his political beliefs. He can do whatever the fuck he wants over there, I’m leaving. And Instances where nobody wants to hang around will die or fade into obscurity. It’s self moderating in a way based on the very nature of how Lemmy works.
In the case of reddit, I would even return, but not with the current CEO. He will need to be replaced entirely. There are concerning rumors that he may be a pedophile based on his moderation work on /r/Jailbait and some gross tweets he made in 2010. I am unwilling to contribute in any way to a platform that may be run by a pedophile. Clear your name with hard evidence, which you can’t, or get a new CEO. I’ve also got several friends who have nuked and deleted their accounts over this as well.
Anyone else more worried about the potential censorship?
As long as i know reddit banned “as spam” posts suggesting a migration to other platform such as Lemmy, removed all references and banned the personal account of a user who developed reddiw, an alternative API for reddit, and the list can go on… Visit the link for more information, I’m a bit shocked…
One of my biggest fear is one day the reddit admins will get rid of downvote buttons in all of the subreddits. Just like how youtube get rid of the downvote button.
But that means no more fearing losing karma.
