Why it’ll only get worse from here.
Wow, this is one of the least shitty news sites on mobile I’ve seen in years. No autoplay videos taking up 90% of my screen as I scroll? Only a single popup asking me to sign in? No paywall? No car ads every other paragraph? I never knew articles could be so clean.
I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about Substack, but the design is definitely appealing.
I do my writing there and I am still on the fence, haha, it’s probably going to be “enshittified” one day, but it certainly isn’t yet.
A popup that tells me to enter my email but won’t let me just enter dave@mailinator.com and continue reading is effectively a paywall.
Just close the popup lol
This is probably the most realistic prediction of reddit’s downfall I’ve read.
There was an article on here earlier that compared reddit to Digg, which I think is way off-base. Digg never had the mainstream userbase that reddit has, and the cause of the current migration from reddit is in no way comparable to what Digg did.
Here @JustinHanagan instead predicts reddit “dying” in the way that Facebook has. Which is kind of a surreal statement, as Facebook is still the largest and most popular social media platform in the world. But almost everyone agrees that Facebook is stagnant or in decline. The coolest and most creative people have left for other platforms. We only stay on there to hear about sales from La Senza and life updates from our racist uncle so we don’t have to talk to him in person.
And that’s a very plausible future for reddit. Think about all the unusual communities and concepts that make reddit what it is. Love these or hate these, it’s the place that brought us AMAs, reddit secret Santa, AmITheAsshole, MildlyInteresting, BestofRedditorUpdates, AskHistorians, WallStreetBets, and so on. All of these were invented by users/moderators, not by reddit.
It’s easy to imagine a future where those communities all continue in some fashion and reddit keeps its hundreds of millions of users, but the creatives and visionaries move on. Which means reddit’s chances of being home to the next /r/PhotoshopBattles or /r/TodayILearned are hugely reduced.
I may check Reddit once a week now, instead of 10x a day. I’m stepping back from modding a 20k subscriber sub, and posting here instead. I used to respond to questions there, and spend maybe an hour or three a day communicating, now I’ll quickly check the updates and move on. I’m not leaving Reddit, but I’m “leaving Reddit”.
People who choose not to understand any hint of subtlety will decry that it did not die all the while, just the same as happened to Digg, and Tumblr too (which lost 90% of its subscribers, but technically does still exist). But the reality is plain & obvious, in spite of their alternative facts to the contrary.
People who choose not to understand any hint of subtlety
Genuinely not trying to sound snarky here, but you’ve described how it feels when I read comments on Reddit.
It’s entirely different here. Imagine being offered the benefit of the doubt, rather than having literally every word picked apart even while ignoring the other 90% of the words that went along with it. SOOO many comments on Reddit are along the lines of “there are sentences after that one you know…”, in response to snarky people who were invited by Huffman to share their snark, to increase engagement stats.
Don’t get me wrong, there are places MUCH worse than Reddit. I could name a Discord server for instance, that often shares screenshots of my exact words in the most misleading way possible, somehow every time. Like in one instance they couldn’t manage to share the entire sentence or it would have actually made sense, so they just lifted the middle few words that they wanted - if anyone bothered to read the words immediately before or after they would immediately see the truth… but they guessed correctly that no-one would bother. I’m not naive enough to think that this is an accident, every single time.
But the point of sharing things on Reddit isn’t always “communication”, and instead it seems to have shifted more towards emotional vomit, to share their feelings of depression, by attacking others. When you understand why they do it… it makes sense, although somehow that doesn’t manage to make Reddit “fun” again:-(.
When I read comments on Reddit I often see a lot of frustrated and burned out people with short tempers who might not have someone IRL who will listen to them vent. Like you said it makes sense, but that doesn’t make it any better.
What makes me optimistic about decentralized social media is that the communities are (hopefully) small and varied enough where mods and admins can keep an eye on everything much easier, and step in an say “Hey, you’re not being nice right now” when someone isn’t. It’s one thing for communities to have rules, but you can’t make enough rules to maintain a culture of amicability. We ultimately need humans for that.
In my Reddit sub (20k subscribers), we have like a bot or maybe just a collection of people who regularly (daily) brigade the sub, mass-downvoting every single comment entirely in a post regardless of content. I literally have screenshots of people calling for it to be done - but Reddit admins do nothing. Tbf it happens to a larger version of us (200k subscribers) as well, so it’s just Reddit being Reddit: someone who is pissed off and sharing their toxicity with the entire world. At least it’s just down-votes rather than shooting up a school or something:-(.
Whereas with down-votes being public here, something could be done about such scenarios, and mods could remove people for that behavior. Like Reddit admins, except being a member of the community that they moderate, they would actually care and act to do something.
THIS place is totally different than THAT one, in every way that matters.
Yes! Thank you. I tried to be careful with my wording and I’m glad it came through. Facebook is not “over”, neither is Twitter or shopping malls. But they’re not what they were and the reason they’re not what they were (I feel) really comes down to corporate incentives. Something I found really interesting to learn these past weeks is that Twitter and Reddit are not profitable, which kinda implies that the business model may not really work on that scale. Maybe Steve Huffman isn’t a greedy monster, it’s possible he’s between a rock and a hard place with profitability.
Which if that’s the case, it kind of implies that open source/Fediverse-style social media might actually be the most sustainable kind, as weirdly structured as it is.
Truth is stranger than fiction - e.g. how people are now saying that despite how he was a mod of r/jailbait, he also was not at the same time; and yet still yes too. That complexity used to be handled in the golden era of news by people who genuinely cared at getting to the root of a story and telling the (whole) truth - before all the news outlets got bought up and those who continued to do that were fired, while those who pushed “engagement” (likes, shares, whatever) promoted over them, to make their already-billionaire bosses even moar monay.
Anyway, it’s possible that he is both a greedy monster, and being heavily pushed by those above him - who in fact hired him b/c he shares their values, in order to do exactly that. You were peeling back the onion one layer - yes it’s more the system than Huffman b/c if he weren’t there then someone else much like him would have been - but it’s also him at the same time, as in they pushed but he’s the one deciding how to get it done, and doing those AMAs saying exactly what he said, that’s his choice.
Yes, absolutely please do not interpret my comment as a defense of Steve Huffman haha, moreso a criticism of the structure of incentives he chooses operate within.
You can relax now, we aren’t on Reddit - you are among friendly people here:-). Everything is going to be different now.
😂 Wow I’m really learning how up my guard has been all these years.
It has messed with us all… whether we realized it or not:-(.
I started !2010spics@midwest.social and I won’t be doing the same on reddit. We’re over here celebrating the past, they’re still living it.
We are entering a new era of the internet. I think much of these once big sites are just going to be flooded with malware. And website to me that prompts you to subscribe to read the rest, or forces you to see ads, is malware to me.
Remember on the old computers when you could barely do anything because of malware? So it became a useless piece of junk.
That’s what is happening to these websites, they are becoming cluttered with junk, while the website is developed around keeping distracted minds attentive.
I think people are becoming aware of their mindless scrolling, and they are realizing the junk they are being fed.
Over here on these sites there is far more constructive conversation and far more interesting posts that I don’t need to scroll past 10 different ads to get to.
As people get smart and identify garbage social media, we will develop a smarter more realized spaces to mingle.
Even for people using adblockers, yeah.
If I open a website and something pops up or prevents me from scrolling, or any ads that prevent me from seeing the content, I just leave the website. I didn’t need to see the information.
I have a few YouTube channels and websites that I only check on PC because of robust ad blocking and SponsorBlock. If a website has information that I routinely want to see a go about once a week on my desktop to look at everything all at once in a not-mental-health-ruining advertiser hellscape.
At least for me, the current internet and advertising is actively preventing me from accessing content as often as I’d like to. That feels so… user hostile. I wonder if I’m an earlier part of a wave of people that are going to be like this.
What a shitshow Reddit is. They banned all of the subreddits I moderate/created this morning.
What the fuck? Why?
I think, because I was actively bringing moderators from Reddit to their communities which I cloned onto lemmy. I recruited one of the reddit mods to come to my lemmy.world Cardano community, for example.
Just curious, is there actually a rule that was violated or is that just a convenient excuse?
Seems really weird to give mods the power to make a sub private or marked as NSFW and then complain when said mods use those features.
Interesting piece. Definitely worth a reading the whole thing, but here is Bing AI’s summary:
Reddit’s decline: The author argues that Reddit is becoming less relevant and more generic as it tries to squeeze its users and moderators for profit. He compares Reddit to a dying mall that is losing its cultural middle class to decentralized platforms.
Enshittification: The author explains the concept of enshittification, which is how platforms attract and then exploit their users and businesses. He gives examples of how Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google have followed this pattern.
Moderators’ resistance: The author describes how Reddit’s volunteer moderators are obstructing and sabotaging Reddit’s attempts to enshittify the platform. He says that moderators are the ones who create and curate the content that attracts users, and that Reddit is losing their trust and cooperation.
Fediverse’s rise: The author predicts that Reddit’s users and moderators will eventually migrate to the Fediverse, which is a network of independent and interoperable social media sites. He says that the Fediverse offers more freedom, authenticity, and sanity for online discussions.
Enshittify
Did bing really say that? I love this word.
Comes from this Cory Doctorow article.
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification…
It’s not a long article and the topic is interesting enough to spend the 10 minutes it takes to read it IMO
Difference is there’s something aesthetically appealing about dying malls. Reddit looks more like a dumpster fire at the moment.
Difference is there’s something aesthetically appealing about dying malls
Eh, dumpster fires can be aesthetically appealing too.
I’m not so sure about it.
Reddit is one of the biggest site on the web, has millions of users and thousands of communities that alone are much bigger than any of it’s alternatives.
People using third party apps are a small minority and in a month things will be much calmer.
However, I can really see lemmy and kbin as an alternative in a few years if the people moving now stick around. Not only that but with better content also (like Reddit a few years ago).
I don’t think they will lose a lot of users on 1st of July. But some moderators will leave, others will continue with shitty tools that make their job hard. Overall, there will be more spam and more rule-breaking comments. Whether it will be bad enough to make people leave the site at some point, I don’t know.
It’s definitely a slow bleed, but most people aren’t content creators or visionaries. They will migrate with time, we just need the tools here and things will grow.
I have no doubt that federation will lead to the best network of positive forums
Yeah, unless whoever is paying for it stops funding it or something dramatic happens, I can’t imagine there will be a “Digg v4” day where everyone just decides to leave. I’m sure it’ll be around a while, but I do think Reddit has peaked in terms of it’s cultural relevancy.
I think because the federation isn’t profit motivated it won’t become enshittified which is what drives people away.
I know it will get better and evolve. I’m excitied to see how it evolves over time.
That’s my hope as well. If an instance starts to behave sketchy, users can pack up and leave without losing access to the wider network.
Plus, there’s no incentive for Instances to endlessly grow. A lot of toxic behavior on social media stems from the fact that toxicity breeds engagement.
facebook is too.
but anyone with half a brain has left or minimalized their interaction with the site. it’s a dinosaur of a site compared to where it was in the 2000s.
reddit will be the same in a few years. another dinosaur lumbering around, but doing nothing worthwhile for moving the internet forward or being a space for active and engaged users.
If lol? I think it is obvious that they will already - at least for anything tech or dev related for sure and that will be enough to sustain it because obviously those same people have other interests as well, and will attract gamers and the rest. It may take time for the Vinn diagrams to all align with each other but the rest will come eventually.
How reddit itself formed… tech the tech centric audience from Digg and slowly everyone came along with them - even if they didn’t like the transition initially. Reddit has literally committed suicide whether spez realizes it or not. I think obviously people like Mark Zuckerberg and the guy ahead of twitter - pre-elon saw it coming, why bluesky exists and why Facebook wants to join as well before they become irrelevant.
Spez is a fool who can’t see past his own nose and just wants to cash out by IPO’ing - but the thing is he’s both too late and mishandled the IPO already. He will get the absolute smallest pay day of all the platforms that have gone public in any way imho. I am sure he’ll make out fine still, but it will be a small pittance that it could have been had he shown an ounce of respect for the reddit community.
That’s more or less my take on it, the average Redditor just doesn’t give a shit about any of this, they just wanna get their daily/hourly dose of Reddit and that’s it. All of the outrage on the bigger subreddits was fine and all, but the people in the smaller, more niche and local subreddits just don’t care all that much, the vast majority of them will keep using the site.
Which is just as well because the average Redditor is an insufferable mouthbreather.
I think there will be a considerable movement away from Reddit. It might not be very huge in numbers but it will be a lot if the users who are most engaged and contribute a lot of content and time as moderators. These are the people who help create a quality experience for the casual users that seem to be all that counts these days. Losing them will make for a worse experience overall and this hurt the site and ultimately the bottom line.
So Reddit will have a bunch of closed stores but an open and fully functioning Bath & Body Works store?
That was beautifully written. A delightful read.
Thank you! Your comment really made me smile (I am the author btw).
You write like someone who is really handsome.
I bet you’re handsome.
oh wow well I truly meant it! Had no idea you’d be here. You’ve got a wonderful way with words and I look forward to reading more of your work!
I didn’t until just now- someone linked me to this post and I made an account just to reply to you!
Ok you are so wholesome. You’re officially too sweet! Welcome to the fediverse! Happy to have you here!
Sounds like it’s time to fire up some vaporwave and savor the a e s t h e t i c
Immersing myself in the liminal space
Right now reddit reminds me of twitter. All the worst people are there and they’re promoting their backwards ass way of thinking. Fuck that noise.
I understand the sentiment, but malls are cool, they are great place to hang out with plenty of things to do. And people don’t need to worry about weather conditions, don’t need to drive (assuming you can go to the mall via transportation).
I don’t know why North America decided strip mall with oversized parking (most strip malls literally have more space for cars than for people, which is kind of ridiculous IMO) is better than traditional mall.
Because rents at malls started to go up, and urban sprawl meant people lived further further away from the malls, making them less convenient to get to.
So, fewer people are showing up, choosing not to travel as far, or to shop online instead, while rents grow. This pushes retailers out, and robs the malls themselves of the resources or motivation to pay for maintenance.
We saw over the pandemic that commercial landlords were unwilling to give clients breaks on rent, and so a lot of businesses closed. Around here, at least, many of those locations are still vacant, because the demand for rent now doesn’t account for the lack of it later.
So, you know, fundamentally the same thing happening at Reddit.
All the big tech platforms have followed this pattern: Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, eBay, Google. They used to be good, then they got less good, now they’re awful for everyone but also the only game in town.
I’d call Google pretty darn good. I mean, it gets hit with spammers, but I don’t think that it’s especially bad at dealing with them – any large search engine will be the target of the SEO crowd.
Amazon’s not perfect – I’d really rather than it not incessantly keep trying to get me to sign up for an Amazon Prime subscription, but I’m generally not all that unhappy with it. It isn’t always the best retailer, but I haven’t generally had a bad time using Amazon.
I haven’t used eBay enough to have much of an opinion, and I’ve actively avoided Facebook and TikTok since they came out (though sometimes TikTok videos spill over elsewhere, and I do think that the fact that everything gets set to music seems to be really annoying).
Give it a year, then we’ll see about the mall.
Nah, Reddit is fine. Traffic is back to normal levels.
The question is about the short run on sites like this, which will lead to medium run problems over on Reddit.
We have already seen many mods and power users leave Reddit for federated alternatives. They’re bringing their content with them. That in itself does not upset Reddit, because the initial number of users is relatively low.
But losing the content effects Reddit because it becomes less interesting to browse. As you realize that the site is just going to be worse than it was last week, you lose motivation to log in. That happens on a content level, but it’s also going to happen on an advertising level. One of the goals of cutting off the API is to get rid of third-party clients, many of which didn’t show advertising. The Reddit admins have said they want to make more money which means they’re going to introduce more and more advertisements. And it’s just anecdotal, but the increase in ads over on Instagram in the past 2 years means I don’t look at it much anymore because it’s just a waste of my time. That’s where Reddit’s going very soon.
Of course users are willing to deal with some advertisement if the high quality content is available and especially if the high quality content isn’t available anywhere else. Unfortunately for Reddit, and fortunately for all of us, that’s not true anymore.
Did you read the article
Ignorant comments from people who didn’t read the article…Man, this place really is like Reddit!
