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 cut back almost all my content generation for reddit, so no more posting, adding comments or even upvoting / downvoting.
Reddit has effectively said we’re a bunch of leaches so that’s how I’m treating them now, give me your content, I’m giving you nothing in return.
I’m definitely feeling a shift in the quality of content getting produced.
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.
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I stopped using reddit… so I have no idea!
I still use it and all I see is useless memes. All the helpful stuff is private.
I know this has always been an issue for the nearly 12 years I’ve used reddit, but I’ve seen a lot more of the smug redditor comments than normal that remind me of this guy’s skits. Usually I’d only see larger instances of smug know-it-alls when someone brings up religion (since some reddit atheists can’t help themselves), but I’ve personally been seeing more smartass remarks on the weirdest of things.
Has anyone else noticed that as well?
Definitely. the tone of the site is much worse
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.
The quality of discussion here reminds me of when I joined Reddit like 12-13 years ago. The massive user base and tendency toward hivemind/dogpile responses, canned inside jokes, and repetitive content definitely made the experience stale and uninteresting the last few years. If you use the new website design and/or the first party app, you can see how the content delivery has become the same as every other social media, a nonstop torrent of visual candy you can flip through, with the comments becoming an afterthought. The only thing that kept me coming back to Reddit were the comment sections, and I feel a rebirth of that draw occurring in this open-source social universe.
Yes exactly! I’ve always be in Reddit for the comments sections. 12-13 years ago, back when forums and IRC were what there was (aka, DISCUSSION based communities where low effort posts didn’t blow up, and platforms were run by hobbyists and webmasters catering to communities rather than social media corps desperate for clicks). It was a better time to be online IMHO. I think part of it was that joining web communities was slightly unapproachable, which meant you had to be at least a little smart to realize that you wanted to join that community and figure out how to join it. But I think the format of the sites had a bigger effect in selecting the quality of content that got popular.
As you say, nonstop torrent of visual candy you can scroll through and click click click getting another ad impression or 12 each time.
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
A lot of small, shitty subs are popping up on r/all lately, I’ve noticed. I used to doomscroll and only notice I’d been too far when I started seeing stuff from subs I’d never seen before, like r/artefactporn, r/justguysbeingdudes, or that weird Talylor Swift circlejerk sub. That was usually around pages 7-9, somewhere in there. That was the sign that I’d been scrolling for too long, and probably ought to either touch grass, or at least refresh the page.
Right now, for me, all three of those subs are on the first page of r/all, along with other subs I’ve never seen (or rarely seen) before the bottom of the barrel, like r/newsofthestupid and r/rabbits. The one from r/rabbits is on the bottom of the front page with less than 1500 upvotes.
This is something I noticed as well, glad to see it’s not just me.
r/all is a bit like 9gag now. Even sort by controversial is boring.
It has been said from the very beginning: First the quality will drop, then the user numbers.
Those who are talking shit right now didn’t listen then, they won’t now. It’s a lost cause.
I just checked. They are pushing more ads from what I’ve seen and now there’s ad for every several posts. At least for myself this has never happened before, not sure if it is different for people in other regions with higher traffic to Reddit. It’s obnoxious.
The occasional time I get on there, yes. It’s a bunch of reposts. There’s no substance what so ever and there seems to be a lot of arguing in the comments.
No idea TBH, I quit using it.
@yunggwailo That’s good to hear. I nuked my accounts and haven’t been back to that particular dumpster fire.
@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
I thought I saw an anouncement somewhere that some people from that sub moved to lemmy… Maybe search for it again.
Yes, big time. It feels almost as if half of the comments are bots, propping up spez and crapping on the mods who supported the blackout. Unfortunately, there are still a few subreddits that have no equivalent here just yet and I end up having to revisit reddit to get the info I need on an ongoing basis. I started two communities (Signal Messenger and Amex) here myself in an effort to help with transition but so far there hasn’t been much happening on that front. I even went as far as messaging the mods on the /r/ equivalents but none of them wanted to move over, or even give it a shot as a subscriber. Nevertheless, I am not giving up and still feel there is growth to be had. Perhaps once the apps die off on reddit, we will see additional users transitioning.
Quality was dropping a ton anyway, but god damn I miss the sports subs.
Even /r/baseball can garner 75-125 comments on some minor post.
Sports always seem like the hardest categories to get content/comments with when it comes to places like these. I remember reddit a decade+ ago and how it seemed like those NFL and NBA subs took a long time to get traction.
It’s the toughest part about adopting kbin and Lemmy for me. But fuck it, I like new shit so I might as well try
yeah I’m missing sports subs a lot, I loved the live discussion threads for games/matches
r/MMA mods did create m/MMA on kbin, but once r/MMA opened back up it seems most people ran back to reddit…
also smaller communities like r/iRacing or even the wider simracing community will take some time to build up a userbase on the fediverse
I haven’t been able to find a replacement for r/hiphopheads either
EDIT: just searched again and apparently !hiphopheads@sopuli.xyz does exist, so that’s cool!
