The CEO is a total scumbag and Apollo closing down.
Just got the death message from BaconReader today. Sad panda, but also good riddance.
That one article that coined the term ‘enshittification’ and made me realise centralised, for-profit social media will always turn garbage after awhile. I’m tired of changing sites every few years. Time to use something that’ll stay good this time.
Losing Apollo was the main reason.
However this whole saga unveiled other disturbing things such as how Reddit is leveraging its communities for advertising in this post: https://lemmy.world/post/837198
I was on the fence about it until the Spez AMA. Then, I decided I’d be leaving on the 30th.
Then, I had a user call me “fucking stupid” for supporting a sub shutting down, and that was the final straw for me. I had seen how friendly people on Lemmy are and this showed me how toxic Reddit is by comparison. So I immediately nuked all my comments & posts and deleted my account. This was around two weeks ago and I’ve been much happier here.
The amount of boot licking is astonishing.
In that AMA I discovered a subreddit literally named friends of spez they were going around that ama and raining people with legitimate criticisms with downvotes although most of the other redditors tipped the scales fairly quickly they were also throwing reports on these users as well and of course they weren’t banned because they’re friends with spez
I left Reddit because I gave them so many years of dedication (and $ via Reddit premium), not even considering the fact I bought coins on multiple accounts.
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Reddit became way too focused on Karma. Karma is great in concept, but more than half of the users are only posting for internet points at this point. It takes away from the validity of posts imo. How many “I stopped drinking for 30 days!” posts did you see on there with like 70k upvotes and thousands of karma?
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The amount of not genuine posts is alarming. People have become addicted to the upvote/downvote system moreso than boomers on Facebook have become attached to their pages.
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The amount of hate speech, misinformation and blatant lies the site actively promotes is insane.
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They literally made everyone NFT wallets…???
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NFT wallets?? Why the fuck was this ever approved? Oh yeah, more $, and something else for Spez to add to his IPO rubbish. Hey look at us we have some NFTs too type beat.
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The userbase is pretty shit and Spez has even admitted to not caring about the people who made his site what it is.
Why would anyone ever stay on a site where the literal CEO says he doesn’t need nor care about you?
To expand on 1 & 2: the amount of karma farming accounts and the monetisation of karma. It became second nature to check the OP account and top comment accounts to see if they were repost bots. Supporting them through engagement meant inadvertently helping bad actors who needed legitimate looking accounts, to either sell of to use. Reddit was absolutely rife with them.
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main reason is the app changes of course, but I’ve been getting sick of the site for quite awhile.
powermods that run hundreds of subreddits abusing their authority, everyone is snarky and rude, only approved stances are allowed and anything deviating from them get dogpiled/censored, the annoying redditisms (edit: Thank you kind stranger! Wow I didn’t expect this to blow up! obvious fake stories in AITA/Relationships, etc).
the entire site was just getting really stale.
the upside was that it had an active forum for almost every niche interest, but that’s also a negative as it really killed many of the small special interest communities.
You summarized my experience / feelings on the matter perfectly.
A few of the reddit mods were so obnoxious, they would ban you for posting to other subs they didn’t like. Even if you had never been to their stupid sub or cared about it, you would get a random ban notification from some wacky niche sub.
On the one hand: who cares. But on the other hand: it doesn’t feel like a very welcoming place when you check the site for the first time that day and some weirdo has banned you “because reasons”.
I even saw one mod that would stalk individual users and mock them for getting banned from his precious sub. It was so absurd.
As for the typical users of reddit: I know it’s a tired cliché…but it really was like a “hive mind” over there.
It also has a horrible new user experience. To get some basic level of karma you have to jump through hoops. The whole thing feels like a nasty reindeer game.
I’m really glad lemmy doesn’t have karma.
yea, I regularly deleted my account and made a new one.
each time, I would create my account.
have zero karma, start commenting to get karma, and all my comments were removed because I didn’t have enough karma lmao
Oh boy, you get an updoot for that!
Any time someone says upvote but replaces vote with anything I downdoot them.
What are your feelings vis-a-vis “upboat”?
You’re still replacing the word “vote” with something. It’s all annoying to me and my visceral reaction is to downvote. Petty and not something important, I know.
Spez
Honestly I was using reddit app on all my devices, but I kinda despise big ass tech companies who think they are too big to fail no matter what they do…
So, here I am.
When I first learned that Reddit would be pricing out third-party apps I was angry and upset, but I still entertained the notion of maybe continuing to use old.reddit on the desktop (until they inevitably killed that). I like many of the communities there and didn’t want to give them up.
But then came the AMA and the leaked memo and the crushing of the protests with threats and strongarm tactics. Everything spez wrote dripped with contempt for the community and the moderators that had made the site what it was through their unpaid labor. The message became clear: “Let the little users cry it out. They’ll have their little tantrum and then they’ll settle down and accept that the reality is that we can do anything we want to them and they have to just accept it. Their communities, their conversations, their culture, it all belongs to us, not to them. We have everything and they have nothing”.
I’m not going back to that.
Yeah, I completely agree. The main app I use didn’t even shut down (Relay) but the AMA convinced me to leave anyway. Spez and the rest of the admins came across as simply vile.
He fantasizes about owning slaves in a post-apocalyptic feudal society. The fact that he makes those sort of statements about the community, us, is just creepy as hell.
Literally. Reddit users are both content producers and consumers. They are also (unpaid) moderators and developers who made the website usable on Android and iOS devices. In short, Reddit is (was) its users, and spez and Ellen Pao contributed nothing. He deserves to watch his baby (which wasn’t even his idea in the first place) die a fiery death.
Give it a few months of reddit users seeking an alternative and Reddit will follow in Twitter’s footsteps: 50% of the content will just be robots talking to each other.
It left such a bad taste in my mouth realizing that they were absolutely just going to let people get their rage out, and then rely on the good ole human nature of just going with the flow. I mean realistically, once you have the momentum of a site like Reddit, you can do some pretty shitty stuff, and not get canned for it. I’m fairly certain they’re just going to rely on that, and then make money on what’s left after that.
I’ll probably still keep using old.reddit.com, but making an account on Lemmy has like 0 opportunity cost, so why not right?
Mods power-tripping. All the other shit put the nails on the coffin.
I was a mod on Reddit so I was personally aware that for years Reddit’s mod tools have been totally inadequate for the job, that Reddit has been promising to give us something better, and that Reddit has failed to deliver. Honestly, it was even worse than just not delivering: we’d get new tools that didn’t solve the main problems, were only available on the iOS app, coming to Android eventually, and coming to the websites never. Third party API tools were the only thing that made modding vaguely functional, even on a small sub.
I’m also a supporter of accessibility in apps, which is also something Reddit has been promising for years and Reddit has failed to deliver. Again, third party API tools are the only thing that makes Reddit vaguely accessible right now.
Reddit’s API changes are not realistic to implement in a single month. This was made clear early on and Reddit has refused to budge. So at this point Reddit is knowingly upending an ecosystem that makes their site usable by groups of users with no first-party replacements ready. And given their history of failing to deliver these very tools, I have no confidence that they will ever do so.
And THEN the Spez AMA happened. I was hoping he’d listen to the community, engage with our concerns, or at the very least actually do an AMA. Instead he got caught lying, he got caught astroturfing, and he inadvertently made it clear that the real issue was that he was butthurt over these third party apps being better at business than Reddit was. Oh, and later we found out the Reddit CEO really admired Elon Musk’s handling of Twitter, a platform I left for all the reasons Spez seems to like it.
Even if none of these issues affected me personally (which they do), Reddit has made it clear that I just can’t trust them to run a fair and functional platform. They do not take their obligations to their users, mods, and business partners seriously. If they don’t like the way the game is going, they’ll change the rules without warning. They will promise features they will not deliver even when those features are essential to their site working for the users who keep it alive.
I don’t want to help Reddit build what Reddit wants to make anymore.
Losing RiF, I can’t use the official app it’s trash.
It’s why I’m moving on fully now as well. The official app is the worst garbage pile app I’ve seen in a while. Only apps woede are the low-efdort moneygrabs. That and loosing boost is why I’ll probably not be seen on Reddit for a WHILE.
Honestly, mostly solidarity.
Sure, the fact that my preferred Reddit app was going the way of the dodo and the fact that they weren’t even trying to negotiate in good faith were reasons, yeah, but at the end of the day, I was just gonna grit my teeth, patch the Reddit app with Revanced, and have that be my personal and insignificant F you.
Then I realized a bigger F you was to deprive them of content, future or present, (mine, specifically. As insignificant as it was) so I did.
And here I am
Honestly same! There’s no particular reason for me other than solidarity
Like, sure, some communities were getting better or worse, but that’s wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and honestly due to Reddit’s age it was bound to lose it’s spark. Change is inevitable, so I jumped shit early
Loved this comment. Thank you. I wish more people were like you.
Reddit, like Digg before it, was a gathering place, where people could post or consume content, and interact with other users. It was much like a town square, where people can set up their soapbox and bark, or where a person could go and listen, interact, and enjoy.
Reddit is now like the Home Owners Association for that particular town square, and are actively trying to control the entire experience, by acting like they own the soapboxes, and as though the barkers are now obligated to ensure that content is HOA approved.
That kind of neighborhood holds no appeal for me.
I actually left Reddit in early 2022, I’m not from the latest migration wave. I left for a combination of these reasons, the first of which is the main one:
- algorithmic feed designed to arise strong emotions, often negative
- snark and noise in the comments
- ads
- impenetrable moderation rules that often make it difficult to figure why a post is rejected, even after carefully reading all the sub’s guidelines and FAQs cover to cover, as well as reviewing past threads
Spez and his API changes.
spoiler
fuck u/spez
