Probably 1/2 of the users on this platform are here as a protest against Reddit. Either the API stuff, or the admins nuking your account, or the mods being… goofy. Or the users, or who knows what.
What’s your story?
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So many reasons, in no particular order.
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Same questions and content being repeated again and again
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The environment became hostile, so many people arguing.
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Intrusion of politics into everything. Particularly right wing politics.
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Extremely inconsistent modding of forums and inconsistent bans etc…
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Going public, changes to API, old reddit, comercialization, selling data for AI
I joined when it was a much smaller place, now there are many millions. I realise I like smaller communities. It’s why I left Facebook.
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Pre 2014 Trump, I believe reddit was so successful in disproving Republican bullshit that they decided to just take it over because they couldn’t fight the truth. It was a slow yet successful highjacking. I literally believe they had a thinktank dream it up and hired people to do it.
It’s around then when you saw the influx of more right wing users but they were still getting banned by the mods because reddit was a notorious left leaning community. But I think gradually they were able to become mods of themselves.
I think I’m the only person to be banned from world news for being pro Israel and eventually saying fuck israel.
The difference between reddit then and reddit now is night and day. It has become a safe haven of the right wing.
I come from a generation where there were many societal references to younger males (let’s say 12 to 16) being attracted to older women. Think of Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher or the scene from the Blues Brothers where the playboy Bunny was thrown through a kid’s bedroom and he says “Thank you, god!”. When I was that age I would have loved the chance to have had sex with an older woman. I think it’s a normal part of the sexual awakening of young straight males.
So there’s a story very similar in some sub about a 14yo kid having a woman in her mid-twenties coming on to him. I don’t remember if anything physically happened between them. The news about it at the time was saying the kid was traumatized and everyone was screaming it was sexual assault. I posted something along the lines of it being a dream of mine for this to have happened to me. And it would have been. Well you can imagine what happened next. Those on the Internet whose views have been hardened by group think and psychology and where there is no room for any discussion or questioning of these ideas attacked en masse. One person in particular said they were immediately reporting me to the admin of the sub, and sure enough I was banned from the sub within 30 minutes.
People on social media fall into being judge and jury at the slightest push. They’re so terrified of losing their group identity that they’ve shut out any ability to question or consider another viewpoint. They’re exactly like the villagers with pitchforks rushing to Frankenstein’s castle to kill “the monster”.
I run and grew /r/piracy for over 10 years. I took part in the api protests and also urged people to migrate to lemmy publicly. One of my mods went behind my back and asked the admins to demod me and rearrange mods so that they’re on top, and the admins complied. Then the sub went back to business as usual.
Thanks for your work there.
The internet makes picketing impossible, UK union miners used to throw stones at any scabs.
I used to have an iPad, and watching an entire movie on the Netflix app drained the battery by 2-4%. The Reddit app took 15-20% of the battery over breakfast, so I switched to Apollo. Then, I could get through breakfast with the battery still at, say, 95%. Clearly, the official app did something else in the background; since they didn’t disclose what, it was probably nefarious. One day, Apollo stopped working, and that was that.
Personally I would assume bad design over compute vampirism. But I could be wrong.
Nah, the app is pushed so hard because browsers sandbox the site and only provide minimal context about the user. But an app can request whatever permissions it wants. And the Reddit app wants a lot of invasive permissions. It is 100% a tracking and data collection thing.
Full list of trackers/permissions listed here: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.reddit.frontpage/latest/#trackers
The day Apollo died I stopped using Reddit altogether (which was probably a good thing).
I was one of the people who they actually unbanned because the bot wrongfully banned it. But because I used a second account during the wrongful ban, again cannot underemphasize so wrong that they admitted it was wrong, it perma banned all of my accounts.
I have a similar story. I was banned, then “unbanned” (as in I got a notification apologizing + stating I was unbanned) but then they never actually lifted the ban
that was pretty common last year. thats how whole swaths of people got eliminated and are now lurking. because multiple accounts have each generate thier own content
I moderated a large sub that participated in the blackout. Our mod team was threatened by the admins into reopening, and that’s when I knew I was done with the platform.
Can you give more details?
They basically told us that if we don’t reopen they’ll simply remove us as moderators of the sub and reopen it themselves.
reddit wants AI mods to replace the human ones now.
No RIF, no reddit, bye Felicia…
Sync, then later the open source Slide were amazing. Apollo on iOS was ridiculously good.
And now I’m using Voyager and Summit on Lemmy and Piefed and in some regards they might be even better. Summit especially has become so good.
A shame about the Sync version for Lemmy, hit and run the dev took the money and abandoned it. I suppose they were hoping for more growth, but still. Although I’m no dev and probably shouldn’t judge
Same.
It was really fun a long time ago; getting gifts/exchanging gifts. Secret Santa. Making artwork and just trading it for stuff, lots of subs. And overtime all of that was gone. It became a hateful festering pile of shit. Once reddit became “old” it was done and it showed. It really became a hardcore data mining trash bin. Getting multiple down votes for things I disagreed with was it for me; not that I care about the down votes, it’s just there was no comments no interaction. Reddit maybe has a few more years left in my opinion, with new users only joining because it was indirectly advertised by the people that made it what it is. It’s like Regr’etsy, wasn’t too bad on launch to hey allibaba or temu is in the house!
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I’m just not buying across millions of users, there exists a combination of ethical pattern matching (e.g. subs, comment patterns, online timing, etc). to reliably identify a single human behind multiple accounts. We’re not that unique.
It’s 100% IP and cookie based. Each of which can be circumvented without too much issue.
Browser fingerprinting however is not easy to circumvent.
You can generally fool them by just changing one or two variables like GPU acceleration.
Or, change browsers.
i used librewolf now for reddit purposes, maybe thats why my new account dint get hit yet. i also avoid any political subs. for a month brave hid my old account before it was shadowbanned last year, i stopped using that. how do you change the GPU acc? im interested.
There’s a couple of extensions for that. But yeah its usually not easy.
some forks have anti-fingerprinting, but they have ways of detecting things like device components. they are pretty much catching onto anti-detect browsers, and ip switching methods(cost money) that isnt a vpn.
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they have fingerprinting methods too, like your looking at your browser version, your time zone, and other things. they know people evade by changing thier IP alot, so they upgraded.
axolotl
I recognize that name from this site.
So do I. I used to be quite active in /r/Conspiratard, /r/TopMindsOfReddit and other such subs where we laughed at the silly people of /r/conspiracy etc. axolotl was featured regularly there. I kind of missed what happened to him, did people finally get enough of his antics? Nervous breakdown? Banned? Anyone know?
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Ah, thats nice to know. Not a big surprise.
Is it the same one?
they use alot of fingerprinting to find your other accounts, likely used the same IP/DEVICE that recieved the other bans and they just connected the dots. i made an account after a year of shadowbanned all my old accounts. the new ones i use with a different FORK browser, (maybe there was a Ip change) thats why they arnt catching on,. reddit has unofficial unbanning after a while of getting ban, but usually it wont work if you had so many accounts banned. i think a new ID/browser/device is enough. im still using the same device, possibly ip but a different browser.
The mod for r/AdultChildrenofNarcissists disappeared, and replacement essentially admitted that they were running an experiment and couldn’t give more details because it would ruin the experiment. They also said they were going to try to remove the anti-parent bias in the subreddit. So much for that support group.
So anyway, r/AdultKidsofNarcissists was created, but there’s no reason to think that same sort of thing didn’t happen to a bunch of other subreddits. They will eventually sell the comment database to someone who’ll run a poorly thought out LLM and find red flags by cross referencing a support group subreddit with other subreddits and cause real world consequences. It isn’t enough to stop using reddit now; they already have the posts and will have them forever.
something tells me that is r/adultchildrenofnarcassist new mods are right wingers, trying to say parents are not at fault for causing children to hate him, are unemployed, unable to move out of the house, or refusing to house the parents when they retire. it sounds convoluted but alot of stories like this, have a very boomer center to it. why is the 30-40yo woman not having a job, or moving out, or whatever(usually its the sibling complaining)
It used to be a place to see that other people had similar issues with their parents and had links to other resources for people doing research. So of course someone found out the children were talking bad about their parents and brought the parents to come supervise. The perfectly manicured, sharpened fingernail at the tip of the slap to the face was that the new mod removed some of the helpful links, like this one: https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons/ that distills the issue down to such a condensed form that I wouldn’t have thought it possible. You’d might as well stand outside an AA meeting and offer free airplane bottles to people walking in as pull that kind of maneuver.
I’m not trying to draw equivalencies between people’s trauma, or elevate one or dismiss others, but if a group of people found a spot to sit and talk quietly about shared experiences, then it’s better to let them alone. $RDDT couldn’t have drawn up a mission statement that more clearly stated that they weren’t there to help, and any help derived from their platform was accidental and subject to their “adjustment” at any times.
And just in case anyone missed it, the link that the mod removed from a subreddit by and for Adult Children of Narcissists was this one: https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons/
EDIT: added a piece to a sentence to make a thought more fully formed.
This happened years ago before most of the big reddit controversies popped off and before words like incel and red pill were coined. There used to be a medium sized community called /r/foreveralone. It was mostly a community for people who were romantically alone and provided support and semi-edgy memes about it. Mostly though it was a support group by the time I found it. It was a decent community then full of lonely people who mostly encouraged each other and tried to help each other overcome those mental blocks we all set up that keep us from what we want.
Over time though new users started to migrate into the sub offering a different kind of support. They would claim that women were to blame for their lonely state and their rhetoric became increasingly aggrieved and violent. Around this same time /r/redpill was coming into it’s prime and sucking many users down a very dark path. The /r/foreveralone community fractured and a schism created two groups within the community, those that wanted it to remain mutual support and chuds that wanted more red pilled content. Unfortunately the chuds won.
Despite many efforts my members of the community and mods to combat the problem nothing worked. I know many users also reached out to the reddit admins for help, but they chose to do nothing. After unmasking who knows how many chuds posting for support only to try to manipulate the community I left and moved on with my life. But it wasn’t until months or years later (I can’t remember the exact timeline) that the reddit admins squashed /r/redpill and helped the /r/foreveralone community recover their subreddit, but even now it’s still fairly poisonous.
Like Facebook and X after them, reddit had a choice to keep the community free of knuckle dragging chuds, but chose not to for some vaguely defined, free speech ideal. That’s why reddit sucks.
I wouldn’t call it vaguely defined free speech ideal.
Reddit wants more users. It wants them to look more active. Loud mouth chuds give them that. Infact I feel this is why reddit is pushing algorithms hard. It wants more users, and best way to get more users is to trap more and more of them in echo chambers.
Right wing ideologies were very rare to come by on reddit 2-3 years ago. They were small conservative islands. Today reddit’s right wing communities are growing fast, and are larger and more numerous than they’ve ever been. That’s what algorithmic recommendations allow you to do. Also destroyed the reddit Hivemind, though I have mixed feelings on that one.
I don’t disagree with you, I’d just like to point out my story happened a long time ago. This was before Ellen Pao and Gamergate and most of the reddit controversies younger people remember today. I was in my mid 20’s when I was participating in /r/foreveralone and now I’m in my early 40’s. Back then /u/spez, when he was still almost universally loved, posted about not banning the red pill community and it’s satellites because of free speech which is what ultimately destroyed the forever alone community and allowed the alt-right pipeline to take root.
It’s always bothered me how incel’s are discussed when really, the group they are referencing are often sexually active but just deeply misogynistic. Meanwhile many people who are closer to the ‘forever alone’ crowd deserve genuine sympathy. Being lonely sucks, and being unable to ‘obtain’ a partner is lonely.
Beyond that - some people will just throw out ‘incel’ as a catch all for “took issue with any pro-woman or pro-lgbt statement”.
Yeah, incel today has more angry loner vibes than anything. It was never a really good term though because involuntary celibate is not an accurate way to describe either the modern chuds or the older /r/foreveralone community members. It’s got misogyny baked right in because it externalizes the cause of isolation when in most cases those folks are their own worst enemy when it comes to dating.
The /r/foreveralone community had a somewhat derogatory term to describe it, terminally special. So many of the people who would come to the community looking for help or support would receive pretty excellent and sometimes very personalized advise and do nothing but explain how their specific circumstances meant they couldn’t use dating apps or join a group around a hobby or whatever. They preferred to remain isolated rather than leave their comfort zone and where experts at making excuses.
Those folks are one of the reasons the red pill message was so successful in the community. It didn’t require them to change anything about how they were approaching dating. It’s picky women or alpha males or whatever and never themselves.
This reminds me of something I heard many years ago, “people love to hear good things about their bad habits.” It unfortunately doesn’t surprise me that red pill won out. Those who don’t want to do and self work are prime targets. Those who are overwhelmed by the work but still are willing to do it, can still get sucked in. Humans are fascinating. Even if that fascination isn’t all good.
before they were called incel, it was the “nice guy”
unfortunately those "forever’ alone get draw into the incel manosphere and become mysogynist themselves. its in games too, where people get talk to other characthers, yucky incel talks.
admins are complicit, they know you were likely fighting against TROLLS/propaganda even, reddit has no interest in dealing with these. currently they are now given AI tools themselves.
only the small niche subs remain pretty quiet, the ones that inundated with posts every few hours.
User culture change for sure. The subversive, progressive, smarmy nerds that used to hang out there were “my people” so to speak. The shift to a 50/50 mix of bots and soccer moms made it kinda useless as a forum. Lemmy isn’t quite the same, but I think it’s a good thing. Much less culturally homogeneous, but 100% authentic.
So much of it is people just ditching about things in their lives looking for validation.
Nothing is about anything anymore.
Unfortunately the one place with the most engagement to solving Linux issues are still the Linux subreddits. I was hoping Linux was more prevalent on Lemmy, but it’s not…
I’m not that suprised, lemmy still suffers from there being many choices of instance and their not being a convenient way to compare which ones federate with which other ones.
Just how I got banned, really. I forget what the topic even was about. Someone who abused a child and got off light. Like they got probation or jail time served or something. I said people who harm children should face longer sentences, like a decade or more. I’m not sure if it was my wording or what, but I got banned for inciting violence against a protected class. I wasn’t sure if it was an AI thing (automated, like automod) or what, but I appealed and they upheld it… so I didn’t go back. I figure if that’s their position, I don’t want to be there anyway.
“The API stuff” is so glossed over by people who either weren’t there or forgot or, I dunno, don’t want Reddit to look as bad as they were? They tried to accuse a third-party developer of extortion, but he recorded the conversation and provided the raw recording as well as a transcript. I think Reddit mostly just wanted Apollo in particular to go away and tried some underhanded tactics to make that happen, but they didn’t expect the developer would record the conversation and embarrass them.
Your second paragraph is why I’m here. That pissed me off so badly I didn’t go back for years except for modding. I still don’t spend any real time there unless it’s for the Heinlein Society.
Left in 2023 when the API thing happened and never looked back. Nowadays I only go there through search engines when looking for a tech solution. Most of the useful stuff is either deleted or outdated. Reddit sucks.
