cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
Even if size does become a problem (SufferringFromSuccess.meme), we can always defederate a smaller Lemmy/Piefed network and call it Fedi Classic.
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
Reddit got bad long before they restricted API access. That’s what was the final drop for many people, but it wasn’t the beginning at all.
I agree that growing would be a benefit for Lemmy though. While I wouldn’t dismiss the dangers of a growing community entirely, we can just defederate from or block problematic parts in theory. So I wouldn’t say we’re in quite the same danger as centralized platforms.
I think it was pretty clear it was enshittified.
By now there’s also more in form of description and research, it’s not just a negative word.
I’ve used Reddit heavily for 16-17 years. The slide was slow and incremental and began at least 10 years ago. These are the reasons I would estimate have caused Reddit to become what it is now:
-
Intentional political polarisation. The owners made their political affiliations clear over the years, and have not been shy about wielding their control. Every decision, from firing Victoria, to creating terms of service which excluded racism against white people, to hiring very left wing progressives as administrators and staff, to hiring Pao, to selective rule enforcement, has resulted in a place where even mild dissent is generally not tolerated. An echo-chamber in the truest sense. It’s so bad that it is now violent. We have cases of killers who became radicalised on Reddit. Something people may not know is that there is a very incesutous relationship between the moderators of the top subreddits and the owners and administrators. The larger subs are required to have administrators on the team, and they mostly control all of the large subreddits. It gets worse though, because the automated moderation system flags accounts which are banned by the moderators on those large subs. They get selectively tougher enforcement. Meaning that anyone who dares post in /r/Politics and doesn’t agree has all of their posts scrutinised to a much higher degree, and people are frequently banned from the entire website for innocuous reasons.
-
The demographic became much younger over time. This is a product-led decision. Children are easier to manipulate and get addicted. They’re easier to control and indoctrinate. They’re an easy target to which to foment anger and “engagement.”
-
The audience became much wider. Another product-led decision. The original demographic was male, 20-40, geek. Conversations were pretty mild, very respectful. With a much wider audience, all semblance of “Reddiquette” has disappeared. No one has a shared frame of reference anymore. The people who joined either didn’t care about civility, or were used to combative social spaces such as Twitter and Facebook. They brought those practises with them, and Reddit embraced it and encouraged it.
-
Reddit embraced bots. They look great for advertising metrics. They foment that hate and engagement. I estimate that the majority of comments on Reddit are bots now. In some subreddits I would not be surprised if 90%+ were bots. Bots can’t be reasoned with. They’ll just keep spewing hate forever.
I honestly think Reddit is a dead man walking. Even the hyper partisan left wing people hate the site now. Everyone is waiting for an alternative. This is Digg all over again, but at a larger scale.
-
For me reddit got bad because of grouphink and terrible moderation (you were not nice to some idiot? banned for life!). I never used any 3rd party apps (nor the official app for that matter, only the website with adblock).
they ovvereached with thier AI-moderation/filtering bans, so now theres even less content. AI isnt finding reddit useful to scrape anymore, because they are getting Ai content instead.
Reddit admins repeatedly asked mods how to make like for them better. And then repeatedly ignored almost every single answer they got, rolling out features nobody wanted and taking away things people used. It was the years and years and years of putting in hours and hours of time working against the enshittification that made me tired, and then it was the stupid fucking over-reaching AI moderation that caused me to leave after my accounts started being banned for no good reason with appeals failing.
It took far too long for them to drive me away, as I know it did for a lot of others.
What made reddit… reddit: The people running it, and a lot of the people using it.
I don’t know, size made it pretty bad. Subreddits with hundreds of thousands or more users create environments where no one is trying to have a discussion. People are just vying for attention. That creates an environment where comments are either all jokes, or all snark. It’s really, really hard to have anything that resembles a human experience in a place like that. People stop recognizing each other as people, and just treat everyone as an audience.
That makes for a pretty bad experience.
one sub i recently visited talking jobs/layoffs got meme-fied recently. because happen tor each the front page a couple times, it drawn into many trolls and bots.
First
This.
We know… we were there.
We know…
Just amused by the juxtaposition, obviously they weren’t contradicting you (or replying to you). lol.
I’m easily amused. :)
The constant engagement farming rage bait and instant bans for the stupidest shit. Felt like i joined that one streamers sub who was controversial and got banned because of that in unrelated subs. Due to commerce reddit suddendly felt uneasy with non-mainstream opinions.
Brute force moderation is what killed it IMHO. Same shit that as happening to .world
I don’t disagree, but I think the heavy-handed moderation was often in service of “cleaning up” to make the website more commercially palatable. Like when they pulled r/atheism as a front-page reddit.
For me, the out of control engagement bots constantly commenting on my comments was the last straw that made me leave.
when reddit started heavily restricting r/all is around when it fell IMO
Same thing happened when Christians ruined Tumblr. I still miss the porn.
The problem is, they get so trapped up in the vague-at-best definition of “civility”, that they allow propagandaised bullshit as lit as its polite.
This isn’t how a community should be run, and it’s why the divisionists pretty much own the comment sections in any political posts and communities.
No mods have the balls to tell these fuckos to kick bricks.
So, you want mods that power trip harder, just in the direction you like?
I dont fully disagree, but it would be a very hard role. They’d be volunteering to cop abuse from all sides relentlessly.
Yes, actually.
Set the rules, and enforce them. If you, as a user, don’t like the rules of the community, don’t fucking post or comment there. It’s not power tripping to take out the trash. Take the free speech absolutism bullshit to Twitter.
Woah, I’m not advocating for free speech absolutism, you’ve misunderstood my position. I want more empowered/activist mods as well, all I am saying is that it isnt simple.
The problem with “set the rules and enforce them” is that the assholes will rules-lawyer the mods into the ground. They’ll post stuff that the flirts around the edges of the rules, and when punished for it, will harass the mods relentlessly via yepowertrippingmods.
There’s no quick and easy solutions here.
The direction of democracy shouldn’t just be the direction I like- it should be the direction EVERYONE likes. And when there’s people yelling that both sides are the same and trying to convince others not to vote-
Yeah… I think the mods need to quit being so chickenshit and kick those assholes the fuck off the instance entirely.
.ml would welcome them with open arms. They can preach to the choir there all fucking day long.
A duopoly is not a democracy.
direction EVERYONE likes
That’s the tough part of democracy, getting people to agree. And if the assholes outnumber everyone else, then you’re in trouble.
IMO, if we want mods to be more aggressive, we need to empower them to be benevolent dictators. Otherwise its far too easy to fallback to doing nothing. Modding is already a thankless task, telling mods to toughen up and endure the hate doesnt help that.
I’m telling mods to toughen up and kick the Russian psyop trolls the fuck out.
pelmeni is so delicious though
r/atheism as a default subreddit was one of the biggest problems with reddit, honestly. There’s only so much smug self-satisfaction that a website can handle before going to shit.
You’re basically emphasizing my point. Reddit started as a subreddit meritocracy. Any and all subreddits could have content on the front page, so long as said content received sufficient upvotes. However, atheists are the most hated religious minority in the U.S., so their content had to be suppressed to cater to commercial interests. It’s viewpoint suppression to cater to the lucrative majority.
This too. Just heavy handed and lazy power mods. No real appeal process either.
Size and commercialisation generally go hand in hand. After all, how do you keep something running with infinite users submitting infinite content for free?
This is a big issue for everyone, it’s important that the fediverse understands that size might some day increase the importance of sensible business models or proactive funding initiatives to counter the growth. This doesn’t mean harmful profit models necessarily, but it does mean keeping revenues under control for individually run nodes or for archiving services for old fediverse domains that might not exist forever.
Wikipedia is proof you are wrong, it is possible to run large-scale services with no profit
They do ask for funding from time to time, though. It’s definitely not cost-less running a big website.
yes, of course, but it’s not a business model. Which means decisions aren’t driven by profit. The issue isn’t about money, it’s how/why it flows
Just like having buying and selling things is not necessarily capitalism, an organization that gets and spends money is not necessarily a company.
Imho, “submitting content” is the language of commercial sites. Like we are working for free for a business. But people post their ideas, hang out with friends, and share their art and code freely because they want to connect with other people. Some people have the means and knowledge to maintain a server allowing that to a limited number of people. It costs money, sure, and time, but this is also a thing people do for fun, sometimes with the help of voluntary donations.
I see the point but I don’t necessarily agree. Before the intense commercialization Reddit had definitely changed for the worse for me because of the influx of people.
I stopped talking about Linux because Winbros would brigade me. I stopped talking about politics because I would be brigaded by western/capitalist bros. The discussions also got a lot worse over time and nuanced opinion was almost always down voted and brigaded.
I fear the same would happen for lemny if we suddenly had a hundred million users. Having a good community is desirable, but having a ton of people not so much so.
To be honest, here I’m also feeling that you can’t say some things if you don’t want to get insulted and downvoted.
I have almost nothing positive to say about Windows so I don’t really mind if only Linux is allowed, but I feel like you have to have an anti-state and anti-police stance here.
I’m none of these and I really understood that it’s difficult to have a different opinion here.
Still, I’m enjoying Lemmy/PieFed, but nuance seems more difficult to have here because it ain’t full of « normies ».
About size, I guess it would be nice to have less dead communities, so probably nice to have more people in these.
About not saying certain things, I think that is normal everywhere and Lemmy definitely leans certain directions depending on the instance.
You are not wrong about the anti state/police stance. I have lived a good chunk of my life surrounded with the opposite belief so I don’t mind. It is nice to hear concepts that are not mainstream even if I sometimes disagree with them.
As far as normies, need I remind you that we are all different in exactly the same way.
I stopped talking about Linux because Winbros would brigade me.
Damn … we really need more people on lemmy.
I stopped talking about politics because I would be brigaded by western/capitalist bros.
With the Ghislaine Maxwell WorldNews moderation stuff I wouldn’t doubt if there were more unknowns around banning generally cordial leftist/Pro Palestine/Anti capitalist voices. I mean also just look at the Luigi Mangione crackdown.
It bleeds into conspiracy, so I try not to push it much, but I’m sure there’s some type of moderation aspect.
I noticed a profound change in moderating about the time TheDonald became popular. People started getting bans after this for things they would have never been banned for before and it wasn’t the racist/sexist people getting banned.
I eventually received a subreddit ban after leaving a comment in a conservative Reddit effectively stating the Republicans should take out Ron Desantis like the dirty diaper he was. When I pointed out to the moderators that what I said was rather tame compared to other comments they claimed I was harassing them (for exactly one appeal message). I received a 24hr site ban over this which was both bizarre and confusing. I started to disengage after this and after the API changes I stopped using it completely.
thats the same time i got bans, the gop in trumps first term was threatening social media platforms, if they dont “censor anti-right wing content, they would be liable to lawsuits”
No, what made Reddit bad was incivility, bots, trite comments, and theme accounts (and my axe!). It was massively popular, which exacerbated this stuff, and it incentivized upvotes.
Lemmy has upvotes but people seem less interested in them.
Here, we have the ability to mute toxic groups (defederate). We are decentralized, so it’s not just one dickhead in charge. Our users are, for the most part, civil and somewhat intelligent and funny.
I was with Reddit from 2012-2015ish and then lurking on and off until the API shit storm, and we are nothing like Reddit in my opinion - not that that was the intent of the original post but still
the “I also choose this guys dead wife” is what gave the site character
