Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
Don’t be fooled. Most went back.
Quantity is not quality.
More important is originality…
Lots of people/bots would just take an existing post from Reddit, and repost it. Sometimes to a different sub, sometimes to the same sub.
For most users, it was still “new” because they hadn’t seen it before.
Those accounts are still reposting. There’s more than few that do it here too.
But that OC has been drastically cut down, there’s just a delay in users noticing that there’s fewer and fewer “new” reposts going around.
So reddit doesn’t see a huge decrease in users immediately, but time on site and daily users will continue to decrease
More important is originality…
Is it, though? I left Reddit for here, so don’t take this as being in their defense, but if originality and ad revenue were meaningfully correlated, Facebook and Instagram would be bastions of original content.
Hell, some of the most profitable YouTubers only post reaction content.
To me it is.
You’d have a point on any other platform. See, the unique thing about Reddit was that you could go there for OC. It’s basic business that you carve out a niche and you play that niche away from the competition. Reddit may not be doomed to fail but it is doomed to stagnate because it is competing closer with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and news sites without decent ways to monetize and grow.
Investors like to see a unique market. Why is the platform retaining users? Moderation is on a downhill slide and these huge communities hardly feel organic.
Reddit is becoming Facebook + porn and the porn makes them no money. It’s actively unattractive to investors.
What sucks for them is that the users themselves cause this. OC is hard to make. Harder to highlight and celebrate. Reposts and news about politics and porn are 90% of the site. They get upvotes constantly. There’s an audience for that, but it has far less growth potential.
I would love to agree with you, and OC is certainly important to us, but the majority of the most upvoted content on Reddit hasn’t been OC for quite a few years now. I would guess Reddits serves most of its ads to people doom-scrolling the front page, and it probably likes it that way.
Yes but OC is what makes platforms unique and what makes them thrive. Facebook has the content of your friends and family. Twitter has the most recent words of celebrities and politicians. Instagram is similar.
Those platforms all have the same content as Reddit does. Reposts and news and memes aren’t unique to Reddit. So will Reddit fail and die? No. But Reddit isn’t as social. Why stay on Reddit if your friends aren’t on there to easily share content with? This is what TikTok does extremely well. It’s designed to share reposts and memes and news with friends easily even if few of them make OC. That’s the problem for Reddit. They’ve encouraged the wrong things with their platform and have not made it homogenous with the rest of the internet.
That works in both directions. Don’t assume that the few that didn’t return are the ones that would have saved Reddit via incredible content.
Quality is the same, on most middle size subs.
Never was subbed to those. Quality dived many years ago on those subs I cared about.
I was active nearly every day for 13 years, and I didn’t return. Granted, I don’t come here much either, but what Reddit did disgusted me too much.
My reddit account is 15 years old. I removed myself as a mod from the communities I took care of before signing out.
If they want to shit on the mods, they can handle the job themselves.
I already had inactive subs removed from me. Not like anyone would ever recreate them. It’s weird.
I was transitioning out, but it just felt disgusting to even open the site so I stopped doing it. I probably have a bunch of unread messages because of that.
As 10+ year vet, I still go back for certain things. Mostly communities that have not been recreated here yet in any meaningful sense, and there are a lot of those. There are people here, yes, but the niches, the non-general topics, are lacking a true community. That will come with time, but I still can’t substitute Lemmy for reddit 100% yet, much as I might want to. Unless I only want to talk technology, news, and politics all day.
But I will say Boost for Lemmy has taken the spot RIF once had on my mobile home screen. Lemmy is what I open reflexively now. I only go back to reddit when I need to see something specific, I’m not browsing there. Partially because it’s very tedious to navigate old.reddit on mobile, but partially because I just don’t want to spend too much time there anymore.
I had a reply to a four year ago comment I made. Up until that moment I had thought everything was archived.
For me it was a sub I participated in for years whose mod suddenly accused me of advocating for the abuse of children, told me I had mental health issues, and permanently banned and muted me. It was weird and I haven’t been back since.
16 years and agreed.
same here, since 2008. Pretty much every user of the site was on the same standard default subreddits. I don’t like what Reddit has become but I don’t blame them like a lot of people here.
Honestly they were a corporation from the get-go, out to make money once it became popular. They built something no one else did.
But going forward, the little reddit escapade from their corporate suite shows that freedom of speech can only thrive when there is no driving profit motive.
Spez wanted to be Zuck and just like Zuck, he allowed bad people to abuse the site in order to hurt others.
They weren’t a corporation from the get-go though? They were a Y-Combinator project that became successful, and were eventually bought by Conde Nast (when the “sell-out” began, btw).
I think profit was always the end goal, except for Aaron Swartz. They might not have been incorporated but the intent always seemed like profit.
Same except I was at about 10 years. I don’t even find it useful to include “reddit” in my Google searches as many communities are locked down unless you sign in to an account. Can’t say I feel too bad for them.
I didn’t return either… to be fair, it’s because I was one of the ones who got a bullshit permaban
Did they? I had one of the top non-porn accounts actually run by a person (most high karma accounts use bots, I didn’t out of ironic laziness) and I haven’t posted or commented since whenever Day 0 was for rif is fun. I’ve been back a couple times for very specific things but not logged in or participating in any active way. Of course, I’m just one (high karma) data point, but I really don’t think I’m unique in this. I also have no real desire to contribute to Reddit again in the future. Getting off of it has been pretty nice.
Look, it’s not that people aren’t still posting, the site obviously still has content, but it really is just “content.” The quality of discussion I’ve seen has gone down pretty steep. Modding appears to be almost nonexistent in big subs or very agenda-driven otherwise. I think a lot of contributors who treated Reddit like old school forums have left and it’s slowly turning into a weird combo of Facebook and 4chan if that makes sense. If that’s what the userbase wants, go for it, I guess. But that’s not my jam.
Why not delete the account ?
My old one? It’s a good question and I have actually thought about it. I have a lot of inanity on there but some (I think) decent replies to people trying to be “reasonable” fascists, racists, misogynists, etc. if that makes sense. I’ll admit I mostly posted news articles I thought were interesting, though I would regularly participate in the discussions for those articles, but those articles frequently got a lot of traffic. So I guess there’s two problems with nuking the account:
(1) If I delete all my comments, you end up in some cases with what looks like someone deleting their response to a bad actor, leaving that bad actor not only unchallenged, but looking like they “won” the argument, and
(2) If I delete all my posts, I remove from public view the comments of (at this point) likely tens of thousands of people, if not more given how many high karma and high participation posts I submitted, many of whom might not have wanted me to do so.
I have so many of both that it’d be a massive pain to go through and selectively delete stuff. Easier to just leave the account be and never use it again. Deleting the account just means it’s anonymized, which can also invite bad faith.
A lot of search results still take me to Reddit. It is still a source of knowledge.
I tell myself that landing on Reddit, because of a search result is different than logging in on Reddit and subsequently browsing Reddit.
Using their app is on another level.
It is, there’s a lot of highly specific knowledge on Reddit. It’s still a resource.
I’ll be honest. I want to believe in the Fediverse and Lemmy, really really hard.
It’s ideals (rather, the gestalt of the best of what everyone says is the best of Federation) appeals strongly.
But sometimes, it’s instance after instance of complaining about this or that. Double points when it’s all reddit complaining.
I dunno if being a heavy content creator necessitates an air of misguided superiority but there’s no more nuance here than anywhere else, and the content can’t seem to form precisely because everyone decides to take their toys away and do their own thing at the smallest provocation.
I don’t use them on my phone because fuck their app, but I’ve found no choice but to join up with an alias and as much extensions to make their job harder as Firefox allows, just to have genuine discussions on hyper specific topics from a PC.
Really? No choice?
Take control of your life, goddamn.
As much as I hate to admit it, I’m considering it too - not instead, but also. I haven’t been back since Apollo died but Lemmy just doesn’t have the diversity of interests and niche communities yet. It feels really one dimensional sometimes.
I’m not. Pretty happy here overall.
Sometimes I want to see things besides hard left politics, Linux and furries. And a huge helping of divorced-from-reality beyond-left opinions from .ml and whatever hexbear is.
And I know I can block all those communities, but you’re not left with a ton once you do. Those demographics are dramatically over represented on lemmy.
If someone can tell me which direction to game specific communities i used to be part of (RimWorld, Souls games, Paradox games…) I’d be happy. Now I can only rely on discord.
And no, don’t tell me to create the community and content myself. The audience isn’t even high enough for discussing all games as a whole let alone specific games. This is what “let Lemmy stay small” crowd misses. Niche community can only be started as branch of (very) large community.
You can search for communities with https://browse.feddit.de/ .
For Rimworld I found: https://lemmy.world/c/rimworld
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
For me the main issue is that my professional community is pretty active there but not here. So if I want to share some professional work and discussion, I can only go there. I will probably double post out of activism but I know it won’t have much effect. For entertainment though, I’m good here.
Yeah. Lemmy really isn’t as good as Reddit. You run into people on Lemmy who will ban you just because you disagree with their echo chamber. Also, there isn’t as much content.
But after cementing lemmy as a viable alternative. I actually find fun content on lemmy. Reddit feed for me ends up turning into a left vs right garbage.
When I’ve gone back for a look I’ve found just the opposite. It’s just bots and trolls.
But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That’s devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.
What’s your basis for this statement? Any evidence to back it up?
I go back for a couple niche communities that haven’t escaped yet. And occasional search results for advice, but that tends to be 3-5+ years old on average.
Never going back.
?
Me, going back to that cesspool. I left quite the account behind as well.
What I’ve noticed is it became way more toxic over there since the API changes
I still scurry over occasionally (a lot of communities didn’t move over) but not nearly as much as I used to
Same. It runs so badly now, and enough moderators left or cut back that it is not the same site it was at all. Some communities are still intact, but I’ve begun to see lemmy and even Mastodon results in searches alongside reddit. It’s going to take a while to see if reddit can recover (it’ll take some humility and leadership from the top which seems unlikely) or die slowly then all at once. Remember digg, etc? The internet is fickle and for every Facebook there are a hundred friendsters.
Ironically way more bot now
The only sub I still go there for is /r/zerocarb (a low carb diet sub), and that’s now mostly deleted comments and posts. With the moderation tools unavailable on mobile the mods have made automod very strict. Heaven help a person new to the diet, they’ll have a hard time asking their questions
I still occasionally browse the smaller subs when I need help on things like /r/unraid.
This became an instant classic lol, do we know who the artist is?
That was one of the reasons they killed the api: to support ad growth. Unfortunately they failed to realize the combination of ad-blocking browsers and users just quitting the site from losing client access means they were never going to hit pre-IPO revenue targets.
Had they instead focused on affordable API pricing and driving subscriber revenues up, they would have exceeded revenue targets.
source: I was in a somewhat similar position (not quite the same, no third party client), but chose different and found myself making more subscription revenue than ad revenue thanks to a viewer base more than happy to pay more.
Do you have any data to support that? My feeling is that not much changed after that. I feel like there is business as usual there. At least when I talk to my peers.
Subs I followed (and still rarely visit) became much harsher with moderation, to the point of being very difficult for new visitors to use; in a sub that is mostly for helping people adopt a very low carb diet
I feel like this was definitely the case in small subs where the main content generators were also mods. The ones who didn’t straight up leave became uncommitted. Places like Askreddit didn’t change, but smaller communities are pretty dead.
So much looks as deleted as /r/legaladvice was (is?) now
Reddit’s value as a social media platform drops as it’s value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that’s was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
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Yes, I agree. In the end, Reddit lives off its reputation, just like every social media platform. Seriously, is there an effect that when you’re long enough the CEO of a company, you begin making decisions where it is obvious that they will negatively impact the user base and thus long-term survivability of a company? Is there a term for that?
I imagine your priorities become different.
You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.
Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.
Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.
Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”
I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.
I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.
You make some good points. I’d agree if it wasn’t for the API changes that fucked all the 3rd party apps and 3rd party tools like automod.
Even if it was priced well it still somehow filtered NSFW content out.
They clearly wanted more market share for the reddit app by any means necessary. It’s sad for all the mods that were ignored.
You’re describing the Cory Doctorow enshittification process.
Sounds like Enshittification.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking. Examples of alleged enshittification have included Amazon, Bandcamp, Facebook, Google Search, Quora, Reddit, and Twitter.Thanks :)
You mean hubris?
Thanks, yes! Well, another word learned :)
More like stupris, amirite
When having a bacon and egg breakfast the hen participants the pig is committed.
You had me at bacon…
I deleted my reddit account and joined lemmy during the subreddit blackout, but there’s still a few authors I follow on reddit. Most I’ve followed to other sites, and just recently one was suspended for what sounds like a fuck up on reddit’s end.
Reddit lost most of their quality content creators and I can’t see the few remaining staying long term.
I reached the same conclusion and posted it to reddit over a decade ago, asking people to try to come up with a better solution, long before I even knew open source software was a thing.
Well, took 15 years, but lemmy exists now so hooray!
Honestly feels like a scam for rich people. Spez just has to convince some suckers that Reddit would be profitable as he cashes out. Then they’re left with a dead platform as they kill it with ads and astroturfing.
This is honestly what I feel like most businesses are these days, just scams to convince other rich people to invest, so they can cash out early on. Basically the same stuff all the crypto currencies were doing.
as its* value to advertisers rises
It’s kinda funny on Reddit, you would have had to pay for your picture comment. I’m happy to donate to lemmy, but putting features like this behind paywalls is silly.
You have to pay to post pics? When did that happen?
It was recent.
I’m going to have to trust you because I’m not going back there to check.
being able to post inline images was a reddit premium feature in the official app only, iirc. you could still link images to text like we had always done in ye olden days and use an inline image opener to get the same results… but grifters gonna grift.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
I will say, though, anything that disincentives people to spam useless images and gifs in the comments, kind of like the next comment down, has its merits.
If there’s one thing I miss about Reddit, it’s that there was a lot less of this Discord-esc image spam over there than there is over here
Yeah. I agree that it’s bad to put the feature behind a paywall, but I also just wish it wasn’t a feature in the first place. Meme picture comments are attention grabbing and take up a lot of space. They can end up dominating the thread; making people just kind of skim over the text comments and just look at the highly prominent pictures, as though they are a kind of super-comment.
So even though sometimes the images are great and funny / interesting / clever or whatever - I think it can degrade the conversation on the platform. I’m at least thankful that not many people are using them on lemmy; currently.
Sounds very familiar. I think I’ve heard pretty much the same thing before when discussing paying for streaming services as opposed to sailing the high seas.
Dear fucking god, THAT explains why I couldn’t do that.
Its always the same with online services/platforms looking to make money. Offer a free or cheap online service/platform, then advertisements, then more advertisements, then start removing features and hiding them behind paywalls, then more advertisements, then death.
Or, like Facebook and Insta, you get so big that the world itself warps around your platform because no one can remember the before times.
Someone needs to redo this with the answer being “s p e z”
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Is he Australian?
No idea
Anyone else posted this yet?
Nope and I really wish nobody had still.
This reminds me… we need an “I’m sorry Garfield” community on Lemmy.
You mean “I’m sorry John”?
Fuck. You’re right.
Stick to your guns. I’m sorry John has been done. Now is the time for Garfield’s comeuppance.
No, i want ‘im sorry garfield’.
Be the change you want to see in the world, TacoButtPlug.
You’re right.
He took one for the community with spez, I’m surprised there isn’t one yet. Guess you can have the honors, TacoButtPlug.
[email protected] seems to exist
Edit: not exactly active, though
why does garfield have preposterously large bazongas
Too much lasagna.
You spelled “magnificently” wrong.
The origin story:
* basagnas
Does this represent some higher meaning or is it just Garfield fucking spez?
Yes
Why not both?
What a terrible day to have eyes
Looks like someone’s got a case of the Mondays
Looks like yours went up first lol, but as long as it’s up. 🫡
So many questions about this
It’s referencing this meme.
Ohhh thank you!
No problem, I know it can be hard to figure out the context.
Weren’t these assholes supposed to IPO like 6 months ago? lol
They were totally lined up to IPO. I think somebody told him to go all musk on it. I’m still not exactly sure how taking a big fat shit on the user communities face was supposed to impress the investors.
Well yeah, I’m probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together… after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought this on themselves.
Came from using it daily to only going there only when google forces me to use it
Many of such cases I assume
Nothing to celebrate.
Reddit revenue is still up, just not as much as they had hoped.
That’s still enough to tank an IPO.
Yep, in the face of the infinite growth monster, anything other than exceeding expectations is seen as a failure
“We see here you’re up 5%, but you were up 5% last year too, so you’re dead now.”
-Capitalism
I still remember a line from a boss I had in one of my very first “real” jobs. “I expect you to exceed my expectations.”
I didn’t bother pointing out the problem there. I also didn’t stay working for her for very long. :)
Yup it’s all about expected growth.
Can you buy puts on an IPO?
Reddit, as a concept, can’t make more money without destroying it’s value. The more advertising is injected into it, the less useful it becomes, and the less people will want to use it.
So yes, it’s up, but they’ve hurt themselves drastically to get it up by hurting so much of Reddit’s usefulness, and even then, they fell short. People who remained are already low on patience with it.
To drive it even higher, they will have to cripple it even more.
It’s possible to make money with Reddit while leaving it unmolested, but it’s not possible to make ALL the money that way. Investors want ALL the money.
Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.
They feel like they get shorted because many of those users don’t contribute to ad revenue from 3rd party apps but instead of improving their app to lure users in they instead tell those users to fuck off.
A user is a user, even if they don’t contribute directly to ad revenue they contribute content to make the site more alluring for those who will contribute to ad revenue. As well they help spread the word about reddit to those who don’t use it regularly yet by sharing that content outside of reddit.
They were pretty short sighted by doing what they did.
It’s just many power users and mods were power users and mods thanks to tools in these apps, and Reddit still didn’t provide anything comparable. Many small communities I still care about have a lot less posts if they don’t have bots. It’s not like Fediverse won Reddit, but something changed in them. NSFW OC subs are still good, but idk if they make the image spez wants from that platfom. The only thing we def should do is to stay online and be welcome for stray redditors to join.
A bunch of subs that I like and that are niche had the mods say “fuck it bye” and they are no more. Some migrated here, some on discord, but the fragmentation means less users overall, so less content. It’s a shitty situation.
I would have been happy to pay to get API access for 3rd party apps on my account. Maybe 1 or 2 dollars per account and month would have been reasonable to cover the costs without ad revenue. Double it to please greedy shareholders.
Instead they asked for such ludicrous amounts from 3rd party developers, basically telling them to fuck off.
Either they were mad for control or got greedy over their „golden data“ for AI training. Or both. In any case, they never were interested in finding a user friendly solution so fuck them.
The phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” comes to mind.
I believe it’s “spider-face.”
Edit: lol, guess we don’t have a lot of fans of The Office around here.
Some app dev mentioned they wanted to work with them to introduce ads that Reddit would have made profit from in the free version of the app and it’s Reddit that said “Nah it’s ok”…
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Do you have a citation on that 25% figure?
Source: my bias
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Critical hit to my self esteem.
Thank you for building up the community.
Ya do realize that internet access is pretty much universal, dudes well within the acceptable posting amout id expect. It aint 20010 no more, everyone has a pocket computer and can do it damn near everywhere. Fuck the mountains near me are now scattershot on signal rather than completely worthless like they were back in 2014.
Fuck spez
We did it, Lemmy!
Let’s for a second take stock of what’s happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn’t lose a dime they just didn’t make as much as they wanted to.
Remember, the reason I ditched Reddit wasn’t the ads per se, it was the constant data selling, and the official app just getting worse and worse with unwanted “features” pushed on everyone. They kept getting greedier and greedier so when they disabled 3rd party apps I ditched Reddit.
