Been thinking of making a post like this for some time, apologies if some of this is not completely relevant: this community seems more like it’s about Reddit the platform/product than Reddit the social “thing”, but I’m sure a lot of people have similar experiences to mine. Maybe on some instances more than others.
Here’s the one of the last comments I wrote as a regular Reddit user, on the eve of the blackout (almost a year ago to the day), under a post titled “Will your participation in Reddit change”:
My comment
I will keep searching Google for Reddit help threads, but as a cultural and news aggregator I think this is the end for me. Maybe I will check it every so often. On desktop. On the old site. Until they sunset that too.
I wouldn’t be against using the first party app if it wasn’t so awful to use.
It’s a massive shame that we’ve all collectively agreed that Reddit is the de facto way to create open communities online. There were so many forums that could fill the void left by Reddit for things like tech and art and they’ve all shut down in the past decade.
I try not to be too negative about the evolution and constant growth of the userbase of the site and of the internet as a whole, but I’ve really felt like things are moving in a direction I can’t even be cautiously optimistic about lately.
I think of all the mod tools that will be defunct. The commonly cited example is that people who comment excessively on adult subs are automatically barred from commenting on the teenagers subreddit. Sure the admins can whip up functionality to do this, but this site was built on custom tools and custom CSS and all that. I think the API was one among the many secret sauces that give Reddit this staying power. These sites and forums I talked about - I used to hop from one to the next year after year. Until I found Reddit a decade ago.
I like that I choose my subs and that I don’t get algorithmically ordered sludge designed to game the algorithm on my homepage. Yes the sensibilities of the lowest common denominator redditors are gamed by people posting, but that’s (in my opinion) acceptable.
Frankly if they kept the old Reddit Gold pricing (4 bucks per month/30 annual) and gated unrestricted API access behind it I would have been inclined to finally give Reddit money. I use it a lot, I don’t mind paying now that I can afford it. But something about how it’s all going down really doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I’ve been trying to write a post about this for a while now, but I haven’t felt like it was relevant. Thanks for asking here
Reading through this is a bit funny, in retrospect, seeing how Reddit-centric my understanding of the internet had become at the time. I am happy to report that I have checked the home page maybe a half dozen times since the blackout, instead of once or twice a week like I expected. I suppose the disgusting state of the heavily astroturfed worldnews sub was a big part of it as well: for me Reddit was the one big online platform where the average visible user didn’t seem to be very misinformed about Palestine (at least not by default), and it was frankly very sad to see where it got in the past few months.
I do miss Reddit, I haven’t been able to replace it outright. I’m from Lebanon, and Lebanese Twitter is (if you can imagine it) even more of a toxic cesspool than regular Twitter. I’m not on Facebook (also cesspool here), I’m not on Instagram - my point is I don’t get anything about my country on ostensibly user-curated social media. /r/Lebanon was very far from perfect, but it was nice to get a trickle of local news with users who were more in line with my own politics. The local news outlets focus on a lot of irrelevant crap, the sub’s news feed was a bit more interesting.
One thing I loved about that subreddit was that users with more mainstream views in my country (eg. transphobia-as-default) were allowed to spout their bullshit in the subreddit with little mod pushback (if it’s just JAQing off etc, not harrassing people obviously). Then the regulars would dogpile on that user’s post - very refreshing! And very validating I would imagine for anyone who is used to hearing this shit everyday.
I was applying to be a mod to help keep the sub moving, at one point, but hey. Maybe that headache was never worth it. Still, I felt like I lost one of my online homes.
More generally, I have enjoyed my first year on Lemmy, although the experience has been lacking in many ways. For one, while Reddit has a reputation as a meme cemetery, the memes here are generally a bit moldier. But that’s okay. The fact that there’s fewer posts I think isn’t necessarily a bad thing either, I think we all preferred Reddit’s slightly slower homepage in 2013 than the one we left in 2023, that would regurgitate more and more from the bottom of the barrel if you were willing to keep scrolling.
I’ve toyed with opening a Lebanon community here on dbzer0, having opened one on FMHY that nobody used. But it wouldn’t be the same, and I wouldn’t know how to populate it. I posted maybe 2 non-question posts on Reddit in my decade+ of being a regular user, but I wrote tons of comments. It also helped keep my English sharper, I think.
I’ve reactivated my old Instagram account and it’s pretty ass out there. The ad/post ratio is just egregious, and they’ll just serve you random posts from random pages. I want to see my friends goddamn it, isn’t this what your platform is supposed to be for? For those of you who don’t know, the app will also send you a notification once or twice a day suggesting you look at “today’s top reels”. I have never watched a reel of my own will, fuck off.
Point being, the main platforms people use online haven’t been up my alley. I can only hope the zoomer dumbphone pushback keeps expanding, and that social media starts being seen as something for older generations. Wishful thinking?
This is just a post about enshittification, everyone’s favorite word, but every time I think about it for more than 2 minutes I can’t help but miss a simpler internet. Some part of me was hoping it would kickstart me “growing out” of spending this much time online per day (not everyone spends a ton of time online), but it hasn’t.
Also every time I ask something longer than 20 words on Discord some middle schooler will reply “yap”, even in the channels designated for questions. Discord has had its uses (yes I know there’s privacy concerns), but it’s hardly a replacement for Reddit, or forums. Both of which are/were searchable. But enough yapping from me.
Thoughts? How has the exodus been for you? Is this how Digg users felt?
Yeah, it’s bad. I’m a person who has no ideology and my politics go far left to far right, depending on the issue. I’m mostly interested in how the world works, not how it should work and calling it names because it doesn’t work the way I think it should.
Here I am the embodiment of EVIL. On reddit I was a asshole to both the left and the right, and got regularly banned for challenging group think and humanizing the ‘enemy’.
I miss forums where people could talk about politics and life from various perspectives without demonizing each other, let alone ask questions. Or realized that political opinions were just opinions. Now everything is conflated. The car I drive is my political loyalty, and if I don’t want an EV I’m clearly a LGBT+ hating pro-capitalist bigot. It’s truly absurd. and the people who spout this nonsense think they are a supergenius will start nitpicking your grammar to prove it to themselves.
Unless you don’t vote political opinions do often matter, and they affect people’s lives in real physical ways, especially for oppressed minorities, like LGBTQ people or currently Palestinians, which is why you’ll probably see people speak up for groups like them the most. I’ve never seen anybody be mad at someone for driving an EV car on Lemmy, though. That feels kind of like a straw man.
that entirely depends on where you live.
and having grand-standing opinions about lgbt+ or palestinians when you live in liberal american is just that… grandstanding. I unless those folks moving to texas to try to influence elections there, they are just shouting into the void to feel morally superior. lgbt people aren’t oppressed in the northeast in any real physical way apart from dealing with the occasional idiot, just like the rest of us.
Do you discuss things or attack people? Serious question.
It is hard to tell from this post. It started off well but went a bit off the rails by the end.
discussing things is interpreted as an attack by those who doesn’t want to discuss them and simply want you (and everyone) to believe what they believe.
There’s a pretty solid different between discussing things that people might disagree with in a mature, measured way, and attacking people for disagreeing with you.
Starting things off with a rant about the people against you is… probably not the best way to try and convince anyone you’re the former?
it’s not a rant. it’s my experience of this site on a daily basis. mostly because i don’t agree with leftist dogma like ACAB and I acknowledge the world is complex rather than simple and anarchsim won’t save it and turn it into Shangri-La. I also don’t think Linux is superior and all Windows/Mac users are pathetic for wanting to use command-line. And I work in tech.
but please tell me more how horrible and clearly all me, not the environment here. plenty of other comments in this thread share that same story of being attacked and harassed for not agreeing with the dogmatism that dominate most lemmy threads.
But let me be pedantic in the spirit of lemmy… I didn’t start anything off. I am only replying and sharing my experience. you’re the one interpreting my experience as an attack on people, which seems to be to be a manipulative tactic that amounts to victim blaming. maybe if i wore a skirt that covered my knees lemmy people wouldn’t assault me, right? maybe if i just agreed that ACAB, linux is the best ever, and anyone who is LGBT+ is a divine angelic being who can do no wrong, lemmy would be nice to me, right?
lol.
lmao, even.
Yeah I know exactly what you mean. People don’t want to discuss an issue, they seem to just want to prove how much of a hardcore whateverist they are and prove you’re a part of whichever nefarious group their group is a against. “So you’re a neo-con-classical-liberal-proto-fascist because you don’t want to burn everything down and start over with a the new whateverist utopia I want! You’re too stupid to talk to me!!!”
I think it’s mostly kids in university that learned some terminology they never heard before and think everyone should be impressed by the word they learned. But when a topic they’re unfamiliar with comes up they’re out of their element and instead of just lurking and learning something they start spewing out the jargon in a desperate attempt to sound like they know something.
Yeah. I know people who talk like this IRL too. they are all under 25 and still economically dependent on their parents… while they rant and lecture about UBI is going to solve everything and you’re an evil capitalist bigot if you disagree, and once they have done that they start bragging to you about how worldly they are because they just went to India/South America/Africa and you haven’t been there so what do you know about the world you are clearly racist if you’ve done voluntourism like them.
The desperate need to feel morally superior to others is a hell of a drug. Especially when you have achieved nothing in life on your own.