Reddit Migration

I came to Reddit in 2019, it felt nice then (avoided anything but tech discussions, though). Since 2020 it has been consistently getting worse, maybe before that too.

Anyway, centralization is bad. I'm not coming back.

No idea TBH, I quit using it.

I started to slowly realize this with the blackout. I tried using twitter and Deviant Art more, and found them to be a lot better since I could see more cool fan art.

While I still like my reddit home feed, popular and all just suck. Its mostly all rage posts made to generate outrage. I see so much negative stuff from /r/Antiwork or /r/Politics. I signed up for cat photos. I’m not here to listen to how our world is so garbage for the 100th time.

I popped over there after my suspension expired, and... yeah? A little bit. I don't know if that boils down to my resentment for Lemur Boy or if it just started to suck after we all left. The whole thing feels insincere, corporate. The heart's not there.

I stopped using reddit.. so I have no idea!

Quality was dropping a ton anyway, but god damn I miss the sports subs.

Even /r/baseball can garner 75-125 comments on some minor post.

Sports always seem like the hardest categories to get content/comments with when it comes to places like these. I remember reddit a decade+ ago and how it seemed like those NFL and NBA subs took a long time to get traction.

It's the toughest part about adopting kbin and Lemmy for me. But fuck it, I like new shit so I might as well try

I've cut back almost all my content generation for reddit, so no more posting, adding comments or even upvoting / downvoting.

Reddit has effectively said we're a bunch of leaches so that's how I'm treating them now, give me your content, I'm giving you nothing in return.

I'm definitely feeling a shift in the quality of content getting produced.

I've been observing the creation, expansion, and slow heat death of Reddit for a long time now (had accounts there since it opened). I think that Reddit's decisions here accelerated a decline in content quantity and quality, but the trend had been happening for a while.

I think that the biggest issue behind this decline is infrastructure based. Reddit was designed around the basic concept that the desire to post and contribute to the discussion would be reward enough to drive participation. Karma is the point system for this participation, a number that only speaks to popularity, not the quality of a post or a contributor. When the community was small, this non-specific variable served the purpose of identifying content trends, but karma is very poor at describing WHY a post or comment is popular. Eventually, instead of karma being an indicator that someone had contributed to conversation, it's only meaningful metric became one of popularity or notoriety.

This meant that where once Reddit had been a haven for enabling discussion on any topic, it became a shouting match between who could get the most upvotes. This cultural shift became very apparent after the Digg exodus, and the trend accelerated as other social media copied Reddit's voting and karma system. Of course, Reddit began feeding off of their content, which was also popularity driven, and once the content algorithms started coming into play in the mid-2010s, it created a feedback loop of popularity driven schlock that drove most real discussion to fringes of the site.

We've recently seen this dynamic start to even affect Google, whose search results are getting hammered due to Reddit's blackouts, and whose search results have been significantly dropping in quality over the last few years.

As for myself, I still browse certain reddits that I haven't found equivalents for in the Fediverse, but it's pretty clear to me that Reddit's not really a positive place for contributors - whether they be moderators or posters. To some extent, I'll miss the reach of Reddit's audience, but lets face it, most of that audience is just shitposters and bots.

Will the same trend happen in the Fediverse? Possibly, but I think there's more potential here for positive change than there ever will be in a company led by the likes of Huffman, or for that matter any company or centralized authority. Besides, it took about 15 years for Reddit to condense from being a cool place full of new ideas to the condensed black hole of regurgitated shitposting it's become. I think the Fediverse has a bit more potential longevity than that.

It has been said from the very beginning: First the quality will drop, then the user numbers.

Those who are talking shit right now didn’t listen then, they won’t now. It’s a lost cause.

I felt Reddit's quality started going downhill around 2021, which is not long after ~~they introduced the official app and~~ started allowing Google logins.

EDIT: Looks like the official app's been around longer than I thought. :O

I think Reddit quality has been declining for some time.

There are two factors at work I believe. One, once something goes mainstream, you get a much broader set of the population on the platform, and much like real life, the idiots seem to be louder. More importantly though, updates to the platform deprioritized serious conversation in favor of mindless scrolling. Look at the new website, or at the official app. They are not conducive to in-depth conversation. They keep trying to distract you with posts from other communities that you don't even subscribe to, the goal is obviously to get you to keep clicking clicking clicking rather than spending a bunch of time on one page composing a well thought out reply.

And that shows. Really high quality in-depth conversations on issues of importance used to be far more common for me on Reddit. Today they are much less frequent, fewer people seem interested in real discussion or debate. And there's much more of the attitude of 'you disagree with me there for you're wrong fuck you'.

I think the recent protest and beginning of migration are going to make that even more prevalent. I think many of the smarter people who enjoy in-depth discussion and post quality comments are going to migrate to Lemmy or Kbin leaving Reddit full of idiots. I think that will actually be good for Reddit as a company, at least in the short-term, because idiots don't use ad blockers and they install the official app without thinking. It is of course killing their golden goose, but their actions suggest they have decided they prefer to do without that goose's continued services.

Depends on the community. Many of the subreddits I've been in are going strong - or have gotten better since the blackout.

Like 75% of the subs I actually go to (and not just see on the frontpage or all) are still dark. So I have very very little reason to go back.

@yunggwailo IMO it’s bad on big subs but for niche subs that can’t/won’t move to the Fediverse it’s the same. It’s incredibly frustrating because there’s almost nowhere else to have a decent conversation about these topics in a non-discord, forum-like fashion.

It's been like that for a while, I think we just got used to it.

Yes, big time. It feels almost as if half of the comments are bots, propping up spez and crapping on the mods who supported the blackout. Unfortunately, there are still a few subreddits that have no equivalent here just yet and I end up having to revisit reddit to get the info I need on an ongoing basis. I started two communities (Signal Messenger and Amex) here myself in an effort to help with transition but so far there hasn't been much happening on that front. I even went as far as messaging the mods on the /r/ equivalents but none of them wanted to move over, or even give it a shot as a subscriber. Nevertheless, I am not giving up and still feel there is growth to be had. Perhaps once the apps die off on reddit, we will see additional users transitioning.

I just checked. They are pushing more ads from what I've seen and now there's ad for every several posts. At least for myself this has never happened before, not sure if it is different for people in other regions with higher traffic to Reddit. It's obnoxious.

It has been going downhill for years, but right now its like it jumped of a cliff at the bottom of the hill. Into hell reddit goes, where it belongs!

@yunggwailo That's good to hear. I nuked my accounts and haven't been back to that particular dumpster fire.