Reddit

I'm jumping between Reddit and Lemmy. Some subreddits have all of their mods booted out (r/GoCommitDie and r/OpenAI are two I can think of). Some subreddits have decided to flag their subreddit as NSFW but are being threatened by Reddit to reverse that move, and many have returned to business as usual.

Let's face it. We've lost the API protest. All we can do now is make Lemmy popular and make it attractive to other users. Give people an incentive to actually join here. Our job here is not to make Lemmy a copy of Reddit. We need to make Lemmy different (in a good way!).

And here's an unpopular opinion: we need to make Lemmy easy to use and understand. If normies find Lemmy difficult to use or understand, then we're fucked.

My personal opinion is that normies might get confused by the fediverse and might be turned away by thinking they need to make an account on every single instance in order to participate in them. I am not proposing that we get rid of federation. What I am proposing is that we somehow make it clearer to everyone that all you really need is one account and you can get access to everywhere. I don't know how we can do this, but I'm sure there is someone who knows.

My favorite thing over there right now is r/videos, which only allows text descriptions of the video you were going to post. It's way more entertaining than it has any right to be.

How would I even access it without rif?

/r/all has top posts from very obscure subreddits now

My Frontpage has much much less churn.

As long as we keep making this place good and active, it will be attractive. With the increased spam bots and degraded moderation, people will start looking elsewhere

What infuriates me are subs that act like nothing is happening. I can understand not wanting to get involved with drama but actively supporting the devs by pretending everything is fine is vile to me.

IMO the protests are having an effect. I haven't been on there for 2 days (full disclosure: was given 1 week suspension under dubious pretense while I was mass editing + deleting all my comments), but, before then there was a huge undercurrent support for the protests but a lot of outright hostile naive complaints regarding them. At this point it feels like the majority of those that are willing to leave have left, and the rest is a dumpster fire of increased hostility. Everyone is angry for seemingly ridiculous reasons. You can't post anything without somebody saying something absurdly contrarian within a day or 2. TBH I really think there's a 'instill anger' bot program (and its replicants) running amok now and the moderators can't (or are unwilling to) keep up with it.

I read a post somewhere that really vibed with me. It said that they use Apollo and Reddit was just a backend. When Apollo died, Reddit did too for them.

I love the sound and view of a good trashfire, so I sometimes go look and see how hard it's burning.

So /r/madlads Mods did what madlads do: They made everyone a moderator just like /r/politicalhumor did from the beginning of the protest. I brought the idea up to the /r/pics mod just to let them know. Would be funny as hell.

Postwise, Bots started reposting content from 2-3 years ago, ChatGPT was spotted multiple times as a replying user and smaller subs returned to normal, but are slowly drowning in spambot posts or switched to approval-only due to the failing tools.

EDIT: A major antispambot on reddit closes down today by unbanning EVERY SINGLE SPAMBOT on reddit. Did I mention that I love watching things burn down?

To me it feels like the whole ordeal shook reddit quite a bit and made maybe the top 10% of the users drop out of the bucket this way, going to the Fediverse (flavors: lemmy, kbin, mastodon) as far as I can tell right now. Tildes and squabbles got some users, too, but IMHO those seem to be not doing well so far.

Hmm, i checked out the FP and a few of the subs I used to frequent. Front page seems to have more TikTok style crap than ever, like "guy gets punched!" or "someone makes annoying food!". Relationship advice: "get divorced!!".
City subs seem about the same as before. Medical subs I used to read seem about the same and holy shit, am I glad I'm not reading those every day. Same questions and memes that have been rotating through for like 5 years, and the confounding pattern where the community consensus on issues changes from week to week or post to post. One week it's "this term is offensive and I hate it" and 50 people are "YEAH! That's right!" and then the next, "don't you know about this term, it's perfectly valid" and 30 people are "YEAH! Use your brain if you have one broo!!". And the questions like "does anyone else with this condition suffer from these extremely common effects that are listed in every medical article about it?" So anyway whether reddit has gotten worse or not, seems like I was ready for something different.

seeing a shit ton of spam

No joke there are chatgpt bots going around, even in smaller subreddits.

The Finnish language r/Suomi is shut down so the Finn's have moved to the English language r/Finland, making it all confused with languages now.

Reddit has made it easy now that my mobile apps are gone. Also, my main account got permananned on Tuesday apparently out of comment posted 5 years ago about spez. Also, a niche sub I followed was taken over by a Nazi when the historical mod got kicked out by reddit and now that's gone too.

Reddit has slipped into being irrelevant very quickly.

Most subreddits are no longer private, but a lot of them are still protesting in various ways. If I were an advertiser viewing the chaos on Reddit, I'd hold off on buying ads there.

R/cyberpunkgame turned NSFW since, you know, the game features such things as a dick slider for your character and fully rendered sex scenes with prostitutes, and reddit is hilariously trying to turn it back into being marked as SFW.

For me, I check reddit like once or twice in a day where I just check what on popular and on r/all for like 5 minutes on my desktop. Also to checkout r/OMSCS and that's about it. Lemmy is where I am at most of the time now lol. I used use the official app and its so garbage but it was so addicting for me to use before the Apollo drama. Now that addiction isn't quite there anymore and Lemmy hasn't been super addicting for me and I like this feeling a lot.

Ah, yes, typical reddit addict having withdrawal syndrome.

Don't look back...

I've only been back to visit a small, private sub, but I've seen a lot of posts here saying that a high percentage of bot content is obvious. The conjecture is that there's always been a lot of bots, but they were somewhat less obvious because there was more human content. With a lot of big content creators leaving, it's more apparent when a lot of posts and comments are from bots.

Plus some people think Reddit has increased bot usage to astroturf against the protests and to give the illusion that traffic isn't down.

I was wondering if what reddit did was on purpose to lower their pre-IPO valuation so insiders could get a better price before it goes public. After the IPO they entice people back with reasonable API policy and then they can demonstrate huge user growth to boost stock price... Nobody working with investors on preparing for an IPO is going to do something this stupid without major pushback from the investor advisors.

Watch this space...

Since so many decent folks have left Reddit, proportionally, there are more bigots now. I never log in anymore and when I am there it's to find something specific.

I only used Reddit for reading, haven't had an account in a long time. I checked r/all the past few days and it's had basically the same top stories every day. After seeing all the same things again today, I decided I'm not going back, just a waste of time. Any interesting happenings in the world are making it to my All/Top Active Lemmy RSS feed. Let's keep it up!

For the most part, business as usual, but I did notice that on tech subs, the average comments were a lot meaner and ruder than usual.

Deleted my 15 year old Reddit account yesterday. It’s the same shit over there as per usual.

There will be better things. I hope it’s here. I just worry once the corps realize a competitor what they’ll do to it. (Bots, law suits, what else?)

Do not protest reddit. Boycott reddit for good and live in the lemmyverse.

If your lemmy instance gets unbearable, there will always be another lemmy instance to go to.

If you do use reddit, it should be to post and comment about lemmy to inform the current redditors to move to lemmyverse.