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?
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Some communities were unaffected. Some are still shut down. Some replaced mods who wouldn’t play by spez’s rules.
I’m not sure what the data would look like or how one would obtain it. Number of active moderators per day? Moderator satisfaction survey? Change in posting habits of top 1% posters?
I am speaking purely anecdotally from communities I know that shut down entirely and moderators who left. I have no way to estimate the scale of the exodus.
