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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
