Reddit updates look after rough 6 months and ahead of reported IPO::“Edit: Obligatory ‘F— Spez’ for karma.”
reposting one of the worst things i’ve ever heard someone say:
“There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
eat my ass spez
To be fair we did assemble, just in a different comment. Learn to recognize art noob
I knew people who needed the help of some of the subreddits he might be going on about, that is absolutely fucking disgusting.
Also I thought this was in the Ars article, but no, this was in an interview with the New York Times during the peak of the API protests!
Yeah… I don’t know if the person you’re mentioning meant productive stuff or not, but I was in a pretty niche community there. One where parents were dealing with their kids on operating tables, but not often. It was as exactly the kind of thing internet forums were made for: medical advice from doctors, venting and whatnot from strangers who’d been there. I said a lot of practical helpful things and a lot of meaningless nice platitudes at the right time.
And I was happy to do it the same way I swapped guitar tabs as a kid.
There’s honest money in making a community space.
There’s no honest money in monetizing a community.
I dont have any direct experience with reddit any longer.
What I can say, is that I think a verrrrrrry significant portion of comments and commenters are actually reddit run bots. My source for this is my experience in the daily thread of a certain degenerate gambling forum. There were maybe like 12-30 posters who would reply, engage, etc… in the daily and day after threads. However, there was a yyyyyuuuuugggge number of accounts that would just comment with no real further engagement. Like you would respond to them, but they wouldnt respond back.
I truly believe that reddits internal business model is predicted on the use of reddit run bots to create synthetic engagement in certain audiences around marketing targets that a selective group of advertisers (read, not buying reddit ads) are given access to. The basics is that reddit astroturfs synthetic engagement until organic engagement takes over. I have no way of proving this and its pure speculation.
This is why I don’t even worry about considering the user numbers on lemmy. Relying on my anectdotal experience, we’ve got about the usership/ engagement numbers from around the 2009-2011 time period, which is actually pretty amazing. Also, the overall lemmy experience is far superior, for example, just the ability to sort by a couple of different ‘hot’ options is a major improvement. I really think if the devs just keep vibing on their plan, lemmy will be more than strong enough to survive and continue for decades to come.
The fact is that reddit stole from us our faith in a ‘good internet’. The users of reddit built reddit, not the company that owns it (they suck). The users of reddit paid for the server time and made the system work. That good faith was utterly exploited by the leadership of reddit and we should never forget how they stole from and exploited their community.
It’s not just speculation on your part.
How it started:
https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/
How it’s going:
They also started handing out usernames to companies over “trademark infringement.” Someone with the username “FoodNetwork” is losing the username to the real Food Network.
I was on reddit long enough to remember how people used to run corporate stooges out with pitchforks.
“These are fan run forums,” they would say. The idea that you could have your username taken by a corporation was unheard of, because originally, it was considered really bad form to have anyone from the business running the subreddit, because then it wouldn’t be a neutral source of information.
Nope, now they can steal usernames and it’s totes okay for subreddits to be completely controlled by their corporate namesake.
You’re absolutely right about most of it. My only criticism is the first paragraph as I am notorious for just commenting and not responding. Literally if you reply I won’t respond lol but I can’t imagine I’m the only one. A better way to sniff them out would be profiling them and finding things like hobby subs where they would be significantly more likely to comment vs addiction subs where they may feel some shame in interacting or engaging in their addiction.
I’m pretty stupid so I could be talking out my ass but I figured input for data collection and such.
I am not saying you are wrong, but when I was active on Reddit I rarely checked my mail. I still have like 12k unread messages.
You’d be surprised. Lots of people live like this, with all their devices and accounts. Ever piling up never read messages, whether emails, texts, or DMs. I don’t know if they’re just fine with it or if its something psychological making that many messages seem to big to approach, or because they don’t want to hear everyone’s cruel responses to what they said or I don’t know. But people do use accounts like that, for sure.
Oh oh… can we look forward to another wave of reddit leavers after inevitable changes to the site to please investors?
Anyone who didn’t leave when old.reddit.com stopped being the default isn’t going to leave over any other redesigns. They couldn’t possibly be worse.
The fall of Digg didn’t happen in one single wave.
Lots of people just want to stay with what they’re familiar with, and it takes loss of critical mass of content/interaction before they’ll look at the door.
I mean it really was a single wave. V4 or whatever version it was fundamentally changed the way Digg worked in a big way overnight. It wasn’t even the same thing anymore. Sure there were some holdovers but it’s tough to compare the two like this.
With the exception of third party apps, Reddit still more or less works the same for the average user as it has forever.
I think there might be another wave when old.reddit.com stops working, a number of people still access it that way, despite it not being well known by the modern reddit audience.
I’m kind of looking forward to that. I don’t have an account there anymore, but I still check old.reddit.com because it’s quick enough scan the homepage on my phone when I’m waiting on something. Dropping old would help me break that habit very easily.
See, we made the holes in the d’s look like little talking bubbles. We’re not evil. We’re cuuuuuute. Money please!
At least they didn’t rename themselves to “Y” I guess… Though that would be mildly hilarious.
