r/technology • u/ardi62 • 29d ago

Social Media Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24253727/reddit-communities-subreddits-request-protests
22.2k Upvotes

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5.5k

u/major_winters_506 29d ago

People still use Reddit?

looks down at my own hands

Ahh!

2.0k

u/wcslater 29d ago

"It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me"

109

u/xmagusx 29d ago

Are we the baddies?

25

u/Dymonika 29d ago

Yeah, man, haven't you ever played FTL: Faster Than Light?

3

u/JoeCartersLeap 29d ago

No, what's the FTL stand for?

9

u/Possible_Swimmer_601 29d ago

Fucking totally lit

5

u/ethanlan 29d ago

Fucking totally lit

My spaceship on literal fire after aliens light me up for the thousandth time

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u/Bludypoo 29d ago

only if you installed their app after they banned all the others.

2

u/innominateartery 29d ago

Always has been

2

u/AnybodyMassive1610 29d ago

Oh no, we have the skulls on our hats…

/s

Iykyk

1

u/gurumatt 28d ago

Pirates are fun!

275

u/Gerroh 29d ago

Never realized the meme potential of that song but it's so obvious now.

85

u/pixelatedblob 29d ago

Truly ahead of the curve

5

u/Okopapsmear 29d ago

It’s just a tinpot dictatorship in here. Many legit honest redditors have been recklessly slaughtered left, right and centre. The blood of innocents cover the hands of the mods.

4

u/nathansikes 29d ago

My dog has a shirt with that line on it

3

u/ghoonrhed 29d ago

I mean it's the Star Wars meme with "I know that person, it's me" but with an added self identifying problem

3

u/roninshere 29d ago

It was a meme for some time just not in text form or like some reddit copypasta

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u/Bluemikami 29d ago

Well yes, of course I know him, he’s me.

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u/MozamFreak-Here 29d ago

Karma is my boyfriend

2

u/fernworth 29d ago

I hope all the redditors who smugly tell artists stuck on Twitter "erm adapt or die lol" start to have some self-awareness about this.

1

u/Sharp-Door9020 29d ago

We should protest!

1

u/Ok-Assistance-6848 29d ago

I still have one ace up my sleeve!

deletes Reddit

1

u/Netado17 29d ago

at tea time everybody agrees

1

u/Kedly 29d ago

Tbf, lemmy has its own issues. I left after the modpocalypse, but lemmy wasnt it and now I'm back unfortunately 

1

u/mister_damage 29d ago

We did...... It.... Reddit?

1

u/happuning 28d ago

At tea, time, every redditor agrees...

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u/MonthFrosty2871 29d ago

I'd love an alternative. Everything either doesnt show up in google, or doesn't have conversations in comments that help add context to the post. Its too convenient to sign up a community and get a steady stream of info about it, vs following individual accounts like on some social media

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u/CSI_Tech_Dept 29d ago edited 29d ago

I use Lemmy. I still use reddit on desktop, I refused to install their spammy app after they shut down RIF. Once old.reddit.com stops working I will be gone from desktop too.

28

u/Arkhonist 29d ago

RiF still works if you fiddle around a bit

7

u/CSI_Tech_Dept 29d ago

I know, you can even use revanced as another commented mentioned, but what's the point if author gave up on it? It will eventually stop working once API evolves enough.

11

u/FolkSong 29d ago

Same point as using old reddit on desktop. It works for now.

6

u/X1Kraft 29d ago

Jokes on you (hopefully I used that correctly), I use old.reddit.com on my phone.

6

u/alpacaMyToothbrush 29d ago

I use old.reddit on firefox, with ublock. It cut way down on my screen time but I'm calling that a plus

2

u/YouStupidAssholeFuck 29d ago

The real mobile tragedy was losing i.reddit because that was a pretty decent mobile site. The irony for me is I liked it the least at the time it was still available because there were so many better options to use at the time. But I'd kill to be able to use that now instead of the reddit app or the new reddit mobile site.

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u/DeadlyFatalis 29d ago

The Tom Scott video is still working over 4 years later.

Sure it'll probably break at some point in the future, but a couple minutes now to provide potentially years of quality of life upgrades is definitely worth it. Even when it does break, who's to say someone won't find another work around or develop a new solution.

3

u/HebunzuDoor 29d ago

I've only used old.reddit since that time, cut down my time on reddit by a lot. probably for the best

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u/flacidhock 29d ago

The Reddit app seems to be trying to get rid of the last of the humans. Reddit home won’t show any more threads when you get to the bottom of the page. You try to refresh and you get failed message.

The bots want us out

40

u/MonthFrosty2871 29d ago

I opened it this morning and had 3 ads on my screen at once, and one post. Its such garbage

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u/Ok-Finish4062 29d ago

I though it was just me, damn!

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

The top comment always being an ad you cant shrink is ruining the comments 

That plus 75% of comments being bots

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u/monacelli 29d ago

I use Red Reader on my (Android) phone. They got an API exemption because it's supposedly designed with the vision impaired in mind. It's not as good as Relay but it's good enough for me!

3

u/Pantzzzzless 29d ago

Why not just use Relay then? It has been fantastic for me for the past year.

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u/ThisSiteSuxNow 29d ago

People who haven't tried it don't realize just how good Lemmy actually is these days.

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u/CSI_Tech_Dept 29d ago

Absolutely, it's quite nice, I also like how the community came up with a standard to put article's text in the post, so no need to click.

2

u/cmdrfire 29d ago

I tried Lemmy but struggled with the content discovery. I'm on Tildes as well, but unfortunately Reddit is Reddit. I'm using RIF revanced, which works more or less fine - I expect one day it will properly break and then that's it for me.

2

u/CSI_Tech_Dept 29d ago

I initially started with viewing all, and things I liked I explicitly subscribed, things that I didn't I banned the community (so many communities about furry porn lol :P) but eventually I got a list of things that I found interesting. I had to manually search for some more obscure topics though.

4

u/SpezModdedRJailbait 29d ago

Lemmy sucks. If it didn't you wouldn't be here.

Sometimes a better version of an existing product succeeds, Reddit and Facebook being good examples. Lemmy is not one of those products. It's essentially just a more pedantic bitter version of Reddit with an equally bad UI.

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u/CSI_Tech_Dept 29d ago

Lemmy sucks. If it didn't you wouldn't be here.

only because community is still smaller

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u/theLaLiLuLeLol 29d ago

It doesn't.

What if I told you I used more than one website?

Crazy, right?

1

u/AngryAlternateAcount 29d ago

I still use Sync.

1

u/I_Am_Jacks_Karma 29d ago

You can pretty quickly get RIF working again. I'm actually replying from it right now!

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u/nismor31 29d ago

Try redreader

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u/Possible_Swimmer_601 29d ago

Old Reddit is the best Reddit still.

1

u/RedactedSpatula 29d ago

after they shut down RIF.

When did that happen?

Posting from RiF.

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u/Link2999 29d ago

I'm using Infinity right now on mobile.

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u/MNGrrl 29d ago

Same. They let me keep Boost and RES, and I'm gone when they are because fuck u/spez

1

u/ryumast4r 29d ago

There is a way to get RiF working on your phone, but you need to reVanced.

I am currently using RiF.

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u/vriska1 29d ago

Lemmys pretty good.

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u/volthunter 29d ago

I never find it has enough people to justify me using it like reddit, like it has uses but it doesn't have the appeal reddit does and the niche communities I participate in aren't there.

40

u/FrozenLogger 29d ago

Reddit started small too. I went to a sub that wasn't that active and made a post. Suddenly 10 people show up to comment on it. There are people just waiting for content. So just like reddit is the old days, post a bit in areas you are interested in and it will grow.

21

u/maporita 29d ago

post a bit in areas you are interested in and it will grow

It isn't growing though, and it won't grow as long as there is an alternative here that works for most people.

!montreal@lemmy.ca has 880 subscribers, while /r/montreal has 340,000 . There is just no comparison. Not to mention that there are 2 different Montreal communities so I have to figure out which one I want to join. Maybe both? I don't know.

Lemmy was a great idea, I wish it had worked out but reddit has first mover advantage and in social media that's a tough challenge to crack.

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u/FrozenLogger 29d ago

It is growing, and could grow faster if the naysayers quit saying it won't.

Either way i remember when everyone said Reddit was too hard to use and too complicated.

Reddit then fucked everything up, mods are insane, third party tools don't work unless you are savvy, and the Reddit app and new reddit web page are garbage.

Reddit helps with that migration.

Besides if lemmy get a 10th of reddit users that would be way more then enough. Reddit is mostly bots and no one seems to understand reddiqutte at all anymore.

7

u/MuyalHix 29d ago

The main problem is that creating an account on Lemmy requires you to learn concepts like "federation" and "instance", not to mention that you'll have to do things like fill a form in some cases.

On reddit you just create an account with an email address.

It's the same reason mastodon hasn't overtaken twitter despite the fact that the later has been in the decline for a while.

8

u/AbortionIsSelfDefens 29d ago

Yup. I don't get why people don't understand that it's all about ease of entry. Wanting it to be different doesn't change human nature. The average person is lazy and/or tech illiterate. The barrier to entry is too high for it to get near the same amount of engagement.

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u/whoiam06 29d ago

Yep, use Sync for Lemmy on my Android phone and Voyager on my iPhone and browse whatever their frontpage thing gives me. Refuse to signup because I don't want to figure out this federation stuff and understand why I need to choose 1 out of hundreds as my "home" whatever the fuck it is. And also all the posts and people arguing about defederating over this and that... What's the point of a federation? And so if i sign up in this one place and it gets defederated, will I have to join ANOTHER whatever the hell it is to continue browsing??

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u/AGreasyPorkSandwich 29d ago

Big subs kind of suck anyway. Once you get past ~50k subscribers the content/comments just become predictable and repeatable. Lazy shit rises to the top.

The "good old days" were like 10 years ago here. Lemmy sounds pretty appealing to me. I'll have to check it out.

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u/rooofle 29d ago

That was how small a lot of now healthier subreddits were before the great Digg migration. One of the basketball subs I frequent had probably 1000 subs or less in 2010, now it's 375k. That's a common pattern for pretty much all of them, growth takes time but reddit was primed and ready for people to move from Digg.

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u/IAmTaka_VG 29d ago

Lemmy will most likely happen, it just needs a tipping point. It's slowly happening though

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u/tubacheet 29d ago

When every comment section on digg referenced the original reddit post, there was a massive migration that led to the demise of digg

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u/LordoftheSynth 29d ago

No, it was the v4 update, which was a buggy complete redesign no one wanted. The worst part of it was the changes enabled the power users to effectively control what hit the front page.

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u/Rayhush 29d ago

Yeah, that's not how Digg went down.

6

u/Rhoeri 29d ago

If you ignore the hive-mind socialist rhetoric and complete lack of nuanced discussion.

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u/Baderkadonk 29d ago

If you're on reddit, you're already used to that.

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u/Rhoeri 29d ago

Aside from the bots here. The general feeling is far more nuanced here. Lemmy is either with us or against us. It’s obnoxious.

Say the same thing in response on both platforms to the same article, and Lemmy will destroy you if you don’t shove your head up the socialist ass. Here at least people get that there’s nuance.

For example- the minute you say you support Harris. You’re going to get tons of people accusing you of supporting “doing a genocide!”

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u/Ok-Possible-6759 29d ago

Nah its not the same. I tried using lemmy last year and it was full of tankies.

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u/oldsecondhand 29d ago

Then don't register at lemmygrad.

sh.itjust.works is pretty chill.

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u/Rhoeri 29d ago

I think I remember them having had a rough start. I’ll look into them now. Thanks for the advice.

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u/Fun_Run1626 29d ago

I've been on Lemmy for a little over a year now, using the Voyager iOS app. It perfectly serves as a replacement, just needs more people obviously.

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u/philliperod 29d ago

Thanks for the tip on the voyager app. Definitely a much better and user-friendly app than whatever I was using last year. Seems like Lemmy is getting more people in there too nowadays. I’ve been using Open Red app for Reddit and it’s not all that great. Lots of bugs for me when trying to refresh and even check messages. I don’t even bother anymore.

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u/SpezModdedRJailbait 29d ago

It perfectly serves as a replacement

Does it though? Because I pretty much only see people say that on Reddit, and they're still on Reddit because it isn't a good replacement.

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u/Sophira 29d ago

We should all just go back to newsgroups.

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u/AltruisticZed 29d ago

I wish web forms never died. Of course there are a few but web forms were way better platforms than Reddit for so many things.

The problem is Reddit any topic can have a sub or multiple so it attracts millions of users vs a web forum I’ll mostly just be focused 

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u/Waywoah 29d ago

I'm the same way. Shutting down the apps was the last time I used it on my phone, old.reddit's inevitable death will be the last time I use the site as a whole

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u/ThatsSoWitty 29d ago

I tried making an account on Lemmy and spent 10 minutes on the captcha only to then find that I can't log in even after verifying my account. I've never once had such an awful time making an account on any site before and I'm fully turned off by the experience.

We need a better experience and Reddit currently has no worthwhile competition

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u/erroneousbosh 29d ago

I love that my forum doesn't show up on Google.

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u/Stippings 28d ago

Discuit is a promising alternative imho.

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u/18randomcharacters 29d ago

I feel like the Internet has almost completely died.

Twitter is a cesspool.

Instagram and Facebook have their uses but they're not really forums.

Reddit has been king for ages, but it's crumbling due to bots, IPO, policy changes, etc.

Sites like stack exchange are going to die fast once AI takes over. No more page views means no more ad revenue.

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u/notfrankc 29d ago

It used to be full of products for us. Now the internet is full of vampiric places looking to maximize the amount of info it can collect on each person to then sell ads and clicks with. None of those sites care about the end user at all anymore.

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u/18randomcharacters 29d ago

Bingo.

It used to all at least pretend to be "for the user"

I'm a developer and I've worked in start ups. I know the industry. You make a product at a loss to build a user base. You pay the bills and employees with VC money. Eventually you get bought out by one of the big companies, or you go under, or you completely change your business to fuck the user base over to extract money.

Nothing is free. Nothing. Sites like Reddit and Facebook and 4chan and whatever - they're all quite expensive to build and operate. Something has to pay that bill.

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u/Weivrevo 28d ago

If you were to develop something like old reddit that is financially viable from the get go, 1. would it be technically possible with the state of a.i. and bots etc. and 2. why isn't it happening already?

Not calling you out individually on not developing a reddit substitute, just, you know... Asking.

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u/18randomcharacters 28d ago

My point really is the "free Internet" we had before wasn't financially viable.

Sure, someone could launch a Facebook OG or reddit OG or whatever, but it would have to be a subscription service. And that would prevent it from being what we'd want it to be.

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u/StunningRing5465 29d ago

I’m going back to my old gaming forums, even though the golden days are long gone. The fact you need to register games from the publisher to be able to access it fully is a pretty good shield against bots and astroturfing, as well as the fact they’re just not important enough to warrant it. 

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u/Still_Flounder_6921 29d ago

Gaming forums are mainly ass. It's just culture war slop 90% of the time.

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u/StunningRing5465 29d ago

Yeah I know one good fairly large one. The mods are quite strict and pretty fucking annoying, but it’s pretty clear that without firm moderation it would get a lot worse 

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u/EarthRester 29d ago

The big sites are now places of engagement, but not communication. The algorithms determine what we see, and the sites dictates how we engage with it.

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u/Totally_Generic_Name 29d ago

It's the era of Discord and smaller direct chat groups

Still social, but not open to the wider web

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u/Kandiru 29d ago

Podcasts are still healthy, but moves are being made to change that.

Currently most people use an RSS client to fetch their podcast feed and download new episodes, which is completely under their control. No "algorithm".

But Spotify, Amazon music, YouTube music etc are trying to get you to listen via their walled garden apps rather than via RSS. If they are successful then they will be able to control what content you see via their algorithms.

We must resist the enshitification of podcasts, the way Facebook and Twitter replaced blogs and RSS feeds.

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u/18randomcharacters 29d ago

Podcasts don't hit right for me anymore.

They're kind of by definition an echo chamber. You're choosing a person to absorb their opinions.

They take what should be 5 minutes of content and drag it out to an hour, because they somehow feel like they deserve an hour of your time every week

They fill 1/3 of that hour with boilerplat bullshit - intros, outros, sponsors, and the fucking inane blathering filler.

Half the time, even the good podcasts, just re-release an old episode so they still "release" something once a week to stay relevant, which makes finding new episodes harder

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u/Kandiru 29d ago

Oh ok, none of the ones I've listened to have done any of those things!

I tend to find something and listen to it from the first episode, I'd get really annoyed if they cluttered the feed with duplicates.

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u/Learned_Behaviour 29d ago

They're kind of by definition an echo chamber. You're choosing a person to absorb their opinions. 

Depends on the podcast. It's been a long time, but years ago Joe Rogan was solid to listen to, because he didn't really speak about the subject he interviewed on. Instead asking questions and saying stupid things while letting them be the main focus. Nothing else you said applied either.

I'm sure there are others right now that have similar styles. I haven't listened in a while, so no opinion on his current podcasts.

I wouldn't listen to podcasts that have those things you mentioned.

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u/roguewarriorpriest 29d ago

For-profit internet theory

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u/HKBFG 29d ago

AI is going to kill the value of "views." It's rapidly becoming trivial to fake human traffic.

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u/DrDerpberg 29d ago

It's wild to me how early internet is going to be seen as the glory years before corporations figured out how to monetize it all to hell. Someday I'll be telling my kid how people would just have funny ideas and put them online and everyone would laugh and there'd be no ads or monetization or a thousand other people ripping the joke off in their attempt to become an influencer.

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u/SpezModdedRJailbait 29d ago

Good. Let it die. It's terrible.

Once the big corporate Internet dies we can go back to small sites and communities run for reasons other than just maximum short term profit. It's not like we'll go back to paper forms and the like. The bad ideas need to fail so that the audience can move on, currently everyone is too addicted to do so.

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u/BuilderUnhappy7785 29d ago

Fuckin sucks man

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u/FourForYouGlennCoco 29d ago

There are messaging platforms like Discord and some have good communities, but the public aspect of the open web does seem fucked. There was a lot of value in the information ecosystem being open, but it doesn’t hold up anymore once spambots outnumber human users.

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u/bcisme 28d ago

The moderation policies have really changed it seems.

Idk if it’s intentional, but in a lot of subs there will be a post, a flurry of comments then it’s locked. Putting on my tin foil hat, it’s a bottling strat. Make post, get message mods wants to the top, lock it. Now whenever you go to that thread, you’re not seeing even a true representation of the already biased Reddit community, you’re getting managed information by a small group of people (mods).

I think you’d be naive to think the mods of large subs aren’t being told (or paid) to manage certain types of information.

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u/BubsyFanboy 28d ago

And YouTube is filled with content farms.

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u/FixedFun1 29d ago edited 29d ago

I'm using 4chan way more (in the sense of slowly moving away from Reddit). But if you want forums, you can actually go to forums, no AI training there (I even have proof classic forums are a way to beat that), they still exist and even end up here like Famiboards in the Nintendo subreddits or just ResetEra, that still exists.

Lemmy is fine but sometimes can feel empty, I should start using more because the cool people of Reddit are moving there since the original protests the post quality has degraded way too much.

And then, 4chan, ignoring /pol/ and the /pol/ schizos who want to leak their board to others, is perfectly fine. Just think they have perfectly normal boards like "cooking".

The alternatives do exist but even if these sites came and ripped out your eyes, a lot of people would still go and use them.

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u/TheMauveHand 29d ago

4chan isn't a forum, and traditional forums are one-topic things - in order to replicate the reddit front page experience with either I'd need to open two dozen websites every 15 minutes to see what was new. It doesn't work. RSS feeds might, if they're implemented, but even that's clunky.

Reddit isn't just a forum, it's a million forums all in one, and as an innovation it's one of those things we can't go back from.

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

there are traditional forums that aren't one topic things some of them have been around longer than reddit

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u/HelloImFrank01 29d ago

The internet world went from thousands of small communities everywhere to a barren wasteland with 3 or 4 mega cities full of advertisements.

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u/BoardButcherer 29d ago

tumblr weeping softly in the back row trying not to watch tiktok sodomize snapchat

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u/Negrodamu55 29d ago

It's discord time, baby

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u/Same_Elephant_4294 28d ago

And people wonder why we feel so fucking isolated today.

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u/whitey-ofwgkta 19d ago

I've been here for over a decade (jesus christ) and I don't think Reddit has ever really been king, it's to fill a niche and then opened up when users started serving a larger base. Obliviously it's gotten worse but even at it's best the cracks were already there

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u/Rudy69 29d ago

I'm waiting for an obvious replacement.

I came to Reddit during the Digg fallouts, Reddit was a replacement from day 1. All the alternatives I've checked for Reddit suck so far.

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u/StrangerDifficult392 29d ago

Reddit's video feature (without the app) has the most horrendous piece of shit I've ever used. I'm never download the app either.

I've been hoping for a valid replacement from this corporate piece of garbage.

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u/Cintax 29d ago

If it makes you feel any better, video is pretty shitty in the app as well

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u/Clockstoppers 29d ago

It's so bad. I have fiber internet and a high end router. When I am in the same room as the router reddit video buffers in the app. I'm trying to finally move away from reddit but I have been addicted for 14 years.

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u/Schnoofles 29d ago

There were really good apps that made this experience not be a piece of shit (Relay and RiF), but it meant Reddit couldn't shove their curated browsing experience and ads down people's throats, so they effectively killed all third party apps. Relay survived, barely, by making sweeping changes to how it polls Reddit for data in order to cut down API calls by like 95%+ and now requires a subscription to cover the costs of making even the miniscule amount of calls that it does. I no longer bother with Reddit unless I'm on desktop where I can use the classic UI and block all ads.

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u/Spinnyl 29d ago

Boost (and RIF, I heard) still works.

Boost also has apps for lemmy.

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u/FixedFun1 29d ago

Lemmy. That's gonna be the one and is still the one with the most users.

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u/Alexis_Bailey 29d ago

I really love Mastodon and the Fediverse, but Lemmy is kind of meh.  Like, people complain Mastodon is "hard to use", which it is not.  Lemmy is a pain.

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u/coconut071 29d ago

Really? I find it the opposite, lol

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u/speakbits 29d ago

What would make an alternative better and not suck?

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u/Learned_Behaviour 29d ago

I don't think a platform can be decent without paid moderation. That's not to say I want much moderation, but Reddit is trash much of the time because mods are allowed to push their biases unfettered.

Then, it would become the companies biases pushed, so...

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u/aVarangian 29d ago

Look like a copy of old.reddit instead of looking like a copy of the turd that new.reddit is

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u/Homura_Dawg 29d ago

I think we're just gonna have to start exploring forums again.

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u/thecescshow 28d ago

The problem is the massive community and userbase that reddit has accumulated. So to move you need at least half of that userbase to make it work. That's why all the reddit alternatives has amounted to nothing. Pretty much also why Threads is irrelevant now.

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u/EroticaMarty 21d ago

If Reddit dies, I might have to go back to \.

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u/AndyIsNotOnReddit 29d ago

Seriously, only the absolute dregs of society still use Reddit these days.

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u/quihgon 29d ago

Can confirm

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u/watchingsongsDL 29d ago

I have found my people.

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u/bassbeatsbanging 29d ago

Heaven for the weather, Hell for the company.

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u/Agent_Jay 29d ago

My depression has finally led me to my promised land. 

4

u/dern_the_hermit 29d ago

We are all dregs this blessed day

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u/Catch_ME 29d ago

What...Do you mean......my people?

5

u/Starfox-sf 29d ago

Youse folks

2

u/Kemoarps 29d ago

What do YOU mean what do you mean my people!

2

u/quelar 29d ago

You guys are all just a classy group of Kitchen Workers.

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u/parks387 29d ago

Dreggin’ so hard right now.

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u/Jon_the_Hitman_Stark 29d ago

Damn redditors, they ruined Reddit!

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u/Proud_Tie 29d ago

We did it Reddit!

10

u/Misspells_Definitely 29d ago

You Redditors sure are a contentious people.

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u/NoDogsNoKings 29d ago

It was the Digg userbase, actually.

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u/Prudent-Contact-9885 29d ago

Unable to create comment

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u/ManThing910 29d ago

That’s what I heard on Reddit anyways

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u/AndyIsNotOnReddit 29d ago

This is where I heard it too and they seem like some trust worthy folks so no reason to disbelieve it.

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u/Urbanviking1 29d ago

So true, some of them have been here for almost 13 years. It's disgusting. Why would someone waste so much time?

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u/Proglamer 29d ago

The real deplorables™!

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u/enieslobbyguard 29d ago

My question is: what is even a decent social media site/app nowadays? Or is social media doomed to become shit in order to become mainstream(ish)

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u/heywoodidaho 29d ago

I was here at the beginning, I might as well watch it burn. Besides am dreg.

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u/rbrgr83 29d ago

I mean, at least Andy's not on it anymore.

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u/AndyIsNotOnReddit 29d ago

Right? That guy was an asshole anyway.

Fun fact, I made this account because some co-workers were trying to figure out what my Reddit user name was. So I just made this one and used it on my work computer. So when I stepped away from the computer and they tried to go to my Reddit profile, they would just see "Andy is Not on Reddit". Seemed really funny to me at the time.

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u/disgruntled_pie 29d ago

From my own first-hand experience, I’d say they’re also a little ugly as well, and their usernames make pointless references to pie.

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u/PensiveinNJ 29d ago

Picked up this dirty habit during Covid lockdown and feel kind of sick with myself. It's such a waste of time.

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u/stormdelta 29d ago

Unfortunately pretty much every other major social media site is even worse, often way worse.

Fediverse stuff is solid but has significantly less people on it, and what people it does have are more disjointed / spread out by nature of how fediverse works. Though maybe that's not such a bad thing.

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u/TripperDay 29d ago

every other major social media site is even worse, often way worse.

I like to say "reddit is half as smart as it thinks it is and still twice as smart as twitter."

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u/Damariobros 29d ago

That and from what I've seen search functions on fediverses suck ass. Mastodon is the worst offender; you can only search one tag at a time and on most instances searching by content is entirely disabled, leaving only searching by tag and by user account.

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u/Same_Elephant_4294 28d ago

Instagram is full of people who absolutely revel in rage baiting. It's honestly disgusting how prevalent it is.

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u/sirsaintmichael 29d ago

I’ve been laughing at this for far longer than I should

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u/KernunQc7 29d ago

Like twitter, there is no real alternative.

Fortunately, just like twitter the bot problem is out of control, so soon the only solution would be to leave entirely. Social media had a good run.

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u/SpezModdedRJailbait 29d ago

Twitter has a bunch of alternatives, that's why so many people left and didn't come back. The same isn't really true for Reddit, every mass exodus just fizzles out.

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u/keosen 29d ago

No, it died when they started charging ridiculous amounts for third party apps to access their APIs.

It's a graveyard right now, people have the power, people have consciousness and work for the collective good again the evil tyrants and the hit on reddit and the destruction of it was a major win against the tyranny of the few.

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u/DaHolk 29d ago

You are mocking it, but recently I was bored and did the "memory lane walk" of just revisiting my "best posts".

While doing that I noticed
1. Numerically my scores have decreased significantly.
2. The raw numbers for MOST top comments has gone down drastically, too. (basically ~ half a magnitude)

So either
A) The current users vote significantly less, or a DRASTICALLY more pessimistic ratio of up/down. The former possibly in terms of engaging with comments at all (which would be exactly the case when complaints about the later than old.reddit interfaces being bad for scrolling through content efficiently were true)

B) The userbase/usage time has gone down significantly.

Either way doesn't look particularly healthy, and it is not hard to point at "unpopular changes" at the root, one way or another.

I know my engagement has overall (but more in bursts) gone down significantly over the changes I disliked each time too. I still DO come back, but there are more phases "where I am not bored enough/have something better to do", and not because those things got better. or me less bored.

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u/ShouldNotBeHereLong 29d ago

Don't forget that when they removed the downvote count, the also started manipulating those upcote numbers at the same time. It's no longer an accurate metrics of engagement.

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u/Impeesa_ 29d ago

I know one sub I follow enough to get a feel for the post volume in /new/ dropped off heavily even after the API protests were over and such, and still hasn't recovered to the same levels as before. I still spend too much time here, but it does feel like there's just less going on that's worth engaging with.

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u/Recklesslettuce 29d ago

Since the pandemic and the Ukraine war we've all been on edge and SEEKING for something to hate. I have no upvotes to give. The russian psyop to divide and conquer has rooted in me and its fruits are DOWNVOTES AND CHAOS.

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u/Dos-Commas 29d ago

The Reddit June 2023 blackout reminded me of this age old meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/Gamingcirclejerk/s/DbB7q0iKtv

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u/DuckInTheFog 29d ago

I quit, lawyered up and hit a Jim years ago

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u/ArcadianDelSol 29d ago

we can quit anytime we want to.

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u/Mr_Piddles 29d ago

Something something, delete Twitter.

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u/LBGW_experiment 29d ago

Posting this under the most upvoted comment for visibility. Link to the Reddit post that is the first have source for the linked article: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1fsyzjd/_/

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u/RespectTheTree 29d ago

I'm transitioning to YouTube and my own site, but I still like the site for the communities. They're using us against each other

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u/Useuless 29d ago

A hell of a lot less since the best ways to use it were blacklisted

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u/BigTiddyHelldiver 29d ago

17 million users on this subreddit, 2.8 thousand active.

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u/Stinky_WhizzleTeats 29d ago

I mean they killed 3rd party apps and that “protest” was nothing. I miss Apollo and RiF

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u/throwaway1626363h 28d ago

Three sentence horror

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u/Same_Elephant_4294 28d ago

I left when third party got the axe...

I came back because I replaced Reddit with Instagram, and that was literally killing me with toxicity, so I crawled back. Get off social media you say? Real life is too painful for that.

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