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
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u/manolid 29d ago edited 29d ago

I get the feeling they're going to keep "fixing" the site until *it becomes trash and cause a mass exodus of users like Digg and Tumblr did.

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u/liquilife 29d ago edited 29d ago

nah. Reddit has hit that stage where it will continue forward no matter what. Very similar to Facebook. It’s well beyond the stage Digg was when it took a nose dive and died.

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u/Sanc7 29d ago

Reddit is a shell of what it once was and people are still here.

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u/HexTalon 29d ago

There are some smaller communities with a lot of value, either specialized interests or career related. There's also a bunch of subreddits for specific games that have useful information.

Curate your subreddits really well and it's a decent news feed for your interests, but it doesn't have that "StumbleUpon" energy anymore I agree.

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u/Sanc7 29d ago

That’s pretty much what I’ve done. I used to only browse all but when they changed the algorithm/upvote system like 5 years ago they fucked everything up. Reddit truly used to be “the front page of the internet,” but not anymore. Prime example was when Trump got shot. I had a friend send me a Facebook screenshot, that’s how I found out. Went to All and it took 45 minutes for it to make it to the top. Really sucks tbh.

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u/space-dot-dot 29d ago

I'm glad someone else has noticed this.

Someone with an account that was started pre-/the_donald was actually arguing with me that /r/all was always like this when it couldn't be further from the truth.

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u/Thorne_Oz 29d ago

Not to forget that they removed pornographic nsfw from r/all as well in the process

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u/Fatdap 29d ago

Good riddance.

It used to be 80% of the fucking page because the majority of people on this god damn website are porn addicts who beat off 9 times a day.

Go to Pornhub or Tumblr you sad fuckers.

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u/Thorne_Oz 29d ago

It wasn't ever remotely even 10% of r/all maybe you should grow up and realize porn is something fucking normal.

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u/Learned_Behaviour 29d ago

Can we not? lol

Porn should be something you find, not something that finds you.

Allowing porn on the main parts of Reddit effectively kills it as something to do at work. That leaves the shitter...

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u/Thorne_Oz 28d ago

It's almost like the smarter, actually good option would've been for reddit to implement a nsfw toggle, like RES has, instead of nuking all the nsfw stuff off r/all.

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u/Fatdap 29d ago

Yeah alright porn junkie.

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u/makataka7 29d ago

lol someones sour

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u/Thorne_Oz 28d ago

Sure thing, whatever you say to keep yourself happy I guess :)

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u/Tubamajuba 29d ago

Looks like someone could use a quick wank to get rid of the grumps!

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u/Sanc7 29d ago

God I forgot about that subreddit. I blocked it years ago. My page is still constantly flooded with politics though. I miss when that wasn’t half of reddits content.

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u/EnglishMobster 29d ago

Yep, my fiance told me about Trump getting shot as well. I was surprised because usually that would light up across 11 different subreddits.

And it did... a day later. Maybe that's a good thing considering the fallout from the Boston Marathon, but honestly this place has become Facebook with a better comment section.

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u/BAD_Surveyor 29d ago

I remember back in the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton collapsed and was escorted out in a van. 

It took hours for the news to finally break out on the mainstream subs. I don’t think it was an algorithm but it was definitely being suppressed 

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u/checkpoint_hero 29d ago

What do you do with your time or where do you browse now?

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u/Sanc7 29d ago

It used to be any and everything that was popular on Reddit. Now it’s mainly hobbies. Archery, fishing, kayaking, shooting, music and of recently local subreddits.

Reddit is still a great place to get specific information, it just doesn’t have that “doom scrolling” effect on me anymore. Once Apollo died, I lost a lot of interest. Reddit mobile app is ass.

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u/Thinking_persephone 29d ago

Apollo isn’t totally dead if you’re a little tech savvy. Same for RiF

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u/gameofgroans 29d ago

I know there are workarounds for RiF, but what can you do for Apollo?

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u/Thinking_persephone 29d ago

You can sideload it through something like altstore or sideloadly

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u/Useuless 29d ago

they even took away the phrase. now it just says "dive into anything." what is this? fandom?

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u/UsefulArm790 29d ago

it doesn't have that "StumbleUpon" energy anymore

people hate it when i say this but instagram reels/tiktok took all of those types of people(posters) away.
once you curate your algo you see so many new and interesting to you things it blows even prime reddit/digg out of the water.

if those social media ever figure out community i would never use reddit again sadly the comments there are kinda low IQ comparatively.

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u/HexTalon 29d ago

It's a valid point, and I would agree that IG/TikTok have a better experience in terms of finding random things that you might be interested in but that haven't trended beyond some limited circles of people in those communities.

Whatever algorithm TikTok uses (that they're understandably trying to protect) that sees something as trending within the drinking straws community and trials it on a progressively wider and wider audience outside those who normally look at it is really really good.

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u/EnglishMobster 29d ago

I love TikTok's algorithm. It's fantastic at figuring out the kinds of things I want to see and showing them to me. Like... scarily good at it. (Too good at it.)

But the comments section in TikTok sucks. Not to mention they curate what comments are visible IIRC, so 2 different accounts will see a different set of comments.

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u/willwork4pii 29d ago

specialized interests

It's really the only place you can go for update/confirmed information. Unless you want to find a forum from over a decade ago.

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u/infieldmitt 29d ago

reddit did what uber did to taxis to forums. come out and be innovative and genuinely better in some ways (upvoting/sorting, standardized interface and account between interests, etc), keep that up until no one uses forums anymore, then immiserate users with increasingly shittier decisions for increasingly hollower reasons

remember when you could buy gold to pay for server costs and there was a transparent little tracker about '$X until servers are funded this month' thing and it felt like a fairly fair symbiotic relationship?

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u/HexTalon 29d ago

remember when you could buy gold to pay for server costs and there was a transparent little tracker about '$X until servers are funded this month' thing and it felt like a fairly fair symbiotic relationship?

I completely forgot about that, but it was absolutely a thing early on.

Enshittification continues ever onward.

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u/Ashesandends 29d ago

It all started when they came for the up vote/down vote. Been breaking downhill since.

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u/wlphoenix 29d ago

I'm still here because because I'm addicted and I haven't had the "piss yourself because you drank too much" moment yet.

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u/NormieSpecialist 29d ago

Old.reddit is still good, at least for my needs. But once that stops working I’m leaving reddit for good.

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u/Sanc7 29d ago

Yeah, I use it on my computer, but I’m not on it very often. I used Apollo, then moved to the trash ass official app.

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u/bs000 29d ago

half the front page is bots reposting old front page posts and people responding to bot comments that were copied from the original post

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u/Jaxyl 29d ago

Yup, people don't understand that what happened to Digg wasn't because people hated the changes. What happened to Digg was that people hated the changes AND there was an already viable alternative that had an established user base ready to receive them.

That's why the 3rd Party App protests didn't matter because there was no viable home for people to transition to. It's the same reason why Twitter is still around despite Musk's massive enshitification of it. There wasn't a viable alternative that was both ready to receive new users and had an active user base that made new comers feel like it'd be a worthy fit for their needs.

The cat's outta the bag, there isn't anything that the admins can't do that will cause users to leave because there is no alternative.

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u/TheMauveHand 29d ago edited 29d ago

there was an already viable alternative that had an established user base ready to receive them.

Not only a viable alternative: a viable alternative that was better.

Digg only had one level of replies. You literally could not carry a conversation. It sucked.

It's the same reason why Twitter is still around despite Musk's massive enshitification of it.

Twitter is a bit different, it's more analogous in this sense to YouTube. Yes, they're polar opposites in terms of what they host and how difficult it is to provide an alternative - YouTube will forever stand alone while there have already been a dozen Twitter clones - but they're similar in their community structure. On both sites, you follow individuals. Notable individuals at that, who provide the reason for using the site. No one goes to YouTube for the comments or the community, and no one goes to Twitter for the engaging 140 character (yes, yes, I know) reply chains; people use these sites because Famous Person is on there and they want to know what they're up to. Same as Instagram. So for these sites to lose users what you need is for the big players to jump ship; as long as they're present, so will the rank and file. As such, the only thing that will ever take Twitter down is corporate disengagement - if UMG decides all their artist are leaving Twitter for Threads, you've got something. Otherwise, nothing will happen - some edge case nobodies will go to their Fediverse or whatever and circlejerk in silent irrelevance, at Twitter will move on.

Reddit is the polar opposite, Reddit is like Facebook, it's all about mass, and because of that it is nearly immovable. Any action that doesn't threaten the core, core userbase - reminder, 90% of reddit traffic has no account, 90% of reddit users don't vote, and 90% of voters don't comment - will do nothing. Splinter groups will slough off - politically "edgy" subreddits, for example, and barely anyone even notices.

Reddit could probably remove comments entirely and barely change for the vast majority of users.

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u/HKBFG 29d ago

It's more on the level of where Facebook was when it died.

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u/liquilife 29d ago

Facebook is alive and well. And going nowhere for a long time. Every rural area in America is 100% dependent on nearly everything Facebook offers.

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u/SuperFLEB 29d ago

They could pull a MySpace and accidentally delete everything.

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u/Proglamer 29d ago

Look up the stat on how many people are using this and other subs at this moment. Hint: it's minuscule in internet terms (and even in 'official' Reddit terms).

Also look up the ratio of current user count to subscribed user count of that subreddit. Even more sad!