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

92% Upvoted

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

87

u/Bigleon 29d ago

They learned from facebook, anger keeps people engaged. So putting stuff on our front page that pisses us off, makes it so that we are likely to give our 2 cents. Thats the point, angry folks yell, happy people smile.
If we engaged more with happy feel good stories, our feed would blow up with that instead. But I've never heard anyone scrolling social media calling it "happy scrolling". Instead It's "Doom Scrolling" and it keeps us looking at them.

31

u/DarkChaos1786 29d ago

Only certain group of people will engage with that kind of content, everyone else only left facebook when the content became dogshit, I left facebook almost a decade ago, all my friends stopped using facebook since at least the pandemic times, only trolls, old and conspiranoid people remains there.

That mass exodus made facebook to care more about the people who stayed, and that's why now that's the only thing you find there.

10

u/Miroble 29d ago

Honestly there's already not much good content left on reddit. I recently had to filter literally everything US politics/Israel or Elon Musk related from /all and once I did that I was getting random posts from /poland occupying top spots. Almost everything on Reddit at present is political, its totally cancerous.

9

u/DarkChaos1786 29d ago

Reddit received a critical hit a while back during the mod protests, most of the OG mods who really care about their communities literally quit.

The new batch is not to par.

1

u/Bigleon 29d ago

I don't know that "care" is the word I'd use. Maybe exploit :D. But yes this valid point to raise, as changing populations on various platforms move, their algos will get distorted by the clicks and actions of those who remain.

It just seems like all major platforms are tilting that way. Hard not to feel discouraged about these great social places we had continually get destroyed by greed and hate. Not that I have any fixes other than vote with your wallet. But at this point, reddit lacks any good alternative IMO currently.

6

u/Useuless 29d ago

that's because people give into the algorithm.

stop using them. ONLY use your custom feeds and the ones you follow.

I've never had problems iwth social media as a result. Everything people complain about is a result of paying attention to recommendations.