- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.world
‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit::A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever
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I deleted all my posts and stopped using the place almost entirely. I go back, like, once a month because I moderate a niche subreddit that I haven’t been able to find a home for on Lemmy.
Completely quit Reddit. It’s a shame that the article fails to mention the fediverse as a new rising alternative in response to enshittification.
2024 will have mentions of ActivityPub and Fediverse.
While traffic has not changed substantially, many users report the quality of content and the kinds of posts that are surfaced on user homepages now seem different.
While traffic has not changed substantially
has not changed
It’s long write up with a misguiding title. No numbers to back anything after a protest phase. And with problems with API access, there won’t be any from unaffilated sources.
I did found my favorite communities dropped some in activity and I myself access it just like once in a week or two from a desktop, signed off. But it didn’t die. Default subs can’t care and most NSFW posters are still there.
The important thing though is that Lemmy grew a lot. And it’s now enough to have a hit of that reddit poison. And, arguably, it feels a little bit more personal.
It feels a lot more like Reddit used to be, back in the old days. It feels less like social media and more like actual people are here.
This. While yeah at times it certainly feels a bit empty, Lemmy feels like old Reddit or maybe even the days of Forums before. Interesting, engaged discussions, rather than vapid one-liners that reddit ultimately became.
Yeah and it even hits that wierd hardcore nerd vibe that reddit used to where it was like 50% programmers and IT people and you’d see computer geek in-jokes everywhere
Completely stopped using Reddit since they blocked third party apps in July 2023. I never accessed Reddit through other channels than smartphone.
That’s why I’m here too 🤝
I’ve been slowly getting back into reddit lately. While I want Lemmy to thrive and will keep contributing to help it do so it’s still hardly a replacement for reddit. Compared to it, Lemmy is basically a single moderately active subreddit. If I had to name a type of person Lemmy at its current state is ideal for I’d say a left-wing activist type whose into tech and politics. While that has some overlap with what I’m interested about it still leaves out all my deepest passions and to be honest I feel really uncomfortable knowingly being in such an obvious echo chamber. I’d really wish there was more of the kind of users here that most of you probably dont want. Just to even things out a bit.
My problem with Lemmy is that it seems/ feels empty.
This might be a me-issue, not doing something right but all I see is technology & politics articles.
I’m subscribed to many communities (like multiple anime communities) and I barely to not see them). I quite miss the conversations on Lemmy.
However going back to Reddit seems to be no point either, everyone just repeat what another one said - or just people fighting each other.
For example; saw a Reddit thread about relationships. Everyone just echo-chamber “leave the relationship”. But what happened to adults just communicating to each other? Lol
And God forbid you’re anywhere right of Marx himself or you’ll get people telling you you’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Like come on, we want 95% of the same stuff, let’s just work together and have some productive discussions and enrich our political mindsets instead of flinging shit at people who are basically on the same side as you.
I’d say a left-wing activist type
Which is cringe inducing in looking for certain types of left-wingers. There are more tankies here than in other Internet forums I have seen. I’d be rich for penny I get for meeting tankies in Lemmy. They call out American imperialism, but then simp for Russia and China. Two wrongs don’t make a right and they expect to have one but not the other. Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if Russian bots have also infiltrated Lemmy to sow disinformation.
whose into tech
Doesn’t sound different from the early days of Reddit.
Yeah I agree. The apologia for Russia, China and just communism in general (or what ever you want to call it) fucks with your mind a bit. If Lemmy is the only social media you use it quickly starts to seem like this kind of thinking is far more common than what it really is and it can make one question their own sanity when reasonable sounding critizism of this is met with huge flood of downvotes. Especially if the discussion is happening on a place like lemmy.ml. As an outside observer I find it interesting as I haven’t really met people like this before but trying to engage with them is one of the most frustrating things I’ve experienced especially since a mod is going to ban you mid-discussion for “misinformation and bigotry” or something similar while it’s clear to everyone it’s just CCP level cencorship to silence all dissidence.
Yeah, some instances turned to be haven for these tankies. It took me a while before I realised that lemmy.ml is pretty much run by them.
I see way more comments complaining about tankies on a regular basis than actual tankies
Is your defederated from hexbear and lemmy grad? They’re all pretty concentrated there
Well…clearly the guardian does get paid under the rocks to STFU about Lemmy and Raddle.me and I never "donated to them because I don’t got much money but used to on common dreams(fuck them and Jake for not listening to obvious solutions and gripe with none of the answers I have and they don’t listen to) and when I get paid enough, prolly in February, I’ll be donating a little bit to Grist. Now, never will it be to theguardians.
Front page of the Ai bots.Not even feeling real some comments.
Yep; other then forgetting blind people exist, that was one of my main reasons for leaving. There were all these weird numbered accounts that were definitely just bots regurgitating someone else’s comment or post. I’m disappointed that wasn’t mentioned in the article.
Eh it failed in the most reddit way imaginable: Most of the users are too addicted to astroturf accounts posting heckin puppers and epic memes to organise a boycott beyond a few days. Reddit ownership knew how pathetic the “protest” was going to be from the outset and didn’t even bother trying to disrupt it beyond nudging out a few of the remaining holdouts on subs too small to matter in the grand scheme.
All the mods who thought they were irreplaceable just discovered their users are all the more happy to digest low quality slop moderated by amateurs who are more interested in the title than doing anything to protect the quality of said content.
People are even relenting and PAYING for access to the API to use previously-free apps.
The pathetic-ness of the system stems within the fact that Moderators and Subreddit Creators cannot delete the Subreddits they created. I don’t know how we didn’t see this as a red flag.
/HFY did. A ton of authors including Hambone stopped posting there at all around 2018 or 2019 because we found out that Reddit was claiming that they owned our work, since we had posted it to Reddit, or something like that
What is /HFY and who is Hambone? Sorry for my ignorance.
Humanity, Fuck Yeah! It was a subreddit that focused on a subsection of Science Fiction, where humanity is frequently not the underdog at all.
Hambone is the author of The Deathworlders series, also referred to as The Jenkinsverse.
https://deathworlders.com/books/deathworlders/chapter-00-kevin-jenkins-experience/
That “chapter” got posted and Hambone forgot about it for five years, then came back and posted a chapter a month for seven(?) years to turn it into a book. It’s a long book.
He did this because at least three other authors wrote their own stories in the universe he created.
Salvage (this one is only canon until Adrian attempts to “blow up” a black hole. Something like chapter 73 or so. Jennifer Delaney, the main female protagonist, makes an appearance in The Deathworlders)
Humans Don’t make good pets ( Canon, but we never meet the unnamed main protagonist in The Deathworlders)
The Xiu Chang Saga (Totally canon, and Xiu becomes one of the main characters in The Deathworlders)
All of these can also be found as audiobooks, in varying degrees of completion, on YouTube. There’s also a guide somewhere as to when all this stuff takes place. A large amount of it takes place between chapters 0 and 1 of The Deathworlders.
It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren’t just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or I was just so used to it before that that I’d never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself ‘well, that’s just reddit’. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
I’m not claiming the fediverse is perfect or free from that sort of shit but either through the practicalities of federation, or better moderation or a smaller userbase or a more mature userbase or a mix of oneor more of those things it doesn’t feel exclusionary to me. I often see on posts like this some people calling Lemmy a left-wing echo chamber and whilst I do agree there’s more people of a left-wing bent on here I think echo chamber is a bit much and is a phrase maybe used by those who live in a country without a functioning left-wing political party. I’ve not encountered a communist or tankie since Hexbear fucked off back to their kindergarten.
As for the Guardian article, they’ve fallen into the same trap as I’m concerned the fediverse might fall into by federating with Meta - assuming high numbers equal success or victory. If you have corporate/economics based mindset I can see how that works, but to me success equals a popular, useful community site entirely free from algorithms and other forms of manipulative control. One that isn’t gathering data via ads and tracking on its userbase to sell on (lets remember that reddit weren’t upset that AI were scraping reddit, they were upset that the company weren’t seeing any money from that). A community that grows organically, with all that that implies - sometimes growth might be very slow, it might stop entirely for awhile, maybe even reverse - but the emphasis should be on the people making the community better.
Reddit forgot somewhere along the way that it was the users who made reddit what it was. Look at the stats for r/askreddit - in particular the posts per day and comments per day - look at the trend since 2020. There may well be the same amount of users on reddit, but we all know a certain percentage of them are bots and even if they weren’t, just looking at those two graphs tells you everything about people’s level of interest in participating on reddit.
The only thing high user numbers guarantee sites like reddit is ad revenue. Nothing else.
Wow, this stats website is interesting. I checked a number of subs I used to frequent: r/thenetherlands, r/idiotsincars and r/Europe . All of them see meteoric rice in subscribers, but number of posts goes down significantly since 2020-2021 (r/idiotisincars is the outlier here, you can clearly see the pandemic, but once it resumes the trend is downward again).
Well said! I agree with almost everything, except I still want algorithms. I think I’d say “free from algorithms that serve corporate interests” instead. Algorithms that help me find content I genuinely enjoy are sorely missed.
I think algorithms can certainly be useful tools, but if they can somehow be made client-side, transparent in what they do, and customizable/replaceable, that would be ideal. In that scenario, they’d actually be working for the end user instead of the platform owner.
You say, “I’ve not encountered a communist…”, like that is a good thing. Let me fix that for you
I’m a communist. Companies would be better off if they were owned by workers rather than rich people. You know, workers owning the means of production, instead of capitalists?
Hopefully this hasn’t ruined your Lemmy experience!
I mean workers could own the majority of company stocks and be the share holders in a twisted sense of communism.
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Yes, this is the popular side of lemmy communism. When people say they are bothered by Lemmy’s politics, that’s not what they are talking about. They are talking about tankies and campists who seem more interested in simping for shitty autocrats and making tyrants into folk heroes than engaging seriously with contemporary political science.
Basically, as a leftist, I am annoyed by the part which is legitimately indistinguishable from right wing trolls trying to make leftists look stupid, which is unfortunately a large and vocal part of many leftist communities here.
On occassion I also go back there and some comments of mine felt like were downvoted way harder than I felt usually about reddit.
Granted they were bad takes but I felt like responses were way harsher.Lemmy feels more direct in a sense that the discussions are more fact based instead of the aspects you already mentioned.
I miss /SuspensionPorn
Be the change you want to suspend.
While traffic has not changed substantially, many users report the quality of content and the kinds of posts that are surfaced on user homepages now seem different. RamsesThePigeon said the content on some of Reddit’s most-followed pages, which he moderates, had “gone sharply downhill”.
This has been a long term process. I was on reddit since 2012 or so. In the early days I used it to help me change careers and grow as a developer, and keep track of tech and space news and other topics that mattered to me. But the reality is it wasn’t even the API stuff that drove me away. The first thing that really got to me was when I couldn’t get rid of r/all as a subscribed sub, and that was full of quick dopamine hits and clickbait. Then every sub seemed to go downhill in terms of content, filled with outrage and pictures of tweets as if I would use twitter if it only used images of text instead of raw text. By the time the blackout happened reddit had become a net negative time sink in my life and I figured it was time to cut it off for good.
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Just block Hexbear and Lemmygrad. The rest is only has a minor left pull, and there are even conservative communities popping up.
19.0 allows users to block instances. I mostly just block Yiffit, but you do you.
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I personally had no problem with them charging for API access, the rate was my bigger issue. I suspect they were basing it off of the money and hype behind the large language models that were previously training using their data for free rather than the relatively few 3rd party app users. I don’t get how there weren’t more people using them considering how bad the official Android app is, but there’s no way it was substantially impacting their bottom line.
Charging comparable rates or even 2-3x what they would get from users of the official app seeing ads also wouldn’t be an issue to me, paying to support software is generally good as it aligns user and developer interests. But with 20x higher rates than they’d get from the user using the official app that couldn’t genuinely be the case.
They have wanted to kill third party apps for a long time. Reddit’s issue is that it badly wants to market “through the API” by charging for bespoke viral marketing campaigns. Simple stuff like just giving shill accounts free gold and elevated thread positions and stuff. Or on the upper end, engineering whole features like the Thanos Snap thing. That’s why they spend so much time doing the cheesy little April fools games - these are tech demonstrators for their ad engineering team. The problem is that nobody is paying for this kind of marketing without telemetry to show that it’s working, and third party apps really threw a wrench into that equation (in addition to the more traditional ad model).
That’s a big part of where they are getting their ridiculous valuation from - their ad impression value is probably super low because their users are pseudonymous, and because the API breaks ad tracking. I suspect their equation is simply “this would be our revenue if we got Facebook rates for ad impressions.”
im only on reddit for 1 single subreddit that is a very small community
The changes that lead to the protest were only the preparations for an IPO. When that sale actually happens, I think things will get even worse with new corporate interests and influence. This story isn’t over.
