What’s really baffling to me is that a bunch of nerds with too much free time on their hands basically stomped out a fully fledged Reddit alternative within a few months, including multiple frontends and apps.
Yet Reddit spends millions on development every year, for no discernable improvement whatsoever, while still turning no profit.
Where is all that money going? Seriously, Reddit is a very simple site. There’s nothing that hard about it. The amount of data is tiny, since the content is external, none of the resources are that time critical, a lot of content can be cached.
What's really baffling to me is that a bunch of nerds with too much free time on their hands basically stomped out a fully fledged Reddit alternative within a few months, including multiple frontends and apps.
Oh so you've noticed that too? Yeah I thought Lemmy was going to be the difference maker too, the leader of alternative and the breakaway from Reddit. But I've got a bit of a conspiracy theory, I truly think a lot of shitty Reddit users got together and jumped on Lemmy to take a massive dump on it just to ruin it for everyone.
I mean you could tell in moments. The downvote brigading. The report spamming. The snarky responses. Meme-esque posts everywhere. Yeah this was not Lemmy behavior, this was Reddit behavior and it got out of control.
What did the Lemmy mods/admins do about it? Almost nothing.
So now we're in a place of the Fediverse where Lemmy has been fucked up, KBin.social is dead (or in a comatose state since it's still somehow up) and what we have left now are scattering the users.
The ideas leading to Lemmy go back at least a decade, that I can remember. There are many little things that people figured out when developing distributed federated social media networks of this type. It’s a success story of collaboration over a long time with a shared goal of making Reddit and Twitter easy to replace with a superior product.
Not much as the sites talk to eachother. In this case .world is just where your account is located and where you sign in. You can use it to post to communities from other sites as well.
I tried last year but a month back I got banned for ‘ban evasion’ after going on a 5000 mile roadtrip for a honeymoon and using the sketchiest of unsecured wifi APs.
This time around I realized I can set the default sort in account settings to the top posts in the past 1 or 6 hours, def give that a shot, neverending stream of new posts, zero reason to wanna doomscroll reddit ever again
This is just the latest in a long string. Spez has demonstrated repeatedly throughout the years that he’s an entitled cretin - equal parts smug and ignorant.
My personal favorite was when he snidely commented on Reddit’s unprofitability in his AMA after the API debacle, making it sound as if it was somehow our fault, only to then not only have it made common knowledge that the official app was useless garbage and had been for years, but that the entirety of Reddit’s loss for the year was just about exactly equal to his salary alone.
Dude, the fucker has no clue how to RUN reddit much less monetize it.
He's the only clown running the entire circus. He's allowed the inmates run the asylum for years, he's allowed small-dicked neckbeard mods with too much time on their hands to power. He's been pushing out anybody that has a brain. He's made a killing on exploiting the vulnerable (if you're someone with mental issues, the last place you want to be is on Reddit with how much they don't give a shit about privacy on there. Please go elsewhere for your sake.).
He's scrubbed the existence of Aaron Swartz, he's made the other co-founder irrelevant. No, this is Spez just being a power-hungry fuckwad and it's showing.
He wants money and power. If he’s getting those, then he’s getting what he wants. We all know that Reddit was and is overvalued. Several of the things Reddit has done in the past year or two guarantee that it won’t be around in the long run, and perhaps not in the medium run. But if he can get his power and money now, he wins.
Many of us actually use social media in part because we value the community. But some people are greedy jerks and they just don’t care, and it doesn’t matter what you say to them because their values are unfriendly.
I think we should stop with copium every time some change happens on Reddit.
It’s not going anywhere and it’s still the front page of the Internet. A few thousand folks migrating to Lemmy doesn’t mean Reddit is gonna die tomorrow.
And the CEO knows that perfectly well. Spez can juice this place more and more, and people, for the most part, will eat that and stay after a tiny show of discontent.
You know what? That might be for the better. While it sucks to have less content here, we at Lemmy also have a healthier demographic, and that’s something we should praise and look after.
If anything, at our best we should not spend our energy shitting on Reddit, but rather direct it to care for Lemmy. Start your cozy or important community and share it! Make new interesting posts, preferably not about Reddit or American politics - plenty of that in here. Leave useful and/or supportive comments. We can for once build our beautiful garden, not a place of powerless hate and spite.
People are more willing to engage in a positive way and not algorithmically trained to hate.
This times 100x. It is almost as if Reddit, Youtube and Facebook are all possessed by Cyber-Succubuses that intentionally suck the life out of you just to drive up their ad revenue.
It’s not “copium”, reddit is genuinely heavily populated by bots, advertisers, and sponsored content. There aren’t nearly as many actual people using it as before. I’m not saying they all came here, but reddit is definitely not “the front page of the internet” anymore, and hasn’t been since long before the api exodus occurred.
Nobody talks about reddit in daily conversation like insta, tiktok, youtube, or even facebook. The majority of people on the internet do not know it exists. It’s a weird, niche website desperately failing to claw it’s way to the mainstream, when the whole charm of it was that it wasn’t mainstream social media.
However, I agree that I’d like to stop hearing about it here.
Nobody talks about reddit in daily conversation like insta, tiktok, youtube, or even facebook. The majority of people on the internet do not know it exists.
The movie “Good on paper” had a joke about Reddit, but the joke basically implied that Reddit is full of sexist incels… so I get the feeling that most people have heard of Reddit but that Reddit is not viewed very favorably by the average person.
I used Reddit for 12 years, which granted, isn’t as long as some others, but it is really sad to see what it has become after all these years. It helped a lot back in the day, but now it is time to let it go.
I hopped on Reddit the week before the Digg migration happened. I’m not sure how I really took in the Internet before that (lolcats and wimp mostly), but I remember nearly the exact moment it happened. I’d never heard of Digg before that. I’d barely heard of Reddit.
It’s not the same as it was back then, and I’m very happy to be done with it. Fuck spez/Steve Huffman, that piece of shit burned everything to the ground to enrich himself and piss on the community.
The third party app ban was doubly stupid because not only did it piss people off but then they replaced all of those apps with something that didn’t work properly. Even if you didn’t care about third party apps all that much you cared that the only option you now had was terrible.
I agree! After my initial fury over Spez’s whole tantrum, I found Lemmy, and I gotta say, yeah I really do think we need a lot more communities and diverse topics, but for those of us who remember what the Usenet was early on, it was a paradise for free-thinking, tech-savvy individuals to socialize and share ideas. I’d love to see Lemmy stay under the radar, because once something becomes popular enough, it gets enshittified by people looking to monetize and people looking to just plain shit all over it. If it remains fairly small, but in that it is a concentration of the most desirable people (mostly), I’ll take it. I can always hop over to dread-it if I really need something not here.
Even when Reddit exploded in popularity there were still plenty of great, but smaller, communities. I really enjoyed being part of Reddit until the API changes when all the decent moderators quit. The quality of Reddit went off a cliff shortly after that happened.
So I think Lemmy will be fine even if it explodes in popularity. Capitalist greed that betrayed the OG members and mods who built Reddit is what is making Reddit a cess pool, not the number of users.
If they had just done the obvious thing and made ad-free 3rd party API access depend on a subscription fee, then I would have just paid it and wouldn’t be here. But no, they have to do everything the worst way possible.
No, they are charging the app devs instead of the users directly (who would then be free to use Any app, and the apps would have remained as they were: ad-supported or paid or whatever)
Yes. I remember being there for like a week long I guess because I managed to make a post that did well enough to attract someone to gild or give me some subscription time.
And like someone else already said, it wasn't that spectacular because The Lounge was just basically people shitposting. But they're shit-posting as subscribers so it wasn't anything you didn't already see without it.
I got permabanned on Reddit because of events involving powertripping moderators and every appeal I tried has been met only with generic bot auto replies. It seems impossible to get an actual human to look at my case for which I provided a lot of detail on what went wrong and how I was incorrectly permabanned (I was confronting moderators of one of my favorite subs about them violating their own Subreddit and Reddit’s policy).
I’ve been trying for over 9 months but there’s literally no way to get it fixed. And every new account eventually gets permabanned as well.
I’m so done with that garbage platform. Shame about the small fun communities I was in. But the downfall of Reddit can’t come soon enough.