I’m not trying to convince anyone to go back i promise, quite the contrary actually cause I think spez plans to just decrease the cost of the API and act like it was a bargain deal sacrifice while not solving any of the issues at all
But, when I think about it even if spez did actually listen and reverse all changes I don’t think i want to go back to Reddit cause from what Ive seen Lemmy is just friendlier and less :Be Corporate Friendly: I would honestly love it if Lemmy did a project like r/place one of these days so we could see what the internet is actually like instead of what happened in 2022 (I really did enjoy what a bunch of communities did but when the mods started abusing their powers to make it corporate r/place lost so much meaning) but i am curious since i’m not going back is there anything Reddit can do to make you go back to Reddit?
I’ll be real: I don’t want to go back. I want a return to actual communities and comradery, and an exodus from “social” influencers, on ad-riddled and bloated soap boxes.
Bingo. That’s me too.
I never realized just how tired I was of social media until Reddit blew themselves up. I had already quit Zucc’s armoury of social media tools a few years ago. I’ll be glad if I don’t ever have to go back.
As someone who really only went on Reddit for memes and techie discussions, I think I can say this: for my use-case, there was nothing special about Reddit itself. In fact, one thing I have realized is just how little the nature of the host matters beyond ease of use. Sure, certain formats lend themselves better to certain use-cases, but ultimately humans are social creatures, and even in the most inconvenient of circumstances, we find a way to make it work.
And once you realize that, it becomes less about the medium, and more about the people who lead the discourse. From what I can gather, Reddit lost that discourse a long time ago. And as such, their downfall was only a matter of time.
Funny, I was just having that discussion with someone.
I think the problem is all these platforms think the platform is the value and not the content made by the users.
And of course, since they have the best platform, it’d be inconceivable that anyone would ever leave because they’re the best.
Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, and Twitch are all doing exactly the ‘value is the platform’ while taking a massive shit on the creators and users that made the platform have any value in the first place, then acting confused why people are angry about how they’re behaving.
No actual human gives a crap about the platform: nobody goes to these sites to go to the site, they go there for the content from someone they like.
This is exactly correct, and herein lies the problem: how do you monetize content creation from people you don’t pay?
Louis Rossman said it best: when you look at a lot of content platforms, you realize their business models don’t make sense. The people managing these companies are riding on VC money knowing full well there isn’t any long-term return. They want to cash out and dip.
This is why I feel like a Federated, user-maintained system is probably best for the long term sustainability of a community. People want a place to enjoy something or someone? Let’s make it happen, by our own means
Agreed. The community MUST own it’s own platform or else they’re just renters that can be evicted the minute someone thinks they can make money from them.
This also isn’t just an online issue (though my view is US-centric). There’s been a lot of talk about the decline of a ‘3rd place’ and its loss impacting social gatherings. You have your house, work, and then your social spaces, and there’s a very big lack of social places where gathering and relaxing are acceptable without also having to engage in buying permission to be there.
This carried over into a lot of people going online to find the same social gatherings, and then seeing the gathering places turned into profit centers for the owners without any discussion with the users of the space, and now they’re finding that they don’t have anywhere to go be social, and the online places that filled that gap are now vanishing as well.
Now I’m not a sociologist (just a simple country computer janitor), but it strongly feels like a lot of the hyper-tribalism and aggressiveness that people are exhibiting are a direct result of having all the social spaces torn away and turned into profit centers, with zero regards for the people who visited or contributed to them.
It just makes everyone more isolated and willing to hop on to whatever the next big ‘social trend’ that some algorithm drops in front of them, and I think at this point it’s pretty unarguable that what the algorithms are doing is not always benign. You gain a place to belong, even if what you’re belonging to is abhorrent and toxic.
- 100% backpedal on all controversial changes announced within the previous 6 months; including any changes announced at the same time as said controversial changes.
- Form a task force of admins and developers to backport all; critical moderation tools and changes introduced since the new.reddit launch; to old.reddit. (Complete this task within 1-2 years.)
- Irrevocably Hard remove with no severance /u/spez from his CEO position and any position of power at reddit.
- Hire a new CEO from the pool of the community team(s).
- Cease all Dickery at once
- CANCEL THE IPO!!! This shit needs to wait until reddit gets it’s act together.
- Prioritize hiring humans to run reddit AEO; choose them from your MASSIVE FUCKING POOL OF SUBREDDIT MODERATORS! DO NOT USE AI OR HIRE ANYONE WHO HASN’T MANAGED AT LEAST 25K USER SUBS
- Ban all forms of facism; this is including forms of EXTREME viewpoints that grossly exceed reasonable discourse, peaceful free speech, advocate for extremist governmental regulation, violence or oppression of any kind against any group or subset of people.
- fuck /u/spez - Just make sure he never gets a C-Level job again please.
- continue to build reddit out in a way that allows for fair and ethically priced services from reddit (Ads, unlimited API access, rev sharing, premium features that are cosmetic items only, etc)
- Pick up the same “Do No Evil” ethos that Google abandoned; prioritize your users and revenue equally and balance the obligations better.
That about covers it. If all those were to occur, I’d go back. But realistically, none of them will happen.
At this point, it’s only going to get worse. It’s a very large Venture Capital backed company, on track to IPO.
Large VC/public companies goals will follow more of what we see with “mainstream” sites and social media. It’d be against their goals and their business to have less ads, less agorithms showing what their partners want to see and not what the user wants to see, less bloat on their front end. Even if the CEO wanted to go that way, he’d quickly be replaced.
It’s a self sustaining movement of capital now and users are annoyances that they have to deal to achieve their goals.
I’ll be honest, I started using redding decade ago because most forums were very niche, specific, with weird to follow rules, very low on users, and reddit seemed to always have a community for each topic I had an interest on. It still does, but the end is approaching fast, and I don’t want to search Discord servers, social media videos, or even ancient methods that are alternatives like IRC servers, mailing lists ; search results are useless in Google due to SEO and already affect other search engines
It all comes up to finding one or more sites that don’t look ancient or too mobile focused, and if enough people are going to use it and stick to it. Otherwise it’ll just be another corner of the web filled with a few crazy users
Reddit was dead from the day Conde Nast bought it. Every day since then was a roll of the dice as to whether they’d attempt to seize more profits and ruin it, or not. This happens to essentially every public or aspiring public company eventually. The need for perpetual growth warps decisions and guts the original mission in the end.
We call it “autosarcophagy” or “self-cannibalism.”
As I understand it, Reddit also took on a lot of external capital investment, which only makes the pressure to perform financially even greater. I can’t fault them for making the decisions they have to make to keep their jobs, keep their executive salaries, and so on.
Long live the sustainable, community-driven, community-funded future! Nobody can screw this up for us if we are the ones footing the bill.
I wouldn’t fault them as much if they hadn’t dumped the capital into absurdly dumb things to try and become facebook. If they’d invested it into better reliability and reducing costs to operate, I’d have a ton of sympathy.
CEO resignation. A big fuck you to IPO? Apollo continuing. None of this will happen though.
I never considered going back. Lemmy is forward. More power to the users and the community and less from greedy shareholders. This is the way.
Reddit is not what it ought to be. It’s overwhelming toxic environment just ruins what could have been a great forum. But it is what it is and for that reason, I’m out.
Going back at this point would be like returning to an abusive partner and thinking that the relationship could actually be better this time.
Exactly. Reddit is a far cry from what Aaron wanted it to be in the beginning. It’s just another corporate hellscape like all the other big platforms have become.
Honestly I really don’t see much of a future for profit-driven social media. Time and time again we’ve seen that power over communication is just too much power for an individual company to have. The fediverse makes a lot of sense, but I’m not sure if it’s the ultimate end state. It would be very nice if it were
YouTube was great before creators made money from it. Now it’s 99% hypebeasts
I don’t think creators making money is the root of most social media issues. I would place more blame on greedy monetization by parent companies and algorithms that prioritize engagement above any other metric. Engagement shouldn’t be a primary metric for value.
Nigahiga skits in the living room was peak YouTube
I’m done.
The subs I moderated have either gone dark, or are going dark in the next ciuple days.
And with that I let the mod teams I was a part of know that I am moving on. I hate what reddit did to the community, and my time feels better spent where it will be appreciated.
if reddit becomes federated I’ll consider subscribing
I think many people were looking for a reason to leave but kind of felt stuck seeing all the alternatives being either dead or abrasive.
Lemmy seems to have captured the soul of what a significant portion of people have already been looking for.
Lemmy in it’s current state feels very similar to reddit did ~14 years ago.
I am just smitten. I’ll never go back.
Exactly. Lemmy is great, and is essentially all I wanted from Reddit without the Reddit
Could not agree more.
Exactly! And like McDonalds, McFapper is loving it. Now bring on the NSFW instances.
I’ve only found one NSFW community so far.
Your name checks out with what you said 😂
This describes me perfectly. Most of the alternatives I saw previously just ended up being coopted by the alt-right crowd who got chased off of Reddit. Lemmy (so far) represents what I want from an online community.
Its so weird that the alt right hasn’t tried to seize Lemmy yet from my experience it was always the immediate fate of Reddit alts in curious if the alt right is too busy over at truth social (or rumble) oh could we please get a youtube alt next that would be so great
Peertube is a good federated alternative to Youtube, it also connects to the Fediverse and there is a central search engine called Sepia Search, which makes it easier to find content on the different instances.
You want to know why the alt right haven’t seized this place and won’t? It’s in the name. The fediverse. We’re all a bunch of feds!
Or it’s because Lemmygrad fought them off.
The structure of the fediverse (lemmy/kbin/mastodon etc) makes it really difficult for alt-right and troll instances to find a meaningful presence.
Truth Social for example is just a mastodon instance, but everyone immediately defederated (blocked) them, so they have no reach. Hateful ideologies want a large audience on which to inflict their bullshit, and the federated model makes it really easy to cut them off.
The alt-right is so strange it used to be that they wanted to be popular so they would invade subreddits and start cultivating hate until either they took over the subreddits or got expelled (almost like how a virus spreads actually)
But now its like they decided to pretend to be popular and are kinda imploding a bit
I have to agree with you on that I saw a comment earlier about the people who left Reddit being a loud minority but something feels off about that
Lemmy’s community feels so familiar I sadly just can’t find the right words to describe it though
It feels oddly nostalgic. I think it reminds me of the fun I used to have when I first joined reddit.
Rather than just mindlessly scrolling with a couple “hehs” or a blowing air out my nose slightly faster than normal.
It reminds me of forums I signed up for as a teen.
Let’s hope it stays that way and grows!
I’ve heard for a lot of time about these federated social media (lemmy, mastodon…) and I really like it. The interface is not bloated, no bullshit notifications, no ads, no damn algorithms that try so hard to spoonfeed me taking 60% of my feed, taking place for the communities I am actually interested into.
If I could put it into words, lemmy feels a lot like early 2010’s social media, fewer people, less stakes, just a bunch of people enjoying some topic (it is ironic, since I started to use Reddit because it seemed to be the only mainstream place left where you can talk with real people). Anyways, I am enjoying it, more than “What would Reddit need to do to get you back?” I would prefer more posts like “What should Lemmy improve to keep you here?”.
Nothing. They’ve burned too many bridges and have lost all faith the community had in them. Without a community, they are nothing.
Even if they revert the API changes, I know It’s only going to get worse when the IPO happens, so I don’t think I could ever come back. I also like the federated approach more anyways 🤷
I like the idea of federation, but worry about three things:
- What happens when the instance I’m a part of pulls a Spez? With a federated system, it’s easy enough to join another instance or spin up my own. However, it now means that I’ve got to keep an eye on dozens of community policy statements instead of just one, and none of these tiny fiefdoms are large enough yet to have dealt with the moderation growing pains that truly sink sites.
- How do they get paid? If even a small fraction of Reddit migrates to Beehaw, we’re talking about several orders of magnitude more server fees. What does it mean for data privacy when all these fediverse sites finally start thinking about sustainable funding models? What does it mean for moderation when Beehaw is large enough to attract bots, shills, and corporate interests?
- Privacy. The only thing keeping posts and DMs private in the fediverse is a handshake agreement that if you run an instance, you won’t leak things you’re sent from the other instances
Those are valid concerns, however privacy could be solved by support for encrypted DMs and posts. IIRC Mastodon has plans for encrypted posts and DMs, so it’s not out of the realm.
Hopefully, hosting costs could be handled by a reasonable number of users donating a small amount regularly. It I agree, it’s not a guarantee; and it’s one of the reasons I’m looking into setting up my own hosting—both for owning my own content and for better understanding what it takes so I can have better ideas how to help when bigger servers grow and cost more.
as for the hosting costs, i’d hope that’s not a big issue for admins seeing as a large portion of their new users have come from reddit apps they paid to use, sometimes on a monthly or yearly basis.
