I decided to take a peek at Reddit to see what kind of activity is happening, a good handful of the subreddits I am subscribed to are still super active with posts and commenters.
There’s quite a few news articles on the front page regarding Spez and the blackouts, I am surprised those articles are even still up for people to see.
The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit’s and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted…
Perhaps there is some AI activity going on, I mean it’s kind of easy to do in this day and age. You just prompt an army of AI bots to defend Reddit, and try to keep users engaged.
I am so happy I found Lemmy, and I am so happy that there is a comfortable level of activity. Sure it’s only a small fraction of what Reddit is activity wise, but it’s so much more hearty and welcoming.
Reddit has just turned into one big toxic mess. Lemmy reminds me of what Reddit used to be 10 years ago.
Worth noting that the main migration happened in 2007 and start of 2008, but look how it managed to drag on for another 4 years before really dying.
I think the same will happen here - like there’ll be a lot of users on Reddit still, but it’ll be heavily corporate controlled and moderated, and most comments will be on the level of “Putin small pp” etc.
I suspect that some of the main subreddits - funny, aww, and pics, for example - could be populated entirely by bots and a lot of people would still browse through them. If you’re just idling through looking for a little dopamine, then r/aww and r/pics are kind of like instagram or tiktok. From Reddit’s perspective, those are the important subs, where the smaller ones where you can find good discussion and insightful answers don’t get enough views to serve enough ads to affect their bottom line.
Those subs could just be replaced with random bot reposts from the last decade. Actually, I think that’s most of the content already. Tho r/pics going full Sexy John Oliver today was hilarious. I even broke my personal embargo to go and vote for the SJO format (and to do a daily re-delete of any of my comments which might have been restored).
Wow, I didn’t realize the Reddit to Digg migration was so drawn out. Do we know how big the initial migration to Reddit actually was in terms of user count? It seems like Lemmy/Kbin are seeded with a few tens of thousands of users, and I wonder how it compares.
The main migration was actually in 2010 after the v4 redesign. Digg wasn’t dying in 2007-2009, it was one of the hottest websites on the internet.
Hmm something happened in 2008-2009 though, as it was when I migrated and I remember loads of people were doing it at the same time.
It might have just been Reddit having a cleaner, more direct interface, and a better community.
The site started to go downhill around that period because of power users and some started to move to reddit, but it was still pretty niche.
I stayed on digg until v4, then I moved with the masses over to reddit. They lost over 30% of their users that month!