Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
“I wonder what we did to drive away engagement.”
I don’t think you can count on that level of introspection.
They have screwed it up so bad I literally find myself on Facebook more often then Reddit and that’s after being gone from Facebook for like 20 years lmao
I’m on Facebook as often per year as I am on Reddit these days. Hint: you can count it on one hand. F— both of those sites.
It’s all bots and influence ops over there anymore
It’s easy to see the effects of users moving to the fediverse. Reddit has been sad since it nerfed /r/All. In fact, it seems like a thinly veiled attempt to control what its users see under the guise of providing a more tailored user experience. For me, the overall effect is that it’s homogeneous, boring and I don’t want to be there anymore.
Let’s mods indiscriminately block users for arbitrary reasons; why do we keep losing users??
“please install our app to continue”
I don’t browse Reddit since I switched entirely to Lemmy the day the API migration happened, but I did still reluctantly have to reference reddit on occasion. Now I can’t even do that for niche issues I run into. I am so upset that millions of people donated their time and energy into making Reddit the place it was just to have all of that entirely gated off. I know we’re likely all in the same boat, but there really are no words for what spez did. He ruined a really great place for community and knowledge and turned it into a slop fest.
I learned that lesson with experts-exchange even before stack overflow. All sites will be bought out and enshittified.
but there really are no words for what spez did.
Profited. That’s the word.
Is this a real thing? I can still access both new and old reddit via both mobile and desktop without being logged in. FWIW, I’m hitting it with Firefox + uBlock Origin on both.
People have been reporting it quite a bit. If i were to guess A/B testing.
Its been hitting me. Can’t use old.reddit without logging in and new reddit is an abomination.
It depends on your location and who you are.
A while back, I did an experiment. Reddit started asking me to log in to scroll, so I closed the window and didn’t try again that day. Next day, I tried to scroll reddit and the login to view popup appeared again. So I closed the window and didn’t look at reddit for a week. After a week, I went on reddit and magically it no longer worried about me logging in…for about a month.
I can scroll comments for about a minute before that pop-up comes up saying you need the app. But I rarely visit reddit anymore unless it’s something I need some information on that I can’t find anywhere else.
I had that for a while. Then yesterday I got a lockout message.
There were so many fun reddit moments that the community got behind and some not so great like the Boston Marathon bombing.
But the Snapining was one of my favorite events reddit did for infinity war
The cat fuckers getting what he deserves.what
I assume this is some reddit meme that came up after I left 3 years ago
Good.
CEO Steve Huffman said, “These deals aren’t binary. They have to make sense for Reddit, but there are many ways, I think, for the value to return to Reddit.”
lol - “The value has left Reddit”
-/u/spezWho could imagine when you piss off:
- third party devs who make the apps your best contributers use
- your unpaid content creators
- your unpaid moderators
…that the “value” would leave 🤣
I actually got an award as being in the top 1% of reddit karma earners for 2022.
In 2023 they banned me because I didn’t buy stock when it was being introduced.
You’d think they’d want me there. Creating content. For free. I’m sure they thought I’d just create a new account. Nope. I just came here.
Weird thing is, I’ve had two main running jokes for years. One is being obsessed with corn. The other is calling George Clooney a smug bastard.
George Clooney really is a smug bastard.
I was also invited to participate in the IPO (in 2024) due to my “top tier” karma.
Didn’t get a ban for not participating but wouldn’t have given a shit if I did.
OH NO! CAN’T CREATE A NEW ACCOUNT!!! ThAt’S bAn EvAsIoN!!! (autistic screeching ensues accompanied by excessive farting noises)
Reddit never was the same after the whole API/Mod fiasco. Many subreddits simpy died. Old users that made the site what it is left and there were new ones, but the whole vibe shifted.
Yep, it was the API thing that finally did it for me, but looking back, I should have seen it coming after all of the other stuff.
Remember when YouTube started having AI narrated posts from r/askreddit in its shorts? And how that slowly morphed into the AI generated slop stories about how one family member give the rest of them their comeuppance because the Henderson account valued results instead of random cheap business practices involving Sgt Menendez and his cheating ex girlfriend?
(This stuff is like candy to Boomers because it mirrors the reader write in sections of Reader’s Digest.)
I should have noticed this earlier, but it dawned on me a few weeks back.
For me it was the way they treated the Apollo developer Christian Selig leading up to the whole API thing. Absolutely heinous.
Third party apps made Reddit a dream on mobile, a big part of its success were the passionate people. And they showed us all the middle finger
I want that sticker!
And continuously piss off 99.9% of your uses
aw shucks
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m almost glad Reddit permbanned me two months ago. It’s a shame Anonymous hasn’t tried to DDoS u/Spez. Reddit needs the Ol’ Yeller treatment.
It’s fucking laughable “us daily users metric dissapoints”. What the fuck do they expect when they ban their long time users permanently with no appeal process, make it so you can only view the site through the app censor any revolt and start bringing on nazis.
It’s literally the antithesis of how and why reddit became so popular in the first place.
It is genuinely impressive how unusable Reddit has gotten in the last 6 months, especially. Login walls, no All, Best instead of Hot default sorting, constant popups to use the app (RIP RIF, you were the best), obvious AI posts everywhere. Really speedrunning the Digg experience.
Yeah, I stopped going there regularly a few years ago like most people on Lemmy, but I still occasionally go there for niche topics I can’t find anywhere else. I only lurk, not post, so I just used old.reddit.
I tried using it this week after they turned off old, and holy shit!! It is unusable. Like you said, it’s impressive how bad it is.
Honestly what would it take to get more people on lemmy. I only found it by someone saying the boost for lemmy app. I didn’t understand the rest of the technical jargon. But it works. Just the interests I have there are either no subs for or very few users.
Banning valuable subs like piracy, emulation, and roms would get at least those people. The subs that provide valuable guides and resources like that would have to get purged for users to be forced to seek out alternatives.
Makes sense, Reddit feels like a shell of it’s former self.
After the apicalypse many subs seems to have died, also the new UI that has been pushed for a decade or so, seems to promote consumption of content and discourage creation of content, further reducing new content.
Reddit has been many, many times by AI companies, why keep scanning if the content stays 98% the same, with most new content being of mostly lower quality, simply due to people posting AI shit.
This was a very predictable outcome.
As soon as Reddit’s history got scanned by AI models, it lost 98% of it’s future value.
not to mention the NSFW purge. Like it or not, that was a HUGE part of reddit’s success.
Wait what did they do to the NSFW subs? They were still active when I was banned a few years ago
I hope they purge piracy, roms, emulation. Currently that is a huge valuable resource, and getting rid of that might lead to those users coming here. Those types of contributors are the ones who add value with their content.
Never forget that they killed the API for a mere $60M AI deal.
Like, if spez apologized and restored API access, and made an effort to kick fascists off the platform, I might consider going back. But as is, I will watch with glee as he fucks over everyone stupid enough to buy his IPO.
Besides apologizing and changing course, spez would need to leave before I considered going back. The way he behaved during the API BS ended my capacity to trust him in any way. Reddit as an organization, maybe they can turn things around and return to their purported values, but spez is not an honest person and will do or say anything if it serves his own interests.
60M USD is insanely cheap for that data, remember, it was categorized and structured into threads and subthreads in specific categories, not to mention all different languages already being mostly sorted and ready for consumption.
They could probably have got a few hundred million USD for it if they held out longer.
Most of the people who bought during the IPO probably already cashed out.
Don’t forget that you can’t use VPN now, use the web version on mobile, and most accounts gets banned as soon as they are created by the automod.
You also cannot view it without being logged in now. Which gets a groan from everyone in chat when a friend shares a Reddit link.
I have no clue why they decided chasing off users and being less useful was somehow going to help them. Particularly when they were the place to go for huge segments of the population.
You can still browse anonymously with red reader. Suggest getting it off f-Droid, but it’s also on the play store. No iPhone version though.
Redlib is also an option with a few working instances. No need for an app for that.
Another reason to switch to Android/GrapheneOS.
Just within the last week or so old.reddit.com was effectively disabled and stopped working. (I think it might work if you log in, but i quit doing that 3 years ago). It was a nice resource and it’s said that it’s such a shell of what it was. Right when the internet is really needing human voices too
They are only doing one segment of users at a time and I’m guessing their metrics are telling them 90% of those users don’t play ball and just stop visiting. I’m guessing they might go back on it in a bit.
They fingerprint your device, if you get a new phone or reset i (you can restore, just logout on safari and clear cache, use a new user, etc. google automatically logging me back in to an alt that got banned alongside my main got it banned) I’d just quit and find better hobbies, reddit feels like it isn’t a waste of time but it really is.
Yeah it is a waste of time and I have been seeing that more since switching back to the fediverse.
Also thanks to the mods of /r/worldnews for helping kick my reddit checking addiction since I got banned and keep getting flagged as ban evasion lmaoooo
Fuck spez and etcetera
I swear Reddit started changing as soon as Trump won. I think reddit did such a great job of exposing Republican lies and grifts that some rich ass hole just said we will express interest in investing if you start censoring your content and now here we are
They pushed donald and conservative to the front page constantly with less upvotes/comments than any other post there
/r/the_donald was one of the most active forums pushing Trump.
The r/AskRedit thread that got me banned permanently was asking how people thought the Trump presidency would end. You could tell by the amount of “Post deleted by user” and “post removed by reddit” that the general consensus was that eventually someone would hit the bullseye and finally ventilate this sack of shit’s skull. I observed that it’s telling that they are so against even discussing threats of violence, that it makes the mods complicit in the crimes of the regime. Fun fact/spoiler alert: The mods did not like getting called out like that.
The_Donald was banned years and years ago.
Along with chapotraphouse but the Donald did quite a bit of damage. I swear the Donald was pushed as a honeypot to enrage users who hate the fucking right to get them to engage and then get banned
Was always going to happen.
The most valuable data is always going to be on open platforms that prioritize ease of use, because that’s where people will go. But then the company starts looking at all that data and how much it’s worth.
Before they can charge people for it, they have to make sure no one can get it for free. But in doing so chase off the users who were making that content.
Leaving them with a locked down worthless ecosystem.
Nothing is meant to last forever tho, and reddit won’t be the last.
reminds me of how Gaia Online’s user run economy crashed so hard due to Admin mismanagement that it became a cautionary tale in economy textbooks. https://youtu.be/vyzQnsa8SA0
Your last paragraph is a major point that I think a lot of people don’t think about, and I’m surprised Reddits executive team didn’t bail as soon as the AI was finishing the scrapes.
They didn’t need to bail since they did the IPO and could just sell their shares. I haven’t kept an eye on how much insider selling has gone on but I am sure they all have made bank over this past year, it is public info if anyone feels like looking it up. I would expect if the stock prices continues to tank and stays down you will start seeing executives abandon ship for greener pastures.
They have their own AI, but it’s an eyesore that undermines searching in a mobile browser. They added it after an update further deteriorated the Reddit App experience.
So they:
- further enshittified the app,
- put AI in the search bar.
And that’s within the last year or so.
