- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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It just occurred to me that convincing someone of leaving a social media site is a lot like convincing someone to leave a big city.
They have friends there and have grown accustomed to the vibrant and diverse activities, but realistically nothing they do or have there can’t be replicated in a smaller town, a smaller media site.
They’re liable to put up with a lot of shit to stay with their community, but eventually people get pushed out and find greener pastures and a quiet space for themselves elsewhere. At least, that’s what I attribute to what I perceive to be a higher average age on the fediverse.
I’m too old to find the constant stimulation and activity attractive anymore, and I much prefer the freedom to move around and be choosy about my media choices.
(Copied from the thread on /c/Quark’s)
I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit’s platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.
The consensus I’ve seen on Lemmy has been largely “we don’t need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there”. So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can’t rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.
Thanks for sharing this perspective. Complacency won’t grow the userbase here.
To be fair, a lot of users don’t seem to want the user base here to grow at all. I don’t feel that way but I’ve had enough discussions here to know that this is literally not the case for everyone and it kind of sucks because stagnation is how social networks die.
There is a point where more users may bring more downsides than upsides - but we haven’t reached that point yet. There are still many many niche communities that have no equivalent here and starting them would never take off with the current number of people.
I get not wanting to grow the userbase of lemmy.world which is already kinda bloated but there is basically infinite space for new instances to be added.
60k active users isn’t enough, really. 500k would be a great spot to be in, though.
Agreed. I can understand fearing being as bloated and not filled as reddit. But we don’t need to grow that big to be a thriving active community of users.
Thanks for bringing this up. I think I’ve heard this too and I have to say I’m of two minds about it.
In one end… I am frustrated with Reddit’s greed and I think they’ve lost most of my respect at this point. I think I’m kinda bitter toward them, so seeing them lose market share might bring me a bit of schadenfreude.
On the other hand, Reddit’s content quality really feels like it’s gone to crap in the last 5-6 years or so. When I came to Lemmy (and Mastodon), it was refreshing because the community seemed to have a bit of that scrappy, fringe attitude that I missed from early Reddit. I’d be sad if that went away due to over-population.
Basically, I like Lemmy and I want it to be even more successful so that algorithms have less control on our lives. At the same time, I dislike Reddit because they’re going whole-hog into enshittification. I guess I just convinced myself that I want Lemmy to continue to grow ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The difference is that Lemmy is not centralized. So it can’t really be over-populated. If an instance is poorly modded and doesn’t have that vibe you like you can find one that does. The more people using Lemmy the more options there will be, it’s the opposite of Reddit.
What you guys did to the alternate Star Trek subs (ie: the ones that allowed criticism of NuTrek) is inexcusable and will never be forgiven.
started StarTrek.website.
I don’t use that because you are (or someone is) modding it wrong. You don’t allow people to talk about which parts of Star Trek they don’t like and others might want to avoid. Fuck that. All parts of Star Trek are not equally good.
oh yea i got banned on r/startrek for expressing mild dislike of the discovery show, wasnt even rude or anything. Tried to appeal the ban by asking why i was banned got instantly mod muted and perma banned.
Fuck that Subreddit. I called someone an idiot there and they banned me. I don’t know if this changed but at the time ALL the moderators were privated. I found out one moderators and called them them all cowards and losers. It was THAT exchange that got be banned from reddit entirely.
I came here and never looked back.
I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit’s platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits.
You quit reddit because they didn’t ban subreddits you don’t like?
https://time.com/7015026/meta-facebook-zuckerberg-covid-biden-pressure-censorship/
I quit because contributing my labor made me complicit.
@KingThrillgore The second the reddit started fucking around I deleted my account. I no longer care what they do or if they even exist.
There’s still one protest possible.
LEAVE REDDIT!!! GET THE FUCK OFF OF IT! LET IT DIE. MAKE IT DIE!
Same with twitter.
And all things Meta.
Twitter and Reddit went so much to shit and lowered the bar so much that Meta actually became almost not bad in my eyes, almost.
Meta is still on a whole other level when it comes to data privacy.
Gee are you implying that storing passwords in plaintext is a bad thing? /s
That’s security, not privacy.
That’s security, not privacy.
helenslunch - the slayer of untruths
How much privacy do you have when someone has your account password?
You have none, because your security has been compromised. This is a flaw. Poor privacy is intentional.
I’m still pissed off that I’ve never had a facebook. I never gave them any info about me. I gave them no reason to have a profile on me.
Yet because OTHER people have facebook, they know my name, my address, my phone number. I don’t know if they can identify me in pictures that other people post, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
That shouldn’t be allowed. I did not consent.
Correct. And the same is true for the mobile phones, carriers, and a slew of apps that all look at contacts. They know who you are and who your friends and family are.
There’s a guy in the world of pro wrestling named Jim Cornette that said a quote this reminds me of.
Cornette is known for holding grudges, and being hateful. He keeps a shitlist of people he hates.
Well in the 1980s he was working for a wrestling company, and hated one of his coworkers for a year. Then a new guy came in and was so much worse.
Then one day he says to the first guy “You know, you used to be at the top of my shit list, but with all these new fuckheads coming in, you managed to move down a few spots simply by not doing anything!”
They’re doing a Bradbury, in a way, kind of like Tumblr and Steam. Everyone else is shooting themselves in the foot.
I think Meta is doing a decent job with Instagram. I mean except for collecting all possible data and psychological profiling of users to serve them targeted ads, it’s a decent enough platform. And the only one still allowing for engagement with your actual friends rather than exclusively professional content creators.
Even if you ignore all the ads and data-mining IG its still a shit experience.
- You can’t share any links, which does nothing but make it a worse experience, because people just use annoying workarounds.
- All the buttons for user profiles, hashtags, and comments are impossibly small.
- In the search function you can conveniently “flick” between posts so you don’t have to line each one up perfectly on the screen, but this works nowhere else in the app for some reason.
- They created what are essentially 2 completely isolated social media platforms (posts and stories) into the same app, which results in fragmentation of where people post and where you have to look find their posts.
- Every time I try to scroll down, I scroll to the side instead.
- Every time you open the app, it shows you a post, and then that post disappears 2 seconds later.
- They abuse the DM system by cramming other notifications into it for tags and “broadcasts”, presumably to force you to receive them after you’ve disabled all the other notifications.
- Of course there’s the flaw of not allowing text posts, which again does nothing except force people to post photos of text, which undermines the fundamental purpose of the platform.
- Incessant “suggested” posts that I do not have and have never expressed interest in.
- No scroll bar for video, so if there’s something you missed or want to watch again, you have to watch to the end or start from the beginning.
- Read receipts subject users to abuse. Any other platform you can disable them.
- Standard image posts are hidden by the algorithm, so no point in even posting them anymore, which essentially makes it almost entirely a TikTok/Snapchat clone.
- You click the play button on an image, thinking it’s a video, but it’s just a still image with annoying ass audio.
- Auto-playing videos.
- Stories just flip along without you doing anything, and trying to go back and see them again is a nightmare.
I could go on but I digress.
WTF are you on about? no one likes instagram shorts and the feed is a jumbled mess of bullshit and advertisements. I deleted mine a long time ago and don’t regret it for a second.
no one likes instagram shorts
it’s “reels” i think tiktok recommends better videos, but IG has closed the gap in recent years.
I really don’t understand how people use Instagram. I’ve tried, but it’s about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don’t follow, it’s not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it’ll show me about 40 posts before saying “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!” and then refuse to show me any more.
I guess this is why I’m here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I’d rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.
I mean except for collecting all possible data and psychological profiling of users to serve them targeted ads, it’s a decent enough platform.
It’s not. Instagram is popular the way it is because “It’s going to be a lot harder to pull off massive protests” there.
Don’t worry that’ll change, they haven’t owned it for that long yet.
they haven’t owned it for that long yet
they acquired it in 2012.
…OK, well I guess we wait until the wrong person is in charge of that division. Also I’m old because that feels like yesterday…fuck.
Meta is a little hard because they acquired a lot of existing social networks in their prime and have kept things subtle. Think about how long it took EA to finally strip Maxis of everything but The Sims. The only way you would know something is owned by Meta is from the splash screen.
The problem is that FB is the “core forum” for tons of niche hobbies. Irts the only reason I still have a account. They successfully killed off the old php forums.
If you live in rural America sone information is only posted to Facebook, from private businesses to small county or town governments
Additionally FB Marketplace killed Craigslist, at least in my area (also US). Nextdoor somewhat is a counter but that has its own problems.
Meta probably is the hardest one given that in many influencal countries WhatsApp is the app everyone uses for communication
It’s also the main organization tool for “groups”. I have tried to migrate mine to other platforms with no success.
And also the biggest online classifieds marketplace for trading goods. Even though it’s a fucking awful experience and simply ignores any filters you give it. If you want to actually sell your stuff, or sell it for market value, without shipping, you just have to use it.
Yep, agreed. The biggest problem there is that Meta is generally not making life worse for its users than they’re used to. Facebook and Instagram are giving you almost the same shitty experience you got a decade ago.
at least they are developing affordable vr
And locking it behind their account system
Yeah they’re subsidizing the price to get between you and reality.
Affordable purely by the money you pay upfront. They earn more by the ridiculous amount of tracking they do, and they’re also forcing you to stay within their services.
As with so many other things, you’re paying with more than just money.
they’re also pushing the technology and pressuring other manufacturers to adopt and be competitive
Using Reddit as a platform to protest Reddit is even more idiotic than staging a sit in at Disneyworld to protest against Disney.
“Hey we’re getting revenue and media is gonna give us a bajillion clickthroughs from rubbernecking, please, if you can still protest in any capacity on our site please do, make it a huge spectacle”
Like what the hell are they even protesting about now? What is left to protest about? And why? Just go.
I left Reddit 6 months ago when I was permabanned for asking a question about what is forbidden. They can kiss my ass. And I hope they go broke.
Aw man. I left Reddit on my own terms as soon as the writing was on the wall re: 3rd party apps.
To have access ripped away without notice must have bred some deep hatred for the platform.
I left Twitter for much the same reasons. All the replies are basically unusable now, because bots just pay to get put at the top of the sorting algorithm, and it’s now full of bait and spam, since the website formerly known as Twitter now pays for engagement, since that apparently worked out well for Quora (!).
I genuinely tried to leave but lots of communities didn’t leave Reddit and therefore had to stick to Reddit. I did with RRSS-feed and avoided their app.
Recently figured out we can Sideload Apollo app with almost all functions available. So did that.
Thankfully never used twitter! I read valuation dropped from 44B to 9,4B recently.
You can create the community and begin the migration
I’m not the right person to start a community, that’s the main problem. I’m not fit to be a Moderator and such.
It’s super easy, the main problem is no one will move. I still moderate a couple on reddit, but it was hard enough getting people even there, certainly no one will come here.
I feel like internet users have become so lazy, stubborn, and resistant to change. I’m pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo, IRC, ICQ, AIM… people used to try new things
I’m pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo
In some respects it was somewhat easier to get them to be on multiple platforms instead of moving. Think of the original messenger proliferation, where sometimes people would be on IRC, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, or etc. so much so that you had software like Pidgin and Trillian to help consolidate server/chat rooms and friends lists to more easily chat with all your contacts.
Even with Ventrilo, I remember being open to also switching to Mumble or vice versa if there was some hiccup with either.
Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their “ecosystem” of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you’re “invested.”
Gee, I sure wonder why…
There have always been people like that, it’s just more noticeable now because the numbers are larger.
People still use MySpace and Digg, and there are people on Bluesky, Mastodon, here, etc.
If you’re still posting on Reddit or Twitter, and it’s not for a niche community, please don’t come here.
No, because then they’ll all flood here. Then I’ll have to consult with 9,006 different rules between each sub, while subsequently making sure I’m bending to each power-mods weird and unwritten agenda.
No I’m good with reddit. I encourage reddit. And I encourage all the weirdos to use reddit!
Nope.
If you encourage it, it will continue to fester and rot, and the entire internet will lower their expectations.
We need to destroy these companies. We need to smash them to pieces, and hey guess what - it’s going to hurt a bit! We need to be prepared to stand up against evil, corrupt, racist, bigoted robber barons. We need to make some sacrifices to fix the internet.
Burn the fuckers to the ground, and let spez rot in a hole.
…I’m gonna go ahead and say it.
I like it better here.
Same. This place is great, even with the tankies from lemmy.ml and the fascists from hexbear, at least we somehow still get along.
Not all of us are tankies fwiw, I just wanted to be on the largest and most well-supported instance with generally the least amount of downtime.
Fair 🤷♂️
Isn’t it lemmy.world?
That one isn’t the largest, no. The largest is .ml and it’s run by the two Lemmy maintainers.
I am confused, every statistic of .world seems bigger. What am I missing?
Looks like I was mistaken, then. Looks like .ml isn’t the largest, it’s just the one run by the two Lemmy maintainers, which for me (combined with .one keeping going down when I was actively using it) made it my home instance.
What’s the deal with having a .world user complain about ml and hexbear in every single thread lately?
I’m not from .world and also complain about it sometimes. In my opinion, it’s a legitimate reason that makes Lemmy less attractive, as a consequence, you have to set up blockers to keep your sanity which is a hassle for the average user.
It’s crazy. Almost like we all have the freedom to say whatever the fuck we want, including complaining, because we fucking can.
hexbear isn’t fascist
They are heavily biased towards China and Russia, two countries with fascist governments. That kinda speaks for itself, even if they claim to be communists or socialists.
Don’t confuse authoritarian regimes with fascism. China is an authoritarian state running a diluted version of communism, but it’s not fascist. Russia under Putin is leaning more towards fascism these days for sure, but they’re not fascist outright yet.
Maybe what the hexbear folks gravitate around the most is the idea of authoritarianism. The flavour doesn’t matter as much.
a diluted version of communism,
Is there still something communist in their economy? Are the people working 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week, owning their means of production?
They share the same positions on global politics as pretty much every Marxist-Leninist political party on the planet. You may not like those positions, but trying to characterise them as actually far-right extremist is absurd horseshoe theory nonsense.
Liberals & social democrats on lemmy.world acting like NATO, the US Democratic Party, and capitalism are the real bulwarks against fascism is amusing.
The guy punching me clearly espouses a pacifist ideology, so calling him violent is absurd horseshoe theory nonsense.
Lemmy was better before the Reddit exodus last year, when people started insulting others by calling them tankies and fascists. Before that, it was much more peaceful.
He says from his 7 month old acct.
No chance that is an alt account?
No chance whatsoever to hold alternate accounts on this federated social media website that are all incapable of account consolidation and OTP validation like reddit can /s
It was still full of tankies though, lemmygrad was the second biggest instance and you’d see it everywhere
They were tankies and fascists before anyone ever came here and found out that they were.
Calling them such didn’t create them.
Basically… A tankie isn’t not a tankie just because theres no one there to accuse them of being one.
I honestly believe that Lemmy is cool, but it either needs more content or I need to perform a magic trick to make my feed “better”. At least it’s not that addicting, and the “small community, small town” vibes gives charm to it.
I’ve been here since August 2024 or so.
I agree, so I’ve been posting photos and things. What we don’t need is a bunch of autoposting bots.
If you want to find the busy threads though, sort of Active and All. And just see what is going on across the lemmyverse
If you want to find the busy threads though, sort of Active and All. And just see what is going on across the lemmyverse
Yeah, this helps, but it’s not always topics that really interest me. We kind of need more diversity of content around here.
I prefer scaled to active sort for that reason.
I agree though, more content and more content diversity would be great.
The small percentage that contribute content regularity in social media platforms instead of just consuming are great.
I’m too boring to have much content that would be good for anything other than microblogging myself though.
Lemmit bot was one of the first things I blocked. Idk if it’s still around. It would copy like every post and comment from Reddit lol. It clogged my feed so bad. If it’s still a thing, block it, you’ll be glad you did.
On Reddit, everyone is trying to get a million votes and just brutally murder with words everyone. It either gets really hostile, or just lots of bots posting bot shit.
On Lemmy: Even the posters I disagree with, I have a lot of fun with them. We say stupid shit all the time and accept the upvotes/downvotes with our shitposts.
That’s been my experience as well. I’m using a Lemmy client that allows me to tag users, and I’ve been tagging people who have posted comments that annoyed me. A few are obvious trolls, but the rest have posted many comments that I liked or agree with since I’ve tagged them. It’s been refreshing to see, actually
since August 2024 or so
So, two months? Lol
Wait, it’s have been only 2 MONTHS? Phew, time’s passing slower than I though!
Lemmy is nice, but the content on it is quite niche. If you want something less tech-oriented, you’re generally out of luck, for example.
Reddit startled the same way. It’s aways first the tech weirdos, early adopters and Foss enthusiasts that start it.
Where my bass fishing homies at?
It’s a lot better than August 2023!
It’s so much better. Personally I don’t hope it grows much either. Satisfies my content itch, have still had some good quality convos here, seen some great comments threads. Absolutely none of the bullshit that Reddit purposely encourages. Plus most of the zeebs and the chronically offended seemed to have stayed with reddit, and I’m super OK with that.
I’d argue Lemmy is turning into its own echo chamber. I’ve seen some mods power tripping just like good old Reddit. I erroneously thought people would learn from past mistakes, but sadly this is not what happened.
We all do
This place feels like old reddit. When we could have actual discussions and not just be downvoted by bots. It’s so much better here
And you can still tailor it to yourself. Instances have different mindsets to different topics and things they allow or don’t and there’s tons of people to agree with or disagree with but everyone is cordial.
I just don’t have a reason to go back
The only way to win the reddit game is to not play.
How about a nice game of Chess?
Launches entire US nuclear arsenal against Russia
Can we launch it against Spez?
Very good Joshua
I just lost The Game
LOL!
You know what’s not impossible? Leaving that shit hole and never coming back.
It’s possible but reddit isn’t the only one looking for engagement, so are individual users. If a site has more users, it has more engagement and content. It is also not impossible to drop the lemmy name when you do go back there to make people aware of the alternative.
My thought exactly. They can always do like me and nope the fuck out of there.
That’s not a good method though on it’s own, there needs to be effort to undermine them. And since they don’t want to do peaceful protests, the only option left are the more violent and less legal ones. The ones that compromise their platform and its data.
True but how do you get the message out when they control the media?
And moving to a different, more decentralized shithole?
Lemmy has the same power tripping admins and mods, just more of them and each with a new and unique bias. You don’t hate AI? Ban. You acknowledge certain genocide? Ban. You made fun of my typo? Ban.
It’s sad how many docile idiots remained on Reddit and Twitter after last year.
People still use AOL internet. I expect Reddit and twitter to die sometime in the 2050s.
Digg still exists. Death of websites is rarely a complete shutter, but usually more of a steady decline into obscurity
Wow!! It’s the Divide By Zero admin!!
I’m not a celebrity :D
I missed the part where Aol. was promoting toxicity and hate while attempting a short-term grift on its users like Reddit and X have.
That fact that Aol. is still alive is amazing by itself. It’s just another sleazy, beleaguered company that used to be meaningful. You leave because other companies have better products, not because they offend your sense of morality.
(Or maybe they do.)
I think you underestimate how ignorant people can be. The reason Aol still exists is because they are grifters too. My Aol example was to show that people are docile idiots and won’t change their habits. Aol is grifting just as much as reddit does. They’re just grifting different groups in different ways.
That’s why i think reddit and twitter will continue on for a long time. Maybe not as powerhouses but they won’t implode or go away any time soon.
My mom was still paying for dial-up AOL in 2016. She had been paying them $20 a month for over a decade while having high-speed internet that she was also paying for.
When I asked her why she didn’t cancel it, she said she would lose her email.
So I canceled it because AOL provides free email because they make money off of the ads.
Not just AOL Internet, but also the email service. Same for Hotmail. I used to work at iHeart, and the number of those email services (from prize winners) was not insignificant.
Hotmail was owned by Microsoft when I signed up in the late 90s. It’s no surprise it’s still around. It hasn’t been my primary email for a long time, but I still use it as my MS account. So really it’s just my Minecraft account.
I have a few accounts floating around for different services Microsoft has bought out or since integrated logins for. I genuinely don’t know how many Microsoft accounts I have, and it’s always a pain trying to guess which one a given service is on
There are a lot of subreddits for which there is no real replacement. Sometimes the strength in a community is the people. Doesn’t matter if reddit sucks if the people are there.
I believe you missed the point. There’s people there because they know that their content won’t be found elsewhere.
I don’t know, I feel during that exodus we got the best of the best. I miss some of the niche communities, But there’s so many fewer assholes over here.
A lot of it is just propaganda bots at this point.
Those still on are a bunch of bootlickers IMO
The best protest is to stop moderating. Lie flat. Let the subreddit go to shit.
That’s when I knew we lost. When power hungry moderators felt threatened and, instead of standing in solidarity with its users, caved to corporate demands.
“But we’ll be able to still protest. Every Tuesday.”
Hell are those protests still going on? I highly doubt it.
People tried that.
reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.
Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless “We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power” idiocy.
At least you’re not the sucker doing it for free for the shareholders anymore.
I mean… everyone contributing all those super useful posts that everyone thinks are the only authoritative sources of information on the internet are doing exactly that.
Every time you provide some tech support or a bit of advice? You are providing reddit shareholders’ money.
Scabbing for reddit mod clout is utterly wild.
Many subs did that, so reddit substituted the mods for others that do as they are told.
The dndmemes protests were a pretty incredible thing while they lasted. The mods changed the subreddit to “nsfw” because that disabled most of the monetization. Then Reddit admins told them the subreddit obviously wasn’t really nsfw and to change it to accurately reflect the subreddit content.
…so the mods changed the subreddit rules to allow actual nsfw content and people went nuts. In multiple senses of the term.
Of course “accurately reflecting the subreddit” wasn’t what Reddit really cared about. They wanted to preserve the advertising stream for a popular subreddit, and this did the opposite of that. Reddit admins soon after basically said “remove nsfw content, restore the subreddit to what it used to be, do what we say or we’ll replace you with a mod team of our own choosing”.
Thanks for sharing this I guess I left before all of this happened and I haven’t heard any of it.
The problem is that this opens the door to far right bootlickers who a salivating at the idea of turning reddit into an even farther right shithole.
lol no if anything they’ve become far left shitholes.
Reddit would close the sub for being unmoderated until someone asks to be the new mod
mission accomplished? That has the same effect as making it private, doesn’t it?
Well, the power hungry mod that lost their power wouldn’t be very happy with it and larger communities wouldn’t stay closed very long
Reddit mods are such cucks for power that they cave when it’s threatened to be removed
A lot of subreddits have done that. The problem is nobody notices…
That’s what I did with all mine.
It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.
There was this one post for a call for mods about “doing a social good for the community”.
Like bro, this is a video game subreddit. And you’re doing it for free, to help another dude get really rich.
Ideally, it would be because they care for the community they moderate, which I believe is the reason most mods do it.
Then you have creatures like awkwardtheturtle, who knows what motivates them.
I would assume Awkward is motivated by narcissism and/or because they’re a power-hungry freakazoid, but who knows? 🤷
I learned if you Google “fertility doctors who used own sperm”, there isn’t one or two incidents. It’s A LOT.
I don’t understand why anybody would do such a disgusting thing. but it helps me understand narcissism and power hungry behavior.
it’s power. power motivates and corrupts.
It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.
Well it used to be (when Reddit was FLOSS and Reddit didn’t take communities off the founders who created them, at most they’d close the community) that people saw it as choosing Reddit to host the community instead of creating it somewhere else. However, Reddit has since changed the rules drastically, and essentially taken the communities people created there.
Best response for mods is to move your community somewhere else, and put in an automod rule redirecting people to the new community on Lemmy or whatever. Reddit will probably eventually try to take over and keep competing with your community under the original URL.
I was reading this post recently: https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/ - I guess it applies to communities equally as much as it applies to anything else.
If all mods quit that’d be perfect. Reddit has shown they’ll replace mods when they actually need to (or want to). But if no regular users wanted to pick it up then they’d have to pay admins to moderate. I don’t think we’ll see it though. There’s always going to be someone who wants it enough who has enough time for whatever reason.
so many leaders are forgetting what the point of protests is. yes, protests are annoying if you’re a leader. but they’re better than the alternative. that’s the whole point.
They’re better than the OLD alternative, which was total boycotting at best, and torches and pitchforks at worst. The NEW alternative is complaining about it for a week or two, then continuing on without making any changes at all. They don’t mind the new alternative.
The new alternative is becoming obsolete
I sure hope so, but I don’t see much changing. I guess we’ll see by looking at where Reddit is at business-wise by next year. People were saying it was doomed last summer after the 3rd party app fiasco, and their daily traffic has only gone up since then. I’ve long since lost all faith in the masses making the best choices for themselves.
their daily traffic has only gone up since then
Although the quality has noticeably decreased. The number of bots has shot up a ridiculous amount.
The quality on Reddit has really gone down with content creators disillusioned or gone, fake content everywhere (I’ve seen almost an entire scrollable thread copied comment-for-comment), and so many users wiping their comments.
The owners are acting like everything is fine, but I think there’s a good chance it keeps hollowing out until the appeal isn’t there even for casual users. They can’t really turn back at this point, they burned the bridge.
i’m not yet sold on this “old vs new” thing. while i do agree that it would be better if people were more engaged/active about boycotting things and pulling out the pitchforks, my understanding is that hasn’t been the historical precedent in situations like this. the pitchfork stuff certainly did happen quite a lot in the past, but my understanding is that it was for more extreme problems than a social media company shutting down third party apps (which many people didn’t even know about). but then again, it might be hard to compare this to the company transgressions of the past.
my understanding is that frustration is building, and if things continue in this direction, they will reach a tipping point where people do actually stop using the website all together and switch to alternatives. and, this ban on protests will give the reddit executives much less information on how close things are to that tipping point. (not to mention that the ban itself will probably accelerate things.)
but i could be mistaken about this, and i’m open to changing my mind on it.
You can’t even make an allusion to torches and pitchforks on Reddit. Legit, they’ll ban ya.
But that complacency isn’t happening to everyone. A lot are just festering, slowly digesting more incredulous and radical propaganda/influencers. Every ones base reality of the events that are happening over the country is getting completely skewed by the new types of outlets like tiktok that they flock to because of the lack of accountability by our elected officials and journalists/news organizations.
During just this last hurricane Helene I’ve heard more anger and outrage about the government than anything to actually do about what’s been hit or what the people and rescue workers are actually doing. This is how we get mass shooters and assassinations becoming more prolific, people aren’t just complaining and going about their day. They’re nodding and grinding their teeth while smiling.
Something Great and something French
I have made like, idk, maybe three reddit posts in the past year. Apart from incredibly specific niche topics which don’t have enough folks here to get a good answer, I don’t use Reddit.
The old alternative is better IMO, makes change happen one way or another. Specifically the unsanctioned, and non-peaceful protests. Boycotts don’t work in the days of ad-revenue, since ad-revenue funded companies have immunity from user dissatisfaction in that regard (can replace a substantial amount of users with bots that look at ads and they still get ad-revenue).
What we need are old-fashioned style pitchforks and fire protests against them, but in the digital age, using cyberwarfare, like this.
(reposted because SJW deleted my others)
Even archive.org can’t resolve archive.ph
Removed by mod
People haven’t been using the alternative, and that’s the problem. Reddit and tech giants have grown complicit. They do not believe people would do it to them, or they think they could survive thousands of people trying to do it to them, if one can then many can.
Protests: a pressure valve to release steam. You gotta let them get out there and march around for a little bit. Let them walk it off. Then proceed to implement the next new tyranny a little bit at a time.
The violent ones produce change one way or another. They’re significantly less desirable for leaders, and that’s kind of the point.
Or just agree with what your betters want you to think, obviously. </s>
More hilarity: as of about a week ago, it appears the reddit algorithm has also started boosting posts with negative karma on their horrible mobile app. Guessing it’s a move towards ‘negative engagement’. I have not seen it myself (I don’t use the reddit app) but I see users complaining about it.
I have to imagine that when some c-level suit saw that term in his moth-eaten copy of “Social Media for Dummies,” I don’t think it was intended to be taken quite so flagrantly visibly literally…
This isn’t limited to the Reddit app. You can see it on the desktop and mobile website too.
So that’s what happened?! I rarely come here, but last weekend was so bad that I started updating my subscribed communities here.
I thought I interacted with too many downvoted posts, and screwed up what reddit thought were my main interests. Guess I was expecting too much from reddit…
At reddit, line must go up. So user experience must go down.
A friend and I were recently discussing how spineless modern boycotts are.
We set a goddamn deadline for when the Reddit boycott ended. No wonder Spez just waited. Most people then just continued using the website. What a disgrace.
Imagine if after one week of the genocide in Gaza, the BDS efforts just stopped. A boycott must be indefinite. It should go on until demands are met.
Go_JasonWaterfalls on the platform, writes in a post on r/modnews. “We have a responsibility to protect Reddit and ensure its long-term health, and we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm.”
You mean like killing all third-party apps and selling user-data to AI companies? That kind of harm? Oh no, you meant “harm” to your personal finance.
Harm? That is what would happen to their company if they explained what they meant by “harm”
Because certainly they don’t think brigades harm communities if they won’t trust mods to set subreddits as private
…we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm
Seems like that’s about the only actions Reddit execs have taken over the last several years. Glad I left when I did.
