I mostly stuck to a small circle of communities on Reddit, and while the quality of content has stayed about the same, the frequency of posts has dropped notably in most of them.
The one exception is /r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/, which is supposed to be for IT memes and funny interactions with users. Since the blackout started, that sub has gradually devolved into reposts of years old memes (not even IT specific memes, just anything tech related) and text posts asking random computer questions, which was previously banned.
I suspect what the article is describing is actually happening, but I’m curious how the writer a couple of quotes deep goes about identifying “emotionally sticky nodes”. They are using verbiage that makes it sound like they are describing something objective, but I have my doubts.
Not really. There is some discussion of "emotionally sticky nodes", but they aren't really defined, just described. Which is fine, and it's actually an interesting article, but when you start throwing around terms like "nodes" it makes it sound like you want your readers to think you're talking about something that is empirically valid, not just giving your opinion.
The article does kind of define it, but does a poor job.
An emotionally sticky node is a user who makes other users stay on the site. Examples of this for Reddit would be accounts like poem_for_your_sprog, ShittyWatercolor, Shittymorph, or wil.
There are others, of course, that you may not be able to name - /r/California was mostly kept alive by /u/BlankVerse, who posted 85% of all the articles to that subreddit. You'd never notice unless you paid attention to usernames. Similarly, a small percentage of people made a large percentage of Reddit's OC. Typically you couldn't name them, either, but you'd know if they weren't there because they gave Reddit a soul.
Reddit started off as a bunch of bots reposting links they found, without even a comment section. Eventually real people came and started posting nerd stuff (like programming articles) alongside the bots. Enough of a critical mass was created that a comment section was added, making old Reddit look like what HackerNews or Tildes look like today. The programming and porn were sent to different subsections of the site for the people who don't want to see such things (these became the first subreddits). The default subreddits were slowly created, then anyone could make their own subreddits for their own topics.
Still, it was largely posts to things found elsewhere. People went to Reddit as part of their trip through several other websites. They'd usually gather what they found during that trip and repost it to Reddit. OC wasn't expected; reposts were encouraged. By the early 2010s, a lot of the pictures on Reddit were mainly 4chan reposts. People who had a lot of stuff saved from other sites were the "emotionally sticky nodes" and people would come to Reddit to see stuff that was explicitly gathered from everywhere else - hence why Reddit was the "frontpage of the internet", an aggregate of what people had found elsewhere.
Eventually we started to see OC for the first time. Advice Animals sprung from 4chan memes and really started to go viral across Reddit. Reddit users started making their own native advice animal formats and now Reddit was no longer just "things from elsewhere on the internet" but new content you couldn't see elsewhere. Soon these people making OC became the "emotionally sticky nodes", keeping users on the site.
And, of course, there are other things who were "emotionally sticky" without necessarily posting memes. Reddit became a great place to aggregate news at-a-glance. This is because of the moderation of the news and politics subreddits, ensuring that things posted to their subs were actual articles, post names were real headlines (no editorializing!), and the page wasn't littered with random YouTube videos or self-posts or images or whatever. Good moderation meant that you could go to /r/news or /r/worldnews and trust that you were getting the same effect as looking at the headlines of a newspaper. Similarly, the 2012 election had /r/politics become a great source of information and discussion about the US Presidental Race. These sorts of things made Reddit a useful site and kept people coming back.
Even now, Reddit still has "emotionally sticky" places. They could be individual users like the ones I mentioned above, or they could be entire subreddits that aren't quite captured here on Lemmy/Kbin yet. Neither Lemmy nor Kbin have great mod tools, and a lot of mod teams here are inexperienced and not as aggressive as Reddit mod teams are. You can argue this is a good thing, but aggressive moderation really matters for places like the news communities where legitimacy comes from users avoiding editorializing. This means that these places aren't a good replacement for Reddit (yet) - subreddits where moderation is important are still "emotionally sticky" because nothing can compete with them. (This is why it's important that Lemmy develop good mod teams and good mod tools!)
There are oodles of niche communities that you've never heard of that haven't come over, either - for example, !modeltrains (@modeltrains) and https://lemmy.world/c/nscalemodeltrains are niche communities on Reddit, but neither of their fediverse counterparts have much activity (other than me). People on Reddit thus don't want to leave their niche community because it doesn't have any activity over here, and because there's no activity over here, nobody wants to come over here to start activity - meaning there's no activity over here. That's why it's important to make sure you contribute often to niche communities you care about, even if your content isn't "good" - there needs to be something to lure emotionally sticky nodes here and get people to jump over.
That said, some places absolutely have made the jump successfully (https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196). But for most places there's a while to go before Reddit gets to the point where it can't maintain itself as a site.
Deleted my 15 year account and what little posts I had. Joined kbin and lemmy since I don't know what I was doing. But it also made me think of what other social media and what else I'm using that is governed by corporate overlords. Deleted Twitter and joined Mastodon just to see what is like. I uninstalled Windows 11 and installed Linux Mint on my PC. Now looking for alternatives to Google apps that I use even though I'm on a Google Pixel phone but it's into it's 3rd year so it'll probably die sooner than later. So looking for cloud hosting for photos, spreadsheets etc between my phone and my PC to break away from Google. Anyway moving from Reddit has started a avalanche of introspection of what I'm using. Tldr: No.
Without Google wallet/pay support and it's 50/50 if banking apps work I won't be switching but I like everything else about the OS. I don't want to go back to carrying cards around with me, been too many years of just using my phone for payments. Thank you for the recommendation though.
Very well put. The shutdown of Apollo was enough to make me want to ditch Reddit but the very noticeable drop in quality in both posts and comments since at least the blackout was the final nail in the coffin. Glad to see that it’s not just me. Luckily Lemmy has quickly filled the void for me and I’ve been very surprised with how much it’s been growing lately.
I visit out of habit. There's nothing interesting being posted. bots are posting super old reposts, and spam is being posted and the mods aren't removing them, and i'm not going to report them. I'm in a weird state where there's not a great content aggregator anywhere right now, so its giving me an opportunity to waste my time on other things instead.
Anecdote incoming: i had coincidentally put myself on hiatus from news/Reddit before the whole 3rd party app drama started the Exodus, and didn’t have a clue what was going on until about a week ago.
I think it’s a perfect time to say goodbye forever. I miss a couple smaller communities to the point i want to remember them for what they were. I don’t want to see them die firsthand.
I’ve been shitposting 12 years. Its bittersweet, I’ll truly miss it, like an old friend. i’m ripping the band-aid off.
Yes. I've deleted several previous Reddit accounts, and ended up losing some pretty good stuff. Meanwhile, I'm not deleting the ones I currently have as I still have use for Reddit.
I think it is a big mistake to underestimate the effect of having reached the critical mass of users. It will not die easily (spez is working hard to achieve this), much less quickly.
MySpace and digg still exist as well. Social media sites don’t die in the typical sense of the word, but they “die” nonetheless. More like abandoned malls than 6 feet under
Yeah it’s changed focus a few times. They focused on music for a while, then pivoted to entertainment news. Surprisingly they still have around 100 employees.
Some years ago they “lost” a lot of data during a data center migration. MySpace was the go-to place for small indie bands in the mid to late 2000s, so a lot of music that was only available on MySpace is totally lost now. People didn’t get a chance to archive it, since MySpace didn’t announce it beforehand.
I say “lost” because my opinion is that it was expensive for them to keep storing all that data and so they just deleted it all and made up an excuse.
I didn't delete anything, because there's quite a bit of programming & tech advice. I always knew reddit was profiting off my contribution, everybody should have known that from the beginning.
I'll stop contributing, but I don't like how much useful information has gone dark or otherwise suddenly just been lost. I wouldn't burn a library down because they started charging exorbitant late fees, I would just stop going there.
I didn't delete my account, but I did wipe out my post history.
I keep my account active because I've already found a couple of instances where reddit restored my posts in particular sub reddits ands I had to delete them again.
If I deleted my account I would never again get that special feeling of conducting a websearch to solve some problem and finding a hit from a person who looks like they are having exactly the same issue as me, only to find it was me posting 2 years ago and there are no useful responses.
Makes me wonder how identifiable I am by my "accent" online... I must phrase things in unusual ways. And I spend a lot of time trying to solve problems that are either unsolvable or over my head..
I always find this situation crushing, demoralizing and very funny and until lemmy has better search indexing I don't want to give it up.
Also I wrote things I think were useful too. But I don't stumble no them.
Tech/programming stuff is exactly why I did nuke mine. Going isn't as meaningful if you leave a bunch of value behind when you do. While I'm here for entertainment now, I'm often spending my reddit time during work hours on vendor-hosted support forums, stackexchange, etc. now.
Gradually, that library will be relocated to other places. Instead of just not going, I think it's better to take away others' reasons for going too, give them reason to seek out better libraries.
Good thing is that the content is not lost for those that know to surf the web. But those locations don't help reddit at all (main one is the wayback machine from archive.org and then there is a raw datadump of anyhting up to march 2023 as JSON)
Why I left mine intact. The Reddit "library," as it were, remains one of the largest and most significant public goods online. I think that's more important than burning my contributions in the hopes that Reddit management will do a 180. I also pinned a post advertising kbin/lemmy and Squabbles on my profile.
I'm certainly no longer participating, however, and I don't think Reddit's built to survive only on visitors from Google.
Same here, I just stopped using it. I never had the urge to burn the place down.
Not that erasing my paltry contributions over the years will probably have made that much difference but who knows if it helps someone in a future Google search that's a good thing.
Yeah- there is so much information that is more detailed and accurate to specific situations in almost every area that would be lost to the future.
And you literally never know what weird take on a current situation, or what seemingly small detail of information about a field of knowledge might be important to people, historians, etc., in the future. So much of our knowledge is in our inherent understanding of how the world is right now, that we tend to assume that that knowledge will always be there and available, but that's not necessarily the case.
Anyway. I get deleting, or even removing maybe some of the more frivolous content if possible, ("This" "So much this" somes to mind lol) but I think it's ok to preserve that history.
Had been on reddit for 12+ years, tons of accounts, ran a few small subs. Some insane supermod decided to fuck with me across the site so I nuked all my comments, accounts and subs and I'm done with it. Not having it on mobile since the third-party apps shutdown made it easy. I'll still peruse some interesting/hobby subs but I won't participate ever again. No regrets, the place is toxic.
They have too many users to die any noticeable death.
Their bot defense left. Tons of communities affecting millions of subscribers have changed to adopt rules to make their platform borderline unusable (/videos only allows text posts describing videos).
Without defense against bots, the place will become a “dead” website in that the majority of the content will be bots posting for bots, and a handful of addicted dipshit interacting with them.
Much like Facebook, their soup du jour will be anger. Posts will seek to dri e engagement from what few users remain, and the main method they will achieve this through will be so ially and/or politically divisive topics.
Let it rot from the inside out. Let it be the new Facebook.
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