CopernicusQwark

Arotrios, 2 years ago

Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.

In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.

I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.

What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.

Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.

But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.

And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.

JonEFive, 2 years ago

It's a lot like Twitter. Twitter was doing alright prior to Musk. Their user base was as strong and plentiful as ever. There have always been shitty users and toxic corners but Twitter did their best to downplay that and highlight the better parts of their platform. They did their best to walk that fine line between moderation and censorship.

But with Musk spending $44bn so that he could meme without consequence and restore accounts of politically powerful people to gain favor, along with him gutting all of the departments that did the moderation, the site has gone from a legitimate place to interact to a well known cesspool of toxicity that users and corporations are starting to shy away from. Turns out that getting rid of moderators might not be such a good idea.

There are still a great many users on Twitter who are actively participating and that won't change anytime soon. But the ratio of good content to bad has changed and Twitter's reputation both as a company and as a platform has been tarnished. Twitter isn't going anywhere, but many people have grown weary of the antics and moved on. And that's what we're seeing of reddit right now. The only difference is the simultaneous mass, organized exodus of users from reddit vs the more gradual enshitification of Twitter.

1chemistdown, 2 years ago (edited 2 years ago)

When the API shut off early, Apollo dev u/iamthatis (@ChristianSelig) revoked his token so I cannot see any of this; but I’m wondering if reddit isn’t pulling a silent reversal of this to stem the bleeding of users and content. There is a lot of useful stuff that has been deleted. The AMA staff resigning and all the stuff migrating to fedi. No matter how much f-u/spez tries to shout “This is fine”; the building is still burning all around him.

Bet they left turned access back on.

AlecSadler, 2 years ago

Exactly. Relay user here and it'll continue to function but...

1. Fuck spez
2. I don't care to support reddit anymore
3. Reddit's content for my feed is already turning to garbage. I'm already finding kbin and lemmy better.

Good riddins.

islandmonkeee, 2 years ago

The thing is that it really is no longer about 3rd party apps working or not, rather, the level of disrespect displayed from Reddit towards us, their userbase. That's why I'm not going back.

Valdair, 2 years ago

I thought access would essentially be the same from the app's perspective, just the app builders would start getting MASSIVE bills in the mail? And they were shutting it down preemptively to avoid this.

Candelestine, 2 years ago

There’s shitloads of secret communities everywhere. Discord is particularly popular. The reason they exist is that average people are only averagely intelligent and averagely interested in most topics, so if you want a higher level of content than average, you have to go where they can’t find you.

When a dance club is cool, nobody knows about it. When everyone finds out about it, those cool people go somewhere else. Being cool, itself, implies being something different enough from normal to necessitate its own word to differentiate it. Think hipster.

Average people made McDonalds the worlds most successful restaurant. Not everybody wants to live on big macs though. But on the internet, where the users control the content, they find your cool burger place and accidentally turn it into a McDonalds because they don’t know the difference.

In my experience, most people outgrow the secret clubs phase eventually. But I’m sure not everyone does. Who doesn’t like feeling special, no matter how unjustified it is?

BlondieBuff, 2 years ago

Funny how r/blind saw this coming from a mile away

Elkaki123, 2 years ago

I agree but with slight differences, I don’t think it’s only about power but more on the first thing, they have built communities for over a decade, to just leave is extremely difficult when you have poured this much work and time into the thing, it might be like an abusive relationship but they still love the places they’ve built.

That being said, some of mods have left big subs, but it’s kind of difficult to get everyone on board.

Lastly I do think this is impactful, it literally strips one of the most “prestigious” and well recognized sub of all the functions that made it special, only doing the bare minimum to keep it alive

Kill_joy, 2 years ago (edited 2 years ago)

It's funny... Moderators are SO hungry for power that they just can't let go. If the moderators for huge subs like IAMA, PICS, etc. dropped the cutesy meming bullshit "protests" and just simply quit doing the job for free, some damage could actually be done to reddit.

But these people are simply too invested in the communities they built and in love with the power they have to let go of the dead corpse they are clinging to.

liminis, 2 years ago

There's been a pretty wide range of responses, and while some boil down to that, I think the general trend is attachment and people fearing the result of some rw 'scab' taking over. Elkaki above's comparison to an abusive relationship feels really on the mark.

Even without all that though, sometimes it's genuinely hard for people to break habits; and many of these habits are years old. Doesn't really come down to region or logic.

d00phy, 2 years ago

This is something I’ve been wondering for awhile: if I were a mod on Reddit, and was being threatened by the admins to bend the knee, as it were, my response would likely be to remove any and all tools i had put in place to help me moderate, and say, “goodbye.”

I’m sure there’s something I’m just not understanding, but why isn’t this happening?

018118055, 2 years ago

But everyone is a bot, except...