Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
Don’t be fooled. Most went back.
Quantity is not quality.
That works in both directions. Don’t assume that the few that didn’t return are the ones that would have saved Reddit via incredible content.
More important is originality…
Lots of people/bots would just take an existing post from Reddit, and repost it. Sometimes to a different sub, sometimes to the same sub.
For most users, it was still “new” because they hadn’t seen it before.
Those accounts are still reposting. There’s more than few that do it here too.
But that OC has been drastically cut down, there’s just a delay in users noticing that there’s fewer and fewer “new” reposts going around.
So reddit doesn’t see a huge decrease in users immediately, but time on site and daily users will continue to decrease
More important is originality…
Is it, though? I left Reddit for here, so don’t take this as being in their defense, but if originality and ad revenue were meaningfully correlated, Facebook and Instagram would be bastions of original content.
Hell, some of the most profitable YouTubers only post reaction content.
Quality is the same, on most middle size subs.
Never was subbed to those. Quality dived many years ago on those subs I cared about.
Did they? I had one of the top non-porn accounts actually run by a person (most high karma accounts use bots, I didn’t out of ironic laziness) and I haven’t posted or commented since whenever Day 0 was for rif is fun. I’ve been back a couple times for very specific things but not logged in or participating in any active way. Of course, I’m just one (high karma) data point, but I really don’t think I’m unique in this. I also have no real desire to contribute to Reddit again in the future. Getting off of it has been pretty nice.
Look, it’s not that people aren’t still posting, the site obviously still has content, but it really is just “content.” The quality of discussion I’ve seen has gone down pretty steep. Modding appears to be almost nonexistent in big subs or very agenda-driven otherwise. I think a lot of contributors who treated Reddit like old school forums have left and it’s slowly turning into a weird combo of Facebook and 4chan if that makes sense. If that’s what the userbase wants, go for it, I guess. But that’s not my jam.
Why not delete the account ?
My old one? It’s a good question and I have actually thought about it. I have a lot of inanity on there but some (I think) decent replies to people trying to be “reasonable” fascists, racists, misogynists, etc. if that makes sense. I’ll admit I mostly posted news articles I thought were interesting, though I would regularly participate in the discussions for those articles, but those articles frequently got a lot of traffic. So I guess there’s two problems with nuking the account:
(1) If I delete all my comments, you end up in some cases with what looks like someone deleting their response to a bad actor, leaving that bad actor not only unchallenged, but looking like they “won” the argument, and
(2) If I delete all my posts, I remove from public view the comments of (at this point) likely tens of thousands of people, if not more given how many high karma and high participation posts I submitted, many of whom might not have wanted me to do so.
I have so many of both that it’d be a massive pain to go through and selectively delete stuff. Easier to just leave the account be and never use it again. Deleting the account just means it’s anonymized, which can also invite bad faith.
A lot of search results still take me to Reddit. It is still a source of knowledge.
As much as I hate to admit it, I’m considering it too - not instead, but also. I haven’t been back since Apollo died but Lemmy just doesn’t have the diversity of interests and niche communities yet. It feels really one dimensional sometimes.
I’m not. Pretty happy here overall.
Sometimes I want to see things besides hard left politics, Linux and furries. And a huge helping of divorced-from-reality beyond-left opinions from .ml and whatever hexbear is.
And I know I can block all those communities, but you’re not left with a ton once you do. Those demographics are dramatically over represented on lemmy.
If someone can tell me which direction to game specific communities i used to be part of (RimWorld, Souls games, Paradox games…) I’d be happy. Now I can only rely on discord.
And no, don’t tell me to create the community and content myself. The audience isn’t even high enough for discussing all games as a whole let alone specific games. This is what “let Lemmy stay small” crowd misses. Niche community can only be started as branch of (very) large community.
You can search for communities with https://browse.feddit.de/ .
For Rimworld I found: https://lemmy.world/c/rimworld
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
For me the main issue is that my professional community is pretty active there but not here. So if I want to share some professional work and discussion, I can only go there. I will probably double post out of activism but I know it won’t have much effect. For entertainment though, I’m good here.
Yeah. Lemmy really isn’t as good as Reddit. You run into people on Lemmy who will ban you just because you disagree with their echo chamber. Also, there isn’t as much content.
But after cementing lemmy as a viable alternative. I actually find fun content on lemmy. Reddit feed for me ends up turning into a left vs right garbage.
When I’ve gone back for a look I’ve found just the opposite. It’s just bots and trolls.
What’s your basis for this statement? Any evidence to back it up?
But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That’s devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.
Never going back.
?
Me, going back to that cesspool. I left quite the account behind as well.
What I’ve noticed is it became way more toxic over there since the API changes
I still scurry over occasionally (a lot of communities didn’t move over) but not nearly as much as I used to
Same. It runs so badly now, and enough moderators left or cut back that it is not the same site it was at all. Some communities are still intact, but I’ve begun to see lemmy and even Mastodon results in searches alongside reddit. It’s going to take a while to see if reddit can recover (it’ll take some humility and leadership from the top which seems unlikely) or die slowly then all at once. Remember digg, etc? The internet is fickle and for every Facebook there are a hundred friendsters.
Ironically way more bot now
I still occasionally browse the smaller subs when I need help on things like /r/unraid.
This became an instant classic lol, do we know who the artist is?
Do you have any data to support that? My feeling is that not much changed after that. I feel like there is business as usual there. At least when I talk to my peers.
Reddit’s value as a social media platform drops as it’s value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that’s was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
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I reached the same conclusion and posted it to reddit over a decade ago, asking people to try to come up with a better solution, long before I even knew open source software was a thing.
Well, took 15 years, but lemmy exists now so hooray!
I deleted my reddit account and joined lemmy during the subreddit blackout, but there’s still a few authors I follow on reddit. Most I’ve followed to other sites, and just recently one was suspended for what sounds like a fuck up on reddit’s end.
Reddit lost most of their quality content creators and I can’t see the few remaining staying long term.
Honestly feels like a scam for rich people. Spez just has to convince some suckers that Reddit would be profitable as he cashes out. Then they’re left with a dead platform as they kill it with ads and astroturfing.
This is honestly what I feel like most businesses are these days, just scams to convince other rich people to invest, so they can cash out early on. Basically the same stuff all the crypto currencies were doing.
as its* value to advertisers rises
Yes, I agree. In the end, Reddit lives off its reputation, just like every social media platform. Seriously, is there an effect that when you’re long enough the CEO of a company, you begin making decisions where it is obvious that they will negatively impact the user base and thus long-term survivability of a company? Is there a term for that?
You mean hubris?
More like stupris, amirite
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Is he Australian?
No idea
Well yeah, I’m probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together… after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought this on themselves.
Same, but only a few years user. Sync for lemmy is so much better.
I loved Sync for Reddit as an app. But I already was seeing Reddit go downhill even before they killed the apps, that just sealed the deal for me. I was a digg refugee so sadly I’ve been through this before already.
Does your user name mean that you’re a lover of misspelling ready?
Came from using it daily to only going there only when google forces me to use it
Many of such cases I assume
Me too. It was the constant popups making me download their app that did it for me.
tHiS cOmmUnIty MiGhT hAvE sEnSiTiVe CONTENT, dOwNlOaD OuR ApP pLeAsE!
Just give me my porn, you fucks
Didn’t it die together with all other 3rd party clients?
No, instead of using the official (now paid and ridiculously priced) API, Libreddit uses web scraping. This leads to some instances getting temporarily blocked, but it should work most of the time. That caused some admins to shut down their instances, which is really dumb, because we need more instances, not less. Maybe they can implement IP address rotation like Invidious https://docs.invidious.io/ipv6-rotator/, that would definitely get around the IP blocks.
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Critical hit to my self esteem.
Thank you for building up the community.
Ya do realize that internet access is pretty much universal, dudes well within the acceptable posting amout id expect. It aint 20010 no more, everyone has a pocket computer and can do it damn near everywhere. Fuck the mountains near me are now scattershot on signal rather than completely worthless like they were back in 2014.
Let’s for a second take stock of what’s happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn’t lose a dime they just didn’t make as much as they wanted to.
The difference with Facebook is that it is a public company, so it does have to grow every year to have value for investors.
Reddit doesn’t. It’s existing private investors can splot the profit and be just fine. They just want a huge payout that will only come from an IPO.
And the issue with consistent growth in billion dollar companies is that it’s not sustainable. We can’t just keep pilling on profits on top of profits to sate investors insecurities.
These morons will try though, their strategy invariably seems to be building the Jenga tower as high as possible, thinking they’ll be “quick” or “smart” enough to sell their shares before it tumbles.
It’s gambling, but with people’s livelihoods.
Are you not aware that public companies split the profits too? They do not need to grow to have value for investors.
Not all of them do that. There are growth stocks and dividend stocks. Growth stocks typically don’t pay dividends, but instead reinvest the dividend back into the company. Amazon, Alphabet and Berkshire Hathaway don’t pay dividends.
Of course not. But they can, whenever they choose to. Parent comment said they have to grow since they are public, unlike private companies like Reddit.
Yeah tell it to the shareholders
Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.
They feel like they get shorted because many of those users don’t contribute to ad revenue from 3rd party apps but instead of improving their app to lure users in they instead tell those users to fuck off.
A user is a user, even if they don’t contribute directly to ad revenue they contribute content to make the site more alluring for those who will contribute to ad revenue. As well they help spread the word about reddit to those who don’t use it regularly yet by sharing that content outside of reddit.
They were pretty short sighted by doing what they did.
It’s just many power users and mods were power users and mods thanks to tools in these apps, and Reddit still didn’t provide anything comparable. Many small communities I still care about have a lot less posts if they don’t have bots. It’s not like Fediverse won Reddit, but something changed in them. NSFW OC subs are still good, but idk if they make the image spez wants from that platfom. The only thing we def should do is to stay online and be welcome for stray redditors to join.
The phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” comes to mind.
I believe it’s “spider-face.”
Edit: lol, guess we don’t have a lot of fans of The Office around here.
I would have been happy to pay to get API access for 3rd party apps on my account. Maybe 1 or 2 dollars per account and month would have been reasonable to cover the costs without ad revenue. Double it to please greedy shareholders.
Instead they asked for such ludicrous amounts from 3rd party developers, basically telling them to fuck off.
Either they were mad for control or got greedy over their „golden data“ for AI training. Or both. In any case, they never were interested in finding a user friendly solution so fuck them.
Some app dev mentioned they wanted to work with them to introduce ads that Reddit would have made profit from in the free version of the app and it’s Reddit that said “Nah it’s ok”…
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Do you have a citation on that 25% figure?
Source: my bias
It’s such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn’t corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word “Reddit” to the end of the search.
As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there’s a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.
Edit: /oblig fuck you spez. Slimy little arsehole sold everyone out and thinks he deserves to be rich because his shitty site isn’t absolutely irredeemable.
Reddit was like the StackOverflow for life
…sometimes coding too We’re like regressing to friend’s or known in person people’s opinions, because Internet will be full of bot and sponsored content and opinions. Either way, double money for corporations, sponsored content ->more sales; people not trusting reviews and trying out stuff just to find out it’s rubbish ->more sales
11 year old account on Reddit too and I left it during TPA too. Had nearly 2 million karma. Same username as this one.
I wish Elon would scare away Reddit’s advertisers instead of twitter’s.
Remember, the reason I ditched Reddit wasn’t the ads per se, it was the constant data selling, and the official app just getting worse and worse with unwanted “features” pushed on everyone. They kept getting greedier and greedier so when they disabled 3rd party apps I ditched Reddit.
Same
I mainly lurked on the art and fanfic forums, and considered getting an account when I had the time/had created something worth sharing on there. But when I learned about the disabling of apps to improve accessibility…I started looking for alternatives.
Plus, I don’t like the idea of the karma system on there. Supposedly, it reduces the number of trolls and low effort posts, but I’ve seen it cause people to post ragebait to karma farm on subreddits that reward you with upvotes for making up outrageous stories. I’ve also seen “debate” subreddits where people downvote people who make good points, but disagree with. Then those people leave, not wanting to be punished on other subreddits that require a high amount of karma to post, leading to “debate” subreddits that are laughably one-sided.
I actively participated in Reddit before the killing of the Third Party Apps, because I really liked the content and the platform was a superb experience on a third party app.
fatbird still exists
eh ill still oen their stock
Fuck Zuckerberg, Fuck Spez!! 🖕🖕
Good, fuck spez.
Nothing to celebrate.
Reddit revenue is still up, just not as much as they had hoped.
That’s still enough to tank an IPO.
Yep, in the face of the infinite growth monster, anything other than exceeding expectations is seen as a failure
“We see here you’re up 5%, but you were up 5% last year too, so you’re dead now.”
-Capitalism
I still remember a line from a boss I had in one of my very first “real” jobs. “I expect you to exceed my expectations.”
I didn’t bother pointing out the problem there. I also didn’t stay working for her for very long. :)
Can you buy puts on an IPO?
Reddit, as a concept, can’t make more money without destroying it’s value. The more advertising is injected into it, the less useful it becomes, and the less people will want to use it.
So yes, it’s up, but they’ve hurt themselves drastically to get it up by hurting so much of Reddit’s usefulness, and even then, they fell short. People who remained are already low on patience with it.
To drive it even higher, they will have to cripple it even more.
It’s possible to make money with Reddit while leaving it unmolested, but it’s not possible to make ALL the money that way. Investors want ALL the money.
Reddit who?
If I can’t browse my way, I simply don’t use the site.
If reddit pops up in a search result on my browser, wellll best believe I have multiple adblockers making sure their ads don’t load.
And every time a Reddit results show up, I’m immediately reminded why I don’t want to go there by an error telling me that I can’t use the site without logging in.
Fortunately, just changing the link to old.reddit.com still works even through VPN, but fuck this behavior. I do that only for questions I really need an answer and couldn’t find anywhere else, and most of the time the replies are shit anyway.
Hate any results from Twitter as well.
Log in, log in, tell us who you are!
Fuck you. I never made an account when it wasn’t run by a thin-skinned narcissistic man-child, and I’m not about to start now.
Thanks for the tip I didn’t know that 🙂
I honestly can’t believe they haven’t killed old.reddit yet.
Right?
In-between comments are ads.
Under every post is a recommendation for other subreddits where the last update was 2-3 weeks ago.
Subreddits with clear bait clog up the front page, and no filters to remove them.
Top comments are jokes and memes.
It’s a real shit experience on Reddit right now.
They really leaned hard into the fraud strategy, hoping to IPO in 2023 and run with the money.
It got to the point where the entire front page was just bots reposting the greatest hits, with the comments section literally being bots reposting comments from the first time it was posted. There were entire comment chains of bots just having reposted conversations with each other.
The release of LLM APIs was the last straw, now even the conservatives are jumping ship because it was just a bunch of fascist liars lying to each other. And if there is one thing conservatives hate, it’s being around other conservatives.
Some of those issues went over here pretty quick too.
I feel we have a lot of the faux intellectual crowd who thought 5-10 years ago they were better than other for using reddit.
Nonsense. Most of us thought that at least 10 years ago. Reddit didn’t start going downhill hard until the 2016 US primaries, when /r/conspiracy went from semi-interesting headcannon to full on Trump worship over the span of a week. Then we realized what we were in for but it was like watching a car crash into a dumpster fire.
IFunny is unironically better
