Agreed. For years I had truly (and naively) believed that Reddit, despite their prior blunders with which we are now all mostly familiar, would maintain an acceptable level of decency and never push things so far as alienate their core userbase. Shot themselves squarely in the foot on this one I think, as their recent changes affect so many.
What a bummer.
I’m doing ok without it though. I didn’t load old.reddit once today.
I probably won’t tomorrow.
I used to look at Reddit in almost all of my downtime at work. Now I’m trying to write when I see nothing new is coming up on Lemmy.
Still though. 15 years on Reddit. Goddamn. It definitely bums me out. I mean, it’s just a website, but it has helped shape so much of who I am.
I’m an atheist in the Bible Belt for example, and atheism being a default sub back in the day really helped me out a lot.
All things must pass.
I understand your pain with that last point. Being an atheist teen in a family that highly values religious holidays (and more) is a life experience I hope people don't have to go through.
Things got better, as I hope things are well for you.
My theory is that they want to destroy anything like Reddit ... a community of free thinking, free talking people all mixing and melting political ideas, theories and thoughts freely with one another.
It was an absolutely intolerable situation to bare for governments and big business and corporations that want to control people than to see them all freely talking to one another and exchanging ideas.
Reddit is like the invention of the printing press .... a tool that allows people to freely share information with one another ... nothing threatens the establishment than the prospect of free thinking people
Which is why Lemmy and the Fediverse is important .... reddit was the single page manual printing press ... the fediverse and future iterations of decentralized social media will become the automated multipage mechanical printing press
Lemmy and the fediverse will be made fun of and discredited ... until it is adopted by enough people ... then it will be undermined with capitalism and marketing and commerce ... then the whole system will repeat itself again.
People want to talk and share ... it will always be like that ... no one will ever want to stop talking to others about the problems we all live with.
But that's just the dig they did make horrible decisions that fucked Reddit up. But the 3rd party apps fixed most of those problems. Whenever I look at new Reddit it's literally so much harder and spammy to use. For year's now
Most people expect gradual change when many things in life are more like punctuated equilibrium.
Stable state despite gradual change in underlying conditions.
Then rapid change to new stable state.
You've now put a fear in me about my life that I wasn't ready for...
This article felt a little more relevant, recommended by wiki on the one you linked: Punctuated equilibrium in social theory
It's like Rome 😭
Like with Twitter, it's a rapid-fire series of knee-jerk reactions, like a hammer, as in - "When you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail", destined to get caught, to not fix what you were supposedly trying to fix, to generate deeper and more baffling situations in the process, to fail.
r/programming was one of the earliest subreddits, I think it was actually #2. Can't view it anymore, but the moderation team of r/programming would have been pretty reddit admin/staff heavy. Pretty sure spez was listed on the moderation team at one point.
Shut down, you say? Every subreddit should post such truths, you say? Reddit will atomize itself instantly, you say?
Okay, maybe not but it's a fun thought, no?
...they just reopened. Hmmmm.
Hello i hope you dont mind if i post that post, in case someone does not want to go onto reddit:
r/Save3rdPartyApps
u/attackofmilk
Subreddits are starting to see spam from anti-protest, pro-admin ChatGPT bots
Thread on /r/Pics discussing bot spam. (Pics is now NSFW, but this thread is only profanity / vulgarity.)
/r/pics/comments/14puynz/chatgpt_bots_are_spamming_proadmin_astroturf/
/r/Programming closed (by admins?) after community recognition of bot spam:
Ycombinator thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36361247
Top-voted post from /r/Programming before it closed: https://web.archive.org/...
(I would have just crossposted the top thread directly, but this sub forbids crossposting NSFW posts (which is now everything on /r/Pics )
Good idea, thank you
The perfect site for reddit admins would be endless bots posting, commenting and viewing adds while said advertisers are oblivious to the con.
The first two have been going on at some level for years. The last? Well, it will be interesting to see the official reddit app's adoption numbers in the coming months.
That's also a fantastic way to end up in jail, which I wouldn't be opposed to spez getting familiar with
Just gotta make it look good for the IPO, then what does Spez care?
Ad-free no-money-to-reddit teddit link, https://teddit.adminforge.de/...
@fivezero Holy shit that is one top heavy company. No wonder they haven't made a profit. I'm done with f u/spez but it will be entertaining to watch him continue to devalue the company. Fidelity downgraded the value and who knows what the Chinese investor Tencen thinks. It will be delicious to watch spez screw up his IPO. Desperation has gripped spez and its getting worse.
@BraBraBra I’ve heard people say that. I’m aware that there have been previous reductions in value. My experience is that investors have the best access to a company’s information, often in real time in a situation like this, so I think the investors are baking in any user loss and loss of revenue even if they are not publicly admitting it.
Jeez man ... +1 to this person! https://teddit.adminforge.de/...
(After r/programming went private, they sent the u/ModCodeOfConduct modmail to the mods of r/programming - which is modded by reddit admins.)
I guess that message worked as the sub reopened. /s
Jesus Christ, do we have a good reason to believe that this was the admins and not some other random third-party group just deciding to do this for shits and giggles?
Because on one hand yeah I could totally see red it doing this after all of their other stupid mistakes so far.
On the other hand this seems really strange to me and it just seems so insane to think that Reddit would even think of doing this.
On the other hand this seems really strange to me and it just seems so insane to think that Reddit would even think of doing this.
Have you read about any of Spez's interviews? This feels entirely like something they would do. Don't forget, reddit was originally populated with bots.
I haven’t heard about that (being originally populated by bots) but I would love to read something about it if you know of anything.
“Huffman […] together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005. Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#History
It's also insane to stealthy edit user comments but he did and "apologized" for it
This is the main issue here. This whole narrative sprung from one comment in one thread that was made without any real evidence other than 'this account is obviously a bot'. Did the admin do it? Maybe. Did someone else do it? Maybe. On one hand, we know that everyone on the internet is a good honest person and if anyone is trolling it could only be the self-serving admin and absolutely no one else would ever try to troll people on reddit, on the other hand the site is run by and full of a bunch of absolutely assholes. So really it could go either way.
I've always had problems with mob justice, bandwagons, etc. though, and don't go in for witchhunts and claims made without any real evidence to back them up.
Ozymandias
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Reddit is in a real nose-dive, no mistake!
It shows how bots were there all the time posting adverts and paid posts anyway. One of the reasons to limit API is other companies were using them to advertise (hidden as a comment or post) without paying the piper.
At least ChatGPT is a more polite than the toxic, racist & sexist shit that remains on Reddit. Scrolled through /r/all this morning and was appalled by some of the toxic comments in the various submissions. I also noticed some sockpuppets somehow spewing the same bullshit opinion about certain topics, using the literal same type of phrasing too, just in different comment chains and with different accounts.
Honestly, probably better for my blood pressure to stay away from most of it.
This is hilarious. Reddit resorting to bots…like a new twitch streamer trying to con their way to partner. What a sad, sad outcome for what was once a great website.
Between Reddit and Twitter I hope big tech begins to take notice and realize they don’t control as much as they think they do. They’re much easier to replace than they think, and ultimately they’re just ad companies.
Wow, so would mods of r/programming get another threat asking them to open the sub again? :D
Even better lol
They found a bot on Reddit!? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you... well okay, not that shocked :-). \s
(yes I know, there's more to it than that, I just wanted to say the meme text, and also take this opportunity to BOW DOWN BEFORE OUR NEW OVERLORDS)
I already knew they didn't want moderators to have better anti-spam tools since it would decrease the apparent activity to attract advertisers.
When people tell you who they are, better to believe them the first time.
Huffman said he didn't need no stinking meatsacks... so now he must be happy with the way the site is working now... right!? :-P
They really are just bungling this completely.
If they were competent, we'd all still be on Reddit.
You make a very good point.
That’s really all on Steve Huffman. He had years to prepare Reddit for profitability and an IPO. He was caught swimming naked when the proverbial music stopped, and he went for the low-hanging fruit (killing the costly API) with nothing but scorn for the dissenting voices.
The board should have fired him after the stealth edits debacle. This guy has no business being a CEO.
I really just do not get why he thinks Elon Musk has it right idea, only isn’t going far enough. And it’s the board has just decided in for a penny, in for a pound and are determined to stick with him even if Reddit burns to the ground. I wonder what metrics they’re seeing that we aren’t, besides dollar signs.
Personality cults are a hell of a drug.
Someone (presumably at Reddit, but there's no hard proof of that) has recently begun using a large number of dummy accounts and what appears to be ChatGPT, to post pro-admin, anti-protest comments across the site and give them a lot of upvotes. Someone figured this out and posed evidence of it to /r/programming. Shortly after that thread reached the top of /r/programming, the subreddit was abruptly closed by the site admins, which is extremely suspect to say the least.
It would be a shame if people started saying that the sub was closed in protest of the API changes, the very thing the admins were using the bots to oppose
What's astroturfing?
It's a play on the term "grass root movement". A grass root movement is one that starts with the people at the bottom, not at the top. So if a bunch of people got together (mostly independent of each other) to promote or protest something, that is a "grass roots" action.
Astroturf is basically fake grass, so "astroturfing" is something that is made to look like a "grass roots" movement but it isn't.
A campaign by a marketing team to give the false impression of something.
In this case it's a campaign by reddit to make it look like there are lots of users who are in agreement with reddit instead of the truth where it's universally hated.
Thanks... I bet it works, too
I don't see Lemmy referenced enough in Reddit. If more people would know, the site will dissolve even faster.
PSA regarding federation (copied from previous comment)
I also want to continue spreading the word about federation issues. I've been on Lemmy for a month now and it's going great. But that whole time, it's essentially been impossible to comment on kbin magazines. The comments simply don't show up. I'm not seeing most of your comments when browsing here from Lemmy, but I am seeing Lemmy comments.
I obviously have this account, but its annoying to keep switching between accounts, plus I haven't really gotten the hang of the kbin interface yet.
Point being, I suspect much of the sluggishness of organic growth is not due to a small userbase, but rather due to the fact nobody can actually find the threads and comment on them efficiently. We need to remain steadfast and trust that the developers will fix this stuff up soon. I really feel that simply making Lemmy and kbin federate perfectly would immediately make this platform 10 times more active. We have plenty of people but right now we are fragmented into parallel communities. This isn't even getting into the server overload at a number of Lemmy instances.
I just don't want people to write off the platform before we can see how it's actually meant to work. I've seen a ton of brilliant comments on kbin and I haven't even had the chance to really mix it up with you guys yet.
Here was the Lemmy post about this story that somebody actually posted here a couple days before this thread. But it doesn't show up here and none of you can see it.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/706681
I really don't want people to get discouraged by this bug because it's very disconcerting when you make a high value comment or post and the response is crickets. Its not because the platform is empty, it's because federation is fucked and your post is invisible to everyone not on your local server.
Reddit admins have apparently used bots to populate content the way they want before as well: https://reddit.moe.ngo/...
Gees, the Admins aren't very smart. Least they could have done is go buy some karma farmed accounts and use those self-respecting bot spammers do.
Reddit is deploying millions of bots across the site, most of people on that shit site are interacting with bots.
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
Looks like r/programming discovered the astroturfing, so in true Reddit fashion they simply shut down the subreddit entirely to avoid the spread of negative public sentiment. Thanks for galvanizing my resolve to migrate to the fediverse, Spez
save