Yeah I think it’s part of the natural cycle of social media for corporations to ruin things, increasing organisational complexity leads to management who can increasingly delude themselves their interests still align with the users when they’ve clearly drifted far apart.
I think the future is small, decentralised communities with no VCs, no ad men, and no CEOs. I’m much more excited to be a part of that than I am sad to see Reddit go.
I hope the decentralization has a chance. It could still be monetarised or "regulated to death" by government's . They both don't like the loss of control that system brings.
So we should have fun as long as it lasts.
The one thing that I am worried about for a decentralized future is incentives.
What keeps a federalized service owner going over the years? Donations alone won't account for server costs, let alone time spent maintaining code or moderating communities.
Most successful open source projects offer enterprise packages to sustain incentivization, or are a subset of a megacorp that releases (off of the top of my head: canonical, hashicorp, apache, mongodb, k8s, chromium, android, redhat) and the list goes on.
Most, if not all, of the donations based or FOSS projects that I have seen over the years lose traction because the hobby wears off for the core maintainers.
It's a fair question, although people kept phpBB boards running for years as hobbyist projects with decent communities on them and moderators are usually volunteers. We don't necessarily want tight-knit communities to scale to Reddit's size anyway and the only thing that's really changed other than Reddit eating the wind out of their sails for those types of self-hosted communities is that search engines are worthless spam-serving tools now so they're less discoverable which the fediverse seems like a decent enough solution to.
Yeah for sure. I was on reddit for 13 years, there were users I recognised by name, people I was friendly with, people I'd have intense debates with, many, many, many subreddits I loved.
But nothing lasts forever, and this place seems nice so here's to new beginnings 🍻
Same exact situation here. Been on reddit since digg v4 happened. Reddit was far from perfect, but for the most part I enjoyed my time there. If this is the end of reddit, then so be it. Lemmy/Beehaw looks like it can grow into a good replacement.
Us old timers! 14 years on Reddit, from digg
It kinda feels like this whole mess is giving me permission to leave. Like when you know that you are in an unhealthy relationship but don't know how to get out of it and suddenly your partner says that maybe you should start seeing other people.
And you actually hope your ex actually does start seeing other people so you aren't tempted to return like you always do.
It almost doesn't even feel real. Like, in a few weeks I won't be using reddit almost at all anymore since RiF will be gone. And yet, I'm still browsing Reddit just as much right now as ever and seeing almost no difference other than salty posts about the API changes on a few subs.
I've checked out for a couple years ago.
In many ecosystems, wildfires are nature's way of regenerating the earth,
I'm looking forward to seeing a new concept, from someone. A new idea all together. Like TikTok/vine or IG. Maybe even something not social media related.
Good point. The main issue with Reddit is that producing original content is really difficult and TikTok like take - where making content is as easy as humanly possible - could be very refreshing.
I'm really fucking pissed because reddit is the only forum for a lot of topics. Realistically, I can't say I'm going to stop using it totally. Like, you can clearly see it is at risk of a tumblr-esque descent. The CEO has repeatedly said they are "fighting" for nsfw content to remain, but I trust 0% of what that guy says considering he's repeatedly lied, slandered people and freely admits to just trying to get profitable as soon as possible (see latest ama, for the IPO so he can cash out, presumably). If this really is a Tumblr level decline which it remains to be seen if it is, they'll be in desperate need of more VC cash so porn is as good as gone.
Anyways, I hope some communities start coming over. The blackout is a good protest, but meaningless if there's no actual action apart from that. Regarding the blackout, I don't even really give a shit about "saving" Reddit anymore, as they've made it very clear they are beyond saving. I just want the same experience with the same level of community somewhere else (fuck capitalism and centralization though)
I really hope that Reddit never becomes profitable despite all of their best efforts--at least as long as Steve is running it. He is so unprofessional and does not deserve to cash in. I hope he loses money slowly but surely due to his incompetent decisions, just as Lowtax did at SomethingAwful.
I agree with you about the communities and forums. Those take years to develop, even with promising options like Lemmy. Reddit became so popular there was a niche community for literally anything you can imagine. I hope the enthusiasm carries over and develops elsewhere/here.
I'm going back to bargaining. Maybe I can find a way to still use it even after they kill off old reddit (I'm sure this is next). But I just think of how the soul of the site will be gone. It'll just be like any facebook group or twitter feed.
Honestly, yeah. Reddit has been part of my daily routine for 12 years now. Sure, a lot of the content is junk food for the brain, and reddit has changed a lot during that time, but I've also learned a lot of cool things and had a lot of interesting conversations there. Lemmy looks promising, but it's still very nascent. The userbase is small, it's missing a lot of the niche communities that you can find on reddit, and the tech is glitchy. Overall it feels a lot more like tinier than reddit (which duh, of course it does).
Reddit is also a bad habit that I've wanted to reduce for a while now, so maybe this is the shove I needed.
Lemmy did not have the same amount of work as Reddit. I guess it's like day 1 reddit. But it has potential to grow. Maybe
Nope, not at all. All products and services inevitably kill themselves when they prioritize growth against providing a high-quality service. Infinite growth is impossible and when the service's growth hits its natural limit, it will introduce quality setbacks to reach the profit goals. I'll miss the contributors on Reddit who made its communities great, but I also know these communities and their users will survive without Reddit. As for Reddit the corporation itself...
I’ll miss some of the communities I was in. I will not miss Reddit. It’s been going downhill for years.
I don't really miss it at all tbh. I wasn't an active poster, but I would lurk every day. At a certain point it got repetitive, where I could guess what the comments would be like on the next post. It got too big to support any meaningful discussion, and devlovled into stupid jokes and puns.
Yeah for sure.
And mods would run wild with power? Remember r/askscience? Mods basically killed it by gatekeeping to the extreme. IMO peak reddit is 2012.
I honestly doubt I will entirely stop using it, but I will likely entirely stop using it on mobile, and continue to use adblock on old.reddit. Some of the communities there are fairly irreplacable for me for now, especially hobby communities with their wikis and tutorials and years of answered questions you can search for.
It will most likely stop being my main time waster website on the net, though, and for that I'm not sad.
Yeah I will probably still use Reddit for my hobby communities. The knowledge amassed in those subs is too valuable to leave completely
I mourn what it was, yes.
There was a recent comment I read about how it's become this incredible resource for the most obscure tech issues and they were reluctant to delete their posts and accounts because they'd receive random messages of thanks years after a tech resource post was made.
And it's true. Reddit has become an invaluable resource for these kinds of things. Not only that, but it's one of the few places that exists on the web where cohesive and coherent discussions even exist. It was always the community and discussion that made reddit great and they want to turn it into yet another swipebait infested serotonin sponge. I sincerely hope lemmy can take its place, but there are going to be some major growing pains if we get big influx of "redfugees."
It almost makes me think that when something becomes such an enormous and invaluable public resource, there should be a legal compulsion to archive it before doing anything that will compromise its accessibility.___
I used to spend so much time on reddit every day. But I just can't condone what's happening. I won't go back. It sucks. I hate it. But I'll survive.
Reddit was a part of my life for almost 11 years. I am 22 and some of my first posts on Reddit were short stories I had written and posted to r/movies for opinions on whether they would be good as full length films… lol Back then it felt so tight knit and close, like a community. It felt like you had to have some savviness for tech and computers to use it, and really it was like a home to me. A place where I could talk about the weird niche things that i found interesting, and find people like me. What Reddit has become is so far from that, it might as well be twitter or something. Just a billion people all throwing shit around, no community, no friendships, just posts with comments. The magic died and it is sad. This site seems like it might recapture some of what I loved about early Reddit, though. I hope
You started using Reddit at 11? That's wild!
Thing is, it already has a mainstream audience with the majority of its users on the official app and using the garbage redesigned website.
Just wondering if the mods and people actually making content are part of that audience or not.
I'm hoping no, and that reddit will fail like Digg given its horrible decision making the last few days. May that IPO crash and burn.
That's what I think, those who are actually interested in managing a quality sub will likely learn how the fediverse works and move, since the quality of people here will, on average, be higher than the unwashed masses.
Yes and no, I loved reddit's simplicity and compatibility with third-party applications. There was basically a subreddit for everything.
My feelings about reddit started to change when they implemented the new reddit frontend. Another change was that some big subreddits have mods who are on a power trip - so a simple discussion was impossible. Now they have taken away my favorite application - Apollo.
I'm pretty sure reddit will survive, but with worse content anyway, because reddit as a business doesn't care about quality of content, they only care about engagement.
On the other hand, I'm "happy" reddit did what they did, and because such a decision to limit the API or introduce nonsense only promotes the development of a federated and decentralized social internet. It reminds me of the "old internet", which I miss a lot, and I'm very happy to see its revival and people using it.
Oddly enough I feel like I'm going to miss the UX from boost more than the subreddits themselves. Even the better ones have so much negativity in the comment sections that there's no point in participating in the conversations, even with the wealth of content compared to Lemmy currently.
Looking forward to the growth from Lemmy apps such as Jerboa and Mlem.
Also a boost user. Also mourning the UX it delivered more than the subreddits.
also redreader since that will be getting support for lemmy and other social medias soon besides reddit
Although I liked reddit, I didn't like the focus on karma. Way to many posts were made purely in an attempt to collect karma. Ruins the conversion and litters the feed with re-posts of videos that belong to someone else.
Yea kinda. I think Reddit in general is quite amazing. People harp about toxic social media etc, but there's something truly great about being able to find people of common interests from all around the world.
In general... This is what internet was supposed to be, right.
Plus nobody forces you to deanonymyze yourself. With that comes some pretty cool culture.
Although admittedly I've noticed the mood on the whole site being more sour in the past months to a year... But maybe that's me more than anything.
It's a shame such a model is apparently not sustainable as a business. Maybe it's true that there should be public services fulfilling this purpose.
Yeah, I'm slowly becoming convinced that actually useful social media is incompatible with being for-profit.
There were times you would find a small community with a few people and it would be really good.
I'm mourning the communities i found, but not reddit itself. Spez has been a turd forever. I saw him at a tech inclusion conf like 6-7 years ago and they knew then he was such a shit they didn't even allow questions from the audience. He said nothing useful and basically said "we keep the donald because both sides" and not so subtly that they keep everyone for add views.
He sucks ass and is only concerned about IPO and will likely just change the r/all to whatever is left and declare the IPO a victory as users bleed away.
Hoping to find more of my old communities around lemmy with hopefully less bigots.
What's happening is so clearly a money grab. Spez has decided he wants to cash out and there's no one who can stop him. RIP, Aaron Schwartz.
I feel like reddit dying could be a positive thing for me. For years now I have felt the negative influence that its toxic environment - fueled by impersonal, discordant interactions - had on me. Not to mention the complete destruction of my ability to concentrate caused by the micro dopamine hit targeting of social media UX. I'm hoping that moving to a smaller platform will help with some of that pervasive anger I feel as a result of constant reddit usage.
Really digging (no pun intended) the fediverse vibe so far, so no mourning, but excitement.
Absolutely, me too.
There were good things about Reddit, but I recognized a while ago that it was having a negative impact on my mental health. I had already been trying to use it less. On the other hand for the last few days when the Reddit drama has picked up I've found myself scrolling through lemmy more, and not necessarily in the positive participatory way that I'd prefer.
We'll see how it all shakes out in the medium to long term I guess.
I agree that Lemmy could end up filling the same negative voids that reddit does. I suppose my hope is that by restricting the conversation and limiting bad-faith arguments, there will be less toxicity here relative to reddit.
In the end, addicting us with anger and outrage in order to drive participation and clicks is the end-stage of all social media, and that cat is out of the bag. But perhaps there's a little temperance that can be found if we don't see social media foremost as an opportunity to harvest data but as a way to interact and share ideas.
At least Lemmy doesn't employ secret proprietary algorithm pitting, ad injection, dark patterns to funnel people to the bloated battery draining mobile app, shadowbanning or session tracking techniques. Even if I disagree with the politics of this instance I do appreciate a space to actually discuss without corporate interference in a federated platform. I really really hope this kicks in.
I've been using Reddit since around mid-2009 (pre-Digg exodus). In my honest opinion, the signs of decline on Reddit have been bubbling for a while, and that's forgoing any consideration of operational/executive decisions that have been made along the way.
Don't get me wrong, Reddit even in 2009 wasn't a consistent bastion of quality, productive, insightful discussion, and a good amount of posts on the frontpage on a given day were memes (not to say those are inherently "bad" posts; peak f7u12 anyone?). But the discussions that were had were, for the most part, friendly and/or constructive in some meaningful way. Over the years though, as the userbase grew and the site became increasingly "mainstream," I noticed there was an uptick of either one or both of two things: 1) low effort posts/comments and 2) sheer vitriol in discussions.
When you combine those two things, you get what -- in my opinion -- is a social media platform with high levels of "engagement" that VCs/execs love to tout and leverage (see Reddit's recent IPO ambitions), but ultimately, a platform that's merely a shell of what it once used to be.
As that happened, I found myself using Reddit less as a "fun" social media platform and more as a tool -- using it for discussions and/or information about niche hobbies, interests, news topics, etc. While the dominance of forums in that area may have been overtaken by subreddits over the years, I don't think there was anything particularly unique about what Reddit as a platform was doing to help these sort of communities exist, and I really doubt that Reddit will be the last place these communities can thrive.
This morning, I was mourning it. However, I made a post asking a really simple question earlier but was instead attacked. It was truly such a simple question about something related to my house. So, not anymore.
Lol, been there.
Was it on r/HomeImprovement by chance?
As a long time lurker, occasional asker/answerer, my experience has pretty much been like this recently:
Ask how to change a lightbulb and within half an hour you'll have 6 replies asking if you got a permit for that, 3 asking if you really need a permit, 2 saying "no, you don't need a permit", someone else brand new chiming in "ackshually you do", and finally 1 awesome person that answers your question but somehow gets downvoted into oblivion.
It was on r/fixit. Every single time I ask a question on there I somehow get attacked every time. Last time I asked how to fix something on my kids toy box and someone said "maybe you shouldn't have kids if they are going to destroy stuff". sir. For real? You ever seen a child?
They probably haven't left their basement long enough to see a child lol
Yes and no, as a 12 year vet.
Reddit is not what it was when I joined. Back in the early 2010's reddit really felt like the internet's evolution from forums. Not going to pretend it was the first, but it really did feel like something was special about it. The community aspect was really important back then. All of the sudden, it felt like you could literally build a community around anything, with little effort, and the "Build it and they will come" factor would kick in.
But things have spoiled since then. We have over a decade worth of "Eternal Septembers", and being a redditor turned into "being a redditor" has turned into, we'll it's just another part of social media infrastructure. Pretty much everybody I know who has use the site has basically sectioned themselves off from using the site as a a whole and just have their specific subs that they browse. I'm a programmer so I basically just use it for the programming subs and different games I play like OSRS, Factorio, etc.
And I guess, a last thought, I don't think reddit is going to die from this. I would wager the vast majority of the userbase really doesn't give a shit, and to be honest, that is fine. Like I said, reddit is part of internet social infrastructure at this point. It's probably still going to be useful to prefix google searches with "reddit some product" to find the best human reviews of that product. But for me, I don't really feel the need to keep using it day to day. I'm looking for a community and I can find it elsewhere.
Honestly, I feel disappointment. What reddit was, or at least how I saw it, is not what was on display for the past few weeks.
But my excitement for new things is awesome! I miss the days of stumbling across new, exciting, and weird sites instead of 1 all powerful site. The feeling of starting something anew is fun, and I'm looking forward to learning how to use and defining what this site is with y'all.
I was part of the Digg migration. I'm part of the Reddit migration. I'll be part of the next migration.
The impermanence of life.
Can we also have a moment of silence for all the other great link sites that have died?
Stumbleupon, kuro5hin, digg, fark (still exists technically but as a shell of its former self)
What was your favorite before reddit?
Slashdot isn't really dead though is it? Still very active, just, not as popular perhaps.
A simulacra shambles on.
Slashdot is not only still alive, but it's not even bad.
It's not what it used to be, though. Back in the CmdrTaco days, when it was the place to go for Linux news, it felt like it was part of a movement. Now it's just kind of...there...hanging on. Not bad, just not exciting.
It's cool to go into the Slashdot comments these days and still see some 3-digit (and sometimes even 2-digit) UIDs posting after all these years.
Sure enough, it is, and my mourning for "imagine a beowulf cluster of..." memes was premature! I was more following along with @Hexorg's statement of how he consumed news before Reddit.
Bannination and its successor zombn. Small, funny, and I met my wife there!
Yeah. Reddit has been my internet home since 2012. It's surreal and depressing to see it so far gone. Still unsure where I will go next, but lemmy feels familiar at least.
I'm not really "mourning" it, but I had a weird feeling, like the end of a great book (series) or movie, like I wish it would have continued more.
Hiwever after switching to lemmy, the community here seems way more active and friendly, and even though there are less overall users, I get more interaction with my posts and comments, maybe also because they aren't drowned in a sea of other comments.
I have the same feeling - I feel welcome here even though I spent years on Reddit lurking. I'm not mourning Reddit however as I've watched its slow decline over the years. Here's to many happy years on Lemmy!
Maybe not mourn but I did have an "oh shit" moment today over a couple smaller communities where I don't know where people might scatter to. It finally sank in.
Yeah, it's the little niche communities that I'm sad about:
An arborist spent 4 years helping me take care of an elm tree. They'd PM me every May to ask how it was doing, and I'd start another thread and send them pictures so they could tell me how to fix the roots or change the guy wires or prune the branches. When it got complicated, another arborist popped out of the woodwork to offer a second opinion and more advice.
I helped a person on oscilloscopemusic breadboard a little 2 channel opamp buffer/amp so they could use a CRT to make shapes from music instead of needing to buy a scope.
I won't miss reddit, but I will miss interactions like that.
Reddit isn't so much killing itself as rather being killed for money.
This is why I hate capitalism. It ruins everything, including the planet and the future.
Pity we can't have a social media site that's a public service!
Run by who, your friendly neighborhood local government?
No thank you. I think Lemmy is great. Hopefully it catches on sufficiently for niche communities to really develop.
The fact that it's a teeny tiny bit more technical than reddit is a nice barrier against utter stupidity.
Governments are at least answerable to the people, or should be. Corporations are answerable to no one except their major stockholders.
As for the learning curve for Lemmy, I think that's been overemphasized. People can learn. And at the same time feedback from the increasing number of users will help the devs to smooth out the rough edges, making Lemmy easier to use.
I remember when practically nobody knew what the internet was. Now everybody's walking around with the internet in their pocket, using it all the time.
I'm going to miss the Star Trek sub but I am hoping the Lemmy one will pick up.
Overall, Reddit has suffered over the years allowing blatant right wing build ups to take root. My old local sub was seeing dog whistles pop up and general quality of the sub sufferes, even more so when the local football people came over and brought their 'banter' with them along with shit posts. The mods didn't really do anything to guide the quality of the sub and I left it last year. Today I deleted my account. No regrets.
Im hoping we get a lot more instances for various niches. Id love ones for particular niche fandoms, like Metroidvanias, or PC gaming, or particular entertainment genres, or animal gifs, that break down into further communities. For example, an pop-nerdy entertainment one could have c/startrek, c/marvel, c/starwars, etc, and only focus on that kind of content.
I dont think one particular instance like Beehaw should have anything more than what the default subs do on reddit
You know what? I'd not even thought of having a seperate instance for stuff like that. I may need to take a look in to how much it would cost and what the moderation effort would be like.
Beehaw posted their financials, not too expensive. As for moderation, you'll be the admin of your little instance, but you can allow others to mod communities on it. Still considering setting up one instance for my interests (many of them, probably most of them, don't have communities today in all of Lemmy), but I'm already on call at work and the idea of having to moderate something gives me pause...
Kinda. I've been a part of it so long, and it has exposed me to so much new stuff. Reddit got me through some tough times as a kid, and I definitely would've been a different person if I hadn't found reddit.
But the site has been dying for a while now. Hivemind is bigger than before, so many more teenagers, no one is following rediquette, and admins are actively trying to 9Gag-ify the place. I've been finding myself disliking the place more and more for a while, sinking time into it more out of habit than anything else.
The only things I'm gonna miss is the ease of access to expert opinions - I could just go on the trees or bugs or any other niche subreddits and get someone really knowledgeable to answer it.
That, and discussions about my city and country - not many folks joining sadly
Not any more than I mourned digg. Reddit is dying, just like Digg did and we collectively looked for a new home and found Reddit. I am hoping Lemmy takes off and we make our new home a decentralized version of the parts we liked about reddit, without the parts we didn't like.
Will be a fun ride and I am glad I am on this train with Lemmy (Both Beehaw.org and lemmy.ml)
The issue is that sites have conglomerated in a way Digg could never have dreamed of. So many niche communities have collapsed into subreddits.
I've mourned more for the shells of the eggs that I broke today. That was a tasty omelette.
I'm genuinely happy that Reddit is dying. Yes, it'll lead to some information loss and that's bad, but we've been stuck in that abusive platform for too long. Now at least saner alternatives will get some room to grow.
I don't mourn it, but I do already miss it. Because as terrible of a place as it can be, it has the huge advantage of being, well, huge.
So even more niche stuff has some level of engagement enabling you (together with the format) to find things you enjoy or are interested in.
That was the thing I enjoyed most about it really
I really liked Reddit. I liked the community, I liked the fact that (compared to other social media) people were intelligent and respectful, I admit it felt like a better community years ago but it was a big part of my life. I'll be sad to see it go.
Been on Reddit for 15 years. Will probably hang on to a few communities that only exist there for a while longer.
I was sad and sentimental about it when it started dying years ago. The desperate "must grow until implode" path that all corporate owned platforms follow, is inevitable. At some point it'll suck too much for you to tolerate.
Make a first-party mobile app for a site that would be fine on web. Sell premium subscriptions. Sell microtransactions. Insert ads. Insert more ads. Insert ads inbetween content. Make the ads look like content. Put usability features behind Premium subscription and forbid integrations that do similar things. Try to be tiktok? Try to be a social network. Short videos! Try to be Youtube? Try to be Twitch!
There's definitely some stages of withdrawal going on for me. Having relied on that site for many years as a source of information, commentary, and just plain ol' entertainment scrolling on my lunch break, I definitely feel the sense of loss.
But that AMA yesterday with Spez really enforced that the site's not going to be at all what it used to be.
I’m mostly just upset about the fact that healthy niche communities that existed on Reddit are likely to die rather than migrate in earnest. Reddit itself has been feeling downhill pretty much from the moment I joined, but it was the only service that managed to have not only very specific niche communities, but a wealth of active ones with quality contributors.
I just joined here and haven’t lurked too much, but the format here looks nice to foster that type of growth over time. I just hope it can be rebuilt to even a portion of what I’m leaving behind.
I don't mourn Reddit, but I am sad that the it's another example of the commoditization and corporatization of the modern internet.
Hopefully federated networks, P2P protocols, and FOSS software/frameworks are able to provide a robust and healthy web going forward into the future. The era of the free general internet is over, has probably been for a long time honestly. Now if massive companies want to stay afloat in that space, they will need to make huge profits. Everything as you are seeing nowadays, is being monetized and centralized.
Maybe this truly is late stage Capitalism and the collapse of it all is on the horizon, idk. But as long as I have an internet connection and things I am interested in doing on there, I will be trying to resist the corpos as long as I can.
Long live the free and open internet!
(PS, power to the users, and I can and do contribute to the products and services I use from these wonderful people in our communities <3)
I’m still in denial. I know Apollo is going away, I know I’m deleting my Reddit account on June 30. But I still don’t feel like any of it is real. Reddit has become such an integral part of my online life that I’m not sure how to even process this whole thing.
It's the helpful communities that I would really miss. Like /r/skyrimmods as an example with wonderfully done community guides. Those type of resources would be a shame to lose, since even if you aren't interested in socializing they are an amazing resource.
And I had done a lot of searches including reddit as a keyword, since there'd often times be a helpful comment regarding what I had a question about.
I'm still expecting a relatively slow death for Reddit, perhaps even not a total one like with Digg's quick and complete collapse. I'll be sticking around Reddit past the June 30 horizon, I'll just be doing it entirely via my desktop browser. I'll probably only stop going once they get rid of Old Reddit.
This means that there'll be a gradual winding down of the communities I pay attention to, accompanied by a gradual migration to places like here. Hopefully little will be lost in the process.
I think what I'm most sad about is losing easily searchable information. Finding an obsscure thread about some weird question I had is great. Maybe that will be preserved somehow. Idk. That and the more unhinged reddit posts and copypastas throughout history.
Shame about those two broken arms.....
How long until we get the first Lemmy poop knife-level story?
Well, there's no TIFU or AMA here, so...maybe a week after that happens?
PS - What's a potato?
Ohhhhh yeaaaahhhh!
But in all seriousness....definitely oh no.....
What I mourn is not reddit. I couldn't give a shit about the company, the software, etc. What I mourn is the freedom and easy availability of information. I've always found it a bit stupid but convenient that everyone just congregated there. I'd much, however, prefer there to be specialized forums for each thing, findable through Google, perhaps federated. Decentralization is the way to go to ensure durability and freedom. Everyone being on one platform is very stupid and fragile.
I was there from 2009, when they welcomed me and asked me to do an AMA while Fark mods temp-banned me accidentally. lol. I spent a lot of the last 14 years on reddit creating some communities, moderating default subs, stepping away twice, but going back each time.
Well, this is finally it. I'm an old.reddit user, so not directly impacted by this, but it's just a sign that reddit is dead. It's been dying.
I got into tildes thankfully, as the discussion there is great. And now I'm over here, as I know there's a large influx from reddit, so hopefully these two sites will fill that gap. :)
I'd also love an invite to Tildes (for anyone reading this) I sent a message to the invites email earlier today but haven't heard back just yet.
If you happen to have another invite, I would love to register at Tildes as well. I've read the conversations there the past couple of days and actually think I prefer it to Reddit. They seem more substantial and I'm struck by the more human tone.
Hi. I would be most appreciative for an invite to Tildes as well as I've been interested in that community too. It and Beehaw look like two of the more promising Reddit alternatives I've come across.
I'm going back to some my old bulletin boards. Better expertise and really more pleasant than reddit.
I've been there since the Digg Exodus and I am so, so happy that it's finally ending. It was only ever "good" to the degree that the parent company didn't give a shit and let us do what we wanted. It's been gradually changing but I've always known that one day, that would change entirely, and so would Reddit.
Reddit in general was never really a good place in my opinion. There are some really great subreddits with a nice community and good moderation. But Reddit in general? There’s far too much racism and misogyny covered up or even encouraged by the admins.
I’m going to miss what it could have and me leaving the site has begun years ago when I left all default subreddits. All this now is part of the enshittification of the internet and most people don’t seem to care. They still use Twitter, they continue using Instagram and they will continue using Reddit because they prefer what the companies tell them is a good user experience. They now prefer ads and an easy onboarding process to enhanced privacy and some missing features.
Federated is the way that Reddit needed to go, so the transition from Reddit to Lemmy is just what we needed. Now, whoever wants to create a community and moderate it according to their own rules can do so.
Eh, I liked the fact that Reddit has boilerplate rules for everyone to follow, basically. I know a lot of that is ignored, but it's not a bad idea.
The coolest thing about having all that federated is the non-monolithic approach. Different instances can kinda be seen like different backups, especially during the first waves of power users happily self-hosting instances. Everybody wins when there's a healthy balance between what kind of power the everymen and the more powerful ones have. Not that there's some looming overseer for Lemmy, but the point remains.
I think it's a bit too early for that for me. Currently I'm starting to participate in beehaw as well as use reddit on Apollo, so I don't mind if I don't see stuff here that I have(had) on reddit, but once Apollow shuts down, I'd be using beehaw/lemmy more than I use reddit, and at that point I might mourn some nice things that were destroyed by the reddit admin team.
I think, at a fundamental level the Reddit I am mourning isn't Reddit as it exists now, but perhaps how I imagine it did ten or so years ago, the so called "Early Days". We're all here now because Reddit at is now is unsustainable and actively hostile against it's users. The contradiction between the need for monetization of the userbase and the userbases disgust at being monetized. This isn't a recent occurrence but sometimes we need to get a bit of a kick to realize how bad its been, in retrospect.
I do know, as many fellow tech people do, whenever I have to look into a problem I haven't encountered before, appending "Reddit" to the search often leads me closer to an answer. I will miss that, as it had become so well indexed. Lemmy isn't there yet in terms of being indexed.
I felt this way about Twitter early on because Twitter for me was the third social media platform I ever experienced growing up, only with MySpace and Facebook before it.
It's sad to see Reddit go this way, but my solace is that the communities that make Reddit will survive one way or another. I'm just hoping Lemmy sees a better adoption than Mastodon has so far. I want both to thrive but I'm especially hoping for Lemmy since I spend/spent more of my time on Reddit.
Yeah I feel like Mastoden tries to do too many things at once. It feels like twitter and discord put together.
Yup. I've been on reddit for the past decade, on and off, through a couple of different accounts (got banned from r/comicbooks for posting a spider-man comic in its entirety), and I discovered so many great books, movies, tv shows through it. I gave therapy a shot because of people on r/getting_over_it, and it's made a significant difference in my life.
It just sucks how much awesome stuff and communities are going to be destroyed because of corporate greed.
Mourn the site that allowed toxic subs like the_donald or worse to recruit and prosper? Hell no. I will mourn small communities if they leave, but I don't believe they will. Lemmy is a good idea, but judging from the twitter / mastodon migration (or lack thererof) I am not holding my breath. The fact Lemmy's main devs are tankies makes mass adoption even less likely
Hardcore communists, so extreme in many things they are indistinguishable from far right extremists. For example they support Russia in the Ukraine. The Lemmy devs are so bad they are fans of North Korea and Stalin. TBH they feel like parody or a psyop effort at times
I am a little. I already deleted Apollo to break the habit. One might as well dive into the deep end. I'm all in on Lemmy now. I mourn the critical mass of Reddit but I'm hopeful Lemmy will rise to fill the void.
I deleted RiF a couple of days ago. RiF is reddit to me. I have countless subs and bots blocked. Still, I was scrolling r/all and realized how repulsed I was by the content. It was just page after page of junk. I still have my account, but I haven't logged in for days.
I am mourning the time I have wasted.
Exact same for me, the re-design and the official app were major red flags but since they kept old.reddit and my 3rd party app (RIF) I was still happy even though the community of reddit was obviously degrading... I feel like having an alternative that is viable that is completely free of the commercial trappings such as lemmy here is something that is super appealing to me. I think lemmy is still in a very early phase and I am glad to be here to see what happens.
"new" reddit and a focus on showing images and video really changed the site. /r/All was often entirely posts with images/video and comments are often just reaction-comments. It really solidified the trend towards a "TLDR" site. I guess they figured their biggest competitor was 9gag or something.
If by 'mourn reddit' you mean 'process the idea that reddit is as good as dead' then yes.
I'm not missing it much, though. I like the social engagement part, and I like the getting news part. I used the time-killing part. Lemmy is social engagement and so far it feels much more engaged, more concentrated, less fluff. And the news in Reddit is 1) mostly America-centric anyway and 2) linked from other sources of questionable repute. And time-killing is something I should do less of.
It's a nice place to find answers and guides, enough so that I use 'reddit' as an additional search term if I want relevant, accessible answers that are willing to call out a product's design for being at fault (if relevant) and suggestion unaffiliated alternatives.
But the communities, the content? I'd barely been engaged there for a year. I loaded it a lot, almost every day; I read it plenty. But I didn't actually enjoy it very much.
Leaving it behind completely will be difficult when it's still the best aggregate of user-generated content, at least for now. But actually commenting or posting in it... I'll be fine.
I’m definitely going to miss using Apollo, as well as the subreddits I frequented. What I won’t miss are the subs dedicated to misinformation and intolerance that have been allowed to fester for way too long. I have high hopes that Beehaw will do a good job at keeping that crap out.
Nah, reddit is a lame horse long past the point of getting put down being a merciful thing to do. The only reason it lasted so long is that there wasn't a viable alternative because everything else that cropped up got overran by nazis or tankies (mostly nazis from what I've seen) and that's why I'm glad reddit is cannibalizing itself. It's going to give rise to the fediverse because it can't be overran by either side of the damn horseshoe and it can't be overtaken by corporate interest which is going to attract the middle of the road user that makes up the majority; yeah it'll take some time but it'll happen and I'm not saying it'll be the main thing, I'm just saying it'll be a viable alternative.
I am absolutely going to miss RIF. That app provided such a clean filtered experience to the content I was interested in on Reddit for years.
I made the decision to leave Reddit after Apollo was announced to be shutting down. I'll hang around until Apollo dies, but I'm already mourning the loss of niche communities. I can only hope that they'll be replicated here.
On the bright side, this place being smaller in terms of userbase makes it less intimidating for me to comment more often.
This is actually the real reason I joined Lemmy. I joined Reddit back in 2012 and as it grew, it slowly became the crapshoot it is today with memes. Shit, remember when comment replies of just "🤣🤣🤣" was literally THE definition of a downvote-able comment? "Adding nothing to the discussion"
I'm SO happy to get away from the shitposts, and hope the lack of ease of joining the fediverse stays as a barrier against users who post that crap, and they remain on Reddit and TikTok.
I miss the community and the excitement it brought me to discover something new. That faded a long time ago. I think it’s a good thing to just let it die.
No I don’t mourn it, it became mainstream around 2014 and went downhill from there imv. The front page was full of rage politics and the comments became really toxic. Everyone got drowned out, spreading that audience across multiple sites might be a good thing in the end. End the hive mind
The fun thing is that even 2014 Reddit seems like a civilized, egalitarian place with all the things you need to thrive and not worry compared to today or even 5 years ago. Enshittification has been hitting Reddit really hard.
I subconsciously open Sync for Reddit and start scrolling about 50 times every day. Just joined here and installed Jerboa to try to supplement the habit. I love the environment here, but boy is it clunky and the content is so much more limited than Reddit. I'm definitely going to miss it, but I'll adapt.
Personally, I've moved past that stage to the urinating on its grave stage.
I was introduced to Reddit thanks to CGPgrey and have been using it since high school, It's definitely sad to see it dying but I'll just treat it as the end of yet another phase of the internet. Such is the will of the sands of time.
I've been mourning Reddit since the r/all porn ban. Content quality overall went downhill, and there were no distractions to the decline left.
For me, this past week or so has just been watching the death throes, and finally looking for something else to move to.
In a way, I mourned for reddit a long time ago. I stumbled (literally, stumbleUpon'd) reddit way back before the great Digg migration, when it was still mostly a haven for techies. The site went through a great many changes. Some good, some bad, some just... different.
At some point it got a little much. I've known for a number of years that I was growing increasingly alienated from it. Part of it was the Nazis and Reddit's inability or unwillingness to deal with any of the hate and bots. Part of it was the pervasive meme / low effort image culture. Those things were always there, but there was a time it'd get you the stink eye and an annoyed upvote.
Besides Hackernews (which has always been full of a certain Silicon Valley type), there wasn't really too many places to go. I've just been kinda waiting in the funeral parlor, hoping a ride to something else would come while I mostly browse the niche subreddits.
It's my hope that this incident starts the seeds of old forum culture as expressed through multiple lemmys. That's a pretty ambitious hope, but still. It's well past the time for the big social media networks to break up.
Relationships with products are worth thinking about. Reddit, other people's content was the product. Reddit was just the gatekeeper. Most social media sites are like this. They want to be able to control what we see so that they can sell that access. Then once they have control they can really ratchet up the costs. Facebook's walled garden is an example. You might remember the video content apocalypse several years ago. That was one of their attempts to control what everyone saw and it turned out all their watch time data was bullshit and their ad rev fell out the bottom and ruined 100s of great shows and stifled careers. After Hours on Cracked even mentions it in their own show, rip. Not that they're good otherwise, but Reddit saw chatGPT just make a fuckzillion dollars off of Reddit data and realized they were being too generous with their gatekeeping.
I'm not at all sad about walking away from that kind of relationship.
Looking forward to seeing where this goes.
It's normal to grieve. If reddit were a spouse, I'd have one hell of a marriage (in a good way). Eleven years and multiple hours of interaction each day?
I've grown concerned how reddit has such a monopoly on message boards. (As I am still concerned at the monopoly Twitter has had). Like, it's to a point where I was googling the word "reddit" next to my question to get good answers. This is a testament to the community there.
The nice thing here is that Lemmy demonstrates that some competition exists. I can still have a fun chat online without relying solely on one company.
Sentimental in the sense that I have been a Reddit user for 16 years and this makes me feel really really old. And in internet years Reddit is even older, I would have excepted it to die already years ago and it seems exceptional that it has kept going for this long.
Back when Reddit was starting to get popular I was mildly annoyed and suspicious of it and all these other new fangled web2.0 things but slowly it replaced random forums, news groups, irc and other old school platforms for me. To me Reddit sits somewhere between those and the more modern and "social" web platforms and as such it feels like a relic from the early 2000s that probably has no place in the modern internet. Bit like me myself actually ("Hey, you should post that on Reddit!" is the usual ironic response that I get from my kids whenever I say something really funny or insightful...)
And like others here I'm worried about all the niche communities and losing the vast source of content that Reddit has accumulated. Sure, most of it is low effort shit as usual but especially with how bad Google has become Reddit is now my first choice when I need to get an overview of some new topic.
That said I have been planning to delete my Reddit account for a while now. After all these years it has got stale, the hive mind is predictable and it feels like I have seen all the same conversations and topics already too many times. I don't need to read any threads on more popular subs since I already know what the most upvoted opinions, memes and jokes are going to be. And it seems like every few years they piss off their userbase in some way, who then threaten to quit and find something better and surely this the end of Reddit, and then nothing happens.
It's old. I think it's time to let it go now.
I've never been too sentimental about anything dying or changing into something else. Especially with Reddit since the CEO is so hell bent on converting it into your typical social media.
But no, I'm not too sad about it. Everything has it's time. Things come and go but the memories you make there certainly aren't invalidated by things going to shit.
I would probably say mourn is a strong word, but it is probably appropriate. I used to use reddit to keep up to date with various topics and to share in the community with some niche circles. Unfortunately, the writing is on the wall and it's time to stop reminiscing on better times. I'm here now, looking forward to learn this site.
I'll still be browsing it with Reeder 5. When they shut off RSS then I'll be completely gone.
I don't think RSS would work for that (it only seems to pull the content for the post itself, not the comments), but I've always used reddit-stream.com/ for live comments 😊 you can just take any link to a live thread (e.g. https://reddit.com/comments/145upmt/) and replace 'reddit' with 'reddit-stream' in the URL. It shows a live (updates every few seconds) feed of comments, and you can still comment if you link your reddit account.
That way you're still not on the reddit site or giving them ad traffic, and it's also a lot nicer to use as a bonus! I'd still prefer a fediverse alternative but it could be a good option for now
I am beginning to mourn what reddit was. Not what it is or what it is going to turn into.
for me its going to be very melancholic to see something I've (unfortunately) spent years on. I will actually be sad to see it go, not the app itself but all the smaller communities and the wiki's and all the knowledge that was shared. It was inevitable but I didn't think it would be so soon or so quick.
At the same time, good riddance.
@Showervagina that's too bad. It sucks when the community in your country is picking up steam (i.e. local subs on specific topic springing up, other existing communities getting more active etc.) - as the world is not only the US and not only English speaking even.
I know I might be going against the stream, but I think I will stay on Reddit until it fills with spam and shit or until Reddit goes along Musks's oh-we-love-free-speech-but-we-must-comply-with-countries-laws-that-don't-bussiness-is-bussiness-bro and starts deleting posts at the request of governments.
Investment usually ultimately ruins everything. In reddit's case it's an even tighter needle to thread because the platform itself produces little value. To be attractive to investors and to produce returns on that investment (perpetually), they have to make operational decisions that prioritize monetization (like all public companies).
u/spez wants his big exit and he'll burn some of it to the ground to get it. But he'll probably get rich, so good for him.
Truthfully? Mixed feelings.
I've mainly been a lurker on Reddit on account of the Reddit userbase being...well, rude sometimes. I disliked using it as a user ever since this time I asked a question and had to reply to like, 5 different comments apologizing for the way I phrased things. I wasn't even being offensive. It was a innocent request for books! I just apparently had to specify "mainstream" instead of phrasing it as "likely to be found at a library".
However, I won't lie when I say it has valuable resources that people put a lot of effort into. For example, I really appreciated /r/EOOD and /r/Fantasy. One is a small community dedicated to exercising more to help with depression, and many people are nice there. The other is a community dedicated to fantasy books, and the resources there are immense. Loved it.
I think losing out on rather niche communities is going to be my biggest loss from reddit. I've been on reddit since about 2011 or so and the quality and worthwhileness of the site has ebbed and flowed since then, but smaller, sub-10k communities still hold onto the last vestiges of that old-school reddit/internet mindset, and I will miss that a lot. At the end of the day, though, I'm hopeful that Beehaw (and other similar sites/instances) will be able to fill the various voids that we'll all miss - and honestly, we get to be the ones to cultivate that, and I think that's very exciting.
I think this is one of the first pushes where convivences don't mesh with security. We have been taken advantage of for a very long time, and very easily. This type of diversification I feel will ultimately be healthy.
Been mourning for years. I'm finally over it.
Nah, I was pretty much just using Reddit with a "its the least bad and more tolerable for me compared to the other social media sites" mentality so I didn't feel a strong loyality to it. Using it til it either imploded or something better came along, or both in this case!
i’m mourning it a bit, but to be honest i think it’s going to be a bit difficult for me to get off for a while until other places (aside from facebook, which i’d much prefer to avoid over the current iteration of reddit) have the same amount of niche communities. for example, i’m in a private pregnancy subreddit with other people with my same due date and it’s reallllly useful in comparing notes and feeling like i’m not going insane at any given symptom and i think it’ll take a while for a place like lemmy to have an audience big enough to build niche communities like that.
That's really cool that you've got a due date subreddit. I was on a pregnancy/parenting forum ages ago and it was really nice to have a group of women to chat with who were going through the same thing. So much of pregnancy just isn't taught in schools and I was the first in my offline friend group to get pregnant, so I had nobody else to turn to with "is this normal" questions. My kid just graduated high school, so this was before Reddit was around.
For a community like that, I'd probably be willing to suffer through Reddit's bad changes for a bit longer.
I don't plan to stop using it. I'm annoyed by the changes but it is what it is. I doubt Lemmy will be the same level of resource that Reddit is. Lemmy is still great, don't get me wrong, but to think that entire communities might migrate over is a bit farfetched. Most people are still very confused about how federation exactly works.
Not really. Reddit has been an addiction for me at best, and a thorn in my side at worst.
What ruined Reddit for me was the community moderation. Not gonna name specific users but some of them are real assholes who will ban you because you violated some hidden rule not advertised on their subreddit, because you participated in another subreddit they don't like, or because they just had a bad day and felt like screwing with you.
Reddit has become this partisan mess where the right view you as a Commie if your beliefs are anywhere further left than Donald Trump, and where the left view you as a Nazi if your beliefs are further right than Bernie Sanders. Participate in the wrong community and you end up having a bot ban you from dozens of other subs. This goes entirely against the ethos that Reddit was originally founded on.
The worst part is that I cannot even use words like 'trump', 'incel', 'cuck', 'snowflake' etc on Reddit because most of the moderators have shadowbanned people from using such terminology.
I've been a Reddit user since 2010, shortly before the Digg-exodus, and I have never seen the website in such a bad state before. Only wish there was an alternative that wasn't a right-wing cesspool. Lemmy may be it.
will ban you because you violated some hidden rule not advertised
Boy, are you in for a surprise on Lemmy. Did you see the thread yesterday about lemmy.ml banning people for posting news articles in a news community that are critical of the CCP?
It honestly feels more like leaving a bad relationship. I didn't realize how bad things had gotten until I left.
Personally I'm glad to let it go. The site has been a source of frustration for me (not all the time but there's just some uniquely reddit things that get tiresome to run into constantly) for many reasons and having a reason to step away from it has made me realize I will only miss the one community on there I was active in.
The rest, I will let fade away from my memory and let it be.
Not really? Reddit has been on the downhill slide for ages now. I made this account two years ago, but there hasn't been enough content here to really do anything with until now. For me, it's like "eh, eff em," and has been for awhile, even before the API changes.
Reddit felt like one of the last decent places on the internet that wasn't being completely taken over by ads or suggested content. Sure it was there, but I also knew that there were a lot of real people there too. When in doubt, anything you googled could have the word "reddit" added and get you an answer. It feels like all of the social tools we use to communicate with each other on the internet are rapidly deteriorating in favor of profits.
I don’t mourn Reddit, I mourn the people and ideas I enjoyed engaging with through it. But, I’m glad people chose to find another way to engage (such as Lemmy) vs. staying in that toxic system. :)
Exactly. I'm definitely gonna miss some of the meme subs and topic-specific subreddits but honestly I'm not going to miss the platform itself or most of the content there.
I really should have moved on from it a while ago like I did with twitter tbh. Life is so much better with less social media, and when the stuff I engage with is genuinely more positive. I don't have forever to live and don't need to waste time in a toxic relationship of any kind, especially with reddit
Yeah, I definitely miss the idea of what Reddit used to be. But it's just the platform that's dying, the people are still around and it looks like more and more are jumping ship. Perhaps the niche communities will migrate, as well.
IDK...On one hand, we lose a repository of content and information. On the other hand, people will move to federated, non-megacorp-controlled/ran places like the Lemmy federation and safeguard our future. I'm personally excited if it means priming the pump for a mass migration to the Fediverse as a household name. However Reddit was the sole savior of enshittified Google Search since like 2017, and if it goes away that means Google Search will also stagnate heavily. People usually migrate from proprietary service 1 to proprietary service 2 so I really really hope people keep flocking to Lemmy despite the excessive load concerns. lemmy.ml and beehaw should close registrations at some point to distribute the load more evenly though
Yes, absolutely. I love(d) Reddit! All the niche communities, all the subs that I enjoyed so much, like r/whowouldwin and r/tiktokcringe and r/askhistorians and so many more :(
I admit, I have sentimentality attached there. It sucks. It does feel almost like the loss of a friend.
Honestly, I really couldn't agree more, there really was a sub for almost anything that you could think of especially when it comes to interests and hobbies, it's just the bigger subreddits that tends to have a lot of karma-whoring and spams that makes them just not palatable to browse. While im sure lemmy would eventually have those niche communities set up, it's definitely going to take a while to do so.
I know how you feel, reddit felt different from other sites for me because it had so much info nested in a fairly accessible way, there's so many communities with so much personal lore, discussion and knowledge of such particular things and hobbies.
I'm not sure the direction they're trying to take reddit will manage to keep that vibrant part of the site alive.
I am so excited for it to die and be replaced by an ecosystem that isn't controlled by individuals. To that end I think it's really important that we get account moving functionality; no admin should be fully trusted.
Totally, but I'm also upset with myself for the amount of hours and content I've wasted on what is ultimately another corporate greed fest. Learned my lesson. Never again
It's a bittersweet kind of reaction for me. I've been aware of how shit reddit's been for a while, and how shit it's been habit-wose for myself. So maybe it's the push i needed to get away. That's the sweet part I guess.
The bitter part is, I moderate a relatively small community (181k) that's been a passion of mine for literal years. Still is. If i have to moderate that with the official app, I'm out, I can't do it, I tried. I know reddit doesn't care about me or my community. It's all a rounding error. But this situation applies to bigger communities as well. And it's just a big slap in the face after being exploited. Reddit absolutely needs moderstors, needs this free labor. And they just said fuck you to those people.
Well they must've done the numbers and determined that enough of moderstors use their app/website that those revolting are negligible. That, or they really need to squeeze this thing dry before IPO, no matter what.
Honestly, I've been waiting on a replacement for a while. They made a lot of poor choices ever since they dumped the AMA mod. Then there's also this thing about tencent owning a big part of Reddit...
I'm missing it a lot less than I ever missed Twitter…
For the most part, Reddit has sort of filled a void of community groups or random goofy videos/memes for me, as I'm not on either FB/IG or TikTok. On Reddit I could see a post about something going on in my city (Portland), a review of a game I like, a cat floofing out of a tiny vase, and a gorgeous photo of a mountainside all in the span of 30 seconds. It'll be a bummer not to have that experience any more, but I get enough value out of the Fediverse at this point (along with a few Discord servers) I'm not going to lose sleep over it.
It's sad but Reddit has been going downhill for a while now so I've been expecting this day to come soon. This is just the final change that pushed me over the edge after having an account for 14 years. All the big subreddits seem to now be full of spam, arguments, ads disguised as posts. I'll only really miss the smaller niche communities I follow, I'm not sure Lemmy will be able to fill that gap but we'll see.
I'm a bit sad we didn't have more time. But at the same time, I could see where reddit was going: it was inevitable. Once I saw what new reddit looked like, I knew this day was coming at some point. Doesn't mean I'm not sad about it though. Lots of history and useful information will be lost.
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
Remember that legendary times when reddit was new?
That's what's happening now in the fediverse with Lemmy and kbin, I am to excited being a part of it as to mourn about reedit.
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