Why it’ll only get worse from here.
So Reddit will have a bunch of closed stores but an open and fully functioning Bath & Body Works store?
Sounds like it’s time to fire up some vaporwave and savor the a e s t h e t i c
Immersing myself in the liminal space
What a shitshow Reddit is. They banned all of the subreddits I moderate/created this morning.
What the fuck? Why?
I think, because I was actively bringing moderators from Reddit to their communities which I cloned onto lemmy. I recruited one of the reddit mods to come to my lemmy.world Cardano community, for example.
That was beautifully written. A delightful read.
Thank you! Your comment really made me smile (I am the author btw).
You write like someone who is really handsome.
I bet you’re handsome.
Nah, Reddit is fine. Traffic is back to normal levels.
Did you read the article
Ignorant comments from people who didn’t read the article…Man, this place really is like Reddit!
Interesting piece. Definitely worth a reading the whole thing, but here is Bing AI’s summary:
Reddit’s decline: The author argues that Reddit is becoming less relevant and more generic as it tries to squeeze its users and moderators for profit. He compares Reddit to a dying mall that is losing its cultural middle class to decentralized platforms.
Enshittification: The author explains the concept of enshittification, which is how platforms attract and then exploit their users and businesses. He gives examples of how Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google have followed this pattern.
Moderators’ resistance: The author describes how Reddit’s volunteer moderators are obstructing and sabotaging Reddit’s attempts to enshittify the platform. He says that moderators are the ones who create and curate the content that attracts users, and that Reddit is losing their trust and cooperation.
Fediverse’s rise: The author predicts that Reddit’s users and moderators will eventually migrate to the Fediverse, which is a network of independent and interoperable social media sites. He says that the Fediverse offers more freedom, authenticity, and sanity for online discussions.
It’s not a long article and the topic is interesting enough to spend the 10 minutes it takes to read it IMO
Enshittify
Did bing really say that? I love this word.
Comes from this Cory Doctorow article.
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification…
This is probably the most realistic prediction of reddit’s downfall I’ve read.
There was an article on here earlier that compared reddit to Digg, which I think is way off-base. Digg never had the mainstream userbase that reddit has, and the cause of the current migration from reddit is in no way comparable to what Digg did.
Here @JustinHanagan instead predicts reddit “dying” in the way that Facebook has. Which is kind of a surreal statement, as Facebook is still the largest and most popular social media platform in the world. But almost everyone agrees that Facebook is stagnant or in decline. The coolest and most creative people have left for other platforms. We only stay on there to hear about sales from La Senza and life updates from our racist uncle so we don’t have to talk to him in person.
And that’s a very plausible future for reddit. Think about all the unusual communities and concepts that make reddit what it is. Love these or hate these, it’s the place that brought us AMAs, reddit secret Santa, AmITheAsshole, MildlyInteresting, BestofRedditorUpdates, AskHistorians, WallStreetBets, and so on. All of these were invented by users/moderators, not by reddit.
It’s easy to imagine a future where those communities all continue in some fashion and reddit keeps its hundreds of millions of users, but the creatives and visionaries move on. Which means reddit’s chances of being home to the next /r/PhotoshopBattles or /r/TodayILearned are hugely reduced.
I may check Reddit once a week now, instead of 10x a day. I’m stepping back from modding a 20k subscriber sub, and posting here instead. I used to respond to questions there, and spend maybe an hour or three a day communicating, now I’ll quickly check the updates and move on. I’m not leaving Reddit, but I’m “leaving Reddit”.
People who choose not to understand any hint of subtlety will decry that it did not die all the while, just the same as happened to Digg, and Tumblr too (which lost 90% of its subscribers, but technically does still exist). But the reality is plain & obvious, in spite of their alternative facts to the contrary.
People who choose not to understand any hint of subtlety
Genuinely not trying to sound snarky here, but you’ve described how it feels when I read comments on Reddit.
It’s entirely different here. Imagine being offered the benefit of the doubt, rather than having literally every word picked apart even while ignoring the other 90% of the words that went along with it. SOOO many comments on Reddit are along the lines of “there are sentences after that one you know…”, in response to snarky people who were invited by Huffman to share their snark, to increase engagement stats.
Don’t get me wrong, there are places MUCH worse than Reddit. I could name a Discord server for instance, that often shares screenshots of my exact words in the most misleading way possible, somehow every time. Like in one instance they couldn’t manage to share the entire sentence or it would have actually made sense, so they just lifted the middle few words that they wanted - if anyone bothered to read the words immediately before or after they would immediately see the truth… but they guessed correctly that no-one would bother. I’m not naive enough to think that this is an accident, every single time.
But the point of sharing things on Reddit isn’t always “communication”, and instead it seems to have shifted more towards emotional vomit, to share their feelings of depression, by attacking others. When you understand why they do it… it makes sense, although somehow that doesn’t manage to make Reddit “fun” again:-(.
When I read comments on Reddit I often see a lot of frustrated and burned out people with short tempers who might not have someone IRL who will listen to them vent. Like you said it makes sense, but that doesn’t make it any better.
What makes me optimistic about decentralized social media is that the communities are (hopefully) small and varied enough where mods and admins can keep an eye on everything much easier, and step in an say “Hey, you’re not being nice right now” when someone isn’t. It’s one thing for communities to have rules, but you can’t make enough rules to maintain a culture of amicability. We ultimately need humans for that.
In my Reddit sub (20k subscribers), we have like a bot or maybe just a collection of people who regularly (daily) brigade the sub, mass-downvoting every single comment entirely in a post regardless of content. I literally have screenshots of people calling for it to be done - but Reddit admins do nothing. Tbf it happens to a larger version of us (200k subscribers) as well, so it’s just Reddit being Reddit: someone who is pissed off and sharing their toxicity with the entire world. At least it’s just down-votes rather than shooting up a school or something:-(.
Whereas with down-votes being public here, something could be done about such scenarios, and mods could remove people for that behavior. Like Reddit admins, except being a member of the community that they moderate, they would actually care and act to do something.
THIS place is totally different than THAT one, in every way that matters.
