cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
I kinda miss the size from reddit actually. So many niche communities blooming. But still, no way I’m going back
Size is what makes a network attractive to commercial exploitation. An open network like the Fediverse might not be commercially exploited by its infrastructure owners, but any participant can do so.
Reddit basically has fucked over their voluntary mods. If you have a bigger subreddit with several millions of users modding that is nearly impossible. You’ll get all those trolls, crazy people, nazis and fanatics with too much time. You’ll have to deal with astroturfing campaigns from companies with millions of dollars of budget and state sponsored desinfo campaings. You also will have do deal with all that cultural war bullshit. You subreddit can be about cute baby cats, but you will have to deal with MAGA bullshit, somebody will bring the war in Gaza into your place or post Putin with a cat. Karmafarming bots. Users will really insult you and accuse you of powertripping and being a Nazi.
You will have to do everything in your free time. Reddit will not pay you. Reddit will not really support you. You are alone responsible to build a mod team. You can’t pay them either. Spez will laught at you while earning millions. He will insult you if you speak up. You can’t close your sub. And then you will get burned out and leave. The sub will then be overrun by absolute trash.
Every now and then I end up on that site (usually from searching for something and then absent-mindedly clicking to the homepage from there) and get whiplash at just how horrific the whole front page is even on its default logged-out setting for racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and other far-right talking point news stories.
There was a quiet exodus during the_donald era. That whole time from 2016 - 2020 was very strange. Nobody talks about it. Except for the minority of us from the before times.
For reddit corporate there was a serendipitous confluence of events.
- Right wing US politics trolls caused a quiet exodus.
- A pandemic happened causing everyone to be stuck at home doomscrolling.
- Reddit was doing a relaunch, with a new site design and official app.
- They were preparing to IPO.
Basically reddit corporate got a free reset. One that Digg could have only dreamed of. Much of the old unprofitable userbase left. Ragebaiting trolls overran the platform. Fresh userbases flooded into the site. Social media psychological manipulation/addiction mechanisms had a field day on those unsuspecting doomscrollers.
You old timers ever notice how reddit’s demise is a perpetually sliding window? You can tell when someone started using reddit based on when they think it was good and when it went bad.
Most users today talk about relaunch/redesign era as the good times. They think only relatively recently has it turned bad. None them have any clue about the pre-2020 era because they had no clue about reddit before.
All that being said. I don’t think it’s only commercialization that killed it. The type of users killed it too. That isn’t mutually exclusive from userbase size.
Commercialization relies on engagement tricks like ragebait. That requires users who will engage with that too. The old reddit userbase was more skeptical and cognizant of commercialization tactics. The userbase today doesn’t hate it. Some even seem to relish in it.
They like the tabloid posts. They like the emotional clickbait. They like to gossip. They like the drama.
Hell, for better or worse, I remember when the narwhal still baconed at midnight.
There’s academic articles proving negative posts get more interaction. Some people just want to fight, they love the negativity. Life’s hard enough ffs. It’s disappointing cos it used to be a great place to hang out
politics any of the variant subs, and news subs, is where people get most if not all of the bans. the faux ragebaits are aita, and dinnerdiaries.
Even if you block the ads and ignore them the site is so heavily botted with these bots pushing all sorts of products.
One of the most useful aspects of reddit used to be getting other perspectives on products you were interested in. This is no longer useful because of the massive networks of bot farms. You simply can no longer tell what’s real on that site and what isn’t.
The accounts posting fake product reviews to promote products are usually not bots. They are either actual people from ad agencies/brands, posting as a part of the campaign and other people from the agency upvoting (sometime also using engagement farms).
I don’t know how much activity on reddit is bot driven, but logically it makes little sense to me to run bot campaigns there. Until 2020, reddit was quite small and insignificant in terms of how many people you could reach. And now, reddit has made their API increasingly more expensive, making it prohibitive for large scale bot posting. Even scraping data is hard and very expensive, let alone posting at scale.
There might be engagement farms and content farms mass posting, but that is manual, not bots, and happens on all social media platforms.
Yep it used to be you could hop on and get great guidance on products. Now you never know what’s real
apparently indian bot farms of BJP (modi) is very heavy in indian subs, maybe thats why we are seeing alot of indian content.
That and their banhappy atitude towards real users.
I agree and it boils my blood. I have to calm myself by puffing on a smooth and mellow Marlboro Extra Deluxe Cigarette.
that’s an internet wide problem though.
I quit Reddit because of the ultra leftist moderators. You can’t have a different opinion or you get banned.
Elaborate on “ultra leftist”? Literally where are you on the compass if Reddit moderators are “too leftist” for you?
That would also depend a lot on when and why you left.
Shutting down jailbait
Shutting down Trumps sub
Banning the word retard
Or instead what if its about some of the things they continue to allow? While not universally allowed, some posts like these can be made
Pro Luigi posting
Memes about kirky boy
Eat the rich
Each of these, if that is “too leftist” could be quite different. You may not agree with any of them, but what it implies about someone would be different.
I think it’s a mix of both. Commercialization is why the admin staff sucks. The popularity and size of the site is why many users suck. It’s hit with both capitalist enshittification and Eternal September.
Reddit was always shitty from when
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The only reason the jailbait sub came down was do to main stream media pressure - if you missed jailbait was a “SFW” sub for posting reveling photos of other people’s children to be gooned over. It was voted “Subreddit of the year” in 2008
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the mod who ran jailbait was an ICON on reddit for years and he also modded dozens of other equally questionable subs
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The insane redditor backlash to them banning FatPeopleHate sub - which for those who missed it was a sub dedicated to posting photos of overweight people without their knowledge so the internet could mock them. This was mostly made up of - yes you guessed it - mostly photos of fat women getting mocked.
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Leaving up the BeatingWomen sub that is specifically for posting videos of women getting beat up for 10+ more years after jailbait came down.
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leaving up the Creepshots sub, a sub dedicated to upskirt and down-shirt photos of unsuspecting women, for YEARS and only taking it down due to to it hitting the main stream news and forcing their hand. This sub was also modded by the Jailbait mod.
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the RAMPANT sexism and racism as thinly veiled intellectualism that has gone on for DECADES
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Ghislaine Maxwell was a moderator on worldnews- I cannot back this claim up so I am removing it.
The API thing and forced logins is probably one of the least shitty things this site has done.
At least back then they didn’t ban you for suggesting nonces like trump should be fed into woodchippers or that its time for guillotines.
Yeah - Reddit is a scammy company and spez should be in jail for what his company has allowed to happen there.
the RAMPANT sexism and racism as thinly veiled intellectualism that has gone on for DECADES
This what I came to associate with reddit.
This kind of very super shallow toxic intellectualism that consisted mostly of call-and-responses opinions play-acted in weird rituals really wore on me. Even the more organic conversations were more like people just slapping opinions at eachother.
Not that we’re immune to ANY of this. Our smaller scale and decentralisation sidesteps the issue a bit, though. For now anyway.
I dont think it is likely to deteriorate in the same way. The mainstream service algorithms reward engagement and make no value judgments about the type of engagement. Since its easier to get engagement by spouting bombastic false claims and unsupportable opinions, that is the bulk of what you see.
Lemmy barely rewards engagement, if at all, so the perverse incentive to be a jerk on purpose is simply just not there. Surely, drawing a broader audience will shift discussion toward humanity’s lowest common denominator, but it doesn’t actively encourage that particular bad behavior, at least.
The API thing and forced logins is probably one of the least shitty things this site has done.
Cannot agree more. That was shitty, but the turds had already filled the bowl.
Anyone remember how redditors thought the „most evil“ subreddit on the site wasn’t any of those but „ShitRedditSays“ which made fun of them while pointing out how awful they were? What a website.
Wasn’t that mostly just rimworld or kenshi comments taken out of context?
SRS was awful itself. the OG meta ragebait subreddit.
It’s a self perpetuating cycle. Abuse justifies abuse justifies abuse.
SRS wasn’t exactly some paragon of virtue and good judgement, a lot of their posts were ‘gotcha’ stuff taken out of context or joke posts taken seriously. I was on SRS myself a few times, usually due to sarcastic/sardonic comment that SRS users took literally. They often fell into the ‘bonsai kitten’ trap.
I also used to get in fake arguments with other users on one sub, for fun. And people also took us seriously and would ‘report’ our comments as horrible and abusive. The mods didn’t ban us though, because they understood the context, we were taking the piss out of each other and/or roleplaying.
Tbh Reddit was bad because of lack of censorship is a take. Reddit is bad now because of censorship. It is a really great example of a time when slippery slope was not a fallacy.
The issue is really that it’s not really possible to do good moderation (i.e. censorship) at scale.
When the site is centralized, all users have to get the same basic experience. That means someone needs to decide for the entire world what’s allowed and what isn’t. It isn’t just whether you’ll have porn or no porn. It isn’t just whether you’ll have hate subs, or subs dedicated to violence. It’s where you draw the line at politics. Is sexism allowed? What if it’s just a sort-of sexist joke? Can people talk about Nazi ideology? What if it’s a sub for historians?
What makes something like Lemmy better is that each instance can make their own choices of where to draw the line, and other instances can decide whether to federate with them or not. That way an instance running in Germany might have different ideas of where the lines is when it comes to Nazi imagery, and sex, and violence. One in New Zealand might have completely different ideas. If you’re a user from NZ the NZ instance might match your tastes better, but if not, you’re free to sign up for the German one.
Subreddits basically acted like that in the early days of Reddit. Nobody is making anyone go to any subreddit no?
You’d still see them pop up in /r/all or similar spots that showed big posts from other subs.
Yep.
And lots of the users on your site will be idiots with think historians talking about Nazi Germany are Nazis and have a idiot extremist stance that any reference to Nazi Germany must be wiped from the history books or something.
The whole feddit thing awhile ago was wild. It’s German hosted, so abides by German laws, and people here accused them of being being biased/censoring content, but it was literally illegal for them to have Nazi content, but folks were spamming Nazi imagery as criticism of Israeli, and when the admin/mods took it down they were ‘pro genocide’.
the world has changed. the free speech idealism of the 2000s internet is dead. reddit was founded by people with libretarian ideals, but those quickly change when money replaces ideals.
If anything our broader culture has seen ideal erosion across the board, as money has taken supremacy as the only ideal worth pursuing.
You forgot the Slavetrade sub. Where they’d post pictures of women that appeared to be have been tortured in cages for sale.
I didn’t know about this sub but now am horrified and unsurprised.
SVU shit happened there. It wasn’t just actors or consensual bs from some freaks. It was, compare that girl to the girl on the missing posters on vicap and the fbi missing people posts shit.
Then the Arabics found the place. They began auctions of their “concubines” giving their real cell numbers.
you realize that’s like a whole fetish thing right?
Totally - “jailbait”, beatingwomen, rapingwomen and creepshots were also fetish subs. The more you know 💫
No, women/men getting in cages and acting like slaves is a fetish thing. It’s part of BDSM practice for some folks, including the physical abuse. Some folks like being hit. I’ve dated women who I had to break up with because they wanted me to beat them, spit on them and etc. and treat them like a slave, and that wasn’t my thing.
But keep equating it to abuse, if you want? Just because you find something distasteful doesn’t mean it wasn’t produced by consenting adults who actively seek it out and derive pleasure from it.
I am sure it was the content from consenting adults that got the sub banned https://www.reddit.com/r/slavetrade/.
Listen - I am not saying you can’t have fetishes and consenting adults cannot enjoy fetishes together, I am saying reddit is a cesspool of people trying to play off horrific abuse as fetishes and this is very well documented.
reddit is made of people, yes.
do you think those types of things were unique to reddit or something? i just get so confused when people make these things, like… what is your thought here? reddit should have never allowed this stuff ever in the first place, and that they ever did at all ever, means reddit is forever awful and horrible, and so is anyone who ever used the site, even if they lurked?
or are you just morally grandstanding here or something?
I used to buy guns through r/gunsforsale.
wait what the fuck? they’re all crazy, but you must be making that last one up.
Internet search on “Ghislaine Maxwell Reddit moderator”
i did. seems like i was right to be suspicious.
ok, I’ll stand corrected on the one count that the only convicted pedophile of the Epstein class was moderating on one of the largest socially acceptable pedophilia sites on the internet. But some might be able to guess how i lean on that unfounded claim.
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i dont see any goofy self promotion videos on lemmy the way reddit has them. there is just less HailCorporate crap here. and the fixed-by-the-duet garbage that is just really uninteresting except WHEN LOUDLY YELLED AT YOU.
Size definitely played a role. It attracted bots, corporate, and political manipulation.
In the attention economy, you don’t need ads to have ads. As long as you’re paying attention to someone, someone could be getting paid because of that.
The two naturally tend to go hand in hand. Advertisers want lots of people to see their shitty ads, and reddit had a lot of traffic, which was marketable to advertisers. Reddit gets paid to keep the servers online (in addition to what they already made from reddit gold, awards, etc. which was just basically people paying for an emoji) and line their pockets so they don’t have much of an incentive to say no.
I want to wage a holy war on advertisers. They ruin just about everything that they touch with the stink of commercial consumerism. Simply blocking them doesn’t seem to be enough anymore.
come the revolution, advertising should be abolished
i had ublock origin on ever since reddit has ads, im surprised they havnt tried to be more ad aggressive.
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
Reddit got bad long before they restricted API access. That’s what was the final drop for many people, but it wasn’t the beginning at all.
I agree that growing would be a benefit for Lemmy though. While I wouldn’t dismiss the dangers of a growing community entirely, we can just defederate from or block problematic parts in theory. So I wouldn’t say we’re in quite the same danger as centralized platforms.
mostly with the political subs in 2017ish they started banning people like crazy the next year. cant even say anything on some niche subs without someone getting mad and reporting you.
no it was before commercializaton, IPO crisis. it was when they started leaning on political/news content so much that any talk of politics that is easily misconstrued , i mean very easy to do, you get a ban. turns out political engagment, especially with russian bots increases traffic to the site. than 2023 happened, and then the ban purges happened, reddit is pretty much in self-destructive mode right now. the more they placate to the gop, conservative censorship, the smaller reddit gets as a platform for discussing anything.
Are these Russian bots in the room with us?
We are on Lemmy, so yeah, they are here. Just take a look at how many people are defending Russia invading its neighboring country and murdering the people there. Or try calling Xi Jingping a dictator who is doing a genocide on the Uighurs.
or, you know, people don’t have the same opinions as you?
It’s a particularly annoying trait of online liberals to think that anyone who doesn’t absolutely agree with them must be stupid or programmed. All while ignoring their own double standards and selective vision.
invading its neighboring country and murdering the people there
As above. Please tell me you’re not American.
We are on Lemmy, so yeah, they are here. Just take a look at how many people are defending Russia invading its neighboring country and murdering the people there. Or try calling Xi Jingping a dictator who is doing a genocide on the Uighurs.
I have never seen anyone claim that Putin or Xi are faultless. I have seen people claim and i agree with them that they are no worse than western leaders. Every imperial project has blood on its hands, be it Rome, Spain, Netherlands, Great Britain, USA, USSR or China, or even India for that matter.
Also propaganda bots on Lemmy are an absurd assumption. Very few people use lemmy as compared to watching TV or Netflix or YouTube or Twitter or Instagram. Any entity that wants to influence anyone would not waste time, money and effort on Lemmy. The returns on investment just aren’t there for Lemmy as a channel (and this is how these media decisions are made as ad companies are often involved in political campaigns).
