What's really baffling to me is that a bunch of nerds with too much free time on their hands basically stomped out a fully fledged Reddit alternative within a few months, including multiple frontends and apps.
Yet Reddit spends millions on development every year, for no discernable improvement whatsoever, while still turning no profit.
Where is all that money going? Seriously, Reddit is a very simple site. There's nothing that hard about it. The amount of data is tiny, since the content is external, none of the resources are that time critical, a lot of content can be cached.
The ideas leading to Lemmy go back at least a decade, that I can remember. There are many little things that people figured out when developing distributed federated social media networks of this type. It's a success story of collaboration over a long time with a shared goal of making Reddit and Twitter easy to replace with a superior product.
I tried last year but a month back I got banned for 'ban evasion' after going on a 5000 mile roadtrip for a honeymoon and using the sketchiest of unsecured wifi APs.
This time around I realized I can set the default sort in account settings to the top posts in the past 1 or 6 hours, def give that a shot, neverending stream of new posts, zero reason to wanna doomscroll reddit ever again
This is just the latest in a long string. Spez has demonstrated repeatedly throughout the years that he's an entitled cretin - equal parts smug and ignorant.
My personal favorite was when he snidely commented on Reddit's unprofitability in his AMA after the API debacle, making it sound as if it was somehow our fault, only to then not only have it made common knowledge that the official app was useless garbage and had been for years, but that the entirety of Reddit's loss for the year was just about exactly equal to his salary alone.
I used Reddit for 12 years, which granted, isn't as long as some others, but it is really sad to see what it has become after all these years. It helped a lot back in the day, but now it is time to let it go.
The third party app ban was doubly stupid because not only did it piss people off but then they replaced all of those apps with something that didn't work properly. Even if you didn't care about third party apps all that much you cared that the only option you now had was terrible.
I hopped on Reddit the week before the Digg migration happened. I'm not sure how I really took in the Internet before that (lolcats and wimp mostly), but I remember nearly the exact moment it happened. I'd never heard of Digg before that. I'd barely heard of Reddit.
It's not the same as it was back then, and I'm very happy to be done with it. Fuck spez/Steve Huffman, that piece of shit burned everything to the ground to enrich himself and piss on the community.
If they had just done the obvious thing and made ad-free 3rd party API access depend on a subscription fee, then I would have just paid it and wouldn't be here. But no, they have to do everything the worst way possible.
No, they are charging the app devs instead of the users directly (who would then be free to use Any app, and the apps would have remained as they were: ad-supported or paid or whatever)
I agree! After my initial fury over Spez's whole tantrum, I found Lemmy, and I gotta say, yeah I really do think we need a lot more communities and diverse topics, but for those of us who remember what the Usenet was early on, it was a paradise for free-thinking, tech-savvy individuals to socialize and share ideas. I'd love to see Lemmy stay under the radar, because once something becomes popular enough, it gets enshittified by people looking to monetize and people looking to just plain shit all over it. If it remains fairly small, but in that it is a concentration of the most desirable people (mostly), I'll take it. I can always hop over to dread-it if I really need something not here.
Even when Reddit exploded in popularity there were still plenty of great, but smaller, communities. I really enjoyed being part of Reddit until the API changes when all the decent moderators quit. The quality of Reddit went off a cliff shortly after that happened.
So I think Lemmy will be fine even if it explodes in popularity. Capitalist greed that betrayed the OG members and mods who built Reddit is what is making Reddit a cess pool, not the number of users.
I've officially said my goodbyes. It's absolutely fucked over there. This is just one of many serious problems with Reddit. The CEO is tanking it harder than Musk tanked Twitter. He's musk'd it.
I got permabanned on Reddit because of events involving powertripping moderators and every appeal I tried has been met only with generic bot auto replies. It seems impossible to get an actual human to look at my case for which I provided a lot of detail on what went wrong and how I was incorrectly permabanned (I was confronting moderators of one of my favorite subs about them violating their own Subreddit and Reddit's policy).
I've been trying for over 9 months but there's literally no way to get it fixed. And every new account eventually gets permabanned as well.
I'm so done with that garbage platform. Shame about the small fun communities I was in. But the downfall of Reddit can't come soon enough.
Is there a way to fully download or scrape a full subreddit or say stackoverflow since they've both committed themselves to enshittification and alienating their userbases?
asking because that seems difficult to do and there's a lot of useful information on both sites
Its not super hard, but the main hurdle will by bypassing whatever api limits there are such as by using multiple accounts
Certain libraries like praw still work to some extent (my discord bot is still running somehow) but trying to scrape all of the posts in a sub might have to be done slowly. You might be able to sort by old so that the results dont move relative to the page and then go page by page.
Reddit getting rid of paid rewards pre-IPO only to reintroduce the feature later on and boast it as a major QOQ increase in non-ad revenue while artificially inflating their on-paper growth was slick.
I went back to reddit after being away for six years and I'm already done with the mods, the toxicity, the fakeness, just the whole thing. So here I am.
I was awarded Reddit gold a few times. The private subreddit it gave access to was underwhelming. There were also mixed feelings about someone liking my comment so much that they gave Reddit money for it. I'm sure there were better ways to spend that money that also wouldn't have affected me much. I generally prefer relies anyways.
Reddit is dying. Spez is a degenerate freak, a scam artist, and a Nazi. The OpenAI training platform / propaganda website begins to circle the drain. Microsoft is starting to lose the last iota of goodwill they once had.
Nothing about Reddit looks good into the future and no one, with serious cash, is going to invest in a dying platform run by a scam artist, a freak, and a Nazi.
The questions now are, "How long?" and "What's next?"
I'm Just hoping that more sub reddits move over I know a few have that I use thought (which are dead) it was during the time spez pull this bs just seems like every company lately has gotten more greedy with their product