Reddit is like the restaurant you've been going to for several years that was a mom & pop operation with awesome food and atmosphere. It got popular, and the owners made it a chain, so you could get the same food in a lot of different areas. The quality started to go down as they expanded, but it was already very popular. Then the owners started raising the prices, and the atmosphere started to get way less awesome. At some point, you realized that it's not the restaurant you fell in love with, and it wasn't a good value anymore, so you started looking for a similar kind of restaurant that was more like that one was early on. But the chain is still really popular, and a lot of people just keep going because it's what they're familiar with and they know the menu - they don't want to go to the work of finding a new place and they're content with what they're getting there. The people who have left are a drop in the bucket so far, and the chain restaurant is likely to continue operating for the foreseeable future.
This is just digg.com evac to reddit.com 13? years ago.
Step 1: Site thinks it owns content users created and made site what it is.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
The overwhelming majority of Redditors probably don't really know what the actual issue is, and on the surface, Reddit charging for an API that they've allowed free access to for years probably seems logical. Plus, people are creatures of habit, they'd rather go back to the same website they've been visiting, with the community that they already know, than try to figure out what the heck a Lemmy is.
Because of what is WAS. While it still remains a bastion of information and data, for me Reddit has went WAY beyond a social media that I'll use. I was already done when they decided not to reconsider their API decision - I could have been swayed, too. Companies deserve to get paid for their data and service; but not price-gouging rates like Reddit is attempting. It really sucks, too - I loved what Reddit, and its USERS, provided to the userbase... when I heard about mgmt planning to forcefully take back BLACKOUT sub-reddits, tho; that was it. NO ONE should remain there - I don't understand how anyone could - federation is the only way forward, aside from going back to a website for every 'sub-reddit'... Lemmy and LemmyNet should, as they are, really take hold right now. The devs need to find more help; I hate to say this, but theres money there. NO REDDIT, NO MORE. MORE Social, less Media.
Honestly, apathy. It is not like people have to start paying for the app or website explicitly
- Facebook/ Meta stole and continues to steal millions of users' data, the vast majority of the users do not care
- Twitter hacked most third-party apps, but people still use it because it doesn't affect them personally. They still use it for free, so why not?
- Reddit killed third party APIs? People will grumble, but they will recalibrate their mind and continue using the official app.
Reddit is unsalvageable and had been for a long time, but again, you are not going to be able to take the redditor out of people even if they move somewhere else for a long time.
None of us should be trying to build a better reddit here, we should be aiming to build something new, knowing what works and what doesn't from our time as redditors.
Something more sincere, I guess.
The arrow of enshitification flys in one direction only. the people that are still there will migrate out eventually. spez was right when he said the majority of users don’t care about the api, but fails to realize that the majority of users don’t generate content. The users that do generate content are jumping ship.
Denial
Anger
Bargaining <-- they are here
Depression
AcceptanceI have zero hope for Reddit. I had no idea there were much better 3rd party apps available for Reddit on phones, so the API changes don't impact me. But I've noticed over the years more and more, astro turfing by bots, bots reposting popular things to karma farm, as to sell the bot to entities looking to influence reddit via the aforementioned astro turfing.
It's all very gross, I started to feel like a duck sitting in a pond surrounded by ducks, but not really, they're all decoys, fakes, mean to give the impression of a big crowd. I don't like that trend, and on top of that, the idea of Reddit going public, and trying to push our content as their value makes me sick. The owners of reddit haven't done the heavy lifting, we the users, the mods all did the work and built up content. The idea that some chucklefuck was going to profit big from our effort isn't something I want to be part of any more. So here I am, and I gotta say, Lemmy feels like a 2000's forum by comparison, and I hope its very nature makes it harder to fall into the same pit falls as reddit and digg did.
Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they're there to stay.
All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:
- Bugs (I love lemmy, but gosh, have you seen how buggy and sometimes unresponsive it is?)
- The complexity of "servers" (don't get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
- Lack of content
- Lack of users
Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn't happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.
Denial, at least for me. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that anyone could be that stupid and eager to destroy it’s most active part of the user base…
And the fact that it’s Reddit, a Site I always preceived as community driven and kinda above those corporate shenanigans, I still have hopes some saner heads might prevail. Although that seems increasingly unlikely by the minute…
because the majority of people doesn't really care sadly
They don't see their niche interest groups migrating to a different platform.
Smaller subs may have had just enough critical mass when accessing the entire reddit user graf, but new platforms are not there yet. It is much easier to gain traction in a unified user base than in a federation of disparate user bases.
Here's one way to realize why Reddit should not be taken seriously: Suppose that the head moderator position for r/politics was put up for open auction. How much would it sell for? It would be purchased by someone who was interested in controlling what information people see.
Subreddits are moderated on a first-come first-serve basis. If you were the first one to squat a name 10 years ago, you get to be the head moderator, even if someone else might do a better job. This is the "landed gentry" comment Reddit's CEO was referring to.
Personally, I just feel bad for Apollo's creator and mods (the good ones) who spent so much time carefully taking care of a community they love, so in a sense I wish Reddit would come to their senses and axe that fucker CEO and revert to reasonable API changes. But it's mostly wishful thinking. Besides, now I would feel bad if Reddit managed to go back to being good because that would mean that this aswesome Lemmy thinghy would go back into the shadows, while it deserves so much attention imho.
The vast majority of reddits userbase are consumers. They are already using the official app and don't care about the politics of the platform. These people are only there to get their content fix.
I realised this when I saw a post on a subreddit where someone shared on how to turn off some kind of notification in the official app. So many other people thanked this person... Reddit has become another mainstream social media site like FB, Instagram and so on.
Like it or not. The internet is evolving.
Hahaha people are stupid bro
Because the content that people dump into it for years and communities are valuable. May be if some of those communities migrated to lemmy and I just keep accessing contents from way back machine, then I may not want Reddit anymore, but at the moment. I wish for it's redemption
We are losing a lot, this new ActivityPup fediverse is exciting but it is like going back a decade for long-term reddit users.
Reddit obviously sucks now and has been like this for years, IMO it was newReddit and its focus on Facebook users that was the biggest event declining quality. What we had slowly eroded and its no longer there, but there were still enough smaller active communities that it could still be a good experience.
We are rebuilding and it is fun and exciting, but we are losing a big part of our lives in the process, we wont have something equal to what we lost for a couple years to come.
I had hope until the infamous AMA posted by spez, and him doubling down on accusing people of blackmail. I've purged my account history immediately after that.
Most of the subreddits I used to frequent (particularly/r/manga) haven't made the move to anywhere, nor they blacked out in protest. While I see some parallels here, there's still very few active users. I would love to be able to post more content myself, but I objectively do not have enough time in my hands.
I get the reddit c suite just wants to go public and finally get their payout, which is understandable but if they're out then we're out too. There's better platforms now anyway that need a reason to be used and developed. They could have so easily handled this differently by just making the reddit app experience better than any third party apps today. But here we are and honestly I wouldn't bet my retirement that teenagers will still be posting to reddit in 40 years.
I don't have any hope for reddit, but unfortunately, it is stil a very good source of information. Plus some previously established communities cannot be easily replaced, so reddit still has a use for me.
I hope that with time, my old communities will find their way here. Until then, sometimes I need to use reddit to talk to some people and access information.
And this is what makes the whole situation so shitty. All of the popular social media sites suck, but it's not easy to replace them with something new when the majority of the content and community stays there.
It's been my community since like 2007. It's hard to move on from all of those conversations and inside jokes because suddenly the landlord says he gets to be a part of our conversations because he owns the property despite never participating in anything besides maybe suggesting a few holiday events that the community had to make happen and execute on their own. It has nothing to do with the site. It has to do with what we created there, a lot like the street corner that used to be a thing. It's been made clear we're no longer welcome there and we'll find a new corner to hang out on. And as soon as it's user friendly enough the masses will follow. That's a mixed blessing because the same tired replies and memes will follow but the content will be there.
I'm a little drunk right now so I'm being overly sentimental, but the point remains. We miss the experiences we had, and fuck that greedy, spineless motherfucker for making us go elsewhere. But we'll do it and laugh about it the same way we used to about Digg. "Fuck Kevin Rose" was a thing the same way "Fuck u/spez" is.
People like being comfortable, new places can be uncomfortable.
It's this simple. So just let them have their porn-filled garbage can of a place.
Reddit is now in the ilk of MySpace and facebook.. Corpo-wasteland devoid of anything but ad revenue and cheers from shareholders.
They can keep it.
Because Reddit has been our online home for years. It's where our communities are, where are online friends are, it's become home. People have spent thousands of hours building communities there, as a labor of love.
Unfortunately I agree with you- the home is on fucking fire and unless a monsoon spontaneously erupts we should get the hell out before it burns to the ground.
They are just following the reactionary social media norms these days. The lack of proper passing of information and just humoured by the subreddit protests such as in r/pics. Some people are not actually on Reddit for information.
Honestly, it's a information goldmine. You'll get answers to most obscure questions and in detail. All others sources on the internet are either fluff or endorsements. It it also inconvenient to have to visit two websites that does same thing. So people don't want to abandon what they are habituated to.
Don’t underestimate how much resistance to change stops people from looking beyond the status quo. Moving away from Reddit is a clear example. I suspect a lot of lurkers from Reddit are actually from the category of Late Majority or Laggards
https://www.betterup.com/blog/resistance-to-change
https://www.liveabout.com/what-is-resistance-to-change-1918240
https://ondigitalmarketing.com/learn/odm/foundations/5-customer-segments-technology-adoption/
I have no hope, but there are a few subs that I still love and it's sad that he is destroying that so he can make reddit like every other soul-sucking social network. reddit is unfortunately the only place I can go to discuss random things I love like the EPL, or WNBA, or the japanese show Gaki No Tsukai as no one around me in real live is into them. Hopefully some of that can transfer to lemmy or other places...but who knows...
some people still poop in holes in the ground.
I can only repeat what I just commented somewhere else:
I built Swift apps and Mastodon or Discord are NOT a proper format to get help, Discord being crappy for archiving, too.
I have a hard time getting help by people that really know this stuff because Swift is made by Apple, and the Apple bubble tends to stick to Twitter and the likes. If enough migrate, I can finally say frick off, Reddit
Because there is not yet a full alternative to reddit.
I get a "sunk-cost fallacy" feel from it. Like Bill Hicks' bit went- This HAS to be real. Look at my furrows of worry- look at all this Karma. This has to be real!"
.. it's just a ride.
I'm of the opinion that Reddit will become incrementally worse going forward, most users are not bothered right now because the whole API fiasco affects mods and not them, but as usual they miss the forest for the tree. The site will go for the users and creators next, but it won't be like this, it'll be one tiny annoying feature at a time to avoid mass abandonment. I'm already looking for alternatives, such as this one, in preparation, but most will put up with anything just to keep consuming the same old content.
Some people like my bf just browse for a little bit of their communities and don‘t care about anything else.
However, if we make this place interesting enough they will come naturally, those sorts of people are like moths who are attracted to interesting content.
The only thing I can say is, I don’t.
The average redditor couldn't care less about what is going on.
The silver lining is that hopefully we can get a few people off Reddit and onto here and eventually grow these spaces. I do miss the thousands of upvotes and comments though, but that'll come in time
Honestly: for my social media consumption Reddit works pretty well. I always used to webinterface so for nothing really changed.
I am here because I felt like changing things up more than anything. Well: the fediverse is a super interesting idea and looking at something fresh is always fun.
Still; it seems pretty likely that this place will be a good deal smaller than Reddit for the foreseeable future and that’s both a strength and a weakness.
The main strength of Reddit is it’s nichier subs. There is one for just about anything. You need a massive volume of users to do such a thing and I don’t think Lemmy will reach that size anytime soon.
I expect Lemmy to be a place where people value Openness and Freedom. Generally there are less people that care about Freedom AND Pu’er tea than there are people who care about just Pu’er tea.
I wonder what will happen to Lemmy in a couple of years🤔
Because no matter how bad it gets, like all successful social platforms, it will stay successful. People will continue to use it no matter how much they complain or criticize it. I regularly complain about Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc. But I still use all of them. It doesn't matter how unsatisfied people are with how things are being handled, if most people still see a reason to use it, they will until it's gone.
I don't think a lot of people who are in the know have any expectation of this turning around and going well, but I don't blame anyone for hoping it will. The existing communities that are uprooted from all this, not to mention the headaches of signing up for new platforms and all that entails, aren't exactly ideal. Avoiding them from being necessary would be fantastic... alas, that hope is indeed slim.
I don't care about what happens to Reddit, but hopefully at least some of the content gets saved. It was already annoying when I was trying to find some answers to a tech support question and the subs that had answers were private.
I think a lot of the general reddit user base is still out of the loop on it or just doesn't care about the drama enough to make any kind of change.
Many users don't log in every day, and might just sign in to look up answers to specific questions or to read individual subs. Those folks are a lot less likely to have been following all the updates through last month and before since so much was announced across a variety of subs.
There are about 5 years of my life on there, for some users 15+. Now, if you dropped your laptop with 15 years worth of memories on it, you damn sure would have hope you could still save the data, even if it's obviously done for.
Because Reddit is familiar and people like to stick with what they're used to and comfortable with.
I think "hope" is a tricky word for it. A lot of people don't really care about the issues and a lot of people who use it sparingly for a quick "haha" won't really be affected (at least not yet). So those people may not really hope for more.
I still use reddit for my niche gaming communities and while the possibility of making federated alternatives for those communities exists, it's far simpler to stay.
I watched his recent interview (only for 10mins) but he described Reddit quite accurately. Namely, reddit(or platforms like ours) is a city, a city is living only if people are living. Also, he knew that very minimal and subtle moderation is the right way.
It sounds like a CEO who knows its stuff, but facts have been shown his actions and attitudes are outrageous. The moderation was good enough to reach success for 18 years, only bc people do it for Reddit for free. He only took the free ride on it.
The biggest problem I have with this guy is that the API charges is really selling people knowledges and memories as a product. It is supposed to be free and open. He is taking all the profits as business with no promises or giving back to the community. This model simply doesn't work well with us, I would rather stick to decentralised model as long as it is reasonably efficient.
Sunk cost fallacy is my assumption, but take that with a grain of salt. I'm one of those low tech savvy old farts people talk about. I left because making it harder for moderators to do their jobs means communities that I love will be less safe and welcoming. Maybe the rest have to experience that discomfort for themselves before they too are driven away. Or they think they can ride this out and continue as before when things settle down.
For people who were more than just the causal browser/lurker, Reddit was an amazing place to not only obtain information about very specific things, but also to connect with other people. I have type 1 diabetes and the ability to connect with other type 1 diabetics to commiserate, share information, and seek help on Reddit was like nothing else anywhere else on the internet. I have a few other niche interests that also only had communities on Reddit.
Years ago, these things (health conditions, niche interests, etc) all had their own separate forums scattered throughout the internet. One forum might have a few dozen people, one might have a hundred or so. But Reddit quickly became the central place where we could connect. Whereas forums could maybe attract a few hundred people, subreddits could connect with THOUSANDS. There’s not yet been anything else like it.
Unfortunately, we made the BIG mistake of relying on a for-profit, centrally owned company to function as a town square. Same with Twitter. We found value in sharing information and connecting through these platforms, only to get screwed over by billionaire CEOs.
Hopefully we have learned our lesson. Hopefully something comparable will take Reddit’s place. It’s not going to happen over time. I never expected Mastodon to replace Twitter overnight. But slowly, very slowly, at least some people are seeing the downfall of corporate social media and will hopefully slowly switch over to federated alternatives. I don’t think it will happen quickly, nor will it happen for everything. But I do think it’s already happening. And it will happen faster if we get some good mobile apps.
