I have no idea what you’re talking about. I peeked in on Reddit yesterday, the first post was some creep trying to find his step aunt’s Only Fans site. Advertisers are sure to love that.
I know some people left reddit, but are we sure they actually lost more users than they gained from all the noise?
I haven't used reddit or even visited the site since the policy change, which was the last drop for me. So I only know what I hear and read from other people, and I never see any solid data.
Just from casually checking traffic stats on various websites it doesn't seem to have changed much, though I have no idea how accurate those sites are. This is more likely just Spez copying Elon's dumb ideas in an effort to increase monetization
Overall users? Probably not. The casual lurker does not know or care what an API is.
But the vast majority of content is made by a tiny fraction of the user base, and that fraction are the ones they pissed off. The quality of posts on large subs very much went down, with repost bots becoming even more prominent than before.
I have occasionally checked my former favorite sub since leaving - the stats are still the same (~900k users) but the content has gone downhill in a very obvious way. Each time I checked, the sub was filled to the brim with lazy, unfunny shitposts, extremely obvious t-shirt scammers and repost bots, offtopic content, conterfeit merch and sometimes an actually interesting post with like 12 upvotes or so, and you would have to dig quite deep to reach it.
And the sub creator seems to have abandoned it entirely. The description still says that the sub has gone private due to spez' decisions and that you need to use discord instead (the sub has been public again since the initial protest, just the description was never updated) and they haven't touched their own sub in 3+ months.
PS: I just checked again and they have a 2 day old screenshot of a dead frog with 2k upvotes as the current top post.
Just adding to the testimony of others: overall quality of both posts and comments have dropped very noticeably. I visit occasionally on my desktop but there isn’t much to keep me there. I find more good content here.
it's SO bad -- they're delineating 'eligible' content now, which, as of Sept 2023 can't involve 'mature themes', such as NSFW, alcohol, gambling, probably weed.
it's gonna get as bad as youtube, mark my fucking words. cReaToRs building careers out of posting and losing income because reddit changed a rule or enforced a rule in a shitty dumb way. how long until you can't swear
Reddit will offer six different purchase options for awarding gold, starting at a $1.99 option to buy one gold and going up to $49 for 25 gold. After you give your gold, you’ll see what Reddit calls a “golden upvote” next to the comment or post.
fuck you
I asked Reddit why it didn’t let people transfer over their coins to spend in the new system. “In the past, there were both paid and free coins that had been distributed, making it incredibly challenging,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said. “After a lot of consideration, we determined it was better to start from scratch.”
fuck you
Gold can be given to posts and comments, unless they include sexual content, content with graphic violence, or feature certain mature themes (e.g., alcohol, gambling). In addition, gold cannot be awarded on content posted in a Not Safe for Work (NSFW), quarantined, or trauma support community.
Someone probably figured out that the optics of allowing minors on a site which has a massive onlyfans ad presence (like, most of the NSFW now) miggggghtttt appear as if the site is creating a "high school to porn" pipeline, and that's going to be a bad look if the media ever takes notice.
Honestly, I'm shocked this hasn't happened yet. It was creepy enough to have minors on a site which was half porn before most of that porn was legitimately "now that I'm 18 I can finally show you my butthole"
Wait, so buying more gold doesn’t even offer you a discount? Isn’t it usually the opposite so the devs or whoever can attract more people to buy pricier stuff?
Yes. Adding a financial incentive to saying whatever everyone already wants to hear, is a brilliant idea that will definitely encourage genuine discussion.
Right, both platforms that algorithmically isolate people into echo chambers, only showing people content that offends them in ways that polarises them further, so as to keep them doom-scrolling forever.
My point is that this isn't conducive with a social platform that unites people and builds consensus, but one that extract's money at the cost of inflaming divisions even further.
I stop by and check the place out once in a while. You're not missing anything. The place has become a dupsterfire filled with bots and spam. I have old comments from years ago getting new comments on them. They're all bot comments. IDK why they are commenting on old posts, but they're doing it a lot.
I wonder how much money laundering will occur because of this. I can also see any community discussing anything even remotely illegal that one could buy getting banned because of people using this feature to commit crimes and the shit admins overreacting because of it
glad I got kicked out of that platform. Admins (not mods) are getting way too trigger happy when it comes to bans, to the point where I was stating the obvious in a normal way and got hit with a ban for "hate".
Other than that, I was getting bot messages promoting only fans accounts once every ~2 days
indeed, I quit for good after getting banned for telling off a shitty mod. "lol fuck off" is banworthy now. it's a high bar to make another account on a site I was barely clinging on to in the first place. content is still a little scarce here but I still vastly prefer it. even when I do end up on reddit researching ebikes or something it's without an account reading old posts. we're the future and the IPO will be really interesting to watch, since there isn't much worth buying
They must have some good shovels, to digg a hole so deep for themselves.
I can't imagine Reddit will ever recover. It's as bot plagued as twitter and lost all semblance or its former self.
What's with the trend of major corporations taking turns turning themselves to shit? Can't these CEO's see the public backlash and tell themselves "Shit, lets not do what they did"?
Every one of these companies has the exact same target, which is to make more money for their shareholders than the previous quarter at the expense of everything else.
When a company is small and not making as much it's easier to make little changes to increase capital, but as the company gets larger and they run out of avenues to extract cash from they start getting more and more desperate and their tactics get more and more obvious.
I've just left a company for this exact reason, as their little cash grabbing exercises were starting to impact employees and they were making cuts all over the place in order to keep up the illusion of growth.
These CEOs don't think about the impact that new policies make, they just see more money not being extracted.
This is not as bad as what Digg did way back, and then Digg very quickly became irrelevant.
But it's kind of in the same direction, and I suspect that this could easily have a negative impact. Creating desperate noise that will drown out meaningful content and debate.
What kind of idiots are in the boardroom or senior leadership meetings saying, "This is a great idea!" Must be some hella salesmen in there to convince people this won't run the site further in the ground.
Fuck reddit but a broken clock is right twice a day. Advertisers pay reddit because there are eyeballs on their site. Eyeballs are on their site because of the things people post. Shouldn't the people making those posts be getting a chunk of that advertising money? Maybe some payment to mods for all their hard work? Do all the negative commenters prefer that reddit just.. keep all the money for themselves and their shareholders?
wHaT abOut thE BotS? Yes, the bots are a problem, they are a problem because reddit actively decides to let them run rampant. There are many tried and true solutions to this problem and with an incentive system they actually become easier to control. It's easier to control people with economic incentives. You can't stop every bot but you can stop most bots and you can make botting harder and more expensive to the point that it's not worth it for most would-be bot users.
It sounds good in theory but look at how people behave just for the fake internet points. Every top comment in any reasonably large subreddit reads like a bot trying to input all the right words to make the hive mind reward them. It’s why subreddit simulator is so creepy.
I guess you could say that’s pretty much how all communication works but at such a large scale, it starts to get very homogenized and the site starts feeling like one person interacting with themselves. There’s no room for actual discussion because anyone deviating from the hive mind gets buried and attacked. I’m not even talking about politics, go to a guitar subreddit and imply that wood makes a difference in guitar tone. You will get downvoted and all the responses will be over the top indignant which shuts down all discussion.
If you can turn your pandering in to cash, this only gets worse.