SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit. @lemmy.ml

2y ago

reddit r/movies isn't doing too well

old.reddit.com

Why is this subreddit now just askreddit for movies?

Why is this subreddit now just askreddit for movies?
Some time in the last few months, r/movies has been entirely consumed by askreddit-style questions like "What's your favorite hidden gem??" or "What actor fell off the map??"
[...]
What is now causing all these unique, seemingly-non-bot posters to suddenly start flooding this particular subreddit with their discussion posts, instead of going to askreddit? Did the whole reddit protest shit change the moderation rules? Has the subreddit been infiltrated by a secret Buzzfeed content farming cabal? I unsubscribed from r/askreddit because I got sick of this shit, but now it's back on r/movies!
What is going on??

I think the comments are most interesting though

Because the audience for reddit has dwindled since July. Reddits offial site and app push controversial posts over just well yovkted ones. Most controversial posts asks inane questions. Then there's bots reposting those questions for karma and then websites juicing social media for content to get crammed down your throat via SEO.

They should make a second internet just for people

This all started with the boycott.
[...]
I’d assumed things would go back to “normal” after the boycott, but it looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?) Maybe reddit will regret removing the 3rd party apps, after all? Maybe we’ll just accept a future where niche subs become little more than BuzzFeed polls, but we get paid if our poll does well, so users won’t care?

It's because Reddit is trying to drive engagement. I don't know if you noticed, but since the purge of third-party apps, the comment sections have been kind of meager, and things don't get as many upvotes as they used to. Heck, half the comments act like bots anyway. It seems like reddit has been distilled down to those most addicted to it and has taken a hard lean into all the most extreme views.

When Reddit killed third party apps, the quality fell off all over the place. It took me about a month to realize the timing and why r/all had so much AITA rage bait stories and celebrity gossip and stuff now. I think a lot of the quality posters and people who liked more high brow discussions just left Reddit.

154 comments

This makes me sad. Not just because of what happened with reddit, but because I'm still missing that high-brow discussion. Most of my reddit comments were replies to other people, rather than top-level comments, and I spent more time reading comment sections than I did looking at the content they were discussing.
I like it here, but I don't feel like I come across the depth of content I did on reddit. I don't mind the lower quantity - that's expected on a small platform - but I'm definitely not enjoying the lower quality. Most of the activity seems to be around memes and American politics, neither of which particularly interest me, and most of the comments across most posts feel fairly unsubstantial. It's so much rarer for me to find something I want to reply to on here than it was on reddit.
- I don't mind the lower quantity - that's expected on a small platform - but I'm definitely not enjoying the lower quality.
  I think the issue here is that there's a sweet spot where quantity and quality are in equilibrium. You NEED a certain quantity before you have a high chance of finding insightful comments on a given topic -- to simplify things, if there's a 1% chance a given comment is going to be from an expert with great insight, you have a 9.6% chance of finding that on a post with 10 comments and a 63% chance of finding that on a post with 100 comments. The threadiverse just hasn't hit that threshold yet.
  Of course, there's a tipping point which reddit is long past, where higher and higher quantities start to drown out the insightful posts with memes and quips, or downvote and mock them with a confidently wrong counter-opinion the mob wants to hear more.
  I hope the barriers to entry with decentralized services that the masses find "confusing" are such that we eventually manage to reach equilibirum and not tip too terribly far past it.
  
  Oh I agree completely (and thought about going off on a tangent about "critical mass" myself but decided against it). It's a rough path towards reaching that point, though, if we can't have enough discussions to draw those kinds of people in and keep them around in the first place. I agree, also, about the "signal-to-noise ratio" on reddit being too low in general nowadays - especially post-third-party apps controversy - although I think that's preferable to there simply not being enough quality content in the first place; good moderation (not that reddit has much of that nowadays...) can deal with the noise, whereas it can't make up for lack of substantial comments.
  I'm not sure what the best way to address the barriers to entry to the fediverse might be, but I've thought that the various apps either hosting their own instances or partnering with other instances to funnel users towards them and streamline the signup process would probably be a good first step. I think having some barrier to entry is a good thing, though - so we don't tip too far past that equilibrium.
- It’s also far too confrontational for such a small community. People’s posts asking for help get downvoted, comment replies get voted down just because of tribalism (shit on Windows, much?), and replies devolve to insults far faster. There’s really no place for any kind of nuanced discussion.
  
  I hate to say it, but I think that's just an issue with online culture in general nowadays. I've been saying for years at this point that "the internet is where nuance goes to die". But I agree; I wish it wasn't the case here, and I wish it was something that got called out more. Calling out people for their extreme and distasteful political opinions is fine, but piling on people because they're fine with using Windows or whatever is just ridiculous.
- I don't know. I get the same raw energy here as I did when I first joined that other site. I get a rush of joy when I discover a new, cool community. The truth is, Lemmy is literally what you make it, not shoved down our throats by someone looking for their first billion.
  
  Lemmy is what we make it. I can't keep a community alive on my own, but sadly that is the reality for a lot of subjects right now.
- That's what happens when you openly express contempt for your userbase after doing nothing about spam or influence operations for 8+ years.
- About movies, !moviesandtv@lemmy.film has discussion threads for every new movie being released
- I honestly completely forgot about Tildes.
  
  Can you even sign up for tildes yet?
- I find tildes.net fills the role of in-depth discussions pretty well, they don't tolerate memes and other fluff which I do still find entertaining but lemmy has plenty of that. Only thing neither do very well is lots of content for niche hobbies or topics that just require a lot more users to work well.
  
  Yeah I like tildes for the slower pace in depth discussions and thoughtful comment section, and Lemmy for the scrolling and occasional laughs. Throw in Hackernews for very in depth technical discussions and I don't miss Reddit much at all. Spending a lot more time reading books or learning new things instead of doom scrolling on Reddit.
- I agree with much of this. Though, I've been here for a couple months now (only just made an account) and I've noticed as the posts have become a bit more diverse. The commie stuff is a little wack/comical but eh - I like my commies out in the open and proud of who they are.
- Agreed, I had largely the same usage behavior as you. Blocking dozens of meme communities managed to filter out most of the junk but substantive topics and discussions are still rare. While things seem to be decelerating lately, I'll be sticking around in the hope that over time the sort of thing we're looking for grows.
  
  Same here. I miss having actual discussions in comment threads once in a while.
- I want Lemmy to grow, but nobody I recommend it to is particularly interested. My husband thinks it's really no better than 4chan or reddit. He's never been a fan of either. He feels that the people here are too high handed and snobby and considering that 4chan has a better time dealing with trolls and (tankies) problem users because it's hard to stalk someone on a completely anonymous web site he just feels like we'll end up going up like a flash in a pan. Here one day gone the next. I hope he isn't right but I also do see my fair share of what he's talking about. We aren't nearly as welcoming as we make ourselves out to be.
  Quality is subjective. But there's always gonna be some slag in the smelting pot. Pretending we can make a community that's free of all of Reddit's problems is kind of foolish.
  On the other hand communities don't just spring up over night. The kind of quality the majority of people say they want happens organically and I don't think we can rush that. I do think that people with message boards or discords could migrate here and start their own instance or subs. That would be a good way to grow the community.
- I’m more grateful for paywalled Web 1.0 platforms from two decades ago than I have been in a long time. Metafilter’s FanFare section is low-volume but particularly satisfying for thoughtful movie chatter. It’s fun when bursts of comments in an old thread are years apart between a title’s theatrical release and arrival on streaming.
- I feel the same and that's why I'm posting here And trying to do my part to grow the community. I loved the fact that I could be having a bad day and go to any comment thread and be laughing within seconds.
- Many of us are still piecing together where our new homes will be on Lemmy. Several of the popular subreddits were re-created here but the content is largely bots cross posting reddit content that sucks. It's taking longer than I expected to find content I enjoy interacting with too, but I suspect that's a problem that can only be solved by continuing to interact with those posts as you find them.
While I don't think Reddit is going to collapse anytime soon or anything, any moderators that chose to stay after seeing how little Reddit cares about them, are not going to be the sorts of people with a bold vision on what they want to see in a community. What remains of the culture is just going to get more and more generic as evidenced here.
- Digg didn't collapse overnight. Neither did MySpace. Or Fark. It was little by little then all at once.
  
  And even then, all of those websites still technically exist, in some form at least. They died, but they're not dead.
  A lot of people seemed to expect reddits crash and burn to eventually shutter the service entirely, but even if every single major content creator left the bots would keep things running semi-smoothly for the less engaged users for probably years to come.
- Brain drain.
- I think the main community that I was in wouldn't mind jumping ship, but there's no where for them to jump to yet.
  Lemmy's mod tools don't seem to be rolled out yet and I haven't found anywhere on Lemmy that has a wiki built into their community yet.
  
  I agree mod tools are the largest hurdle right now. Startrek.website has a wiki but I understand it's not built into Lemmy.
looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?)
Nah we're doing the same shit just on Lemmy now
- Are they not allowed to mention lemmy or do they not know?
  If people don't know, how can they be reached?
  
  You get shadowbanned for mentioning lemmy. The post likely wont even be visible either.
  
  I thought there would be a lot more discussion on reddit about the new privacy changes and migrating to Lemmy. Either people genuinely don't care or Reddit is actively suppressing discussion about this to keep their user base.
  
  Make a reddit account and tell them
- Where are the good movie communities on Lemmy? I searched a couple of times but couldn’t find one that matched the old Reddit one.
  
  lemmy.film
  !moviesandtv@lemmy.film is fairly active.
  
  They might not exist yet. You can create one if you wish.
- Yup. Fluff principle - TL;DR barely passable content will flood any vote-based community, unless you take measures against it.
  
  I got tired of holding the line against that long before the protests - that is why I believe what I heard said about the fact that most mods that cared about their communities only lasted a year, maybe two. I gave up modding one game community, and then along with the protests a second one, and each time I can barely stand to go back and read the posts there, bc they always trend more towards this, as you say bc it takes continual efforts to stop them!
  And like, on the one hand, if that is what the people there want...then power to them? Except even they complain about it too, bitterly - both "why can't I say whatever I want, when/however I want?" while also at the same time "why are others free to say what they want too, can't they be removed somehow?" (ignoring the obvious answer that yes they can be blocked, though that takes all of two whole clicks!:-P). Also, they seem pissed whenever they ask a question on the sub's main feed (ignoring the rules & things like a prominent Questions megathread pinned for precisely that purpose, or in some cases a "Questions" flair, instead putting something like a "Guide" flair, representing the exact opposite purpose of what that was designed to mean) but then nobody remains who wants to answer it. Like: "What phone should I purchase?" (ignoring the fact that the previous 10 posts all had an identical title, nor are there any details about what the person is looking for, plus again a megathread for precisely that)
  I would say that it's literal children taking over the internet, except some of the people complaining say they are retirees, others middle-age with kids, others in college, etc., so it is not a matter of mere physical age. Still, it is a childish mindset of wanting others to take care of them, while not being restricted from doing any of the things that they want to do. Nor is it selfishness, I believe, not precisely; although it may be more akin to self-centeredness. In this way then, it is like a public park or playground where people choosing not to abide by the rules destroy the experience for everyone, ironically also including themselves (when they come in wanting to play, and then everyone leaves rather than play with them, under those circumstances).
- How much of that style of posts is bots?
- the real cycling community hung out at the circlejerk sub because the regular sub was full of the most boring, trite, entry level shit imaginable.
  
  Just like guitar lol.
  
  The cycling circle jerk sub seemed to be embraced and accepted by the main community far more than any other circle jerk sub.
  Far more so than, for example, fuckcarscirclejerk
- The other day I found myself thinking that reddit was transforming itself into a Yahoo Answers, specially r/brasil
- Every subreddit without sufficient moderation becomes /r/Funny with different CSS.
- Three brazilian subreddits? Thats a lot.
When you monetize karma, this is the result. Reddit will be Buzzfeed / WatchMojo / Snapchat Top 10 lists in a couple months. But number 1 will shock you!
- Well, what is it? And is it the hit 1996 film Kazzam starring Shaquille O'Neil?
  
  Let's get back to talking about Rampart.
Glad to see the migration actually made an impact to some degree.
Reddit nowadays feels like quora + socmed with stagnant contents
Reddit has been dying for a decade or longer, it's just now the people who saw it through all the previous crap, and tried to make it have some semblance of the site it once was, have up and left, leaving it to the brainless hordes.
- If I had to name a year when Reddit turned sharply for the worse, it would be 2015 when Gamergate-style ""discussion"" tactics took over everything. It's not entirely Reddit Inc's fault, but they also did nothing to stop it or slow it from devouring the platform. Good moderatrors who didn't tolerate fools could only do so much to preserve their communities when the Admins openly embraced engagement at the cost of everything else.
  
  Oh, was it gamergate that started the trend of calling each other a bot/paid shill?
- I'd been a lurker for almost a decade, and had noticed the quiet variation in post/community "quality" over that time.. I'd kinda wondered where everyone else went too.
I don't understand. I was told in no uncertain terms from many news outlets that "Reddit won."
- Reddit’s bottom line in the short term is unimpaired that is how they won.
  But in the long term- they are dead. I mused on this before.
  Social network need monopoly - otherwise the business model struggles. One Facebook. One Reddit, one Instagram. Facebook, Insta, Snap, and TikTok however are struggling because they are now the same thing in different packages.
  Not so Reddit. Reddit was a true monopoly. Nothing else compared. Well no longer. All their hiking have spawned a true credible alternative in Lemmy/Kbin. This will kill them. No matter of it’s Fediverse or something else - now there use than one place for Reddit. That means a third, fourth and fifth place is in the realm of possibility. And they WILL emerge. Others will try to enter the Reddit space.
  Reddit had a niche and it was so dominant. No one truly tried to enter my ya niche. But that was not good enough. The enshittified it over and over again. And now the. Have competition. As they will never have a monopoly again. They will struggle to get their ads money. They will struggle with the margins. They will struggle. Yahoo will buy them in 10 years and do the mercy blow.
  
  There's also Tildes, Lobste.rs and Hacker News. Reddit has really shit the bed with their decisions.
I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?
Way too much Lemmy...
It never was about the quantity of users leaving reddit, but the quality. Those that didn't care about the changes were not those who were posting the most. They weren't the moderators, the power users, people making original shit. Those all cared about the site and about the changes.
And they all left.
- I definitely noticed in the immediate aftermath of the Great Enshittening, how the quality of the discourse on subs fell through the floor. The people who left seemed to be the ones that had some level of empathy, leaving shithouses behind to snipe and gripe everywhere.
  
  Empathy would make sense, given the tendency of empathic people willing to actually protest instead of being indifferent
- Where did they go? They sure as hell aren't here.
/r/movies has always had tons of those generic hidden/underrated gem/actor threads about huge blockbuster films that everyone has seen. It's in no way a new phenomenon. The /r/moviescirclejerk subreddit has existed for years, and lives off those posts.
- I've seen it happen in a lot of smaller communities since July. /r/Subnautica, for example, used to be primarily memes and gameplay questions and was fairly low-traffic. Since July it's been a steady stream of polls and "what's your favorite" questions - low-effort posts that drive easy engagement.
I wonder what they're doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies?
Like hell they would ever touch grass. They're probably spending all that time on lemmy.film instead.
- Gaming subs were similar.
  Starfield, despite having potential, feels very unfinished. Which is kinda expected for Bethesda, but the games also just boring and underwhelming in addition to the bugs. Yet, I've seen across reddit as there seems to be an open campaign to try and make the game not seems as bad as it is.
  I don't know maybe I'm spoiled - I came off the incredible high of baldurs gate 3 into the slop that was starfield.
  
  MS seems to have the infrastructure to manage public opinion. How do they manage it without anybody spilling the beans? Is it already entirely AI generated?
  
  I'll offer a real and genuine human opinion. I think Starfield I great. I also just generally love the Bethesda gameplay loop, so I guess I'm a bit biased.
  It has its boring moments and I think it doesn't respect your time with so much artificial time wasting (long walks to objectives, slow menus). It definitely isn't the most polished game, but I have really enjoyed my time with it and I'm hoping the modding scene can clean up a lot of the issues people have with the game.
  
  Well, some people actually do like the game.
Reddit has long paid mods to be “Community Builders”. Ostensibly they’re there to help other mods build their subreddits, but actually what seems to happen is they spam low effort posts like the ones described (the “question style” post is very popular) in lots of subreddits.
I’ve posted this before but here’s more info:
Have a look at this user’s posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/ Lots and lots of low-effort posts in various UK subreddits.
And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/
This link confirms that Community Builders are “vetted and paid by Reddit for their time”: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-
Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don’t seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/
- Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
Reddits offial site
I like that this is closer to "offal" than "official".
- Reddit's awful offal official site.
Discussion quality in the whole platform went down. It isn't just r/movies, or large subs - it's everywhere. Specially jarring if you stopped going to reddit since the revolts, and then checked it "randomly".
astroturfing
- This is true. I mean where else would crappy online blogs get their supposed content?!
Reddit is a website rotting from the inside out. Can't wait to see how much of a disaster that IPO is going to be.
- I'll be very surprised if they even make it to an IPO before downsizing and becoming irrelevant. I don't think Reddit as a company has ever really turned a profit and their major private shareholders have been actively cutting their valuation multiple times. Couple with the spiking interest rates and it's just about the worst possible time to be IPO'ing.
Maybe I should go back there and make my fourth Reddit comment in three months. (Down from ~6 per day.) Would be nice to bring more Reddit people over.
Having the niche communities again would be nice. The benefit Reddit had there is that it was the default for so long, people would proactively search out the community for their new hobby. !league@lemmy.ml is just starting to come back.
- Many of the niche communities are still on Reddit. Those who follow the crowd, those who simply follow routine, those who would step up to provide content but it is the type mentioned in the OP here, etc. And quite frankly the Reddit UI/UX, as bad as it is, is still 1000-fold better than Kbin, especially on a mobile browser, and I can assume Lemmy is significantly better but surely not perfect either. Ofc there are reasons for all of this and I'm not knocking these FREE services willy nilly, just saying that it is understandable why not everyone has migrated over to Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon yet, or at least a sufficient number to allow niche communities to thrive as much as they once did. We are pioneers of beta (Lemmy) and alpha (Kbin) services, and that's not for everyone. Though I for one vastly prefer this to the crud of Reddit:-P.
  
  Lemmy had the advantage of a ready API. I'm browsing on an app that's indistinguishable from how I'd browse reddit a year ago.
- Be careful, mentioning Lemmy can get you shadow banned (you might be already, so if you don't see any reaction to your comments, have a look using another browser)
  
  Thanks, but I couldn't find the post by looking through r/movies anyway.
  Looks like it was removed by mods.
A great reminder that !moviesandtv ( @moviesandtv ) community exists!
Reddit has been going downhill for years, this year was just accelerated. Current movies are also pretty bad lately. I haven’t been to a theater in years.
- Foreign films have been getting better and better, by contrast. Improvements in tech have led to a second digital renaissance.
I bet it's fucking Collider again. If you go to Google news and search "reddit", then unless reddit has done some recent fuckery, well over half the results are Collider listicles of 10 Best/Worst according to reddit. [A bunch of the rest are sites writing articles about bullshit posts on AITA and similar creative writing subreddits.]
Fuck reddit
'via SEP' whats that mean
- 'SEO' stands for Search Engine Optimization.
  
  Search Engine Poptimization.
My question is this: Does Spez know? And how? Do they have analytics tracking the same decline we are aware of via anecdotal evidence but they are looking at in in a graph that resembles the Hindenburg’s last landing?
I don’t post in Reddit anymore. But I think we should be realistic, the quality of comments in Lemmy/Kbin is general below that of the even diminished Reddit
- I think that depends on the circumstances. The peak here is like a million times higher than anything I've ever seen on Reddit (possibly I did not look hard enough:-). The average is probably lower, but even that depends on your instance.
  One aspect is that Reddit had (has?) more niche communities, which by their very nature may be of more interest to you, and depending on the niche and community, that may remain on Reddit, have moved here somewhat, or elsewhere like Discord or forum boards/Twitter/Mastodon/etc., or just more or less ceased to exist altogether (possibly in a more complex way like a large fraction of content creators post nowhere now).
  Also the presence of high toxicity - on Reddit, or here, or wherever - runs people off too. So burnt out moderators (or doesn't Kbin entirely lack any moderation tools at all?) means fewer comments overall.
  This.
  I also choose this guy's wife
  And my bow.
  "Overall" comment quality maybe should not even be measured evenly across everything when you can easily digest ones like these, but what looks like longer ones yet that contain misinformation are much more damaging to your perception of a place and overall feelings of love or disgust for it.
  Finally, another aspect is that Lemmy/Kbin requires much heavier investments from the users - to choose an instance, a community, and curate your experiences in them. But once you put in the work and know how, it should get much better!
  I am sure that I offered little in the way of actual solutions here, but I hope you enjoyed these thoughts at least:-).
- I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t miss having to scroll past endless chains of puns, recitations of song lyrics and film dialogue, or references to popular comments from years ago.
  
  I hate to say it but I think it'll happen here too. I imagine it's just a people thing we can't get away from. Already I predicted a: "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords..." before opening a thread. I guess also since most users may be from reddit it's bound to end up happening.
Thanks for the archive link OP, mods removed the post by the time I got to it. (Though the comment section is still intact, for now)
nelson_haha.jpeg
It’s driven by engagement. More comments usually means more users are staying to leave them and others are staying to read. I noticed it on a few other popular subs too, and it’s a large reason why rave bait has become so common.

154 comments