Reddit is such a nice example of capitalism turning a genuinely nice thing into a pile of garbage.
Imo Reddit has been the winner of the 3rd party apps and fuck spez protests. The users came crawling back. A few of us went to lemmy and formed quality communities, but for the most part, a large majority are on there.
Did they? Other than /nfl most of the communities I followed went to shit very quickly and haven’t recovered. They are mostly bots talking to bots or the same questions and post over and over with minimal new content
For me, it was politics that sank Reddit. I was banned from a half dozen news forums for criticism of the IDF in Gaza at the beginning of what most people now acknowledge to be an ethnic cleansing. I reported every account calling for murder and genocide of Palestinians, which is against the Reddit TOS. They permanently banned me for “report abuse” for doing their jobs for them. They have obviously shown that there’s no freedom of speech, even when you follow the rules, if it goes against the feelings of the administration and the unelected moderators. Fiefdoms ruled by angry internet trolls shouldn’t get an IPO.
Shadowbanned from r/news and God knows what other subredits, because I refused to add an email. Banned from r/politics because I said that not wearing a mask during Peak COVID was a death wish. (Apparently that’s promoting violence or whatever?). Banned from r/Pyongyang because I dared question next months chocolate rations.
Site is a complete shithole.
Sure, it’s been the “winner” if you were expecting reddit to topple from top spot as best aggregator - but it was never really reasonable to expect that.
Even now, the perspective that Lemmy should strive to be some kind of new reddit is really daft.
What we actually want, is for Lemmy to grow in a sustainable and manageable way with real actual content enjoyed by real contributing users.
The quality of Lemmy has improved dramatically in the last 6 months. Way more users, servers, content, and third party apps. The quality of reddit has decreased dramatically in the last 6 months. User counts may not have suffered, but the content and the experience most certainly has.
Similarly with twitter and mastodon. Generally, that’s fine … smaller niche online spaces are a good thing (as many who’ve remained have discovered I suspect).
But in the end, for those who see this fediverse project as a mission to “take back the web” … so far only pretty minor movement has been made on that front. To the point that IMO I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter etc just “win” and the whole “alternative” social media thing stays “alternative” and relatively small. If there’s a chance of this, I’d say to fediverse advocates that they should maybe rethink what the fediverse is and what it’s good and not good for, because there’s a real chance here that the fediverse kinda dropped the ball, especially mastodon which has been going strong for a while now.
I’ve never used Mastodon, but from what I’ve heard it’s an entirely different ballgame where you basically need to go where the people are. e.g. artists seeking commission work need more rather than less people, and if you want to follow a particular someone, you go to where they are not the other way around.
And if their servers have anywhere close to the level of technical glitches that we do here on Lemmy… well it is quite off-putting, especially to non technically minded people.
I’ve been on Mastodon for over a year and I never experienced anything that could be classified as a technical glitch. From a tech / UI perspective it feels very polished to me.
I guess the only exception would be that old posts are sometimes missing on profiles from different servers.
I’m not sure they have technical glitches in the same way lemmy does. Interestingly, the difficulties people have, I think, are because federated social media is actually a bad non-idea technology to use for a twitter clone.
So much either doesn’t work how you’d expect or involves new problems that all together they start to defeat the point for many. For example, replies to a post. The author of the post sees all of the replies. But replies aren’t actually federated unless certain conditions are met based on whether someone on your instance follows the person writing the reply. As a result the author of a post that receives many replies has to manage/tolerate a bunch of replies that have no awareness of the fact that they’re just repeating what has already been said, sometimes many times over. For people replying to a post from a small/niche instance, they basically don’t see any of the other replies, which just makes for bad content for them, but also means they constantly risking being really annoying people which in turn effectively punishes small instances. This is generally referred to as “context collapse”, and yea, it’s something kinda extraordinary when the core feature of a social media platform actively destroys the context of conversations.
Lemmy doesn’t have this problem because its based on groups where the whole premise is that the whole conversation gets federated, and for that reason I think a reddit clone or a forum or a youtube-clone (or anything based on groups, sub-reddits or channels) is a better fit on the fediverse.
The other friction mastodon has is that, as a twitter-clone or microblogging platform, its core mechanic is following people and allowing people to form their own network of connections and friendships. But once you’ve got federation and instances in the mix, where defederation happens, then you have this often completely separate dynamic (ie the relations between instances) capable of completely slicing your personal social network in many destructive ways. Often this happens without people hearing about it (as there aren’t mechanics for notifying people of defederations AFAIU), so that they have to find out after some time to realise that they hadn’t heard anything from a whole bunch of friends and were wondering what had happened. Moreover, what such people can then do to re-connect with those friends is rather non-trivial. It’s probably the major draw back of fedi-drama, that the majority of people affected by it don’t benefit from it and would prefer to just be on the big instance (mastodon.social) that no one really defederates from or just go back to twitter.
EDIT (more ranting):
The way someone I like (as a person on social media) put it, after giving mastodon a good shot, was that mastodon misunderstands what people want from social media, that mastodon puts independence over socialising when people prioritise it the other way around … the whole point is to connect and converse, not to run your own instance and make sure you’ve defederated from everyone who has it coming.
Now there’s the whole issue of making sure someone vulnerable to abuse is able to ensure their own safety and happiness from would-be assholes and abusers and even those eager to voice unwelcome, abrasive and triggering points of view which are generally tolerable because they’re the mainstream. Federation across instances can help with this … but can also make it worse because anyone can talk to you from any instance over which you have no control or information until it’s too late. In many ways, decentralisation isn’t great for these problems and creates new problems that a centralised form of social media simply doesn’t have (not least of which being that the whole thing is about copying you and your posts out to everything on the network). It’s for this reason that BIPOC left mastodon and went back to twitter, because to them, mastodon was the racist/facist place, not twitter. In light of that phenomenon, it’s worth considering the perspective that decentralised social media might be a bit of a weird idea and rightly seen as a bit of a fanatical and even a bit of a right-wing or libertarian movement.
In the case of group-based platforms like lemmy and forums however, I think it makes much more sense. Many independent forums are out there, and have been and hopefully will be for a long time. Why not contribute Open Source software for such things (such as lemmy) and enable them to connect to each other however they wish.
meh.im happier as a member of the federation and honestly if we got all the reddit users it would lower the quality fast.
No we didn’t. I happily left reddit the day Apollo stopped. They also lost my premium subscription.
I also stopped Twitter when musk took over. I use Bluesky or Mastodon and find both platforms to be superior.
Sure, some folks may have, but many of us have not. Does that matter to Reddit? probably not. Do I care? not really.
Modern Reddit is unusable, and old reddit isn’t mobile friendly.
I mean, that was never seriously in doubt. The days of massive site migrations happening overnight are long over.
What matters is the momentum.
Every dumb move sends a wave of people over to the Lemmyverse, and some of those people stay, building on the community here
Nah I’ve had a reddit account since the dawn of time and I’ve now switched completely over to lemmy. Can’t remember the last time I logged onto reddit
Now we can watch this place grow into the thick veiny caterpillar reddit always should have been
Lemmy’s very nature killed it for me.
It’s way too much work to try and cultivate the setup I built with ease on reddit.
I’m still here, but the site iddn’t make it easy.
No it does not indeed.:-|
It’s worth noting that Reddit changed too, permanently, both in terms of ease of use (not only 3rd-party apps, but also the mobile and desktop browser routes too) and in how many content creators simply left - who knows what they are even doing now (reading books, touching grass, some came here ofc). Even many niche subs over there are empty, dead, or one may consider them dying from lack of interesting content (though those people still there I expect would be resistant to admit that).
And it will be interesting to see how that changes further, the moment they get their IPO and thus can finally kill off old-Reddit, which still allows you to block ads iirc? That will drive additional content creators away. Perhaps they will come here - despite how we are not ready for that.
Anyway, the old Reddit is just flat gone, for many people, and there is no going “back”, ever, even if you wanted to, it’s not there to return to, especially after the IPO changes it still further.
I still visit Reddit and that’s definitely been my experience - my front page diversity has gone way down, many of the subreddits I am subscribed to have basically gone silent. There’s still a few specialized ones left, and the big news ones I still read, but only in old reddit. When old Reddit is gone then so am I.
Why wait? Jump now! Hehe, okay so only you know your schedule, it’s mostly just a funny phrase (but also: don’t sleep on it forever - you don’t want to be surprised one day when it disappears overnight with no notice).
For me, it’s not just emptiness - it’s the site being devoid of content anymore. Like look at r/firefox after the mods left (I forgot which communities got ousted vs. who left voluntarily, but either way that community packed up and followed them iirc). It is all just the most basic of questions “how do I…?”, often with later edits “I should not have bothered asking, these people will just yell at you”. Just about every post has 1 or 0 upvotes (though more uncommon spikes above 10 do exist, and even rare ones with hundreds), but the titles of the popular posts are all things that are extremely common knowledge - “Mozilla says Apple’s new browser rules are “as painful as possible” for Firefox”, “YouTube is loading slower for users with ad blockers yet again”, “Will Firefox survive in the browser market?”, “Chrome wants to track me? Bye. I use Firefox …”, “Google settles $5 billion privacy lawsuit over tracking people using ‘incognito mode’ (Re: Switch to Firefox ASAP).” These are things that I constantly hear about on Lemmy.
And even more than that, I dread speaking there after Rexit - the trolls omg the trolls… it’s just not fun. Then again, I tended to make posts advertising useful alternatives to Reddit, so you could argue that I brought that upon myself? :-P (edit: although in a community that calls itself by the name r/RedditAlternatives, THAT was the POINT of the discussion that we were TRYING to have there!!)
There’s very little quality on Lemmy. It lacks diversity. It’s quite authoritarian left. Tankies under every rock. Even in non-politics communities. I still use a forked version of Boost to lurk reddit. But as someone else said, if never recommend Lemmy to anyone I actually know.
It lacks diversity.
I think what you really mean is that you don’t feel like you fit in here.
If that’s what I meant then I would have simply said that. If that’s what you choose to believe, so be it. Most observant people can see this is a rather large echo chamber. It’s really obvious.
Ah… so they’re shorting it.
As in short circuit?
Short selling, Wallstreet thing for making money when the stock. It kinda works like borrowing a stock and immediately selling it, then we it’s time to return the stock you borrowed you buy a replacement and if the price has gone down you keep the profit.
shorting means to bet against a stock. instead of buying a stock and waiting for it to grow over a long period and selling it for more money (long position), you borrow the stock from somebody, sell it, then buy it back (for a lower price) after a short amount of time to give back to whom you borrowed it from. (short position). If the stock price rapidly drops in that time, you gain money.
If this sounds like a perversion of what investing was supposed to be, yeah welcome to wall street
Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago… Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that’s their problem, not the stock market’s.
- Tech stocks trading sideways for the last year or two
- The interest rate money printer got shut off and cash is not cheap anymore
- Seemingly all the major new tech stock investment interest is circling around stuff like AI
- Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
- The pandemic is more or less over and people have pulled back from being chronically online somewhat (this is my guess, I don’t have data to back it up)
Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate “synergy” with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.
Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
I think you’re overselling the importance of this one. When I’ve talked to friends about federated alternatives, they really aren’t interested. Even if they hated Twitter/reddit and think they’ve gotten worse, they just don’t really care about a federated alternative. I’ve heard some interest in threads, so maybe we count that?
Yeah, people don’t really care about decentralisation nor federation. People want an easy experience where everyone is
If they really understood the phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the soup’, then they’d realize the advantage of smaller online communities.
Reddit was at its best when it had a low count but engaged userbase, and became actively worse as it grew.
I think this is because trolling and response isn’t a 1 to 1 ratio. All it takes is 1 toxic person to make an entire subforum rancid and takes the effort of several mods to mitigate it.
The more people you have, the more chance you will have these trolls organize, the more likely they will either overwhelm or infiltrate the mods.
Yeah I tend to agree. I think all communities have a critical mass and past that point they go downhill.
I was just googling for the rat overpopulation experiment because I think it works as a great example of this and it turns out this whole concept has a term.
I think a better metaphor is fermentation.
It happens naturally whenever the ingredients are brought together but in order to get a quality product you need ridiculous amounts of knowledge, process, and technology.
And even a tiny bit of the wrong bacteria can ruin an entire batch, but people will still drink it and go blind.
Regular people didn’t know or care wtf reddit was for quite a while also and there absolutely is a building friction between people and corporate social media. We’re in the early stages for now, but stuff like Activitypub is not going away.
Even my most alternative, vegan, communist friends agree with me when I pitch the fediverse and then flock to capitalist social media like moths anyway. It’s disheartening.
Monetisation?
Licensing the site to AI when there’s finally a ruling they can’t just scrape the internet for training data while ignoring copyright.
I was told reddit has already been scraped for AI and all sorts of stuff. There is very little new value to sell.
Except AI models may end up having to start again with licences or public domain data.
They are currently breaking the law and delaying legal action as long as possible in the hopes they can repeat the trick with a new data set.
No they’ll train on laundered model output. Like every llama.
The investment thesis they the data is valuable is bonkers. It’s not. Not only has it been exfiltrated and can be laundered in a dozen ways, Reddit also won’t be able to effectively assert copyright.
Look at Facebook. It’s full of reposted quora content now with AI images and AI laundered text.
Reddit is dead
Corporations break the law all the time and typically it’s just an operational expense.
Whatever already existed won’t be thrown away regardless of the ruling. It’s like throwing all the gold already dug up just because it was done by slave labor. The law and legal actions are mostly just a moat around the pile of gold already dug up. Sure AI companies will have to pay more for the new data from other sources. However that would be peanut compared to how much they will have to pay starting from zero.
If every time what already exists gets used there’s a risk of a massive fine or court case they’ll throw it away.
The game now is to delay the legal process long enough until they’ve built the replacement.
Then they can afford to throw the, essentially faulty, model away.
It’s not at all clear that the current model does breach the law.
If it was a court would have issued an injunction or whatever.
It’s clear from the output that it breaks copyright.
We don’t have to look inside the black box to demand to see the input which caused that output.
To be clear a machine is not responsible for itself. This machine was trained to break copyright.
They already make money with ads. Killing third party apps was part of this, now they can control exactly how you see ads. It’s the same as any other social media now, they recommend you content, which is exactly not the point of reddit.
Reddit’s been running ads for a while and has never turned a profit
Sell it to musk, finish the job
Can’t wait for him to rebrand it as Y
Or 3
Let’s not rule out Æ
Nah, sounds “like a password”
Password hint: ‘p…’
hunter2
correcthorsebatterystaple
Can’t they blow Musk up by accident or send him on a rocket to Mars that orbits forever there (oops)? Something like the submarine last year but better.
Surely we now have the technology
I’ve already left, but seeing them marching towards an IPO makes me even happier with my decision. I just fear that the mountains of helpful troubleshooting and advice on Reddit will be locked away forever soon, while the rest of the web falls to SEO and AI-generated nonsense text…
Reddit Was the only site Google could effectively search. Rip googling questions and adding reddit.
Man, and it works great. It is waaaaay more common to find good answers to a question from a bunch of randoms on the Internet than trying to get an actual answer from a random website. Sometimes you find bs but you can usually quite quickly filter it out, and it gives a good basis from which to then continue to search on the topic.
I hate that Reddit is so good for answering questions. The alternatives are usually AI written unhelpful trash.
It was speedier and usually more effective than forums which crept at a snails pace.
I’m trying out Kagi a little bit, and it has a federation search mode of some kind. I tried it for a search and it gave me results from Lemmy.
I don’t know yet how Kagi compares to Google in terms of results quality, I barely used it so far. It’s pretty expensive though.
Oh yeah that’s true, I should try it as I use it as my main search engine nowadays.
deleted by creator
Everyone here are thinking $5 billion means Reddit won. Wasn’t their evaluation at $15 at one point?
If the went from fifteen bucks to five billion, yes they totally won 😉
Well I guess I fully set myself up for that one lol
If you mean that an entitled douchecanoe who has no trouble allowing genocides to occur on his service getting stupid rich, then they did win. If you are looking at how much they could have gotten, then, yeah, they suck.
Sorry, what genocide happened on Reddit?
The Great App Genocide of 2023.
Lol at the 50% haircut since the API shit.
Can’t wait to release this ransomware data this year 😍
LOL if you listen to some angry people in other threads, they will claim that not a single thing has changed.
You wrote a ransomware?
Me? Never. Idk how to even turn on my Mac.
Politics and whatever the other maladies are that infect Reddit aside: the app and the website are impossibly difficult to use. Ita just ads ads ads. Even if the place was a veritable utopia that’s a no from me dawg.
I 100% can see it easily selling for that much.
You want to know why it’s worth that much?
Petabytes of raw training Data for LLMs. Arguably atm reddit us one of the better gold mines of LLM training data on the internet, bazillion of posts already formatted as post-response chains, which is the exact type if format an LLM wants to train on.
Can you imagine how valuable those servers loaded with posts are to a company like OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft?
5 billion is quite reasonable to harvest every reddit post that has ever been made ever and cut it off from your competitors.
Has reddit not already been scraped? With all of that information exposed bare on the public Internet for decades, and apparently so valuable, I find it hard to believe that everybody’s just been sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying “boy I sure hope they decide to sell us that data one day so that we don’t have to force an intern to scrape it for us”.
I asked Bard whether they could make a bastardization of rogersimon10 post and it made this:
Ah, the 2012 Fiesta EcoBoost. A pocket rocket some called it, a ticking time bomb I preferred. Owned one myself, sunshine yellow with a dent shaped like a screaming Muppet (courtesy of a rogue shopping cart). Let me tell you, that car was less a vehicle and more a high-octane game of Russian roulette with pistons. Every morning was a gamble. Would she purr to life like a hungover kitten, or unleash a symphony of coughs, bangs, and the ominous "Check Engine" light disco? One day, the radio spontaneously switched to polka, which, let's be honest, is only two steps away from a thermonuclear detonation in a Fiesta's internal combustion fiesta. Speaking of fiestas, the fuel gauge was as reliable as a politician's promise. One minute it was brimming, the next it was flashing "Bone Dry, Mate," even if I'd just filled it. Learned to carry a jerrycan like a Prohibition-era bootlegger, never knowing when the engine's thirst would strike. But oh, the things that little lemon could do! On a good day, that turbocharged engine was like a caffeinated hummingbird on steroids. Weaving through traffic, leaving Audis in the dust (until their turbos spooled up, of course). Handling? Razor sharp, unless you hit a pebble, then it was suddenly a drunken ballerina on roller skates. Comfort? Ha! The seats were about as plush as a park bench, and the suspension was tuned for "Feel Every Pebble in the County." But hey, it kept you awake, which was essential considering the constant fear of spontaneous combustion. In the end, I sold the Fiesta to a circus clown for a fistful of juggling pins and a lifetime supply of those tiny, uncomfortable hats. He seemed thrilled, probably because the polka radio was a bonus feature for him. So, would I recommend a 2012 Fiesta EcoBoost? Only if you enjoy existential dread, questionable fuel efficiency, and the thrill of living life on the edge (of a breakdown). Otherwise, stick to something safer, like a heavily sedated hamster. You'll thank me later. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with a tow truck and a very suspicious mechanic who keeps asking about "jumper cables." Wish me luck. P.S. Don't forget the jumper cables. Seriously. You'll thank me later.Scraped data isn’t legal to resell, scraping isn’t even legal in the first place.
Just because you can scrape the data doesn’t mean it’s worth anything.
Companies like MS, Google, OpenAI, FB they make money by selling the usage of their LLM services to other companies who then they use that service to make their own products.
If it came to light that MS/Google/OAI/FB were using illegal training data for their LLMs, it would get all those other companies hit in the crossfire.
So these companies have to do a shit tonne of diligence to assure their investors and clients that their LLMs are purely trained on legally obtained data and are safe to use.
And you know what is a super easy way to assure them of that?
If they literally own the original data themselves
This data was out in the open for a decade and still is. People could train their llm without problems.
Not legally / free.
And yes, that very very much matters if you intend to actually sell the service to companies that they themselves dont want to get hit in the crossfire of potential lawsuits for building their products on top of stolen info.
So if you can own the data itself (via buying reddit), you now have an ENORMOUS quantity of prime training data that you’re investors and potential customers know is legally clean, because you literally own it.
They just started charging for API usage so isn’t it already not open?
And then everyone started deleting accounts, comments and even rewriting and poisoning their comments. The data was way better before the API change.
The worst part is that ai chatbots will start responding like redditers. I can’t wait for chatgpt to regale me with a story about his dad beating him with jumper cables, or jolly ranchers, or hell in a cell.
And then everyone clapped
And then asked “AITA?”
Nonstop “this”
Thanks for the gold
deleted by creator
Did they fucking recover deleted messages?
I can find every post after automatically editing and deleting them afterwards
Would love to see this become the fastest IPO to tank.
Yeah but then when it collapses all the roaches will scurry off to other forums, including lemmy .
Personally I want it as a place to sequester the hard and alt right, like 4chan was before the digg exodus.
Every time someone pops the infection caul where they gather, it just spreads their toxic juice everywhere else.
Sadly I’ve found a few of those on Lemmy already. What I’d prefer is the internet of the 1990s when it took effort to figure out and the masses were too lazy or dumb to do so.
And that sweet, sweet dialup modem sound.
Fuck yes those memories…
I used to purposefully disable the error correction on my modem so the connection sound didn’t have that stupid hissy wobbly beepy part at the end. Yeah it meant that sometimes I’d fjhkswa thjasd ar eee e but it was worth it for that pure music.
Maybe we’re blessed for knowing it like none that came after, or cursed for knowing it will never be that good again…
How about $5?
Silver award. Take it or leave it
Meanwhile tech is hemorrhaging.
Good luck Reddit! 😂
