The CEO is a total scumbag and Apollo closing down.

That one article that coined the term ‘enshittification’ and made me realise centralised, for-profit social media will always turn garbage after awhile. I’m tired of changing sites every few years. Time to use something that’ll stay good this time.

I was on the fence about it until the Spez AMA. Then, I decided I’d be leaving on the 30th.

Then, I had a user call me “fucking stupid” for supporting a sub shutting down, and that was the final straw for me. I had seen how friendly people on Lemmy are and this showed me how toxic Reddit is by comparison. So I immediately nuked all my comments & posts and deleted my account. This was around two weeks ago and I’ve been much happier here.

Losing Apollo was the main reason.

However this whole saga unveiled other disturbing things such as how Reddit is leveraging its communities for advertising in this post: https://lemmy.world/post/837198

I left Reddit because I gave them so many years of dedication (and $ via Reddit premium), not even considering the fact I bought coins on multiple accounts.

1. Reddit became way too focused on Karma. Karma is great in concept, but more than half of the users are only posting for internet points at this point. It takes away from the validity of posts imo. How many “I stopped drinking for 30 days!” posts did you see on there with like 70k upvotes and thousands of karma?

2. The amount of not genuine posts is alarming. People have become addicted to the upvote/downvote system moreso than boomers on Facebook have become attached to their pages.

3. The amount of hate speech, misinformation and blatant lies the site actively promotes is insane.

4. They literally made everyone NFT wallets…???

5. NFT wallets?? Why the fuck was this ever approved? Oh yeah, more $, and something else for Spez to add to his IPO rubbish. Hey look at us we have some NFTs too type beat.

6. The userbase is pretty shit and Spez has even admitted to not caring about the people who made his site what it is.

Why would anyone ever stay on a site where the literal CEO says he doesn’t need nor care about you?

Honestly I was using reddit app on all my devices, but I kinda despise big ass tech companies who think they are too big to fail no matter what they do…

So, here I am.

I was a mod on Reddit so I was personally aware that for years Reddit’s mod tools have been totally inadequate for the job, that Reddit has been promising to give us something better, and that Reddit has failed to deliver. Honestly, it was even worse than just not delivering: we’d get new tools that didn’t solve the main problems, were only available on the iOS app, coming to Android eventually, and coming to the websites never. Third party API tools were the only thing that made modding vaguely functional, even on a small sub.

I’m also a supporter of accessibility in apps, which is also something Reddit has been promising for years and Reddit has failed to deliver. Again, third party API tools are the only thing that makes Reddit vaguely accessible right now.

Reddit’s API changes are not realistic to implement in a single month. This was made clear early on and Reddit has refused to budge. So at this point Reddit is knowingly upending an ecosystem that makes their site usable by groups of users with no first-party replacements ready. And given their history of failing to deliver these very tools, I have no confidence that they will ever do so.

And THEN the Spez AMA happened. I was hoping he’d listen to the community, engage with our concerns, or at the very least actually do an AMA. Instead he got caught lying, he got caught astroturfing, and he inadvertently made it clear that the real issue was that he was butthurt over these third party apps being better at business than Reddit was. Oh, and later we found out the Reddit CEO really admired Elon Musk’s handling of Twitter, a platform I left for all the reasons Spez seems to like it.

Even if none of these issues affected me personally (which they do), Reddit has made it clear that I just can’t trust them to run a fair and functional platform. They do not take their obligations to their users, mods, and business partners seriously. If they don’t like the way the game is going, they’ll change the rules without warning. They will promise features they will not deliver even when those features are essential to their site working for the users who keep it alive.

I don’t want to help Reddit build what Reddit wants to make anymore.

Reddit, like Digg before it, was a gathering place, where people could post or consume content, and interact with other users. It was much like a town square, where people can set up their soapbox and bark, or where a person could go and listen, interact, and enjoy.

Reddit is now like the Home Owners Association for that particular town square, and are actively trying to control the entire experience, by acting like they own the soapboxes, and as though the barkers are now obligated to ensure that content is HOA approved.

That kind of neighborhood holds no appeal for me.

I actually left Reddit in early 2022, I’m not from the latest migration wave. I left for a combination of these reasons, the first of which is the main one:

• algorithmic feed designed to arise strong emotions, often negative
• snark and noise in the comments
• ads
• impenetrable moderation rules that often make it difficult to figure why a post is rejected, even after carefully reading all the sub’s guidelines and FAQs cover to cover, as well as reviewing past threads

Losing RiF, I can’t use the official app it’s trash.

Rif is getting shut down. And most of the sensible people seems to be moving to kbin+lemmy. I just followed suit.

Because apparently Lemmy was blowing up. I really support FOSS, but the only reason I don’t migrate right away is the lack of activity. And then Reddit just became unbearable all of a sudden, then there’s the surge of new Lemmy users. I’m finally happy to join.-

I can’t say I definitely won’t go back…I like Lemmy’s community better than Reddit’s but I’m not sure it’ll ever be as popular or as reliable as a source of info as Reddit. I think the Fediverse runs into similar problems to Linux, where it’s definitely superior in most ways to the nonfree competition, but that superiority goes hand in hand with inaccessibility to non-nerds. I like Tumblr’s community less than Reddit (and Lemmy, Reddit, and Tumblr are the only three social media sites I even find the community tolerable, though I don’t have Mastodon because I don’t have anyone I want to follow there) and Tumblr has never been useful for searching info.

But let me tell you, Spez’s conduct and praise of Elon Musk is what has me considering not going back. It’s just…he tried to act on the pulse of the userbase and failed spectacularly. Also hearing that Reddit is a noticably higher percentage assholes after the protests started.

Spez

Reddit deleted all of my accounts and IP banned me a few months ago because of a shitty power tripping mod on the Android subreddit.

You have no idea how happy I am that Reddit is imploding right now. I finally get to be part of conversations again.