First comment in the Fediverse. Fuck Reddit.
Befitting first comment. <3.
fuck reddit
W comment.
I literally just signed up for lemmy after reading this post on reddit. I’m ready for reddit to crash. Decentralized apps seem like the way to go. It seems super short-sighted on Reddit’s part to be basically extorting all these 3rd party apps that are super popular.
Welcome! It’s a bit rough around the edges here but the devs are making changes every day and the community is better than I thought.
Honestly the rough parts remind me of the good old days of the internet. I’m no gatekeeper but I’m happy when sites are smaller, focused, and slow to grow.
Exactly! For the first 5 seconds, I was pissed that I couldn’t send a reply with Ctrl+Enter, but it just reminded me of the good old days of being part of and building a community from scratch and I love it!
Indeed it is. All I really want is a place where I can intellectually engage with people in good faith, even when people disagree with me; finding it productive, fun and maybe learning a thing or two. Constantly being called a “bigot,” “fascist,” “asshole,” “idiot,” “moron,” really leaves it wanting.
This you?
You stupid? My comment history is right there.
Edit: Aw. Don’t get butthurt, homie. Lol. Tool.
This you?
Indeed.
I get called a lot of things on Reddit, but never bigot or fascist.
Try having openly right-wing leanings, and maybe you’ll understand it. I don’t go around making presumptions about people. But when the person I’m replying to chooses to lead with condescension and sanctimony, then fine. I’ll oblige him and reply in kind. Incidentally, ‘it gets the point across’.
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Unfortunately, I doubt Reddit would crash. I don’t think these online protests have much sway anymore. Twitter’s definitely didn’t. And ironically, Lemmy might crash a couple times with going over user capacity…
Either way, we ought to work to avoid it. Chop chop, people, content, we need content! Lifeblood of link aggregators is people having topics.
I think the thought of major subs going private out of protest has them at least a little worried. Worried enough to try to backtrack on the changes that will affect moderators to “give them more time”, but only if they don’t participate in the blackout.
Sounds a lot like threatening at this point (and who knows if they’ll follow through with their promises if even one sub goes dark), which ironically is the same thing they accused the Apollo dev of doing to the Reddit team.
Worried enough to try to backtrack on the changes that will affect moderators to “give them more time”, but only if they don’t participate in the blackout.
How would that even work though? Say Sub A participates in the blackout while Sub B doesn’t, if they backtrack and don’t start charging for API access how would they reward Sub B while excluding Sub A? Also this all depends on 3rd party apps continuing to operate to even allow these mods to use them for moderating purposes so if Apollo and Sync shut down, there’s nothing reddit can do to change or delay their closure since they aren’t controlled by reddit. Sounds like a bunch of desperate, empty promises on reddit’s part.
Oh I absolutely agree that it sounds like empty, desperate promises on their behalf at this point. I think it’s safe to say (given the OP) that Reddit has ruined every ounce of credibility and good-will they may have had as a result of their lies and backtracking. I wouldn’t trust them one bit with their attempts at garnering more good-will at this point.
why did you share the old reddit site
Because the old Reddit site isn’t bogged down with useless avatars, NFTs, and 10 GB of JavaScript.
I’m always amazed when I see someone using new reddit or the official app. I just don’t understand how, it’s soooo bad
Twitter’s definitely didn’t.
I don’t know… 50% of their top advertisers have left, and their advertising income is down 60%. I’m no longer there, so I can’t speak to overall user engagement, but with their revenue cratering, I’m not sure how long it is destined for this world.
Even if Twitter and Reddit don’t completely crash like Digg did, making them “just one among several” will be a good thing in the long run. They’ll actually have competition for a change.
The thing about social media sites is that they never truly and permanently die, they just slowly languish into irrelevance.
MySpace still exists for example, as does AOL, Tumblr, and yes, DIGG… However to say they are shells of their former selves would be an understatement.
It took 5 years after Facebook opened up to the general punic for MySpace to fall to the point of having to sell out to another company. We are still in the early days when it comes to seeing if Musk will effectively kill Twitter.
If reddit starts to die we won’t notice for quite some time. We will at most see waves of people leaving months or years apart and then one day reddit will just find itself basically forgotten about.
There is a thing, twitter has already had an okay and quite usable official app alongside third party apps. Reddit official app is buggy as hell and not very intuitive. I think too Reddit will survive, but I think the quality of content is going to go down since many power users were using third party apps.
But for Reddit officials that wouldn’t be a problem since they don’t care for quality but for engagement.
I think this is the point that will be a negative for the remaining users AND something that Reddit doesn’t care about. Good quality content will slowly stop going there… but the repost bots and other shit reposts will continue, allowing people to continue to consume content. Which is the real reason Reddit is doing all of this. 3rd party apps allow their users to bypass advertisers, which have noticed or complained and Reddit has to squash it.
For me, Lemmy is quality over quantity since I’ll interact with like-minded people - aka the users that care enough to move away from reddit.
It’s not all about numbers.
I’m one of those that nuked my Reddit account too… Was a Boost user for many, many years. Tens of thousands of contributions in the way of posts and comments and this move by them was the straw that broke the camel. The place is a shell of what it was in the early days sadly. Year by year it’s seemingly declined.
I’m done with it and moving on to pastures a new :)
So far, I’m really impressed with Lemmy !
Well, i’ll wait till 1th july and nuke my account if my app won’t work.
Fair enough ! I have been wanting to leave the place for a while so this was kind of the perfect excuse really :)
It’s actually been quite refreshing the last day or so sussing out a new corner of the web…
It’s the curse of VC funding. Companies love the cash injection, but it inevitably is followed by the demand to quadruple revenue and extract every ounce of capital out of the product. VCs destroy good products for capital. I’m glad to have discovered Lemmy and I hope the general Fediverse world of web applications continues to spread and get more of a foothold. It’s way better for users in the end.
is facebookification a word? I am so sad to see this happen as a long time user of Reddit, been on there for…god, 11 years according to my profile awards. I see a lot of people saying this is the end of Reddit but I have to disagree, it is more like a new age. Reddit will now only be used by people who are fine with getting absolutely fucked with ads and close to nil moderation. I imagine it will be a husk of what it once was - it’ll look the same but I’m sure it will just be repost land. It wasn’t hard to see this coming, but I can’t help but feel a sadness.
Do I need to go outside more? Probably.
RIP
The term you’re looking for is enshittification.
I’ve been using this term a LOT since coming across that Medium article.
Wow, thanks for teaching me this term! Fuck capitalism!
Check out this essay from Cory Doctorow, the guy who coined the word. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
Does this mean “shittification” and “enshittification” mean the same thing like “valuable” and “invaluable” mean the same thing?
Cory Doctorow is clever, but nobody ever said he was smart. I remember being at a talk where he said the original point of Napster was to sell music and I did a double take. Like dude, you lived through this, how did you already forget?
He’s not completely wrong. The founders set it up as a company, so the aim was to make money somehow, and venturing into selling their services was likely the next logical move
With the Fediverse slowly gaining steam, I’ve been thinking a lot about the structural problems with the big social media platforms of old. I really feel like we set ourselves up for this outcome. Of course Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit were going to let us down sooner or later. We placed our trust in private centralized companies to stay good on their ethics. The moment money even entered the discourse in those spaces, they were doomed to become what they are now. I really hope Lemmy and Mastodon and Frendica and Peertube and the other Fediverse platforms can gain popularity. We have a real chance here to build social media from the ground up, but this time with the long term ethics in mind. I really think this decentralized structure can allow us to keep more transparency and allow for smaller feeling communities to thrive without being subject to tyrannical administration.
Edit: Corrected “momey” to “money”. Really sounded like a weird fetish there, I am sorry. Momey is not entering the discourse in any spaces, thank you very much.
Any time I talk about decentralized apps to friends and family I come across as some kind of conspiracy driven weirdo. I do not understand why decentralization comes across as some kind of extreme radical movement. I’m not protesting or anything, everything else just sucks lol
Maybe use familiar terms? Skip the tech jargon, and go straight to things like “Reddit and Twitter and Facebook are boring old media with crappy apps and adds everywhere; the cool kids are now hanging out on Mastadon and Lemmy”. But you have to really own it.
“Decentralized” means nothing to most people, or worse has been associated with crypto scams, and the stereotypical Bitcoin proselytizer. The truth is, most people can’t handle all that information.
You have to appeal to emotion. Statements like “decentralization prevents interference by third parties… Blablabla” will just go over people’s heads if they can’t relate to an abstract concept. Say something like “My family/friends in /country/ can’t buy anything with their local currency because of hyperinflation, so now they all us USD or even Bitcoin” instead. That will appeal to people’s emotions.
In the case of the fediverse an appeal to emotion might look like “Reddit has just turned to shit. It’s not the platform I first joined. A lot of us have moved to Lemmy and it reminds us of when we first joined Reddit.”
Also, just don’t push the subject. Some people are not ready to follow you. Let people figure out the benefits at their own pace. Otherwise they get defensive, and you’ll do more to make yourself look like a crazy from that place than to convince.
Also there’s two facts that can be used to our advantage: the internet started out non-corporate and decentralized, and it’s the for-profit corporate nature of these companies that’s causing the enshittification. So you can just say that you like stuff that goes back to the old good days of the internet and don’t like being under the control of greedy corporations.
It’s because everything is buzzwords these days. They just think decentralized is another buzzword rather than a legitimate descriptor. I blame crypto.
I try to stick to the email analogy, most people have seen email threads distributed across users on a bunch of mailservers. Don’t even have to touch the d-word
Do you think “instance” is a bad word to use for the different Lemmy servers? My wife thinks so, but I’m not sure what a better word would be to use other than maybe just “server”, but that also feels too techy. I do think “community” is a good non-technical word to use for the equivalent of subreddits.
“Server” has been pretty normalized (albeit abused) by discord especially, so it seems accessible to me?
“Instance” does seem vague and overly techy to me, it’s an oop/code term (think “instantiate the class”) that’s been borrowed for casual use.
“Community=subreddit” sounds pretty good, but runs the risk of being misinterpreted as more of a “community = discord server” thing…
I’m also fond of matrix’s “homeserver”, a server that (while your home) isn’t your only location, but that might be entirely foreign to new users too.
Definitely a tricky problem
Not the guy you replied to, but to me personally the word instance comes across as technical, considering how its used in programming
Not too sure if there’s a normal sounding alternative, defo could benefit from a non-techie perspective here 🤔
Ha we had the same thought tho
Crypto is decentralized, though. It’s an honest way of describing it. I think that more to blame are the specific crypto users who gave it a “bad name” with their shenanigans and equally the people who took that as an excuse to dump on crypto in general.
Yeah I should have been clearer, it would have been more accurate to say I blame cryptobros.
I’ve been trying to tell my friends about the fediverse and how happy I am using it and why I deleted my twitter account etc etc. Every time I bring it up I feel like it’s very quickly dismissed as this weird nerdy thing that only I care about.
Some people only join stuff that seems mainstream and cool. You can chart Twitter growth with fans of Oprah and Donald Trump joining: before Oprah it was absolutely a nerdy thing, after I was surprised how many random average people from all walks of life had shown up. I’m talking like startup bros to fast food cashiers overnight.
@Acester47 @dylan, Reddit by default send userdata to Alphabet (Google), Amazon, ComScore and TowerData (known to use even keylogging to profile users). That is, what you write on Reddit is known by most advertising companies, along with your account data. Enshittification is falling short.
Absolutely unreal. This should seal the fate of Reddit.
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I did a little research a few days ago, and it seems like reddit has grown their userbase upward of 40% since the site redesign in 2017. I think they are banking on most “average” users not even realizing that third party clients or old.reddit even existing. They are more than willing to sacrifice power users who avoid ads for oblivious users who don’t.
I think they ran the numbers and went with “We can still make money after pissing off half of our userbase, and we can expect many of the pissed off members to be so addicted they won’t actually walk away.”
I think they also see this with every major game boycott. Gamers are notoriously unable to stick to their principles and keep paying for games that undermine their “demands” as gamers. While a vocal minority stick to their guns, most gamers who claim to want to boycott games end up buying and playing them. Hogwarts Legacy is a great example of where the boycott basically did fuck-all and many who claimed to boycott ended up buying the game anyway.
“Gamers” and Gamers are two different things. Only “Gamers” ever said they wanted to boycott games, but much like Reddit’s userbase, “Gamers” are only 30% of all Gamers.
I feel like if you want to boycott a game but really can’t resist the urge to play it the least you could do is just pirate it instead of buying it
Piracy is often one of the few ways to playtest a game without having to spend money to find out you don’t like it.
@dingus @raresbears, or worst, spend money to find out that the game don’t work in your PC.
Piracy is one possibility, but other is to look for good Giveaways, which are often in Steam or GOG. Also some very good free games out there, like this one (one of my favorite of all time).
https://www.thedarkmod.com/main/It used to be you could get a demo of a game to try it out, but that stopped being a thing a while back…presumably because game studios know their games suck and don’t want people to realize it until it’s too late.
I qualify as a gamer and it is indeed quite hard because of the “easy” dopamine shots you get from playing. But speaking for myself, I quitted and actively boycott the Fifa games to this day.
I used to play alot from fifa 09 -12 and stopped at fifa 13 because of the predatory practices of the FUT implementation. It was close to totally random, costed alot of money and it only counted towards the specific game you got.
For example: If you got Fifa 12 and spend all that cash in FUT within Fifa 12, guess what? In Fifa 13 you can start all over again. Miss me with that sh*t.
I hope that for some people this can be a first and after the “first” it gets so much easier to stand by your principles.
I use(d) RIF for as long as I can remember and Reddit can put their ridiculous practices in a place where the sun doesn’t shine.
My account is gonna be retiring with RIF, wiped clean and that is it for me regarding Reddit.
Also my first comment in the Fediverse is the name(?) ;)
That’s great for you and I’m with you on not buying predatory games, but isn’t FIFA incredibly profitable?
If you look at FIFA as an example, you should conclude that reddit isn’t going to lose a significant number of people. This and reddit should have gambling if they want to make money, lol.
Of course, Fifa is very profitable even to this day. The FUT mechanics have gambling mechanics (loot packs etc…) it is why it is such a sh*t and predatory system.
The action I took personally wasn’t about a delusion of me thinking that just me was gonna make an impact.
But businesses count on people not taking action because of the mentality “What would change?” and “Just me boycotting doesn’,t matter so why would I?”.
It is much more about putting up a boundary for yourself and enforcing it. I didn’t feel like supporting a company that put out such predatory practices so the thing that I can do is to vote with my wallet, which I did.
If I cannot even do the above myself than I have no right in lecturing others.
I don’t know how much people will leave Reddit but I have no reason to stay and fund their endeavors.
The thing that I do know is when businesses have a monopoly for a service/product they provide the money isn’t gonna go to benefit the user but to maximize profits.
The users of Reddit are gonna get railed in the end, one way or the other.
Gamers are notoriously unable to stick to their principles and keep paying for games that undermine their “demands” as gamers.
Some of us stick to our principles, and because some of us do, everyone gets to enjoy a few more indie games every year.
They are going IPO. They are expecting investors to pay 10-15 BILLION DOLLARS for Reddit. Those investors are going to want to extract several times that from the Reddit userbase. Up until this point, Reddit has not been concerned about even breaking even.
Reddit has changed dramatically in the last ten years but it’s nothing compared to what is about to happen. Reddit is not the product. Reddit’s users are the product. And right now, they are going up for sale to the public for exploitation. The pig is finally being taken to the market. Shit is going to change.
Didn’t Yahoo sell for some ridiculous price like 12 billion dollars a few years back? If someone is willing to pay that for a basically dead legacy site, I could see someone doing the same for reddit, especially with all their pro corporate, pro advertising changes as of late.
I am inclined to agree with you but moderators seem to have a stake in this. If they can’t do their jobs, then Reddit will see a noticeable decline in community engagement.
If we’re partitioning user engagement from the growth in echo chambers, Reddit’s seen continued drop off in community engagement for nearly a decade now. This only marks the bigger nail in the coffin.
Reddit is nothing without content, and a lot of active posters and subreddit moderators use third-party apps and bots. Even if it’s a small percentage of Reddit users, it’s the most engaged users.
As much as I hate to, I totally agree. People will grumble and eat their shit sandwich if it means things mostly stay the same from their perspective.
Most of the changes will happen behind the scenes as they usually do. Reddit rarely conducts it’s extremely underhanded shit out in the open, unless the publicity is going to be unavoidable.
If only… I would love nothing more than for it to become Digg 2.0.
Most typical users have no idea what Apollo is, and I imagine most of the engagement is still from the mobile site with the official app taking the next biggest piece of the pie. Anyone commenting on this site now is in a very specific tech bubble.
Anyone commenting on this site now is in a very specific tech bubble.
And it may be better that it ends up this way. Tech people at least in my experience, tend to be more balanced and level headed discussing topics outside of tech, than people who are single-issue, obsessed with other topics.
Fuck Spez Fuck reddit.
Reddit will be defunct in next few years
I’m not too surprised that Reddit would go so far as to lie about somebody blackmailing them. This is a disgusting thing to do to someone who’s bringing people to your website.
I have over a decade on Reddit across several accounts and if I can’t use Sync on Android or Apollo on iOS then I just wont even browse on mobile. They already killed i.reddit and compact, their browser experience is intentionally shit to try and get you to install their app.
If the day ever comes that old.reddit is shut down I will overwrite all of my comments and delete my account
I definitely think old.reddit is next in line. I wonder what bullshit they’ll spun up to get rid of it.
Probably some BS about “server costs” or “difficulty coding for both old and new reddit” or some other stock excuse.
The only reason it’s there currently is because it’s more efficient to navigate for the kind of people posting content. Maintaining two code bases sucks. So once the people posting content leave there will be no need for old Reddit.
I’m not sure where they’re planning on getting content from (maybe bots circle jerking other bots using discounted APIs and scrapers? Does that look good on an advertising sheet?) but I wish them well.
AI shitposting, the dream.
Sync announced a shutdown as well.
I’m pissed, I’ve been using Sync for a decade.
I think this is the end for reddit maybe after june 30th apollo users will be slowly migrate to official reddit app or another platform. This event will generate massive traffic for lemmy. The great thing about reddit is before the API rules reddit is called as mini internet. Everyone shared most valuable content and mods maintained the communities from spam their work is most valuable thing and thank you for all your work.
Especially given that I’d venture a guess that most reddit mods and power users use third party apps
They do, that’s why they are organizing a blackout on June 12th.
I think more people are going to quit Reddit than migrate to anything else. Apollo is such an ingrained experience for iOS users that anything else wouldn’t be worth it.
This week has been full-on-crisis mode for us devs too. Reddit is not making things easy on us.
Hey, i just want to say that i really appreciate everything you’re doing. Tons of awesome work.
And i know I’m not alone.
Where should i donate? Either time or money or both? Server costs, app dev costs(i know you also develop jerboa), etc.
But really i just wanted to say thank you. We all really appreciate your efforts. I know it’s gotta be overwhelming at the moment so it’s nice to just hear that once in a while. You’re very much appreciated.
Thank you! We’re just glad we can make something ppl find useful in some way.
Here’s our donation page, and there are many other ways to contribute to lemmy too: helping code, writing apps and clients for it, doing translations, and helping ppl get instances set up. Together, as a federation, we can beat reddit and all these US tech giants.
Just donated. Thanks.
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The open collective option was easiest for me since it lets you do a one time donation. I’ll donate more later, but I like to donate on my own schedule.
One thing you can do is host your own instance, to take the load off of this one
I’m going to be doing that soon and deleting my account here
I wonder how many PTSD episodes your display name has triggered. 😋
It would take time for reddit client devs to build new apps for Lemmy.
RIF is closing down too. I’m using Sync for more than 8 years and it has not been yet announced but it will certainly shutdown too 😔
The Sync dev has announced that it will be shutting done too.
It’ll be a sad day when it does. I’ve been a sync user for years and that app is fantastic.
Praying he ports it to lemmy somehow
I’ve been a Reddit user for many years. It was a great run but I’m moving here. For now I’m missing quit a few favorite communities but that should improve with time.
I’m hopeful that will be the case too, I’m just worried about the learning curve (even if it’s slight) to get into lemmy
Not to mention data loss and the need for a threshold of active users to keep things running.
Also not get overrun by certain elements which have co opted other social media platforms in recent history…
If there is even small scale organized move to Lemmy with the best mods and content posters, there won’t be much to worry about. I’d be more worried about moving too fast and destroying the servers/network effect accelerating with the influx of meme spam. You see what happened to just about every large subreddit becoming a low quality content cesspool perpetuated by the hive mind. I love Reddit but it’s hard to watch communities need to migrate to niche or private subreddits.
Right now I think everyone agrees there is no rea Reddit substitute, so Lemmy is the main landing spot. So long as we don’t get bored here conversing with a smaller population, Reddit doesn’t do a complete about face, and Lenny’s servers don’t crash and burn - I think time will help work things out.
Obligatory “f-ck Spez” and their silly little AI training thing
ReddPlanet dev came to the same decision. Gutted tbh. After more than 13 years I’m done for good with that place. Shoutout to all the 3rd party devs. You deserve better, and I hope you find success with any new project you might launch in the future.
I would love to see a fork of Apollo for Lemmy, call it Artemis. 😀
Seriously. They’ve released the backend code, why not release the frontend too? Open-source is definitely viable, if the developer just lets the project rot, they’ll get nothing from it, but if they just slap the GPL on it and work with the community on a fork, then they would end up leading a nice open-source project. I’d love to see Lemmy gaining a bunch of users too; that’s definitely be nice.
My wife uses reddit, and couldn’t be bothered to use anything other than the official app. Sadly she’s in the majority with this. I’d say somewhere between 5-20% of mobile only/heavy reddit users will end up over here, and that’s heavily dependent on whether or not the subreddits that they like come over here too. I see far too much content for the moment just linking back to reddit
The question is: Are users like your wife submitting popular content, or are they mostly consumers? If nobody submits good content, there is nothing to consume.
The stats assume all users contribute the same amount to the community.
Like you’ve said, if a large number of the people who submit content are the ones using the third party apps then the loss of those users has a large larger impact.
The same thing applies to moderators who use third party apps (among other tools that may not be affected) because their mod tools are better than the official app.
This. Reddit and their stans keep trotting out this, what, 2% or so of “super users” as a “Who fucking cares about 2% let em cry” but -
Who tf do you think is providing the content and doing the moderation that keeps it falling apart? I learned in all this there’s a big viewership who don’t even have accounts, they’re not suddenly going to sign up and start posting and interacting out the wazoo. People who just comment and chat after work aren’t going to take up moderation duties (especially since all the stuff that made it manageable is bust.)
It can float without that 2% for a while, but it’s going to become outdated quick. You’ll lose that cultural edge of typing “Reddit” after internet searches, cause it stops working because there’s no longer ALWAYS posts about every little thing. The people bickering and providing entertainment are gone, they were all on RIF or the other app, so people stop popcorn scrolling.
I wonder if it’ll go Twitter and just start catering to the fascists cause it’s the only market left.
A lot of Reddit mods rely on third party apps though, as the modding tools in the native app are garbage. I foresee another exodus of users as the modding quality declines and subs start turning into dumpster fires of spam
