This article kinda makes me hope for reddit to survive. I want all the toxic, angry assholes to stay there, not desperately flee to the fediverse in search of their fix.
Kind of happened in r/apple you used to get the occasional good discussion in the comments until the last few weeks of 3rd party apps then it was an absolute cesspool of hate and trolls as people seemed to leave for other sites
If they all want to pile into exploding-heads, it would at least make them easy to contain.
I wonder if there could be a way to effectively shadow-ban entire instances.
What is exploding-heads, is that an instance?
Yes.
Reddit is a bunch of people asking each other to rate them now, including their clothes and wedding dresses. I don’t understand the appeal of any of those subs, especially when we already know some of them were specifically created by 4chan to try to get people to kill themselves 😬
I still have a few communities that have yet to migrate, so I hate browse them. But sometimes it recommends these rating subs, and morbid curiosity takes over. I swear, the vitriol that is emitted from some of these people… It’s just depressing to see people treated that way
@CoWizard
@db0 @pizza_rolls Tell me, which communities are you still missing?Guitars, guitarpedals, various gardening communities, various construction communities, homeowning communities, diy stuff, worldjerking.
A lot of the non tech savvy communities have yet to move. It’s the same reason facebook groups are good for that sort of thing
Well. we need to start from somewhere, on kbin.social there is:
@gardening@kbin.socialand@diy@kbin.social. Both should become more active. Just follow and post something I would say :)On Lemmy you have
@gardening@lemmy.worldand@diy@beehaw.orgAnd what about:
@permaculture@lemmy.worldor@homeimprovement@lemmy.worldI’m already apart of all of those communities, but they tiny compared to reddit’s. A community is the people, not the url
I think it is a big mistake to underestimate the effect of having reached the critical mass of users. It will not die easily (spez is working hard to achieve this), much less quickly.
MySpace and digg still exist as well. Social media sites don’t die in the typical sense of the word, but they “die” nonetheless. More like abandoned malls than 6 feet under
No idea MySpace still existed. it just looks like some entertainment article website, weird…
Yeah it’s changed focus a few times. They focused on music for a while, then pivoted to entertainment news. Surprisingly they still have around 100 employees.
Some years ago they “lost” a lot of data during a data center migration. MySpace was the go-to place for small indie bands in the mid to late 2000s, so a lot of music that was only available on MySpace is totally lost now. People didn’t get a chance to archive it, since MySpace didn’t announce it beforehand.
I say “lost” because my opinion is that it was expensive for them to keep storing all that data and so they just deleted it all and made up an excuse.
I suspect what the article is describing is actually happening, but I’m curious how the writer a couple of quotes deep goes about identifying “emotionally sticky nodes”. They are using verbiage that makes it sound like they are describing something objective, but I have my doubts.
The article does kind of define it, but does a poor job.
An emotionally sticky node is a user who makes other users stay on the site. Examples of this for Reddit would be accounts like poem_for_your_sprog, ShittyWatercolor, Shittymorph, or wil.
There are others, of course, that you may not be able to name - /r/California was mostly kept alive by /u/BlankVerse, who posted 85% of all the articles to that subreddit. You’d never notice unless you paid attention to usernames. Similarly, a small percentage of people made a large percentage of Reddit’s OC. Typically you couldn’t name them, either, but you’d know if they weren’t there because they gave Reddit a soul.
Reddit started off as a bunch of bots reposting links they found, without even a comment section. Eventually real people came and started posting nerd stuff (like programming articles) alongside the bots. Enough of a critical mass was created that a comment section was added, making old Reddit look like what HackerNews or Tildes look like today. The programming and porn were sent to different subsections of the site for the people who don’t want to see such things (these became the first subreddits). The default subreddits were slowly created, then anyone could make their own subreddits for their own topics.
Still, it was largely posts to things found elsewhere. People went to Reddit as part of their trip through several other websites, and they’d usually gather what they found and repost it to Reddit. By the early 2010s, a lot of the pictures on Reddit were mainly 4chan reposts. People who had a lot of stuff saved from other sites were the “emotionally sticky nodes” and people would come to Reddit to see stuff that was explicitly gathered from everywhere else.
Advice Animals sprung from 4chan memes and really started to take off. Over time, Reddit started making their own native advice animal formats and thus we started to really see OC on Reddit for the first time - not just reposts, but new content you couldn’t see elsewhere. Soon these people became the “emotionally sticky nodes”, keeping users on the site.
And, of course, there are other things who were “emotionally sticky” without necessarily posting memes. Reddit became a great place to aggregate news at-a-glance. This is because of the moderation of the news and politics subreddits, ensuring that things posted to their subs were actual articles and not random YouTube videos or self-posts or images or whatever. Good moderation meant that you could go to /r/news or /r/worldnews and get the same effect as looking at the headlines of a newspaper. Similarly, the 2012 election had /r/politics become a great source of information and discussion about the US Presidental Race. These sorts of things made Reddit a useful site and kept people coming back.
Even now, Reddit still has “emotionally sticky” places. They could be individual users like the ones I mentioned above, or they could be entire subreddits that aren’t quite captured here on Lemmy yet. Reddit is still a good place to go for updates about Ukraine (although it is starting to falter a bit). NCD hasn’t really made its way over to Lemmy properly yet, either. There are oodles of niche communities that you’ve never heard of, and people who don’t want to leave their niche community because it doesn’t have any activity over here.
That said, some places absolutely have made the jump successfully (196). But for most places there’s a while to go before Reddit gets to the point where it can’t maintain itself as a site.
Oh the irony of the first “share this” button being Reddit at the bottom of the post.
unrelated but these ai generated article images are fucking creepy
Yeah, what was unthinkable a few months ago is now an ever growing reality.
If ever reddit had a crisis management division, the people there didn’t understand what reddit really was.
Even spez forgot what made reddit special. Or a very big possibility is he never knew it from the beginning at all. It can be argued that reddit was the vision of aaron.
Nevermind crisis management do they not have one sane capable PR person on call??
Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
Sounds a lot like the way ecosystems collapse. At first nothing seems amiss, maybe a slow decline, but hardly worrying. Time passes, and you start to think nothing bad will happen after all. Then an inflection point is reached, and catastrophic failure ensues in an extremely short time. And there’s no going back after that.
Or your vehicle has a few tiny rust spots on the inside behind the exterior paint … you can’t see the rust but its affecting the metal and growing in size every day. You won’t notice for months or even years but eventually, paint will start to bubble up and you’ll ignore that too hoping that it won’t get any bigger. Then a large flake of paint will fall off and reveal a big patch of rust eating away at your car and you’ll realize it’s days are numbered. You keep driving but its only a matter of time before a critical part will break down from rust and either slow you down or stop your vehicle from moving.
