I left reddit on june 12th last year in protest of spez’s decision to change the reddit api from being free as in free beer to an unbelievably expensive cost. That same day, I joined lemmy on a now abandoned account.
At first, I had a hard time adapting to lemmy’s significantly smaller community, but I got used to it and learned to embrace it. However, recently I started missing reddit a lot more, and after some consideration, made an account on the (demonic) website.
But I don’t think it felt the same way as before, sure, there was more posts, but they lacked a heart and soul, they were all so generic, as if it lost it’s spark.
Has anyone else that’s been on there noticed anything similar??
Reddit has been generic for several years now. It’s, mostly, addictive trash content. I miss individual subs but the algorithm for popular / front page posts is doing the same thing every other social platform is doing. If that’s your jam, go for it. I value my time enough that I don’t need to be entertained by an algorithm. I hate it. A lot.
Edit:
I mean, I just went to reddit.com and the top post is a 21 year old married woman asking how to tell their 18 year old cousin they stink because they only shower every 3-4 days. THIS is engaging content? WTF is wrong with you people? This is why I’m thrilled to have left that dumbass platform.
I see more racism, sexism and other bigotry than before. Although there certainly was a lot of that back then as well. Also bots.
Yeah, the incel type have overrun the advice communities and it’s a shit show whenever anything that could be vaguely perceived as negative toward a man gets dogpiled. There’s always some pushback, but the consensus ends up being a coin toss whether it’s actually useful or just blaming the victim for everything
Yes, incels and just angry, bitter people everywhere! For a good time, go to a relationship sub and ask for basic relationship advice for an easily solved problem, like how to communicate to your boyfriend that you don’t want to have sex, and watch your post go down in flames.
The quality of Reddit has been declining for the last ~5 years. Even if you ignore all the shady shit Reddit themselves have done, the platform has been declining due to simple popularity. Simple-brained people joining and upvoting memes and reposts and fucking TikToks. There’s also just the toxicity of society in general. There used to be honest discussions and nuance and input from industry experts. Now it’s incredibly corporate, and hardcore liberal, and full of the same toxicity as Twitter.
It used to be mostly Libertarians and Atheists, kinda like how Lemmy is all sysadmins and Linux enthusiasts.
But Linux enthusiasts could be Atheists, too. Oh wait, I forgot about the church of GNU and TempleOS.
The other day I was on one of those cloned threads where all the top starter responses were old copied responses posted by bots with numbers at the ends of their names and no one in the organically new comments even noticed. Just a few minutes ago I followed a link from the vanilla reddit homepage (I refuse to sign in to reddit but I keep going back anyway like a little baby brain) and there was a thread about a pride parade which was disrupted by a pro-Palestinian protest. All the pro-Palestinian comments were downvoted and all the highest voted comments were mocking “leftists.” In summary, fuck reddit, and this was the perfect moment for me to read your post.
I can’t even use Reddit anymore wince they don’t allow VPN users in. (I won’t turn it off for them)
I was active - and I mean ACTIVE - on reddit for well over a decade. When the API fiasco happened, I deleted my mobile apps, and stuck to desktop. When ‘opt out of selling your data’ became impossible, I logged out for good.
Lemmy is both better and worse than reddit ever was. It will likely never reach the same activity level, but will also not reach the same toxicity.
Same here, I was a super user back in the days, posted multiple posts and dozens of comments every day at the minimum. With the API fiascos I deleted all my posts, all my comments. Fuck reddit.
I don’t care about toxicity, it’s the same everywhere, you wade through that. Toxic users is a thing, toxic management and platform is a whole other thing.
its all bots now. like its been getting worse and worse and i’m not surprised if theres now a much higher percentage of bots in there compared to that time.
Curiously I’m not a bot, but I keep getting banned.
only bots allowed
have you tried digging out your morality centre and posting nothing but propaganda for corporations?
That’s good advice
i stuck it out past the protest up until the day the company went public, and I can testify without any doubt that the downward spiral increased dramatically post protest. It got so bad that even though I go back to check my local sub, I haven’t once felt tempted to create a new account. I began to dread any actual interaction with other accounts
I’ve felt that the popular subreddits were on a decline ever since Reddit was featured in so many YouTube slop videos, but with time the effect of identity loss is becoming increasingly obvious. The crowd on there is not what it used to be. Gone is the desire for accurate information, meaningful comments, sources, and giving credit. Reddit is no longer a niche product but a mainstream one that my parents and “normie” friends know and it reflects in the lower quality content and user participation.
I haven’t gone to reddit.com and browsed around since I left.
But one thing that HASN’T changed is I’ll search ddg for an answer to a random problem and the most helpful link is a reddit post, either from long ago or recently.
For me, it was not being able to use a 3rd party app. Accessing reddit through their garbage app is a painful experience. And unless I find the answer to a question via web search that’s a reddit thread, I avoid it entirely.
there’s still some great subreddits, but many of the mainstream ones have devolved into right wing cesspools
I wasn’t active there before that. To me Reddit just got more and more and more annoying over the last few years.
“Recreational” communities were banned, technical communities were flooded with only slightly related nonsense, meme and fun communities felt just dumb. A lot of communities als felt unfriendly and unwelcoming. Not within two days, but it eroded over the years.
At one point it felt like a burden to go through my subscribed communities feed. So I stopped using Reddit entirely during the protests and disabled my account (and it wasn’t re-enabled by Reddit to prevent loss of users) and I do not miss it one single second.
During web research I sometimes get a Reddit result. I change to
old.reddit.comURL (I have a strict ruleset regarding cookies and JS and the normal Reddit is just shows an error message and I am not willing to change my configuration) to get the information, but that’s it. Neither do I interact with anything nor do I use any type of account.
Same; if I find the answer to a technical question in a Reddit thread by searching Google I may leave a comment for others but that’s the only amount of interaction I have with the platform anymore. And I’m posting my questions to Lemmy exclusively.
My big issue is that a lot of the Aussie subs went full right wing (Murdoch media type stuff.
I don’t even bother browsing it anymore.
Really hope we keep the click bait out of here and keep the more scientifically oriented community
The popular feed for Canada became voat. The far right subreddits are the top posts every single day.
Is that including the r/Australia main sub? I didn’t go there very often because, well, it’s just going to parochial at best but it was somewhere I’d see the occasional top post now and then. I probably first ever visited it and spent any time there around 2013 and it was weird man. It was so hardcore right-wing and overly political that it was impossible to browse it functionally, if I actually waded in on anything explicitly political in nature it was a nightmare. I also even had weirdly innocuous stuff I said just straight up deleted by mods, I’d never up until that point had interaction with any reddit mods so that felt just crazy. That was an abiding and striking memory of the place that I found very odd indeed and weirdly out of step with the experience of reddit in general. One gets used to their bubble and Reddit had always felt like 20-30 something year old male liberal-ish tech enthusiasts so when you accidentally step in to a mixture of a Liberal voter retirees and the One Nation fan club it’s disconcerting. It meant that I was even less likely to ever really see or actively seek anything from that corner of Reddit.
A few years later I returned there, I can’t remember when this would have been but I guess maybe 2018-ish? And then it’d gone a lot more normal. It’s a general forum and there for interaction so I try not to describe and analyse exclusively through the lenses of 2 dimensional political leanings but it’s useful here and I think it was accurate to say, it’d settled on a mainstreamish slightly left of centre type of crowd for most posts where politics featured. This was noted by the occasional disgruntled conservative who disliked having to be in relative minority, but nowhere near the vitriole of before. I always wondered if there’d been a cleaning of house or something, and how that managed to happen if so. I also always wondered where the previous majority of One Nation admirers had scurried off to. Having also quit Reddit a year ago, obviously I’ve not been back and between 2018 and last year I wouldn’t have been in r/australia a great deal anyway, but if it’s gone full Murdoch as your describing I wonder what weird forces were at work to bring it back to its former repellant mix of visitors and moderation policies.
I use it for some niche communities too. Small communities are not infected with bots fortunately. Apart from that, it sucks more than before for sure.