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.
there’s still some great subreddits, but many of the mainstream ones have devolved into right wing cesspools
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 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.
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.
I still use Reddit for queer nsfw content (for now) and r/all is getting worse by the day, and it was already pretty bad for years
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.
After I left I noticed how much of my Reddit feed was and is garbage. Most are meaningless memes. That’s after removing meme subs.
I browse Reddit only for one sub, a country-specific one that is reasonably niche. Right when the API migration happened, there seemed to be a very visible migration of Facebook/Instagram people migrating over to Reddit. Posts asking where to find Instagram/Facebook functionality came in daily, and the overall quality of both comments and posts degraded a lot, suddenly posts had a ton of comments with one word and a ton of emojis.