Reddit admins had the sweetest gig on the planet. They had users who created and curated all their content for free, moderators who donated their time and effort for free, people who bought "reddit gold" for basically no benefit to themselves. All they had to do was sit on their asses and do nothing. (And make no mistake about it, whether the site was technically profitable or not, spez & co. were raking in more than anyone I'll ever know and living more than comfortably).
But noooo. They had to introduce "features" that users found annoying and off-putting, such as the cringe awards they added in addition to gold, profile, "new reddit," a goddamn personal profile for a userbase that valued anonymity, and ... a fucking chat on fucking reddit are you kidding me what?
And then of course the ultimate fuck you that started in June and has been snowballing ever since.
I think admins got the idea that we liked reddit itself, whereas most people I know actually hated reddit as an entity and only derived value from other users. I'm really kinda thankful that spez opened my eyes to this. If he hadn't been an absolute dickcheese, I'd probably still be miserably scrolling through that hellscape, whereas now we're here.
And guess what? I don't even miss reddit. The only regret I have is sharing so much content there and not leaving sooner.
The way to make big money for the past 20 years hasn't been to sell better mousetraps. It's been to attract venture capital. Your revenue didn't matter as much as your size, and your size was determined by your employees and how much you spend.
It's why Uber, whose business model is entirely skimming off of taxi drivers who provided their own cars, wasn't profitable..
With the interest rate hikes, the investment money is drying up, and all these places are discovering they actually need to make money from their users now, and all that bloat is now a negative instead of a positive.
Basically we're all paying the price for the stupid fucking investment bubble that's existed for two decades. An investment bubble that existed because nobody was at the wheel driving the direction of this economy until now.
And of course the billionaires don't want to sacrifice shit, so they're making sure it all rolls downhill to their employees and their customers and doesn't touch their profits in the slightest.
But like... Why not have those 2000 employees generate some actual reasonable value if you're paying them anyway. Reddit externally seems like a business with 200 poorly organised employees. How were they squandering that manpower so spectacularly? Were they doing it on purpose somehow? Like a military unit firing endless rounds at nothing at the end of the year to make sure they don't get their allocation cut for next year?
Oh, I'm sure they were all doing stuff. It just wasn't necessarily stuff that's easy to monetize.
There's a reason Reddit's reliability has shot up over the past decade despite ever increasing popularity. Plus there's all the dumb shit they added like the bullshit awards.
a fucking chat on fucking reddit are you kidding me what?
RIGHT? AND, AND! It's a chat where you can't get rid of the bright flaming red notification until you make the neigh-irreversible decision to either shun a person forever or reply to them.
I logged onto Reddit once sometime after the chat was rolled out, it was some random person trying to contact me which I had no idea for months because I was using a 3rd party app. I put in my profile to message me instead of Chat, then promptly disabled the chat feature on my profile.
Oh, but you do! I'm one of those autistic people who can't fucking stand flaming red notification icons and have to make them go away.
There's no way to turn off the notification without either clicking "Ignore" or "Reply" (maybe it's "Accept"). It doesn't go away just from reading the message. I even tried to disable the element in my browser, which worked, but then it disabled the normal notification icon too.
Also they killed off the only good idea they had in years: Reddit Public Access Network.
Shut it down because a lot of people complained about seeing random DJs and dog enthusiasts in their feed, whom I don't blame cause not everyone is into livestreams. But it was also a great way for anyone to get an audience with little effort, and entirely reddit's fault that they spammed it way too much at people who weren't even subscribed to /r/PAN. For a brief moment it was an amazing time, though.
I wasn't even aware of it beyond seeing some complaints, but then I don't think it's something RiF supported, which was my primary way of accessing reddit
I think that was part of the problem too. None of the 3rd party apps supported it, so all you'd see is the complaints, making people hate it even more. If 3rd party app users wanted to participate in /r/PAN, you had to use the desktop site.
Personally I think it should have been spun off into it's own website. Would have solved the complaint issue.
honestly. i’m still stuck to reddit because of the content only, and if i found a suitable alternative for that niche i’d finally be free to leave. i hate reddit- i hate the app, the “features”, the admins, all of that, but i LOVE the content itself
Maybe we should find an ad agency and crowd source funds to make slick advertisements for Lemmy and Mastodon. I feel like you should promote a specific instance for each though, and avoid the "join-mastodon" page.
The way the instances are split does not generally make much sense for the user. It's extremely arbitrary. We all know why, and that it's not a bad thing altogether, but it's bad for the user experience. That aspect of federation is not something we should promote.
the content in larger subs has gotten significantly worse. like i said, i only really browse a niche hobby sub, and the content there has remained just as good as ever.
i think that most people here (myself included) really like that lemmy is so small, though i can see why it could feel like a problem to fix. it doesn’t have the advantages of infinite content like other services do, but the smallness means anyone here really wants to be here and is interested in discussion. it’s tight knit! i feel like people who actively want a reddit alternative have searched and already heard about lemmy, and i wouldn’t exactly want the general user base to be here considering how bad they can be haha.
I like to use the Imgur app for browsing content now that I've stopped using reddit. The navigation is different, but it's usually a lot more positive of an experience.
like i said, niche interest. i still browse reddit, but it really is only 1-2 subs i spend time on now, really just the one. as soon as battlejackets become an interest with my fellow lemmiers (??), i’ll be out- but that’ll probably never happen lol.
talklittle is from a dying era -- completely unobtrusive ads on the base version of his app, with the ad-free version costing a one-time fee of what? $4? Truly a rare gem.
In general, old UI means shitty or non-existent password hashing, rather than "reputable".
And I don’t see how you can compare something that has a modern UI with instagram. Is that the only modern UI app you use? I don’t even have instagram.
And so yea I use Memmy for Lemmy cuz the website just has bad ergonomics for mobile. Boo boo Apollo be like TikTok hehe cringe
You have bad taste in UI design, and I hope it's not your career field
And yeah I never cared for Apollo and marveled that anyone would pay a monthly subscription to use it. RiF was the perfect experience, and on Lemmy I don't mind using the browser so much, but I've taken a liking to Jerboa since it's not ugly and bloated like most mobile apps
True that, personal taste -- but keep in mind old reddit is what reddit really was. The only reason for new reddit was to increase monetization.
I just can't stand how most web sites look today -- HUGE graphical elements, distracting animations, bloated closed-source code, trackers, ads, telemetry...
Yeah, while I understand that there was a loss of customisation and that naturally the existing username tended towards people who likes the older style, I personally absolutely hated it to the point that I just couldn't get into Reddit at all until the update. It also doesn't really seem odd to me for a website to update it's UI once in a while (tbh, I'd be turned off by one that doesn't. Even the best UI today is still relatively speaking from the bronze age of UX design. If the best we have today is the best we can do I'll be sorely disappointed.)