Reddit is a dead site running
Reddit is a dead site running
Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for th...
![[db0] Reddit is a dead site running](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/061c0905-f58b-41b1-a78b-841482164451.png?format=webp&thumbnail=196)
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.
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.
There is. Lemmy.ml is currently shadowbanning kbin for unknown reasons.
Lemmy.ml is blocking the bots kbin uses for federation. The devs have ignored anyone asking why. It's been weeks and only applies to Lemmy.ml, so it appears to be intentional. They're running slightly different code on their flagship site than what all the other instances use (which makes me wonder what else Lemmy.ml has changed compared to what's publicly available).
Any instance server admin can just silently drop all packages from specific domains if they wanted
@magnetosphere
@db0 or kbin.. *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
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??
They did, but then Spez said they tried to blackmail him so the PR person was fired
My theory is a bit more of an Illuminati conspiracy. I really don't care what people think of my thoughts or of me.
I think the powers that be want anything like Reddit to either die or degenerate. They (as in our wealthy owners) don't want a happy healthy stable platform of free thinking, free talking individuals sharing ideas and openly and freely discussing the world's problems so easily.
They want Reddit to die or at least degrade.
They'll put up with the fediverse for the time being because it isn't that big .... but once it hits critical mass, there will be a slow corporate takeover and eventually another slow death and the process will repeat itself
Yep, I can confirm, I visit it about once a day, the content is... boring, to say the least. IDK, it feels like it lost it's soul. I still need it, cuz of Void, but other than that... no. I'd drop it completely if it wasn't for the Void sub.
What is the void sub and why don't you just start one here?
r/voidlinux. Someone already started one (says unofficial, since the one on reddit is official, run by the Void maintainers), but there are very few posts there. Not enough content to actually get engaged. Plus, the maintainers were the ones that always gave the best advice over at r/voidlinux and they're not here with no plans to move whatsoever (there was a post on r/voidlinux about what the Void community is going to do in the blackout, it got deleted). They see the subreddit as a means to an end (they just don't wanna hassle with maintaining a forum, so they use reddit).
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. They'd usually gather what they found during that trip and repost it to Reddit. OC wasn't expected; reposts were encouraged. 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 - hence why Reddit was the "frontpage of the internet", an aggregate of what people had found elsewhere.
Eventually we started to see OC for the first time. Advice Animals sprung from 4chan memes and really started to go viral across Reddit. Reddit users started making their own native advice animal formats and now Reddit was no longer just "things from elsewhere on the internet" but new content you couldn't see elsewhere. Soon these people making OC 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, post names were real headlines (no editorializing!), and the page wasn't littered with random YouTube videos or self-posts or images or whatever. Good moderation meant that you could go to /r/news or /r/worldnews and trust that you were getting 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/Kbin yet. Neither Lemmy nor Kbin have great mod tools, and a lot of mod teams here are inexperienced and not as aggressive as Reddit mod teams are. You can argue this is a good thing, but aggressive moderation really matters for places like the news communities where legitimacy comes from users avoiding editorializing. This means that these places aren't a good replacement for Reddit (yet) - subreddits where moderation is important are still "emotionally sticky" because nothing can compete with them. (This is why it's important that Lemmy develop good mod teams and good mod tools!)
There are oodles of niche communities that you've never heard of that haven't come over, either - for example, !modeltrains (@modeltrains) and !nscalemodeltrains are niche communities on Reddit, but neither of their fediverse counterparts have much activity (other than me). People on Reddit thus don't want to leave their niche community because it doesn't have any activity over here, and because there's no activity over here, nobody wants to come over here to start activity - meaning there's no activity over here. That's why it's important to make sure you contribute often to niche communities you care about, even if your content isn't "good" - there needs to be something to lure emotionally sticky nodes here and get people to jump over.
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.
I'd argue !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com has made the most successful transition
There's a link to the full thing. It should have more context
Not really. There is some discussion of "emotionally sticky nodes", but they aren't really defined, just described. Which is fine, and it's actually an interesting article, but when you start throwing around terms like "nodes" it makes it sound like you want your readers to think you're talking about something that is empirically valid, not just giving your opinion.
Google searches is seo trash...
Reddit is bots, shills, and feds...
Why would an organic person participate in either?
Sure fedi is way smaller but discussions are prime quality. I post here way more since this where you can have good discussions.
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.
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
I used to subject myself to those rating subs on 4chan for some dumbass reason when I was younger, do not recommend. Sucks to see people fall into the same cycle.
@CoWizard
@db0 @pizza_rolls Tell me, which communities are you still missing?
Haha I visited with being logged in and it was true what you said. So many rate me sub content. Someone disagreed saying it is your algorithm. I wanted to sign in and comment to say no go log out and see what reddit shows by default when you browse all, but resisted.
Oh the irony of the first "share this" button being Reddit at the bottom of the post.
Hah good point. I need to remove that :D
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.
unrelated but these ai generated article images are fucking creepy
They have too many users to die any noticeable death.
Their bot defense left. Tons of communities affecting millions of subscribers have changed to adopt rules to make their platform borderline unusable (/videos only allows text posts describing videos).
Without defense against bots, the place will become a "dead" website in that the majority of the content will be bots posting for bots, and a handful of addicted dipshit interacting with them.
Much like Facebook, their soup du jour will be anger. Posts will seek to dri e engagement from what few users remain, and the main method they will achieve this through will be so ially and/or politically divisive topics.
Let it rot from the inside out. Let it be the new Facebook.
Lemmy is new home now 😊
I visit out of habit. There's nothing interesting being posted. bots are posting super old reposts, and spam is being posted and the mods aren't removing them, and i'm not going to report them. I'm in a weird state where there's not a great content aggregator anywhere right now, so its giving me an opportunity to waste my time on other things instead.
Anecdote incoming: i had coincidentally put myself on hiatus from news/Reddit before the whole 3rd party app drama started the Exodus, and didn't have a clue what was going on until about a week ago.
I think it's a perfect time to say goodbye forever. I miss a couple smaller communities to the point i want to remember them for what they were. I don't want to see them die firsthand.
I've been shitposting 12 years. Its bittersweet, I'll truly miss it, like an old friend. i'm ripping the band-aid off.
Thanks for listening
Time to bring back StumbleUpon and
del.icio.us@dan Now thats a name I haven't heard in a long time aha
I mostly stuck to a small circle of communities on Reddit, and while the quality of content has stayed about the same, the frequency of posts has dropped notably in most of them.
The one exception is /r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/, which is supposed to be for IT memes and funny interactions with users. Since the blackout started, that sub has gradually devolved into reposts of years old memes (not even IT specific memes, just anything tech related) and text posts asking random computer questions, which was previously banned.Very well put. The shutdown of Apollo was enough to make me want to ditch Reddit but the very noticeable drop in quality in both posts and comments since at least the blackout was the final nail in the coffin. Glad to see that it’s not just me. Luckily Lemmy has quickly filled the void for me and I’ve been very surprised with how much it’s been growing lately.