‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit

Same as it ever was.

Am I crazy or did the number of bots and 'new users' ramp up quite a bit around the protest also? Moderation was basically not existent, I would see obvious bots and trolls stay around when they would have been banned in no time before. I find it hard to trust any data on Reddit.

Which, unfortunately, is far too often. In my recent experience..

I literally use Reddit to fix Google Search results when I actually need an answer. At the very least I'll typically find the starting string. Though that's less due to the quality of Reddit and more because of its longevity.

Sometimes Lemmy pops up on my google search! That always makes me smile

I've often found removed responses, which is a good thing, just makes my quest to find an answer harder.

...when my Google search doesn't take me where I need to go.

Tried Kagi?

At least use a redirect extension that gives you an alternative, lighter frontend. Teddit might be mostly gone, but there are still Libreddit instances alive and active. And on Android, Stealth still works.

That's actually a great point. If everyone using the apps bailed it would be a huge number decline that wouldn't register as even a blip on similarweb so it's a terrible metric.

Is she spending time with all the former mods?

I also spend more time with OP's wife wife. /s

Damn. I left Reddit to spend more time with your wife, too, but I’ve only been seeing your mom lately.

That poor woman.

The what?

Probably depends on your subs. Most of mine have went far, far left and have become a tiresome dog pile of virtue signaling from behind keyboards and screens.

And I'm a leftist. There seems to be a huge difference these days in being a leftist and being a "this is now my only personality trait" leftist through which all views must be fundamentally filtered. Even non-political/non-social. It has made some subs unreadable for me, specifically my state and city subs.

Edit: I guess where I am going with it is that the extremes are becoming more extreme and seeking out new frontiers now that moderation is light.

That's true - it bums me out that more people didn't follow through on their threats to leave, but I did and I don't spend hours doomscrolling every day anymore. That alone is a good outcome. I learned to embroider to keep from picking up my phone over and over during the blackout and it's one of my favorite hobbies now. Also a good outcome. For me, the protest was a success. Reddit can make every stupid choice under the sun, and it doesn't impact my life in the least anymore.

I took part in the blackout and moved to Lemmy and hoped that the blackout would be successful, but realistically it looks in retrospect like it didn't matter much to Reddit. I still don't post there. I avoided reading for a while, but found myself still wanting to check on things / lurk. At least I have all the ads blocked.

I think most people who stayed on reddit didn't care about some disagreement between geeks, or (in the case of some moderators) too addicted to the attention that they got, or too full of self-importance about how their subreddit needed to be kept alive. I can sort of understand r/news being thought of as important and that's a sub I still look at sometimes. But I mostly looked at niche hobby subs and sometimes a sub devoted to a specific brand of power tools (because I have some of those tools). And I mean, who cares if those subs dry up or move to Lemmy? Get over it, Reddit.

Well said. I'm not going to be a fairweather-ethical-decision-maker. Every time I make a right choice (and I decide what's right for me) I'm rebelling against the machine of marketing and convenience. In fact, often the more inconvenient it is, the more confident I am in my decision.

I think this is a good point. Lemmy pre protest sucked. There was just no content or activity. Post protest, it’s not too bad here. It’s viable. Slowly, hopefully more people end up here over the years. I still browse Reddit (not logged in, my account is kaput) and it seems the same as it was before though. However, digg too died, so there is hope yet.

I came to explore Lemmy with the migration after Reddit's API changes. Baconreader was my app of choice, and it died with the change.

I didn't have any anger against Reddit - there was no righteous "fuck you!" in my actions - but the reason I stayed on Lemmy and very rarely touch Reddit is because the concept of the fediverse really speaks to me. I want to see a more decentralized internet succeed and so that is where I will spend my time, niche as it is.

I totally agree.

There were definitely people who were trying to start a revolution there or proverbially burn the place to the ground. But for a lot of people who left, like me, it was just an appropriate time to move on. I had been on reddit for about 12 years by then, and I had seen the place change, especially over the last few years. And not for the better.

It happens to any organization or system that grows beyond a healthy critical mass. Quantity goes up, but quality goes down. And the atmosphere starts to get toxic.

I had been looking for an alternative to reddit for a year or so when the situation last Summer came around. I was disillusioned over on reddit, and aside from interactions with two or three of subs (and about two dozen awesome people on one of my mod teams, who I'm still in touch with thanks to other communication options), I didn't really enjoy engaging with other users there. It was exhausting to have to frame everything to mitigate the trolls and the contrarians (who invariably still pulled that shit anyway). And the stench of hyper-partisanship was getting everywhere.

The Fediverse intrigued me, but the reddit variants of it hadn't reached a critical mass of minimal usage (the other critical mass metric) to make it compelling to use. The June protests changed that, and regardless of whether reddit 'won' or not, I'm glad I found this place.

You can have multiple 'winners' and 'losers' in situations like this. Even if reddit fought off the protests and won by not seeing their traffic stats drop off (which let's be honest is all they really care about, no matter what touchy-feely smoke their spokespeople are blowing), I feel like those of us who landed here also won.

I agree. The change in total Reddit users ended up small, but the drop in quality is huge. A lot of my favorite subs are now just memes, reposts, and astroturfing. There's very little left of genuine worth. But it's no great loss. The days of Reddit being the front page of the Internet and a hub of discussion are long gone. C'est la vie.

Personally I'm glad to see Reddit fading away. I have found so many more artist, makers, and thinkers on Mastodon, Lemmy, and Pixelfed than I ever did on Reddit. The fediverse is hard to navigate and has a higher barrier to entry. But those same qualities keep the influencers, astroturfers, and advertisers at bay. I love the experience of exploring people's feeds and follow lists as a means of exploring. It feels so much more organic and engaging. It's not for everyone, and the fediverse will probably never become a giant of social media. But maybe that's for the best.

At any rate for now we have our own corner of the internet to explore and enjoy away from the some of the more negative influences wrought by social media. Enjoy it. It may not last. Just like old Reddit.

I use a work account there on old.reddit on the desktop only.

The content there is [Picture](dae think that XY or Z should have / have not happened?) Or some variation of a question meant to drive engagement. The Minecraft and marvel studios subs are prime examples.

That's all it is now. No higher quality content except in a few niche subs.

Hopefully folks will continue to move away.

I've been noticing lately that the front page of reddit now only contains some posts from the last few subs I visited, even more posts from subs I barely even read before, and currently two posts from subs I've never seen but are now part of my subscribed reddits. And when I take the time to go through the posts that actually look interesting, those read posts stay on my front page for the rest of the day and no new content is brought up. At this point the front page is completely worthless and the only reason I visit is for r/comics and r/facebookscience, all my other content is found on lemmy and mastodon.

Interesting. It never really occurred to me to look at the front page but I guess it is supposed to be popular. I look mostly at a few specific subreddits and afaict they haven't changed much.

Same. I read a few subs that haven't yet fully grown here on Lemmy, but I don't post.

There’s definitely something different about the algorithm that is making the content more sanitized for a wider audience potential investors.

Meh the reddit software isn't that important, and it was once mostly FOSS. It's about the data, not the code. Spez has a ridiculous sense of entitlement.

The reddit app? It never would have occurred to me to use that monstrosity. old.reddit.com still works (dk for how long), same with redreader, and my personal API client still works though they have been messing with that (certain endpoints no longer work through vpn's).

old.reddit is still usable, but I've also pretty much stopped using reddit since the blackout.

You can still get to the compact interface with /.i on the end of the URL. But they are making it harder and harder to not use their terrible default interface, which is clearly focused on ad delivery not UX.

RedReader on mobile still works. You can find it in the fdroid app store. There's also rtv for a terminal reddit client on the desktop.

Same, my version of boost still works for some reason. No idea why but it's useful if I'm trying to search for something

This is a surprisingly good comparison.

Windows 10 is for me like Infinity for Reddit was (now I'm on Eternity 🙏). As soon as Windows 10 is EOL it's Linux time. I'm already getting used to it with VMs. Maybe even before that depending on how long my current device will last.

Probably in context of Meta and Threads, sadly.

And people are getting wise to traffic numbers being inflated by bots.

In fact, they've already failed their quarterly projections from ad revenue which has already negatively affected their IPO evaluation.

Damn I hate Discord for information. It's not open. It's nice as a chat (except for the whole thing with using Electron), but not for having information available.

Yes, this is the popular side of lemmy communism. When people say they are bothered by Lemmy's politics, that's not what they are talking about. They are talking about tankies and campists who seem more interested in simping for shitty autocrats and making tyrants into folk heroes than engaging seriously with anything resembling contemporary political science.

Basically, as a leftist, I am annoyed by the part which is legitimately indistinguishable from right wing trolls trying to make leftists look stupid, which is unfortunately a large and vocal part of many leftist communities here.

It's made my lemmy experience better, thank you. 😘

I mean workers could own the majority of company stocks and be the share holders in a twisted sense of communism.

I think algorithms can certainly be useful tools, but if they can somehow be made client-side, transparent in what they do, and customizable/replaceable, that would be ideal. In that scenario, they'd actually be working for the end user instead of the platform owner.

I just checked a couple old subs I used to visit. And the stats are very dramatic in the drop of actual content. So i tried to actually go to reddit to check. Something I haven't done since opening my Lemmy account 7 moths ago. Somewhat surprisingly to me the stats actually seemed to reflect reality. One of the subs hadn't had any activity for 5 months!! And it used to be reasonably active for a niche sub, with new content every day.

I also tried to look at the most popular non controversial sub I could think of. Which is r/funny by subscribers, and indeed it's ranked #1 since 2019, and that too had a dramatic drop in activity. https://subredditstats.com/r/funny
From these stats, it really seems like reddit is dying, it's going about as bad as some of the worst plausible predictions 7 months ago!
The most notable thing IMO is that content doesn't seem to be picking up again, but rather the decline continues.

I'm not suggesting hateful content wasn't edited or removed, I'm saying when I went back there was a lot of it that had obviously just been posted. I've no doubt it's mostly gone now if I went back and looked (which I really don't want to do unless I absolutely have to) but my point is that it happens so much and so often that its often there for awhile if a mod or mod team is a bit slow off the mark. It's indicative of the type of user on there.

I also don’t understand this infatuation with “old reddit” when that allowed subreddits like coontown to exist.

I guess when I think about 'old reddit' I mean reddit as it was before there were even subs or when subs first launched. Reddit was created by Digg users who were annoyed with Digg's direction. There was a lot of hope and effort put in to it being 'better' - not just technically but also in terms of ethos. I'm the first to admit I stupidly just ignored the influx of bad subs like the one you mention or jailbait etc. But it's become impossible to ignore to the point where it feels like its a constant drip-drip of hate content that mods are barely on top of.

And even without that outright race (or gender, or sex, or sexuality etc) based hate, reddit just feels to me like there's a constant undercurrent of aggression and sneering. Maybe, like I said before, it's always been there and I was just so used to it I became inured to it but revisiting it after several months away it was impossible to not notice.

"Old Reddit" generally refers to the design and layout of the page. You can find it by replacing the www. portion of the link with old. It's a more user friendly layout for some people.

Doomscrolling bad news is really bad for your health. https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/what-is-doomscrolling-and-why-is-it-bad-for-us/143139/

Bad news is also literally addictive and it is important to break that habit https://www.fastcompany.com/90269566/how-to-stop-your-brains-addiction-to-bad-news

I'd suggest subscribing to some of the more positive news threads on Lemmy. I ended up blocking those ones that only seem to post negative stuff. The world is a bad enough place as it is without Lemmy ramming it down my throat to. I'd also suggest regularly visiting other positive news sites to remind yourself that there is good news happening, you just don't hear about it from the normal places. Certainly helps put things into perspective. https://www.groovnow.com/blog/where-to-find-good-news-online

It's important to try and stay happy, friend, now more than ever.

Just block the news and politics communities. It's good for your sanity.

And the concurrent point : "‘If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.’

If you dont measure your failure, no one can prove you failed. Its a win win.

When enshittification hits so hard that it breaks your addiction and improves your life lol

DOZENS!

I found in recent years the quality was hit by spammers who were basically regurgitating content from other social media sites and spamming it to whatever subs would allow. Even though they'd get banned they'd have like a dozen alts, all co-mods on the same subreddits, and just make new accounts to get around it. You'd report them for ban evasion and nothing would happen. It would be political spam too, like you'd have accounts posting to "antifascist" subs and red pill subs just so they could cover all the bases.

Speaking of quality, it basically became the things your parents like on Facebook or Google Image results for "epic internet meme." Political humor was reduced to AI images of angry Trump looking damp with captions like "oh no I'm going to jail." For niche-interest subs it basically becomes people posting pictures of boxes of products they bought or asking which products to buy, people getting angry and debating about products and people who sell products.

Case in point that Oliver guy who would sell his books and shit on his subreddits and respond to every comment with links to his own blog posts, sold anti-Trump merch that hilariously looked like it was pro-Trump, posted ACAB stuff but also made racist copaganda comics, pretended to be an enlightened leftist but also wrote a red pill book about how rape is natural. Guy got banned for harassing mods of other subs and got his network of 20+ spam subreddits and dozens of alts banned, but the admins don't do anything when they try and rebuild their spam network.

/HFY did. A ton of authors including Hambone stopped posting there at all around 2018 or 2019 because we found out that Reddit was claiming that they owned our work, since we had posted it to Reddit, or something like that

It's annoying to me that sometimes I have to use Reddit because the only answer I can find to a problem I'm having is in a Reddit post or comment. I would prefer to never use it again, but I'll settle for only using it when strictly necessary.

And, don't forget to use uBlock among other add-ons to keep that infrequent visit as unlucrative for those fuckwads as possible.

http://farside.link/teddit.com

I redirect from reddit to lemmy in my main web browser. I wish there were some sort of proxy so I could read reddit without that information being lost - but that's exactly the sort of service the API changes have killed. Fuck them for what they did to reddit.

This is what I do. Also, I mostly access reddit from a RSS feed so I don't even really visit the site much. I read everything I want in my feed reader, and maybe look at the comments on the site if a particular post looks interesting. Never logged in, never comment, never vote on a post.

This is the way.