I'm sure it's nothing and everything is fine. Now, who wants to buy some of this Reddit stock? I'll cut you a special deal so you don't miss out! ... Anyone?
Reddit isn't dead. There's plenty of posts and traffic, way more than here. The problem is that that quality has plummeted. Bots posting divisive political shit, bad memes, and toxic commenters. Angry people spurred on by bots and no valuable discussion
Yes, everything that could possibly be posted and discussed has been done. Humanity has officially run it's course, that is the only explanation for a reduction in the amount of content on Reddit.
I like how the user claims 2016-2019 as good years. From what I remember, the 2016 election was when reddit started turning to trash with the political astroturfing and right wing trolls making bad faith arguments. When was the crazy with the totally-not-staged crazy doorbell camera videos?
After the API implosion, so many active and posting users quit that the gap was filled with mainly bots.
Whether intentional or not, this gave the impression that Reddit was still active on paper.... The numbers said there was no significant change after the exedous.
When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots, they decided to chase the money before the site tanked completely.
This led to Reddit trying to cash in on the remaining users with more ads than ever, cash in on their advertisers, and cash in on the platforms (until recent) good image. Most people have at least heard of Reddit at this point, so going for an IPO now, when almost everyone knows that it exists, and only regular Reddit users are really aware of the enshittification happening. So they can demand a high price for the IPO, and collect a bunch of money before the enshittification is more well known, and the company tanks.
Smaller subreddits usually supported by a few power users are dying off. I remember it taking me a couple hours to read through the top posts at end of day. Now you’re lucky to see a week’s worth of genuine top posts.
Posts getting roasted in the comments for being too boomery, capitalist bootlicking or hive-mindish happens less and less.
After last June, I ended up muting more and more and more weird niche subs Reddit kept trying to push in "hot" because all the actually hot Reddits were doing the whole blackout thing.
Then some small subs got rather large quite quickly due to void left by the mass exodus, and that went to the heads of the mods of those small subs.
In 2021 I wrote a story "The Typo which saved humanity" on Reddit and it exploded to 3000 upvotes in less than a day. A couple of years later I wrote a story "Day of the Fat Man" which got 50 upvotes. Everybody I ask considered the second one the better one.
Then I reposted those stories on Youtube and Facebook and both got around the same upvotes, around 5k+ on each.
Yes, Reddit has become quite dead.
But to be honest, my stories on Lemmy got like 50 upvotes so... meh.
Reddit became openly hostile to the people and content that made it great. It’s not exactly surprising that the good users eventually went elsewhere. You could really tell shit went downhill after they killed the third party apps.
Don't underestimate the power of user experience shaping.
The front page is how most interact with the site, and helped it grow. The front page algorithm is bastardized to hell and back now, and unless you're on old.reddit, you cant sort by Hot by default.
Reddit is strangling itself to death with how fiercely it's trying to corral users in various directions. Every HeGetsUs post they force users to look at shoves good content one rank down.
had a vibrant sub with @ 50,000 participants, new content every day. now it's literally full of spam, no engagement, and the 'mod' appears to have fled after taking Spez's offer to take over.
The mod strikes and closing of all the meme subs ended them more than they wanna admit. There's very few memes on there now especially making it to all. Second part is no one wastes time commenting when even an innocent opinion will get your account banned. Waste of time for consumers and contributors equally.
The Front Page used to have a pretty steady turnover of content with lots of interaction. Now I find it stagnating, the same stuff sitting up front for days sometimes. I’ve hit /all sometimes, but that’s a dumpster fire of burning garbage. I get that everyone can do their own thing on Reddit (to some extent), but too much of that content is just a mess. Reposts, scripted, repetitive themed askreddit, and the responses are all the same too. Tired quips and witticisms, there’s far too little conversation, and if someone does respond to something you say it’s far more likely to be someone being pedantic, contradictory, or picking apart your argument with exceptions or manufactured situations.
Yeah, some niche communities are still great and provide good places to share and talk about a subject, but the main subs, all, and the like just suck these days.
Smaller subs still seem to get running pretty well. I'm really only still on reddit for the niche stuff, anything generic or meme related I pretty get my fill in over here
"Social" media is dying, these 2 or so generations will be looked upon partly curious partly estranged in the future, I'd like to believe things regulate themselves through chaos. And I'm curious how and to what it will transform. Too slow, so much is certain. It's all so painfully slow until the celebrity voyeurs and TV substituters get it at last.
I noticed this before I left Reddit last summer. Except for a few smaller niche subreddits that had decent discussions, everything else seemed like bots. I also noticed a lot of my comments and replies were deleted for no apparent reason so I quit participating. I do miss Reddit from the time period mentioned but nothing stays the same and it's time to move on.
It was already empty since bots took over! I'm not surprised for what it's happening, the way Reddit treated their users, and what happened afterwards.
I think it was maybe 2017? At one time I was a heavy reddit user, and I think that's about when they did some monkeying with their systems and somehow post exposures just dropped. LIke it was constantly new stuff presented and then suddenly the front page was the same for a day
Honestly, it's the users that are killing it now. What started as a funny place to chill, throw some funny memes and talk about some niche stuff turned into a toxic Tumblr tire fire. Reddit as it is now makes 4chan look like the normal people.
Honestly the executive comp is outrageous for an unprofitable company, and yes, anecdotally it does seem to be shrinking, if not in sheer user activity, certainly in quality.
One thing I’ve noticed is that a ton of posts from the top 0.1% subs will get about three to four hours of thousands of updoots and comments and then get nuked by the mods with no reason given, pointing to it being bots. Like a few years ago it seemed like the repost bots were sneaking in and getting posts at the top to then be able to sell the account for someone else to bypass spam filters. Now it feels like the majority of top posts are that, and that anyone engaging in the top content is also grinding out the accounts that will be used to spam them at a lower level.
Sidenote, but you know what has been incredibly fucking annoying? And I guess this is a combination of reddit having kind of always been shitty and oh we only find out more recently, or sort of, on aaron schwartz's death, for early signs, and, people choosing to use it in the first place. I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments, especially since you can't use unddit to see what it used to be because of the API business. I haven't had to break out the wayback machine quite yet, it hasn't gotten to that level of dire straits (not that I think the wayback machine would necessarily help for a lot of it), but there's a shocking amount of really good technical information and advice that has been deleted off of the internet as a result of people protesting reddit. Especially because the tech-literate are more often going to be the ones who use those scripts and end up leaving.
Oh they killed 3rd party apps, but their own official app sucks. Yea I'm just gonna view Reddit without logging in. Honestly it's been great, it prevents me from ever posting stupid comments and engage in other ways in the site. In a way I get less addicted with Reddit since they started decide that they don't want me to get addicted.
late to the party. Q: What is it that corporations will not tolerate about online commmunity, crowdsourced news and info?? Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Reddit.. all eaten and changed?
Silly thoughts...
the life in a discussion site is the exchange of ideas/thoughts. For that to happen users need to actually listen, process, and discuss. Reddit's structure has discouraged that for years.
signal to noise ratio - in order for the discussion board site to be useful, there's some magic signal to noise ratio that has to be maintained. Otherwise, its some style of chaos.
Why I left - in a technical subreddit, someone asked a technical question 'Who still uses XYZ, and why?, I never quite understood it', I gave a short primer on how it worked, with a couple analogies. The OP replied testily ' I don't need anyone to explain to me how it works.'. And then testily to other helpful responses, and then deleted their acct.
The experts left most of the technical subs I am in 5-10 years ago. My guess is that discussions are mostly noise: things I could have learned if I read the instructions, or how can I do this without understanding anything about it.
somewhere I read that the upvote/downvote counts on the front page are made up... modified by reddit.. so that people don't know what they need to do to get to the front. By adding this, they gave themselves full editorial control of the front page. It's downhill from there.
I turned on an older device yesterday and opened my old reddit app. It still works. I have no idea if it's because it's an old version of the app or if the policy got quietly changed. Or what. But it definitely works. I could read, up vote, and comment.
It would help if they didn't ban people. I got permabanned for nothing. I posted some timing not permitted on World News, and then made a new account to ask a personal question and accidentally posted something on World News with this new account and was banned for deliberately trying to evade a ban.
Just stupid. I guess they don't need people on reddit.
You think the idea was to just get rid of all the users so they could be replaced by AI bots, only as an indirect way of competing against Google, with the added frustration of being just as enshitified?
After 13 years as a user and earning somewhere over 70k karma last year via discussions about topics like zoology, psychology, fitness, politics and video games, I have slowly stopped using Reddit the last few months because of the blatant censorship. I went from posting regularly each week to 3 posts total in the last 3 months. TL:DR is I got banned from /r/news and /r/worldnews for comments that broke no rules and weren't rude or hateful. The mods just insulted me when I appealed. Actual Reddit staff could not care less, and I got a temp harassment ban for saying a mod handled my appeal badly (while carefully avoiding insulting them personally). I go back a few times a week to look at topics I like, but I actually made my account here on Lemmy today because I'm searching for long-term alternatives.
Of course bad experiences were always a thing but overall you could talk things out or just move on and come back to the same forum another day. Now unopposed mods completely kill any discussion with permabans if it bothers them personally. The site-wide and subreddit rules are functionally just suggestions and Reddit (the company) does nothing to enforce them in many cases. Hateful speech is fine so long as it fits the subreddit and civil discussion is not if it doesn't. Hate men/women/liberals/conservatives/whatever? Just find the right subreddit and you can get away with truly inhumane takes, but better hope you don't break ranks while a mod is watching (even if you're reasonable/polite). Thus Reddit has devolved into echo chambers where you are either preaching to the choir or silenced forever. I'm not interested in farming worthless karma by helping circulate a few popular ideas among people who are essentially guaranteed to feel the same way. Or interested in being treated badly for trying to take those opinions elsewhere.
I got invited to participate in their IPO at an "institutional investor" price with their e-mail saying "you have helped make Reddit what it is today". No thanks Reddit. Not only does my brief research say Reddit isn't profitable, but you don't treat your users well or consistently. I can't predict the future, but I feel like I watched how this goes when Musk took over Twitter and it's not pretty.
Could be bs, could be a troll, could be bait, could be a lot of stuff really
But ultimately it’s a shit platform so I let it lie and rot instead of constantly trying to setup a tea party with it and commenting about the smell lmao
I got permabanned from reddit for repeatedly trolling some ahs (probably not entirely unjustified). Whenever I create a new account and forget to only log in via a private browser window, the new account will be permabanned as well. So know I go "well, fuck it, I don't need reddit".
I don't even intend to try to find out if I could somehow beg somebody to revoke my ban. After I got banned I just send a reply asking the responsible mod to kindly delete themselves.