- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit::A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever
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“We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private,” he said.
They respect it so much they forcibly remove mods to make them public again. That’s so respectful.
“We will teach them our respectful ways. By force.”
Come on now, give him some credit. He waited a whole few days before completely going back on his words.
Not one mention of where said moderators who left went to…
A lot of which were good mods too. I’ve noticed a lot more racism and otherwise right wing posting being left alone/unmoderated since the protest, in the subs I used to browse actively - nowadays I just check in with them every now and then without an account and the intentional or not lack of moderation is making me want to stop doing even that.
I started an entire instance - lemdro.id - to provide a home to Reddit subreddits such as r/Android and r/Google Pixel (and other technical stuff)
Completely stopped using Reddit since they blocked third party apps in July 2023. I never accessed Reddit through other channels than smartphone.
That’s why I’m here too 🤝
Completely quit Reddit. It’s a shame that the article fails to mention the fediverse as a new rising alternative in response to enshittification.
2024 will have mentions of ActivityPub and Fediverse.
In response to such critiques, Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”
Never before has the sheer inevitability of enshittification been so aptly summarized.
What’s the saying? “You can’t control what you can’t measure.”
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.
It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren’t just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or was I just so used to it before that that I’d never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself ‘well, that’s just reddit’. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
I’m not claiming the fediverse is perfect or free from that sort of shit but either through the practicalities of federation, or better moderation or a smaller userbase or a more mature userbase or a mix of one or more of those things it doesn’t feel exclusionary to me. I often see on posts like this some people calling Lemmy a left-wing echo chamber and whilst I do agree there’s more people of a left-wing bent on here I think echo chamber is a bit much and is a phrase maybe used by those who live in a country without a functioning left-wing political party. I’ve not encountered a communist or tankie since Hexbear fucked off back to their kindergarten.
As for the Guardian article, they’ve fallen into the same trap as I’m concerned the fediverse might fall into by federating with Meta - assuming high numbers equal success or victory. If you have corporate/economics based mindset I can see how that works, but to me success equals a popular, useful community site entirely free from algorithms and other forms of manipulative control. One that isn’t gathering data via ads and tracking on its userbase to sell on (lets remember that reddit weren’t upset that AI were scraping reddit, they were upset that the company weren’t seeing any money from that). A community that grows organically, with all that that implies - sometimes growth might be very slow, it might stop entirely for awhile, maybe even reverse - but the emphasis should be on the people making the community better.
Reddit forgot somewhere along the way that it was the users who made reddit what it was. Look at the stats for r/askreddit - in particular the posts per day and comments per day - look at the trend since 2020. There may well be the same amount of users on reddit, but we all know a certain percentage of them are bots and even if they weren’t, just looking at those two graphs tells you everything about people’s level of interest in participating on reddit.
The only thing high user numbers guarantee sites like reddit is ad revenue. Nothing else.
You say, “I’ve not encountered a communist…”, like that is a good thing. Let me fix that for you
I’m a communist. Companies would be better off if they were owned by workers rather than rich people. You know, workers owning the means of production, instead of capitalists?
Hopefully this hasn’t ruined your Lemmy experience!
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.
Hopefully you’ll learn economics some day.
Better dead than red.
I mean workers could own the majority of company stocks and be the share holders in a twisted sense of communism.
Wow, this stats website is interesting. I checked a number of subs I used to frequent: r/thenetherlands, r/idiotsincars and r/Europe . All of them see meteoric rice in subscribers, but number of posts goes down significantly since 2020-2021 (r/idiotisincars is the outlier here, you can clearly see the pandemic, but once it resumes the trend is downward again).
It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren’t just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or was I just so used to it before that that I’d never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself ‘well, that’s just reddit’. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
Am I taking crazy pills or something? Subs and users get put down HARD over that sort of stuff (See r/politicalcompassmemes). I haven’t seen content like that unless I actively searched for that sort of stuff due to morbid curiosity. Would you mind sharing the subreddit/posts in question? Not to deny what you’re saying but I find it hard to empathize without any evidence.
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.
On occassion I also go back there and some comments of mine felt like were downvoted way harder than I felt usually about reddit.
Granted they were bad takes but I felt like responses were way harsher.Lemmy feels more direct in a sense that the discussions are more fact based instead of the aspects you already mentioned.
Well said! I agree with almost everything, except I still want algorithms. I think I’d say “free from algorithms that serve corporate interests” instead. Algorithms that help me find content I genuinely enjoy are sorely missed.
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’ve been slowly getting back into reddit lately. While I want Lemmy to thrive and will keep contributing to help it do so it’s still hardly a replacement for reddit. Compared to it, Lemmy is basically a single moderately active subreddit. If I had to name a type of person Lemmy at its current state is ideal for I’d say a left-wing activist type whose into tech and politics. While that has some overlap with what I’m interested about it still leaves out all my deepest passions and to be honest I feel really uncomfortable knowingly being in such an obvious echo chamber. I’d really wish there was more of the kind of users here that most of you probably dont want. Just to even things out a bit.
I’d say a left-wing activist type
Which is cringe inducing in looking for certain types of left-wingers. There are more tankies here than in other Internet forums I have seen. I’d be rich for penny I get for meeting tankies in Lemmy. They call out American imperialism, but then simp for Russia and China. Two wrongs don’t make a right and they expect to have one but not the other. Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if Russian bots have also infiltrated Lemmy to sow disinformation.
whose into tech
Doesn’t sound different from the early days of Reddit.
I see way more comments complaining about tankies on a regular basis than actual tankies
Is your defederated from hexbear and lemmy grad? They’re all pretty concentrated there
Yeah I agree. The apologia for Russia, China and just communism in general (or what ever you want to call it) fucks with your mind a bit. If Lemmy is the only social media you use it quickly starts to seem like this kind of thinking is far more common than what it really is and it can make one question their own sanity when reasonable sounding critizism of this is met with huge flood of downvotes. Especially if the discussion is happening on a place like lemmy.ml. As an outside observer I find it interesting as I haven’t really met people like this before but trying to engage with them is one of the most frustrating things I’ve experienced especially since a mod is going to ban you mid-discussion for “misinformation and bigotry” or something similar while it’s clear to everyone it’s just CCP level cencorship to silence all dissidence.
My problem with Lemmy is that it seems/ feels empty.
This might be a me-issue, not doing something right but all I see is technology & politics articles.
I’m subscribed to many communities (like multiple anime communities) and I barely to not see them). I quite miss the conversations on Lemmy.
However going back to Reddit seems to be no point either, everyone just repeat what another one said - or just people fighting each other.
For example; saw a Reddit thread about relationships. Everyone just echo-chamber “leave the relationship”. But what happened to adults just communicating to each other? Lol
I’ll be honest, there was a recent thread bitching about me that got taken down where the dominant complaint seemed to be “The jerk just posts every little thing that pops up in his head, fuck that guy, but ya sometimes he creates some interesting discussion”.
It was absolutely pathetic and banal and kinda shows why it doesn’t always pay to be contributing and organically creating engagement. I don’t post as much anymore cuz I just don’t have as much enthusiasm for participating anymore.
Edit: to be fair, one takeaway for me that nobody actually said was I wanted to be way more handsoff in my posts cuz it was a bit much to be as engaged/in the weeds as I was gettting and also, I prefer to let my posts and top-levels + responders to speak for me and I can avoid tampering or influencing the way the discourse plays out as to how the truth-seeking dynamic of it is consequently served
Yeah I know what you mean about the “empty” feeling. Lemmy.world site info on the tab has 2.2k users a day and under 6k a week. Those are miniscule numbers compared to almost anywhere on Reddit.
I too used to post daily here to help generate content but got down voted so badly the thread was deleted, so now I don’t post.
Edit- so many communities here are virtually dead. Federation may be a solution but it’s a far cry from the user base even a decent sized forum has.
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When it comes out how many hundreds of millions spez made of the back of unpaid mods, they’ll rightfully themselves why they’re doing all that free work just to make spez rich.
Reddit had a good run for over a decade, but as always with the internet, now a better thing will take its place.
As always with the internet… a better thing takes it’s place?
Friend. That isn’t usually the standard.
I still mourn Portal of Evil. It was my reddit before reddit.
I want an internet where admins don’t control the world. Where moderators don’t become megalomaniacs that get to control the way submissions and comments get banned without reason.
I want a place where someone’s passion for their unique hobby doesn’t get stripped away by corporate interests, exploitative third parties, and ad agencies.
I know it might be a pipe dream but I’ll keep trying to fight for what I believe.
As much as it’s distasteful, forums need admins. The bots and nazis habitually take over anywhere that doesn’t moderate.
While traffic has not changed substantially, many users report the quality of content and the kinds of posts that are surfaced on user homepages now seem different.
While traffic has not changed substantially
has not changed
It’s long write up with a misguiding title. No numbers to back anything after a protest phase. And with problems with API access, there won’t be any from unaffilated sources.
I did found my favorite communities dropped some in activity and I myself access it just like once in a week or two from a desktop, signed off. But it didn’t die. Default subs can’t care and most NSFW posters are still there.
The important thing though is that Lemmy grew a lot. And it’s now enough to have a hit of that reddit poison. And, arguably, it feels a little bit more personal.
It feels a lot more like Reddit used to be, back in the old days. It feels less like social media and more like actual people are here.
This. While yeah at times it certainly feels a bit empty, Lemmy feels like old Reddit or maybe even the days of Forums before. Interesting, engaged discussions, rather than vapid one-liners that reddit ultimately became.
Yeah and it even hits that wierd hardcore nerd vibe that reddit used to where it was like 50% programmers and IT people and you’d see computer geek in-jokes everywhere
Lemmy is radicalized. It won’t be even 20% as popular as Reddit. Keep projecting your false premises. A normal person won’t even consider getting into an environment full of tankies.
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The problem lies deeper. I see this shit even lemmy.world. I’ll be changing instances soon, to something that filters this trash out for me.
I’ve cut down on my Reddit use by a lot since the protests. I only occasionally browse the site, and I don’t comment on any subreddits save one niche one that hasn’t moved over to any other site.
If you find you want to go back to browse but limit the ad revenue, you can still reach it with some front ends like teddit.
Here is a good link: http://farside.link/teddit.com
Or, for example, you can directly access subreddits by appending /r/yoursubreddit to the end http://farside.link/teddit.com/r/memes
Sometimes an instance will be down. If so, try it again in a few minutes or in a new browser or tab.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In June, thousands of Reddit communities plunged into darkness – making their pages inaccessible to the public in a mass protest of corporate policy changes.
With rumors of an imminent IPO swirling, the company is under pressure to make money – and CEO Huffman has acknowledged as much, stating at the time of the change: “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”
Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota who has studied Reddit for years, echoed these sentiments.
“It bothers me that social media companies are increasingly restricting our abilities as researchers who care deeply about these sites and who believe they can provide many benefits for people,” Chancellor said.
Reddit’s corporate overlords were ultimately unmoved by the massive blackout, and most of the thousands of dark subreddits went back to normal after a few weeks.
Users who have long been dedicated to the site, some of whom have spent countless unpaid hours working to make it better, are exhausted and resentful – and many have simply left.
The original article contains 1,685 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Front page of the Ai bots.Not even feeling real some comments.
Yep; other then forgetting blind people exist, that was one of my main reasons for leaving. There were all these weird numbered accounts that were probably definitely just bots regurgitating someone else’s comment or post. I’m disappointed that wasn’t mentioned in the article.
