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SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit. @lemmy.ml
Lvxferre @lemmy.ml
db0

[db0] Reddit is a dead site running

dbzer0.com 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...

Reddit is a dead site running

The link contains db0's views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it's worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:

  • a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
  • the illusion that everything is fine based on "raw" numbers like engagement;
  • that Reddit was never a "good" site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
  • the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
  • the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.

The text mentions an article from Cory Doctorow. I've copied it to a pastebin, in case someone can't access it.

EDIT: I hope that the author doesn't mind, but I'll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it'll be a bit more accessible.

146 comments

  • theres enough of us here now to make lemmy viable, we're over the hump of any social media of getting enough people on that you can browse all day and still have real content.

    • I had my first "What time is it?!?" moment a couple days ago while browsing lemmy. Hours had passed, and I didn't even notice.

  • Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.

    The mods and tools are leaving. Will the last one to go, please turn off the lights?

  • First of all, I cannot speak for the current state of Reddit myself because I literally never go there anymore.

    I’ve been here for 5 days, and from my experience is this platform has gained a lot of traction even in that short timeframe. Hopefully it just doesn’t level off and then die suddenly.

    Most importantly though, this article hit on the nose of what my opinion is on what made Reddit great… great 3rd party platforms (I loved Apollo) and the moderation/customization of its subreddits. Everything was so hands off. Both of those are gone now. Reddit killed off the very things that made it unique and so good.

    In my 7 years on Reddit, I’d say over the last two-ish years we have slowly been seeing that leave. So many subs got shut down, and some definitely were questionable at best, but in it, Reddit organic feel and freedom. At first it was only the worst of the worst subs, but slowly more and more left. Not to mention moderation was being done by a shrinking number of people and it seemed the echo chamber in each individual sub got worse.

    Some changes were directly administration’s fault, others indirect to varying degrees.

    I’d argue Reddit has slowly been killing itself for awhile now, it’s just that the latest changes are the most abrupt, direct, and significant.

    • I've been checking Reddit once in a while. Mostly to archive a few things here and there, as people mention them in this sub. I feel like db0 is spot on, when talking about how the place is now bitter and hostile (it was already this way, but even more now). The current events were "just enough" to get rid of any sort of cooperativeness that you'd feel on the site before.

    • Yeah, I haven't been around here too long either, but it feels like something interesting is happening for sure. There's tons of memes, but there's definitely also some interesting non-meme content. It's shaping up to be a replacement for the core of what made Reddit work, hopefully while learning what not to do along the way. I know of at least 1-2 new apps on the way from seasoned 3rd party Reddit devs. Sync (!syncforlemmy@lemmy.world) will likely become my app of choice when it's available.

      The biggest issue I'm seeing right now is the amount of data we're asking server admins to store as far as long-term sustainability. In a Lemmy Support community, I saw one admin saying their 1k-user instance was gobbling up an extra GB of disk space daily. I wonder if the devs could overhaul the content distribution system to reduce the number of copies of data stored? Maybe clusters where each cluster is a "core federation" inner circle that shares/mirrors content with each other (basically a pact to distribute seeding the network), then more loosely federated servers that are allowed to view/share data without fully mirroring all relevant content.

      So many subs got shut down, and some definitely were questionable at best, but in it, Reddit organic feel and freedom

      While I agree that deplatforming should be very cautiously and judiciously approached, I will say that there is some content that should be blocked for the sake of preservation of tolerance. I don't care whether the topic of discussion is legal, I care if it's ethical. Hate speech has, and does, encourage real violence against innocent parties. When the goal post keeps moving for the sake of attracting investors or silence activism, rather than focusing solely on user experience, we start to see unreasonable restrictions on free communication. With federation and open source software, there's no way to stop neonazis from setting up their own network, provided DNS is willing to point to them, but that doesn't mean we should assist in growing their ideology/platform.

      Not to mention moderation was being done by a shrinking number of people and it seemed the echo chamber in each individual sub got worse.

      I wonder if this might be a reflection on increasingly difficult times for many people as cost of living exceeds income? Moderation takes real work. It's unpaid and generally quite thankless. If would-be mods are bogged down with real-world problems, they'll have less energy to devote to volunteering.

    • There is certainly a change in character over there. I think we’re at the tail end of long, gradual decline. I’m not sure where along the way we dropped off - probably some proverbial frog boiling going on. But undoubtedly the quality of discourse in say, 2010-2015 was significantly better than today.

      • That's a decent point I would say. I would say even pre 2010 was better, but I was still lurking at that point. It took me years to feel comfortable enough to create an account, probably because most posts were tech stuff that I didn't understand enough to have a valuable opinion.

        Sometime around 2016 it became really bad. Like really, really bad. I don't think the election was the reason for it, but all those bots certainly didn't help. Politics would literally creep into every comment section, even pics of fluffy kittens. The political bots seemed to get quieter after ~2018, but the vitriol, aggressive comments and people feeling the need to dunk on each other only seemed to get worse and worse.

        There was a distinct point when I realized the site had changed when I made a reply to add some additional information to a commentors point and they immediately thought of it as a direct personal attack against themselves, not someone just furthering discussion.

  • This is becoming like the "dead MMO" meme. Just because you no longer use it doesn't mean it's dead.

    • I think that it's different. The author identifies two core points responsible for the popularity of the platform. And it's easy to see why they're so important:

      • open API → third party devs coding features to use with the platform → higher user experience → higher user retention
      • hands-off approach to community → Reddit being used in ways that the community managers didn't expect → Reddit more suitable for a wider audience → larger potential market

      By killing those two things Reddit might make some short-term profit, but it'll be at expense of the value of the platform and associated company. Once that value goes too low, the profit margin itself will go down, encouraging further measures, that in turn will degrade its value even further.

      Using MMOs as analogy what the Reddit devs did was to remove core mechanics essential for the main gameplay cycle, and left the players only with the optional quests and minigames. Even if you don't really care about the core gameplay, you'll eventually get bored, and leave. No sane game dev would do this, and yet that's what Reddit did.

      There's an additional factor db0 didn't mention through this text, that I believe to be essential for Reddit's "aliveness": user trust. It's hard to measure, but it's what prompts users to "play along" the platform and other users, explaining the bitterness and hostility - because for your typical user, everyone besides himself is "part of the platform". And this tends to create a vicious cycle, since hostile interactions make people trust a platform even less.

  • IMO it is like the foundations of the building have been undermined , I do agree with the author , even if reddit looks ok numbers wise the heart and soul has been removed.

  • LOL at the Cory Doctorow reference on medium:

    • For some reason Medium allowed me to read the article, so I copypasted it to a pastebin. I'll also link it in the OP, fuck those walls online.

      • Rather than breaking up ad-tech, banning surveillance ads, and opening up app stores, which would make tech platforms stop stealing money from media companies through ad-fraud, price-gouging and deceptive practices, governments introduce laws requiring tech companies to share (some of) their ill-gotten profits with a few news companies.

        This makes the news companies partners with the tech giants, rather than adversaries holding them to account, and makes the news into cheerleaders for massive tech profits, so long as they get their share. Rather than making it easier for the news to declare independence from Big Tech, we are fusing them forever.

        Holy crap, I never thought about it that way.

146 comments