Reddit now won't let non-logged in users see subreddits until they've been "reviewed"
This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.
Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it's only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.
This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don't really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we're (along with other competitors, we're not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.
Kinda good since devs getting their systems stress tests while service is still young and alpha testers don't removed about minor inconvience unlike Normie's stream...
This FrEe SerVIcE MusT JUst WurK, Rheee
Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we're going to come out much stronger for it.
Imagine the alternative--the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.
That could've theoretically killed us. Now it won't happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking "yep, security is important, that's true..."
It does help when your opponents are stupid
Don't hate us cuz you ain't us reddibros.
spez and Musk burning their services to the ground
Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn't really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don't have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.
The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn't particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren't going away. The bots don't care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can't repost the same stale content perpetually.
I don't think reddit is going to just die. But it's popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it's a shell of its former self.
It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.
It's not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they've turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it'll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.
I completely agree. I hope Lemmy will steadily add features.
If you install the duckduckgo browser and turn on app tracking protection, you'll see just how much data is harvested from mobile apps, which is genuinely scary.
This is why these sites are pushing the mobile app. It's much harder to prevent trackers through an app than it is through a web browser.
I just installed this and am trying the app tracking protection (it's in beta, for those reading who haven't used it). Shockingly, Candy Crush Soda doesn't come up with a list of junk being tracked. whew or something
Here's a screenshot from Discord:
Some of that seems unnecessary (device boot time). But it's not all scary spooky tracking. Some permissions/information is required for certain features.
For example, you can't rotate your app UI if you're not allowed to know screen orientation. Or maybe they do a low power mode if device battery is low, or a warning that the app might not function well if the OS or device is old.
Not saying you're wrong or that Discord is right. Just pointing out that a long list of permissions isn't on its own a bad thing, if those permissions are required for specific features, and not just for the sake of data harvesting.
Christ.
Do you happen to have a screenshot of the data that is harvested? I am genuinely curious.
Examples: I turned on the duckduckgo protection, opened the official app and visited a couple posts.
https://files.catbox.moe/sqbg87.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/nj7y8d.jpg
How is DuckDuckGo Browser able to see what data other apps are trying to collect? I would have expected Android's app sandboxing to block that sort of thing. Does the device need to be rooted or something?
When you turn on app tracking protection, it activates an always-on VPN that funnels the trackers to a deadzone so that they can't actually phone home.
Just wish duck duck go had PWA support. It would be my default browser if so.
Just search TrackerControl on the Fdroid store.
The Mozilla VPN app has a feature to block some ads and trackers on your internet connection. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-change-my-privacy-features
The enshittification proceeds apace. Fuck u/spez.
Someone should answer the phone because we all fucking called it.
What's next in the Reddit bingo?
The removal of old reddit?
Limiting the number of posts we can see per day as a normal user?
Buy upvotes?
The slippery slope logical fallacy doesn't count when there is actual factual evidence.
Honestly, I'm surprised Old Reddit has lasted this long at all, even before all this.
Buy upvotes?
The sad part is, I can absolutely see this happening. Not as an outright "gib money get updoot" but something more roudabout but effectively the same thing.
"Be heard louder with Reddit Premium! Your comments on posts will be displayed closer to the top for others to see!"
To reiterate, the above is just something I mocked up. May not be upvotes, but still rigging threads by paying Reddit money. I just wouldn't be surprised at this point.
A new tier: reddit ultimate
With reddit ultimate you get all the benefits of reddit premium plus you get the ability to link your online and offline personas as well as a weekly free loot box.
Loot boxes (8USD each or 10 for 50USD) may contain one of the following perks:
A as a new democracy oriented initiative, for 50USD you get to dethrone one mod for a month.
The loot boxes would actually be able to get me back, not to buy them of course, but to see the havoc it would bring to r/Conservative.
Include me in the screenshot when this happens!
It's sort of what World of Warcraft did with gold.
The gold farms were making TONS of money selling illegal gold in much the same way upvote farms are making a killing.
Upvotes are free for them to give, and they would have a money printer on their hands.
The slippery slope is only a fallacy when you're making leaps. To go from enacting exorbitant API fees to removal of old Reddit is a logical step so doesn't make for a fallacy. Intent also plays a part for the same reason. If you can prove that enacting exorbitant API fees was for the purpose of restricting user access then limiting number of posts for users not logged in is a logical step. Slippery slope gets a bad rap but it can be a valid point and not a fallacy when done properly.
People get "slippery slope" wrong. Not every sequence of events is a slope.
The idea of slippery slope is that one small action is said to kick off an unstoppable chain reaction. It doesn't just mean that A leads to B. It means that A inevitably leads to B, even if it didn't intend to, and B happening can't be stopped once A happens. And maybe even the people that wanted A don't want B but can't stop it, because we've slipped and we're sliding uncontrollably down the slope. That's the whole concept, that we're stuck sliding.
Reddit doing one restrictive action, and then later choosing to do another restrictive action, probably doesn't apply. There's seemingly no slope, just an easily foreseeable sequence of events.
What’s next in the Reddit bingo?
See what stupid shit Musk pulled with Twitter a month ago, and that'll be what Reddit does in a few days.
Reddit will go away for non logged in users.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they removed the ability to comment.
Well have a look at this and reflect on what beautiful behaviours it will bring forward:
Crypto is #4 in trending topics.
Reddit is Twitter now.
lmao I can't believe the doomers were right and reddit tied itself to crypto bullshit. Absolutely unreal.
That whole crypto thing is scary as hell.
Unless you hold your secret keys then you don't really own your money.
Everything you listed is on the table for them. I hope they do it so it dies quickly.
Anyone can easily buy upvotes.
He's just trying to protect people from inappropriate content. We all know how harmful inappropriate content can be for children unless it's paired with targeted advertisements, which mitigate the danger.
Had me in the first half
No wonder King Steven was so incensed when the Landed Gentry cut off access to the site from commoners; it's a privilege he reserves as a Royal Prerogative....
One wonders when His Royal Doucheness is going to invoke Prima Nocta.
His Royal Doucheness
I prefer King Steven the Turd....
I read this as Stephen King and became very confused
I'm now only on lemmy and YouTube. Never got into tictok or Facebook, left and deleted reddit and Twitter. I'm in a happy place.
I called this happening right when Spez said he wanted to emulate elon. The other shoe has dropped
I assume eventually all subreddits will be locked to non registered users on mobile…and PC
I'd guess it does the news website thing. Scroll down and get meet with a create account blocking barrier.
Yeah. Users who can stomach it should be sneaking back and pointing more refugees to Lemmy. Honestly it should be bots being like "If you like r/pics stay here BUT if you like r/pics and hate Reddit's policies? Try c/pics@lemmy.world" and just have the bot script for communities the fediverse has equivalents for. We're growing still but it's not like I'm seeing much Lemmy mentions in the discussion threads yet. That ship is sinking though.
Enshittification continues…
Remember, corporations are never your friend. I remember when redditors thought spez was "one of them".
One of them... who was a mod on r/jailbait.
This is something that really needs to be brought up regularly.
There are plenty of valid criticisms beyond character assassination. It is my understanding that any mod could add any user as a mod of their subreddit.
It's easy to get corrupted by money and success. Has been shown a myriad of times in any stage of human history.
In the beginning, spez might have been "one of us", but he gradually shifted away from that while the goodwill of his community towards his persona was upheld.
while the goodwill of his community towards his persona was upheld.
He probably really was one of us. To be honest, most of Reddit had no idea who tf spez was before this. Anytime he did something terrible, it would be big then disappear in a week.
Then, since he was so removed from a redditor's in the day to day, all would be well and he'd be forgotten. The local mods and reddit admins were who everyone would direct their hate to.
Mortals defending profits for corporations over humans rights. What could go wrong?
Well, they don't always start out as "corporations". He may have been one of them, till the glamour of profits came into the picture.
he never was. It was always a business. Do you remember they started the site with faking users? They were always a for-profit company. It's kinda cringe to think he ever was one.
They're doing great work on their destroy any positive community sentiment Speedrun, it's been shocking decision after terrible change
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it compares to Twitter's attempt, Elon Musk seems to have a lot of natural talent at bad decisions.
A techbro saw Elon's dumpster-fire handling of twitter and went "Yes, this makes sense!" Oh Spez, this is why we don't idolize idiots.
all to sell some ads
All to make the company look like it has revenue so they can scam people on their IPO
sigh :(
Looks like more efforts to sanitize the place in prep for an ipo.
The execs are almost certainly ready to cash out and retire from that annoying gig 🤣
But just wait until a wallst level CEO gets hold of the reigns.
I can't even imagine it being about the IPO anymore.
There might have been some concerns about profitability numbers for an IPO, but I don't think that's something you can right in a hurry. If the investors didn't like "N quarters of losing money", will they be that much more impressed by "we slashed and burnt big chunks of the platform, but we don't really have any clue if this will stick?"
More importantly, they had a strong narrative they could sell investors: They were the "anti-social media social media". Users remained largely in control of their curation, the content was less ephemeral and more indexable. They were perfectly positioned to differentiate themselves as other big players went whole hog on the "the algorithm is mostly standing between you and what you want to see" models.
Does that narrative hold up when their user base is either fleeing or feels held hostage?
It's 100% about the IPO. Other large websites have gotten into trouble with the credit card companies by offering porn. It's why Pornhub removed unverified amateur content, OnlyFans considered not allowing porn, and probably others. Your platform absolutely plummets in value if people have a hard time spending money there. Hiding unverified subs sounds exactly like this kind of move.
Having tried /r/politics, /r/eve, and /r/valheim, I was going to point out how I didn't get the screen you got. However, /r/nyt gets this message. As an aside, /r/politics, /r/eve, and /r/valheim are verified while /r/nyt is not is interesting to me. Upon further testing, /r/nytimes works. Seeing how /r/nyt has 411 subscribers, while /r/nytimes has 8,431 subscribers, I think smaller, less well known subreddits will run into issues while larger subreddits or subreddits that are more well known will have no accessibility issues.
It's also interesting that this block doesn't exist if you navigate to old.reddit.com/r/nyt instead of just reddit.com/r/nyt. You think they would have just repurposed the page that asked if you if you were over 18 before going to a nsfw subreddit for this task, but old.reddit.com seems completely overlooked as of now.
old.reddit.com on the Firefox Android app looks bad, but I wonder if someone could make an extension to automatically redirect users to old.reddit.com when navigating to reddit.com, as well as an extension that changes the layout of the page to something more mobile friendly, similar to RES but for your phone's browser. That might make reddit usable on mobile without the official app until old.reddit.com goes away or they try to implement some sort of user agent string check.
You think they would have just repurposed the page that asked if you if you were over 18 before going to a nsfw subreddit for this task, but old.reddit.com seems completely overlooked as of now.
Doubt it was overlooked. I moderated a larger subreddit and I can tell you that the stats for old.reddit are tiny compared to the rest so it's not worth the cost of implementing. Further if you use old.reddit you probably already have a dislike for the app and will rather abandon the content then install the app. Finally old.reddit is used more by old-school redditors which tend to be the vocal minority that will complain about the change the loudest. So overall, ignoring old.reddit is propably the smarter decision from reddits perspective... ¯(ツ)/¯
I have the extension "Old Reddit Redirect" in my firefox mobile. You need a version with custom addon collections enabled (beta or a fork like fennec on fdroid), then you can install every addon by adding it to your collection, and most of them work.
If RES or an equivalent addon could produce a good mobile layout you could use them in the same way, but I don't know about that.
They're simply trying to prevent any nut job spinning up /r/watchpeopledie15 and generating a press wildfire again
That's not a bad thing. I wouldn't consider watchpeopledie healthy for anyone.
Anyone noticed how Lemmy links are blocked and shadowbanned in Reddit?
Yep. There is a metric fuckton of tampering across the board, some of which is sub specific.
It's the same kind of things they pulled with WatchRedditDie a long time ago but now it's site wide with little to no subtlety. The rules are imaginary and meaningless, more so than they already were.
Wow really?! Reddit has turned into a total dumpster fire
Turned?
Buddy, that fire was lit years ago. All that happened was Steve threw a gascan in
I moderate a small niche community and the post where I linked to the Lemmy version of the sub is still up and the link works. I logged out and checked it to make sure it's actually there and available. Are they doing this manually and focusing on larger subreddits?
I wish there was a way to accelerate widespread adoption of Lemmy.
Reddit has been awesome, but the community deserves a decentralized platform free from bullshit like this.
It's probably for the benefit of Lemmy that the grow is slow, it gives the servers plenty of time to upgrade. It's already been struggling somewhat with the influx of new users, it may have become totally unusable with 100x, 1000x the user's etc.
Be patient.
I find the size quite pleasing. Sure there are more posts and stuff to see, but here it’s possible to actually have a conversation with someone and not have your comment buried in 3k other comments.
But that being said, I would like to see Reddit crash and burn, so business practices like that doesn’t become more common.
And you are right - decentralisation is the future.
Isn't that exactly what they are doing?
Reddit desindexed by Google in 3....2....1....
That's such a great point. That'd be hilarious.
That may be intentional. I know they want ai companies to have to pay to train on all that human written conversation. Right now it can be searched and accessed on google cache.
Reddit and AI companies are all financially backed by the same people. Anything they lose on Reddit (which they aren't) they gain on the other side. Plus, bots make this unlikely. Who wants an AI trained on spam bots and automods?
Don't let Spez make it sound like everyone working at Reddit is broke and needs pitying. He wouldn't be CEO if he wasn't on CEO pay.
This is gonna work SO WELL, as per Twitter teachings
Really trying to force people to install and browse with the app. I'll never do it.
Never installed the Facebook app either. Just too much data harvesting, too invasive.
Deleted Facebook, deleted reddit, deleted Twitter. Never looked back.
For now old.reddit still works.
Honestly I'm amazed. Old Reddit is still functionally unchanged over the past several years and honestly a great experience. And Reddit must know exactly how many people are using it because they're visiting an alternate domain.
Can't imagine it has much longer...
Weeks maybe a month before old reddit goes away. Reddit has to as it loses them advertising money and those that use it are those Reddit dislike.
It's only a great experience for some. The vast majority of people, attention, eyeballs, and money go to things like tiktok and Instagram.
My operating assumption here is that Reddit can collect more data to sell if people are logged in and use their app.
Does not matter if you destroy 75% of the usefulness of the system if the remaining 25% can be more effectively monetized.
exactly. People keep saying Spez is an idiot. Him and the board ran the numbers, knew there'd be attrition and still think they'll come out ahead so they went with it. They expected people to get pissed off but for enough suckers to stick around to make things profitable under the new paradigm
There's a reason so many sites force users to sign in if they reject cookies. It's all about tracking data.
Does reddit have an ideology ? Without one, I think it is very difficult surviving on long run even if founders were on good will
Do no evil😳😂
Yeah this move has killed all interaction with Reddit for me. I only open a reddit page now if it's in my google results for something I'm searching, but the last few times I've hit this message. There's thousands of subs that are never going to get reviewed because they're small and I'm sure at the absolute end of their queue.
reddit and twitter are literally competing to see who can destroy their platform first and unfortunately they're both winning
I can't believe neither has lost it yet. I keep seeing public entities talk about their Twitter page, and I keep seeing subreddits active.
Old.reddit is next, the new Reddit design is shit on purpose to make you use their app.
They've promised to not remove old.reddit ("old.reddit isn't going anywhere), but who knows whether they'll keep their promise. At the end of the day, if it actually is removed, it'll likely draw even more people to Lemmy
This promise was made by Steve Huffman. You’ve probably heard the name before as the dude that blatantly lied, then doubled down on the lie even AFTER audio recordings were released that completely refuted his lies.
He and all of Reddit corp are not to be trusted.
They promised not to fuck API users over too.
Oh honey. Does remind me bot work here?
Knowing Spez and Knothing track record I seriously doubt it.
With mlmym.org, I don't even need old.reddit anymore to get the same feeling while browsing lemmy.
The second Digg 4.0 speedrun any%
I’d posit they went Digg v4 when they updated the site to remove the ability to see upvote and downvote counts for posts and comments, and artificially inflated scores on the same day. /all/ went from interesting stuff to… promotions, ads, and rubbish. Also when they made /popular/, then turned /all/ into… the same thing.
It's interesting because they justify it by saying it's for compliance (eg, because logged out users haven't answered affirmatively that they're over 18). Gives them cover when we all know the real reason they're locking it down
Just makes me say, “oh, fuck off”.
Wasn't one of Spez's bucket list to have his own private bunker for the apocalypse? This is it. Secured. Contained. Protected. Isolated. But also dead.
Good thing I left there when Sync shutdown.
yup. I'm going to be so happy when Sync for Lemmy lands
Fuck spez
Try old.reddit.com in the browser. It is not pleasant but it works on mobile.
don't you dare bad mouth old.reddit...ah, who am i kidding, idgaf about reddit anymore.
A few weeks ago someone explained you can still access the old mobile version of reddit via https://www.reddit.com/.i
Whoa
Amazing
If you pop into r/compact you can pick up a script for the Firefox tampermonkey add-on that will make old.reddit look like the old .compact interface. Very handy when reddit was still worth using.
Has Elon Musk secretly bought Reddit as well?
They're following the same model of (attempted) monetization.
Meanwhile Elon admits advertiser revenue is down 50% from before, when they were already losing money.
death rattles of a dying app
Search is broken in Reddit right now (for me at least). Best part is, it doesn't always report an error, just pretends there are no results.
Oh, and Reddit Status doesn't know yet.
Lol reddit search has always been almost entirely worthless. I know search can be hard, but it has to be by design.
I'm not talking about inherent brokenness that was always there.
There is a specific search with a non-dictionary word, and limited to specific sub, that always worked, but it's not working right now, returning zero results. Reddit search is fully broken right now (except for finding sub names if you don't limit the search to a sub).
Problem is still persisting btw. And Reddit Status still reporting no problems.
Ironically, if they spent a lot of time improving it, Reddit might've been far more profitable. A big advantage Reddit has is all of the genuine conversation and questions for things people Google. Reddit could have weaponized it by becoming a direct competitor to Google, and I think they would've actually done really well.
Reddit search has always been broken, even when it was working.
Search was always broken. When have you ever found anything you were looking for with it?
When have you ever found anything you were looking for with it?
Always.
So it’s improved? Always had to use google to search Reddit. Ridiculous.
I only use(d) it in a specific way. For example searching for a sport club (non-dictionary) name, limiting the search to that sport's sub, and sorting by new).
For general search, a search engine would indeed probably work much better.
Problem found and solved according to Reddit Status btw, and confirmed by my own tests.
Did Elon Musk enforce post view limit ? I don't know about that
I think its at 1.000 posts per day for regular people, 10.000 for Twitter Blue Subscribers
And People without an account cant see any posts anymore
Yes and you can’t view anything unless you go to twitter
Hold my web archiver
They really are morons.
I generally refrain from considering myself more intelligent than others, because.. well, it’s just a safe bet, but also because they probably have optics on something and know something I don’t.
But this.. what the shit is actually happening? It’s like they’re watching everything Musk does and just.. decides to copy it?
They saw Musk admit Twitter is income negative, right? Right?
Guys?
well spez also admitted in the ama that reddit is "not profitable"
Mark Zuckerberg was planning on introducing some subscription service like Twitter checkmarks to Meta, but at least he responded to questions about it in his comments section. Iirc the program might even have been delayed due to its apathy from users, but I haven't heard much about its plans lately. At least he understood how stupid he sounded once he spoke with consumers.
Somehow the same content become appropriate just because some people know how to download an app.
Good. This further hinders their ad revenue.
Spez suckin some musky dic
Stop. Its already dead.
So glad I rewrote all my comments before getting out of there.
install Reddit enhancement suite and run this script in the developer tools console:
var $domNodeToIterateOver = $('.del-button .option .yes'), currentTime = 0, timeInterval = 1500; $domNodeToIterateOver.each(function() { var _this = $(this); currentTime = currentTime + timeInterval; setTimeout(function() { _this.click(); }, currentTime);});
You even keep your karma that way
I have already batch rewritten everything.
Just few thing for the script you posted.
they made this change months ago, nothing new
They're getting desperate.
Honestly from where I sit seems like the opposite. They are confident they are doing whats best for them, not the platform. They are cleaning house and setting up for new monetization schemes of the platform. Removing people from the platform they can't harvest data from is a net positive from their point of view.
Looks like they’re using a bullshit excuse to funnel people into their mobile app.
How else are they gonna track you if you don't use their shitty app
I genuinely believe that Reddit and Twitter are concerned about AI scraping their website thus allowing users to access the data without visiting the actual websites.
This, to me, is another benefit of the fediverse. These instances don’t care if AI is scraping their data because they aren’t in it to monopolize the user created content. They don’t create the content and they recognize they don’t own the content.
So long as the instances are financially solvent, they are happy.
In other words, "censorship" -- "We shape this site our way and there is nothing you can do about it."
Aaaand that is the final nail in the coffin for me. Rip in pepperonis plebbit.
Hear me out.
Elon destroys twitter and eventually makes it a joke and no one can be trusted cause the process of verification for that is a joke now.
Spez destroys reddit. Shuts down 3rd party apps. The majority of people have to decided whether to stay or leave.
The SAG and WGA go on strike because of wage issues, now shows like Last Week Tonight and other shows that take deep dives into the problems of government can't make shows that inform people.
All of this is, in my opinion, to shut down public conversations about many issues and the timing is also coincidental since the 2024 election is coming up and in a time everyone is divided, there is no comfortable place to communicate. The curiosity is if trumps social media and other right leaning communities are facing the same disruptions. Not saying reddit and twitter are bastions of the "left" but twitter and in particular reddit have been a place for public good. Now twitter is a hallway that is almost completely covered in fecal matter and reddit is a poorly designed website that blinds you with advertisements and OF spam bots.
Elon I can see doing it maliciously, because he benefits from a Republican government. Edge Lord Jr has probably doing it because Senior told him it was a good idea. The survivability of these companies are not in their interest because why care if you can just close it down claim the sale and go make more money somewhere else.
But the biggest one is the "Late Night" shows. Most of them are the way some Americans get informed about some of the more deeply rooted problems in America. You can look at shows like John Olivers, Last Week Tonight and maybe Late Night with Seth Meyers. Shows very critical of Republicans and trump in particular, completely crippled by the SAG and WGA strikes.
In total the information delivery systems we are all used too, have been dirupted and I'm seriously questioned its timing.
You think the writer's strike is part of a conspiracy to prop up Republicans for an election in a year and a half?
No, I'm saying the people that control their wages have been slowly moving towards the point of protest so the shows they write for don't air because they are fighting a noble battle against shitty wages.
Seems more simple and likely to me that the "normal" corrupt and crony capitalism we've allowed to take over our government and big businesses is just reaching even more for the next dollar, like they always do. Although the leadership at Twitter and Reddit seems particularly bad, maybe because their product would appear even more unsustainable with proper transparency.
It's true that capitalism and public interest are generally incompatible. Though this seems a bit more nefarious, considering that actions at both Twitter and Reddit have only continued to devalue these institutions, no?
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, though. America will escape this rut when people realize it's Big Cor'prit that we should be afraid of and not so much Big Guv'mint; the former is a virus that corrupts the body. And the immune system (checks-and-balances, separation of powers, etc.) have largely failed.
From my readings in the last few weeks, there does seem to be some sort of coordinated effort to control public messaging. There was/is a discussion about how the right wing is suing and chilling any and all efforts to expose and educate about disinformation. The lawsuits were so menacing that they even wanted to go after the students of the classes run by professors they were suing for teaching about present day disinformation in our society. It isn't just professors, it includes writers and journalists and groups that targeted disinformation. This is being done under the banner of 'bias'. Opposing, criticizing, or pushing back against far right wing messaging is attacked and sued as intolerable bias.
It's believed that this is to clear the way for a massive onslaught of disinformation and conspiracy theories entering into the 2024 election cycle. As far as what's happening to some social media sites, the timing is suspect. Reddit and Twitter were among the most effective at getting out the blue vote. Now they are in shambles.
Glad I'm not the only one considering this. Been in conversation with another long-time user of Reddit (>15 years) and let's just say that if the goal was to suppress grassroots mobilization of progressive coalition, this is what you would do. We already know how compromised the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg are... And we saw just how much we had to pull the teeth of Reddit to do something about The_Donald...
I often wonder if Trump would have been elected in 2016 if Jon Stewart was still on the air. Now imagine if right-wing groups controlled Reddit, Twitter, and clamped down on all late-night talk shows that help pierce right-wing ignorance chambers of this country.
I'm glad I'm not alone either. I'm thinking he could of swayed the independent voters who were confused but, to be honest things have changed in such a crazy weird way, I don't think it would of mattred. His faithful friend John Oliver was doing his absolute best but the message fell between the mass noise brought on by the maga crowd.
Some people suffer from reddit nostalgia and forget some of the most disgusting subs and activity during the early days was common place but as time went on it rooted them out and forged a better sense of community. Then trump emboldened idiots to be idiots and cultists obey their leader. Questionable people bought up share and spez suffered a stroke after Elon gave him the boner after telling him how much power he has.
Twitter was ruined for the reasons you state, but thinking it was for the west is untrue. One of the biggest investors was the Saudi king, a ruler in an area where Twitter was used to organize actual revolts and revolutions. The destruction of social media is definitely being done in prep for elections. The strikes seem like coincidences as far as the election goes.
Buy it, kill it. 44 bill is chump change to the
Many people benefit from its downfall, its not exclusively to the election i just used it because I live in the "west" and I can see it disrupting a very critical election because 4 more years has of trump is gonna be bad for everyone....
I think the reason is something much bigger than the American election. Just not sure what yet.
The election is rigged anyway. Choose between turd and asshole, both of which are selected by the establishment.
Until people can vote with cryptographically safe identity control, there is no reason to trust manual vote counting in my opinion.
Sounds like a good reason to delete all your content that they profit off of and stop using it...
It won't even let you sort comments until you log in, like ffs
I go there for a couple of smaller subreddits I still visit (barely starting out on Lemmy, tough). But a lot of content seems to be slowing down, like 2 day-old threads on the home tab (I only go on desktop with adblockers).
This is obviously anecdotal, and have no numbers to back it up. We'll have to see how it goes into the future. Reddit just keeps pissing off their core users time and time again.
My anecdotal experience is pretty much the same. My home country's sub (the only one I really look at "new" on) slowed down a lot since the Reddit blackout. Before, you could expect a new post every 15 minutes or so. Now? A whole day can go by with one or two new posts. It's weird. I still see the usual names in the comments, but posting in general is extremely slow. My "Best" tab in the homepage (this is old reddit mind you, I don't know if that's a thing on nuddit) also holds the same few posts at the top for the entire day, whereas it used to cycle a lot faster before the blackout.
I've noticed the same thing. Subs that used to have a vibrant /new feed now seem to have just a few recent posts.
