Dead reddit theory
Random Rant: I feel like reddit died after they banned all the "unmoderated" communities. All the posts became sanitized. Now reddit is adding AI and streaks and NFTs to keep people on a platform that has no more content.
Reddit died imo when they limited API calls for app developers who made incredible 3rd party apps for the platform. Maybe theyve since fixed it, I wouldnt know since I felt cheated having supported baconreader and boost for their hard work in making the reddit exerience feel so premium. I tried the official reddit app and It was buggy garbage at the time. So IMO they pushed away a good chunk of their userbase even before the whole politicapocolypse, bann waves, community removals, etc.
While lemmy is not a perfect replacement in terms of numbers. I feel that every upvote and comment has more meaning here. People here are generally more productive and insightful. It makes me wonder how much bot traffic reddit had prior to the changes. Selfishly I kind of hope lemmy stays where it is in terms of popularity. You all seem generally really cool and It would be hard to find the real ones In the sea of reddit-esque nonsense.
I was a daily redditor since mid-2011, but I had no issue dropping it the day they announced the third-party api changes and came over to lemmy soon after. I could see the writing on the wall with that change.
So glad Boost exists for Lemmy.
Same! Boost Is definitely the best ive found. Even the free version is incredible the ads only apear in a tiny box at the bottom in the comments section. Super unintrusive, I supported Immediately after testing out other options and landing back on boost.
I just wish they could somehow implement saving posts and going back through upvoted content similar to how it worked on reddit, but i understand that there are probably technical limitations and less financial insentive.
Yeah I also hope Lemmy doesnt get more popular. This is a good group.
That was the major sign post, indeed
it was the same time, a article reported that reddit was mostly 50% bots, what acoincidence. i can see it being bots mostly, because many subs have a bot posts people were accusing it of. non-propaganda bots can come in the hundreds, or thousands of account by 1 individual too.
Interested if you have an article or video you are referencing here, would love to read/watch
Firing Victoria was the beginning of the end.
Cake day: 23 October 2023
Guess what made me leave lol
halloween?
Reddit was nice when it was a niche...
Hey, fuck you man, I'm not cool, you're cool!
You forgot the "woah there partner" vpn block page
Partner or pardner?
Since everyone knows it is pardner, it is just assumed that we will automatically do the translation in our heads:-P
I just remembered the one that really pisses me off: 'to use reddit anonymously you must log in'.
Like cant you just give me a "are you a robot" test and let me use a VPN????
Yeah this pisses me off so bad when I need to search for something and the only answers are on reddit. Is there a way around this?
I use RedLib but I make it even easier by having an extension LibRidirect that automatically redirects reddit links to privacy frontends such as RedLib. It's really easy to use and I don't even have to think about using Reddit ever again. Win-win in my book.
All my favorite niches have gone to Discord.
Freaking Discord. A black hole where anything useful is buried under mountains of folks shooting the breeze. Oh, and with a useless search function.
Every. Single. Niche. Even self-hosting ones like localllama.
Reddit may be dead and enshittified, but at least it was accessible to search engines :(
Hardly matters though, as they just randomly shadowban me anyway...
I wonder if discord shuts down due to lets say its predator problem, will this be a library of alexandria type event? Obviously wed attempt to grab as much as we can before the "library" burns down, but how? To my understanding every server owner would have to install a bot to grab all of that data themselves.
Someone please tell me im wrong and why because I hate this.
a library of alexandria type event
It already feels like that, because useful knowledge just fades away into chitchat in Discord.
But yeah, I think it would be. There are already some scraping tools (and apparently, some chat archives built by hackers), but without some crazy hack, there's just no way around communities being invite only.
I'm doing everything I can to move anything remotely important to me off Discord and into other mediums just in case this scenario happens. Or, even more likely, Discord starts asking for age verification shit. I've already let my friends know the day they cross THAT line is the day I will stop using Discord.
No, you're absolutely right. Discord is incredibly impermanent. Besides the lack of being able to search for things or split conversations into separate threads for every topic because it's a chat tool, not a forum, as soon as a server disappears, everything hosted on that server goes as well (as far as end users are concerned. I'm sure Discord can pull stuff from their backend).
We need a return of niche forum communities and the like for the sake of the preservation of information.
Yeah I still don't get why people use Discord, it's so shitty and knowledge just gets locked up there to die
Well look here, for instance:
https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mpk2va/announcing_localllama_discord_server_bot/
Looks like a combination of:
And this is literally a self-hosting community… Look at the comments, they all know Discord is bad, but the mood is “WTF else are ya gonna do?”
For some context, localllama itself is kinda a refuge from Twitter/Linkedin spaces filled with Tech Bro stink, and it’s already been shattered by random niche LLM Discords (like BeaverAI, which you will find in another thread).
I recently downloaded a mod for a game from a custom content creator who hosted their own webpage. I experienced issues, so I went to see if there was a support page of common issues. Instead, their "support" was a link to their Discord server.
Which means instead of an FAQ page, or an email account that they could respond to in their own time, this person preferred to moderate a live chatroom where people ask the same questions over and over again? On the one hand, as a user of their cc, it's reassuring to have someone who worked on the content there to live-answer any questions. I got my problem solved quickly, so the user experience is definitely positive. On the other hand, I would've thought keeping up essentially a "customer support" Discord to be far more tedious and frustrating than maintaining other common alternatives.
I just can't imagine having the time and energy to stay on top of a Discord where everyone is upset and you have to repeat yourself constantly. It sounds like a living Hell.
oh yea, some ytber tried to get people in a sub that was criticizing them to thier DISCORD, everyone knew they were trying to silence them, glad people stuck around and kept the sub around.
Man, Lemmy on Reddit is like having to listen to someone who constantly brings up their ex in conversation whilst constantly telling you how little they care.
"Wow, my ex was in the news again. He's running around downtown in a trench coat flashing people and trying to punch them in the nuts"
"Yeah, okay, we get it. You dated the Nutsack Bandit. No need to keep bringing it up."
I thought they started shadow banning anyone talking about Lemmy at one point?
Adding NFT? In 2025? They really are desperate..
Isn't it amazing that Reddit Gold was actually one of their better ideas to derive income from users?
they want to paywall subs eventually, plus becoming a facebook clone down the line, where the datamining features included, like requiring your REAL ID, facial recognition, i suspect thier bannings propensity will get more intense as facebook too if you try to "lie" on your credentials.
They already require your real ID if you are in the UK
like requiring your REAL ID
Remember when you didn't even need to give an email address to sign up?
NFT is kinda old thing? Got one for free in 2022 and can find info about from 2021. The only notable thing was required password for gosh darn thing.
Got one for free
That's the main problem. NFTs are almost free to create.
It's run by a fucking dickhead worshipping Musk.
Yeah, and Reddit will permaban anyone talking about "political violence", ideas like punching Nazis and harassing MAGAts, all the while giving the bastards a free ticket to do shit they want over there like destroying LGBTQ symbols.
There's like, a billion fucking nazi, incel, misogynist subs on reddit that are just allowed to exist
Tell any one of those subreddit-goers to fuck off for their nazi incel misogynist bullshit? Permabanned
I just got permabanned. I have not had anything so much as a complaint about me in the 12 years I used the site, but in the last 6 months I have received 2 temp and now a perma ban for speaking out against various conservative figure heads.
I got a 24 hour ban for saying a conservative figure should stand on her head and let the blood rush to her brain and maybe she'll have a coherent thought. I was accused of inciting violence.
Edit: Here are the 3 things I got whacked with "inciting violence"
The other day I made it off hand remark about my desire to take out pent up rage on several sexual predators being shown in a video.
Instant ban of a 13-year-old account for "threatening violence." I consider it a badge of honor against the fascist platform. Honestly it's no better than Twitter these days.
Most people talking about "punching Nazis" are advocating punching people who are certainly far right but who have not themselves committed or threatened any acts of violence.
The Nazis of the early 20th century were committing genocide and conquest, and the only way to stop them was through violence. But if you're talking about "punching Nazis" in the context of the UK and Frogage, their odious policies are a long way from justifying threats of violence which are rightly not legal.
In the US where Trump is attempting a fascist takeover, time will tell whether it will take violence to dislodge. But from our position it's easy to see why a lot of these people get banned.
They were nazis before the genocide and conquest
What a load of sludgy shit. "from our position" - this a group statement or...? Kinda seems like you got an AI to take your position and write a comment for you - what's that called again? Nice prompt LLM master.
Firstly,
Most people talking about “punching Nazis” are advocating punching people who are certainly far right but who have not themselves committed or threatened any acts of violence.
Know that do you? Besides, hate based on someone's religion or ethnicity is an act of violence in of itself.
Beginning In the 1920's and through the '30's, years before the Nazis committed "genocide and conquest" the brown shirts and other groups walked through the streets of Germany intimidating and committing acts of violence against those they persecuted and those who disagreed with them. That's where we are now - or at least where some want to take us - so yes, punch the shit out of Nazi scum and their sympathizers.
Curious, would you have stopped the rise of Nazism by asking them nicely?
Now Reddit is adding AI and streaks
The users have plenty of streaks in their underwear.
White streaks mainly.
How it feels to browse any reddit community bigger than 10k members:
What is the 99.99 stuff? NFT ? Avatar?
Reddit is really the only online place that embraced NFTs and maintained an ecosystem with them. It's a small ecosystem, but they use them in all their absurdly nihilistic glory.
Both, I believe. I haven't used reddit for a while, but when I was on there and they were selling NFTs, they were both avatars (more specifically, a combination of outfit pieces you could mix and match with other pieces from other NFT and non-NFT avatars) and a collectible at once.
I honestly don't have much of a problem with how they did NFTs as avatars. If you want to monetize your platform in a way that doesn't paywall any actual features or meaningfully impact the user experience, go for it. But they really started to go hog wild on it and promoted it so persistently that it felt like you were being made to care about a profile picture you probably wouldn't have remembered you even had otherwise.
If I understand correctly you can buy a NFT to use as your profile picture. But its completely useless since the only place you will ever see it as a tiny icon next to your name in the comments and on the profile page that no one visits.
Reddit says that most of these are "limited runs" but that's BS because "limited" can mean they made 5 or 5 000 000.
The auto-moderation is terrible and bans you for the dumbest stuff. Reddit has continually gone downhill the last couple years. Ad's are out of control, and they love to promote religious ads and that should be illegal.
I was permanently banned for saying Trump's health was poor and he may be dead before 2028 and wont be able to run for a third term. Banned for inciting violence...
I guess reddit really just wants a site full of bots and 50 people who post the same stuff everyday.
I got banned when I connected to a VPN endpoint (ProtonVPN). Instant, permanent, unappealable ban. 13-year-old account. Sole moderator of a couple subs
Probably for the best though. Screw Reddit
reddit has been coming down hard on vpn users since last year. its futile one they shadowban you, rarely i see peoples ban get lifted on the shadowban sub, apparently and pretty obvious, The user said reddit "made a mistake because thier filters were misconstruing your words for somethng offensive", i doubt reddit admins have time to look at every appeal, thats why i believe they ignore most of them, if not all accounts that are part of the multiple accounts from a single users.
92 people control about 500+subs on reddit, you can guess which one they are, and the ones less likely to get banned.
I was banned for saying something to the effect of "Fuck all the Republicans" in response to someone hating on a specific one.
My theory is they are removing all the anti-maga and replacing us with neutral/pro maga bots so it appears that there aren't so many people against them.
I wrote a very fiery letter that I'm sure a bot deleted about how it cheapened the phrase "violence" to have it be slung casually around at speech their shareholders don't love.
"Reddit Pro"? 🤢
For the professional shitposter.
Lol yeah... what a shit show
The worst part is the Contributor Quality Score, which is the subjective version of karma.
If you're not a bot, then you have to spend a lot of real time producing acceptable content to get to do anything YOU want to do. You literally have to grind Reddit to be able to post in some subs, even if your account is older than the hills and has positive karma.
Hate that shit, Reddit’s decline started when individual users started to become sanctioned superusers and did away with the veil of equal-ish participation.
Generally all things done there to scale your feed based on recent activity suck too.
It’s infuriating how much time and energy is extracted from everyone chasing hidden and arbitrary metrics that serve some opaque corporate interest.
Thank you for including a link; this sounds like a fucking joke.
First time I'm hearing of the CQS. Wow, just wow. Dystopian shit.
New account experience on Reddit in 2025:
Fuck Steve Huffman and fuck his enshittified site.
I recently started what's probably my 15th account for a single topic. Same exact thing happened to me.
Before the API thing there was only one “am I the asshole” subreddit.
now theres like 4 of them, most of them are bots, or written by a person that is gauging peoples reaction(for thier personal projects)
What happened? Did the original mods protest and reddit itself just make a new one? I know there were alot of communities that shut down for a day or two when the API changes happened.
i remember the original AITA was private for a while, then came out AITAH, and then AIO, and then a couple of other ones.
i noticed the unmoderated communities banned a while ago and didn't realize that was a recent change. The ones I noticed were pretty obscure. I'm using old.reddit.com while it still works so haven't seen much issue with AI and NFT's, at least so far. (I don't post but I still lurk). Most annoying recent change was they shut down the PM system in favor of their shitty chat system.
Reddit is run by evil and ill-intentioned people but it is fairly well executed in terms of keeping user engagement. Lemmy by comparison is, at least for now, nowhere near as lively. Lemmy has much better intentions but I think its execution made mistakes. If I were king of Lemmy, I'd reorganize its software and protocols in the hope of helping it run at bigger scale. But, it's still early days.
yea i knew a unmodered sub that was banned for having next to no post or moderators, but that is a very very small and niche sub.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
I just wish Lemmy had the same subreddit communities on it, the real benefit of Reddit was that you can add it to your search in Google for niche things and it would find threads about that thing, Lemmy on the other hand has either not been indexed as much or just doesn't have those communities and the organic discussion among them. I think one of the issues with Lemmy is there is some friction to joining it, you need to figure out what an instance is and which one you wanna join and then figure out an app to access Lemmy and then find the communities that interest you etc. Compare that with something like BlueSky for Twitter replacement, it's easy to sign up and follow peoplw and they gave a official app
Im pretty sure I am on a Canadian based instance... which is fine by me. But I tried a couple that where branded as general, good for new users, and just never got a confirmation for my account, could never log in. I tried this one, cause the name implied it would work. And it did!
But yea I miss the large communities for a specific video game, and the various large mtg communities. And yea, for tech support I do still add reddit to my search queries.
Yes I ran into the same issue where you sign up to an instance and then it says that the admins will verify your account for approval and then I can't log in for a while and forgot which instances I even signed up for, that alone probably caused a bunch of potential lemmings to not join I think. I still go to reddit for discussions about random TV show episodes discussions and other niche communities, there's sadly no other equivalent easy to search forum that I know of for these things, hopping Lemmy becomes as huge as reddit in the future for this purpose
It's a smaller site, as evident that your subscriptions and even the default homepage barely crawls by and there's often days with almost no new content.
Lemmy is not going to be the future of shared internet space, but it's a good Purgatory for the exiled before we all decide to start doing things outside.
lemmy largely get reddit users, if reddit started banning in large amounts again. but i think they caught on to the fact that if they do perma-site wide ban too many people will notice and they will jump ship too fast.
thats why shadowbans are much more insidious, people might not even notice right away that they were shadowbanned.
It's the same problem Linux suffers from. Too many flavors, not one that almost everyone considers the best.
Yeah I agree. I feel like I'm still figuring it out and missing things. I switched to BlueSky and feel like that was almost intuitive. That's one of the big issues with moving away from reddit for a lot of users.
Yeah what happened to that Lemmy search thing someone was working on
Reddit has been on a slow, steady downward trajectory for over a decade. However, it was the rampant engagement bots nagging me with inane questions that drove me away. That, and overzealous moderation deleting comments and dishing out temporary bans for the lamest reasons. Reddit used to be the place where smart and funny people hung out and shared. Now it's just another bland social media site trying to wring the greatest profit out the unwashed masses.
started in 2017, around the same time 45 first term. subs started to have very inflammatory content, so they start banning anyone that remotely they think, its offensive in that Political climate. just like you cant use the word, black, and demographic word in certain context.
Reddit died long ago, we are just flies tipping on it’s rotting corpse
vultures(AI) are just pecking at the decomposing corpse.
Is that what reddit looks like now??? Gross.
Yes, but add entire threads that are nothing but [removed]
I'm just curious where all the users went if places like Lemmy arent growing. Piefed I heard was growing, but I kind of assumed they are getting users who are switching from Lemmy and still perusing the same content, just preferred their client options
they want a read only site, filled with fake bots, and fake engagement. for the purpose of being read only, for advertisement, or they are planning onf selling the site down the line. the gop and musk, thiel would very much like to have control of something like reddit, especially musk, since he has triggered 2 ban waves when he complained to reddit(they were criticizing him).
ever since REDDIT went public thats whats been happening.
After being there for 12 years, I was banned for no reason I know of. Appealed it a bunch of times and finally gave up. Done with reddit. Maybe I'll grab content from there for here.
Same, also 12 years in and no history of problems. Quoted someone calling a female user a "removed" so they couldn't edit and reported them, I got flagged and banned from the large subreddit for "using a slur." I appealed and had the pleasure of talking to a mod grade-schooler with temper problems so the appeal was denied and as a result, somehow... for reasons that are still unclear, my entire account was then banned. Admins did not care. I made a new account and was shadowbanned immediately.
I could go through the hoops and change my IP and all that fun stuff if I really want to participate on reddit.
But I don't.
even if they lifted a ban, people have reported being re-shadowbanned almost quickly anyways, because they dont clean out thier filters, after someone ban has been lifted. you only need to look at reddit wrong to get banned. new users, old accounts are not safe.
only the determined people will ban evade, have new IP address, new device, and other methods of ban evasions. those that make hundreds if not thousands of accounts to earn money from.
yes i would love for you to consider lemmy as your new base for you
Lemmy has more personal interaction but it's still a deeply niche culture made up largely of younger white males who really, really like linux and while I align with leftists, it gets tiring seeing leftists and tankies bickering with each other rather than real debates between people with actual divergent ideology. While reddit also has it's own demographic problems, there are places where you can get a broader range of ideas and diversity.
I just got an automatic 3 day ban (presumably because my comment contained the word "murder") so I said "fuck it", deleted my comments and posts, and deleted my account
Ironically I saw this ad last night.
Openly? Banned.
Unless you talk openly about surviving suicidal thoughts, rape, or other family-unfriendly subjects.
I'll admit the streaks kept me hooked to at least checking in daily. Then I got a permaban so I couldn't do streaks anymore so I stopped using the site.
I recently checked out the front page out of curiosity. It was really weak, meme wise, and content wise, i didn't scroll more than 2 pages. I understand that the niche communities are the best part but there isn't anything enticing to me there anymore.
I check back here often but I still much prefer Reddit over Lemmy. I’m still using a modded Apollo though.
I did too, but /u/me got banned also so I'm here a lot more. And bsky.
Feels like some apps a speeding the enshitification, before the beta is even public the app is dead from AI bots
Fun fact: the "Enshittification" article on Wikipedia has Reddit among the examples.
It’s sad to see sites like Reddit and Imgur dying. They used to bring me so much joy.
At least Fark is still holding steady, although photoshop contests just aren’t as fun as they used to be.
A week or so ago, I got permanently suspended by an auto mod. I posted some link it didn't like, I think it was this one: https://welcometothemachine.co/ which is about how all the filthy rich CEOs sit on each other's boards of directors, which is a bit ironic because this site is just a compilation of posts from one user that appeared on Reddit five years ago. I still read Reddit, but I don't care about participating.
reddit takes a much harsher stance against links now. people have to "refer to the site, rather than dropping the link.
Always did not like Reddit.. As an ex newgen reddit user reddit banned me for literally no reason.. Did not receive any reason, just some strange invisible ban (I could log in to account, do anything and etc and it would say Server Error).. Also this karma sh**..
I had an alt account, I accidentally upvoted my main account's post and got shadow banned. I didn't realize for 3 months when I was like "why the fuck does no-one reply to my comments and does not even downvote let alone upvote my posts". But that was like 4 years ago.
literally same but I did not like myself bru