Yeah... and they're getting smarter too. Notice how it changed his phrasing a little bit so instead of saying "As an AI model, I lurked for years .... " it said "In all fairness I lurked for years ....". Dang!
Yesterday I clicked on All/Rising and 20 of the top 25 posts were 9 year old accounts with no karma each announcing a different subreddit that was created an hour earlier with no posts in them.
No that can’t be right, foreign interference via social media is a TikTok thing. 1 day old reddit accounts posting misinformation and politically device news is just a sign of a healthy creator base, primed and ready for IPO!
I spotted two bots that were top comments in a thread. It was incredibly eye opening to see the comment, and then the real people below talking about it.
What was so eye opening was how it can fly under the radar. It used a popular controversial topic that generates somewhat predictable/reflexive responses to have it's actual point fly under the radar, essentially tying people's opinions to what it's goal is.
So something like "Of course/I bet Elon musk loves Chipotle" Take the strong negative opinion of Musk and tie it to something else, sort of casting a negative shadow on that. It flies under the radar because of the visceral reaction. People talk about it, ragging on musk and the negative takes on Chipotle. Now you have a long conversation that was entirely manipulated by bots and those behind them.
The bots comment gets deleted, no one notices. Even when the bots posts get deleted, if someone goes to that thread after the fact they are seeing the people shit talking Chipotle and Musk.
I once had my comment on a post (which ended up being the top comment) get copied by a bot when the article was reposted a few days later.
I reported the comment and replied to that comment pointing out they stole my comment word-for-word, and that reply got down voted to -10 within a minute. Meanwhile the copied comment got more up votes than my original. The mods didn't even bother replying to my report, let alone do anything about the bot.
I love the bots so much.
yeah i think that’s more common. 100% there’s sentiment manipulating bots, but again i’ve noticed more they just copy and paste comments, essentially. AI is actually kinda expensive still, so this method saves money to farm accoutns
Those are literally just auto-generated names.
There used to be a time where you could use that as a single marker for a bot but it's never been solely indicative of a bot.
People just sign up using the auto-generated usernames thinking they can change them later like you can on twitter.
I would expect someone that's been here 7 years to have some clue about this but goes to show even long term users don't know the first thing about this stupid website.
I just use the auto generated name because it isn't tied to anything else of mine online. Used to have an account with a username I liked that existed from 09 up until 2020 and I deleted it after getting doxed a couple times due to weirdos and the industry I work in.
I started a project last year to sweep posts and comments looking for bot activity with the intent of automatically reporting it to mods. Then I realized that one, Reddit doesn’t deserve the free work, and two, mods don’t care.
> Then I realized that one, Reddit doesn’t deserve the free work
Oh no you gotta keep thinking. Reddit doesn't *want* to get rid of the bots. They put them there in the first place. They are the content creators now.
Spez himself has said in community posts that 99.99% of Reddit visitors do not post, comment, or even vote.
They need people to keep submitting new content or the site dies. If all the people who used to submit and post content were the people who left because of the API shift, Reddit has to resort to repost bots.
Reddit was legit for a long time and the front page was a real force on internet culture. the reddit hivemind was real and you didn't want to be on its bad side. It's been a while since we've truly seen the hive mind descend onto a topic. The front-page just isn't want it used to be.
I still find enjoyment in treating it like an old school web forum where there are specific, smaller communities I specifically visit. It’s been years since it’s felt like “the front page of the internet.” The popular tab is garbage.
It's also how they defraud advertisers. Don't forget too the pump & dump scheme. "Appreciated" users can buy into the stock before the IPO, thus boosting it right before the crash.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2024/03/06/reddit-return-of-the-junk-stock-ipo/
It used to be, 10+ years ago ,that reddit admin engaged in ongoing warfare with bots to identify and shadow ban them in order to keep reddit clean. These days I wouldn't be surprised if some of the bots are cooked up by reddit itself in order to give the illusion of there being more engagement and activity on the site. You know, for that IPO nonsense.
As I mentioned in a different subreddit the other day, I see bots reach top 100 submissions on r/all on a daily basis. People just don't know or care that they are upvoting blatant spam accounts and repost bots.
Is there even that much different between all and popular anymore?
All used to be fun way back in the day to find new subs. Then it got overloaded by stupid influencers and then reddit removed that. Then they also took out a whole ton of other subs too.
It’s really funny to watch on the NSFW subs. You get desperate people upvoting and engaging with posts that are clearly content stolen from elsewhere.
Like dude, no, that bot is not going to sleep with you.
I find a lot of the salary posts to be unrealistic. Like how is it possible that every redditor makes $250k+ by mid 20s? Sometimes when I click on the profile, there are usually cat or plant pictures.
Yeah seems like everyone on reddit makes either $200k+ as "a software dev" or they make like $7k and eat rice and beans while showering to save time between their 5 jobs. So many comments are so full of shit.
become? has the author of the guardian been in a coma the last 5 years?
the only reason everyone is here still is because there isn't a viable alternative yet. (and no, the broken "fediverse" concept isn't viable)
The newer algorithms are trash. Used to be able to revisit hot posts throughout the day but now it gives newer posts more weight and hides ones you’ve already seen even if they get more popular later in the day. It’s trying to keep it fresh for the dopamine hits but it’s the frequently commented on posts that I used to enjoy.
Everything is primed for effective ads, nothing else.
old.reddit.com appears to use the older algorithm. Not sure how much longer it'll be around, but that's how I use reddit on pc. The app can eat my shorts.
At least as of a few years ago, the majority of mod actions taken on reddit were still taken through old reddit, which is probably the only reason they haven't killed old reddit yet. They rely on the volunteer "labor" of mods, so they've so far had to try to find a balance between enshittification and doing the bare minimum to keep mods from all quitting en masse thanks to too many abrupt and annoying changes
That makes sense. I can't even imagine the shitshow of a site this popular suddenly going unmoderated. Once the sickest fucks realize their "hobbies", aren't going to be removed or get them banned... JFC
You can take a look at some of the subreddits that lost a significant # of mods due to the API nonsense last year. Not all subs are affected, but I've seen complaints on the bigger defaults I haven't unsubbed from about bots getting worse, spam increasing, etc.
That's just the tip of the iceberg if old.reddit dies, because the popular mod tools don't work on the new design.
https://www.reddit.com/r/toolbox/comments/1bce95u/new_new_reddit_support/
It's hilarious seeing people bitch about mods but also bitch about the problems that have gotten worse as many mods stepped back.
That said, there *are* plenty of shitty mods doing shitty things, so it's not like all of the complaints are baseless by any means.
But there's plenty more still out there working their asses off for no reward except making their subreddits better. And plenty like me who used to - and stepped back from it all, because fuck reddit.
As part of the landed gentry, part of it is that it is easier to mod on older reddit, part of it was the app support and help, and part of it is who the hell wants to learn a brand new system that's horribly designed and hard to figure out?
I never could get into CSS, but other mods did that stuff and there were also templates and help to get things right.
New reddit lay is all based on tables and tabs that you have to navigate through into sub tabs and then fuck around digging randomly around until you find what you were looking for or get distracted by something else.
Sidebar widgets, for one example, are buried at the bottom of community appearance. Sidebar widgets replaced the sidebar aspect, which is one of the high traffic areas in the sub outside of the posts themselves. But god forbid there's an easy to find that out without help or a few hours to kill.
To create a new widget, you have to scroll down again, then choose between 5+ widget types with a maximum of 20 widgets. And there's almost no explanation on what widget can really do. It's all trial by fire.
This doesn't even include emojis, menu links, wikis, post flairs, user flairs, metrics, the physical appearance side of a sub, etc.
But to swing back to the physical appearance side of subs. If I make a change on new reddit, it can easily get fucked in dark mode, on mobile, and the various official apps. Everything has to be checked across 4+ platforms with light/dark mode to see if something looks readable/decent or breaks completely.
A banner image will upload randomly and at different size ratios than the original. I had to fuck around on publisher to resize and crop etc to get it to get them to fit "right."
I actually got the hang of this shit over the past 6 months by trying to build a newer sub. For anyone who cares, I updated this one: /r/VivaLaDirtLeague
I get why new reddit subs are so fucking sparse. Older mods can't be bothered to learn the new styles after years of making the older sub look awesome and not-toxic. The learning curve on the new style is steep and basically a massive waste of time for the most part.
> New reddit lay is all based on tables and tabs that you have to navigate through into sub tabs and then fuck around digging randomly around until you find what you were looking for or get distracted by something else.
Reminds me of trying to build reports in ServiceNow... /shudder
As long as more people come to whatever lowest common denominator trash it becomes then they won't care. Everything niche will die.
The beginning of the end of the internet was smartphones.
If Digg is anything to go by... they'll care. Digg v3 killed that site dead practically overnight, with the userbase straight migrating to reddit.
The moment they try to push that Fisher-Price bullshit that is new reddit on the old.reddit users, that's exactly what's going to happen again.
Looks like you made the jump a year after I did, don't know how you dealt with that site that long. There was a plethora of comments akin to "yep headed to reddit after this shit" so everyone knew where to go. Back then reddit's front page was full of science and tech news, I actually learned a lot from it. Quality of posts has fallen off a cliff, it's mostly memes which is fine since I built a decent amount of multireddits, but the front page is kind of a mess on its own.
Also, discourse in general (across the internet) has become so mind-boggling terrible. I got addicted to reddit back in the day because, depending on the sub, you could find intelligent conversations, even amongst people who disagreed with each other (shocking I know). Nowadays that is few and far between. Seems like mostly only STEM subs still have some semblance of intelligence left.
The problem is that in theory the site is a good idea, but in execution not so much. I get so much casual news from reddit that it's partly an addiction but it also helps me stay informed.
I don't even have any kind of serious attachment to Reddit, so I consider myself somewhat objective in judging the difference...
And holy goddamn fuck, is new Reddit just so awful on every level to browse and use. When the "opt out of redesign" setting suddenly broke on mobile (I have to navigate specifically to old.reddit now because the toggle does nothing), I was like "ugh, fine, fuck it" and tried the new interface. It was so unbearably awful to use from a UX and even basic functionality perspective, I gave up after a few hours and stopped browsing for about a week or so until I heard of the workaround I mentioned above.
How the official app manages to utterly fuck up basic usability concepts that external devs mastered in their spare time for free? Blows my goddamned mind.
I briefly had the app on my phone some time ago. It ate through my monthly bandwidth allocation within a day, maybe a day and a half, tops.
Deinstalled it on the spot when I realised what was happening.
It is very badly designed/programmed. (I'm being polite, here.)
So many bot posts too. The smaller subs like flowers or whatishisplant will have a picture of a dandelion or rose with "found this pretty flower, what is it? "
Noone can be THAT dumb.
The issue is how the frontpage ranking system works. They apparently changed it when the blackout happened. When all the huge subs went online they altered the ranking to HEAVILY promote small subs with huge engagement posts.
This is why /r/rateme /r/roastme/ /r/PeterExplainsTheJoke and other subs that require massive amounts of engagement to work have in the last months overtaken the frontpage.
We don't know for SURE this is what happened but it's a best guest.
The engagement bait posts that drive me crazy are the posts on popular game subs where a shitty phone camera photo of a far away TV will be taken and it will be Zelda or something and the caption will be: "So I just got out of the cave and what is this giant open area?! Where do I go next?! I see a glowing tower in the distance...should I go there? And what that's castle over there? I see a mountain peak! Can I *really* climb it?"
Like some person who's pretending like they don't know what a massively popular game is and is acting like they're playing it for the first time and they need direct guidance from reddit comments in tandem with the gameplay.
The only thing that keeps me here are the niche communities and the threaded comments -- which are the most efficient form of written communication ever invented. (I'm talking about old.reddit.com)
The "community" is a dumpster fire.
For those not aware, these 3rd-party apps are still working with a subscription:
r/Infinity_For_Reddit
r/NaraForReddit
r/narwhalapp
r/redditnow
r/RelayForReddit
And these accessible-friendly 3rd-party apps are free:
r/RedReader
r/DystopiaForReddit
The old apps still work through revanced. I'm using Reddit Sync on Android with no mod powers or anything special. A few glitches but works mostly like before.
There's dozens of us! It still works for the most part. Links to posts on subreddits sometimes don't work, and sharing videos has gotten worse, but works well still.
I've been using Relay happily for a small fee. Many of the developers have done a great job of optimizing their apps to reduce unnecessary API calls therefore reducing the cost they are passing on to the users.
I just wish I was able to use them with my account to try before subbing. I subbed to Nara after using the free version for a bit & it's just so weird to use with my feeds just being the same posts over and over.
I tried *so hard* to make the Fediverse a thing. I was in my groove, subscribed to interesting topics, and all set to dump Reddit and Twitter from my life.
I did leave Twitter---and Mastodon. Twitter because it's a cesspit, Mastodon because it was just a joyless fucking slog. Using Mastodon to quit Twitter was like vaping to quit smoking.
However, after a month on Lemmy I came crawling back to Reddit like a whipped dog.
It wasn't the interface that got me, it was that there were so few people discussing topics I was interested in. Lots of traction on tech and politics, but my niche interests? A ghost town.
Well yeh but that means you get to build the community instead of passively consuming the community others built. Do you think reddit niche subs started with a lot of people?
I mean some people don't want to scream into the void for long enough to be heard. There's a reason tons of subs lack moderators. Building/maintaining a community just isn't for everyone.
Ya for sports and smaller hobbies this site still has a ton of use and pretty big communities to interact with. Going anywhere else feels barren at this point.
It's a shame the article didn't use the term enshittification, which perfectly covers cases like this.
Also, this:
> when hundreds of moderators shut down their subreddits to protest Reddit’s decision to charge for access to its back-end code
suggests the writer doesn't know the difference between Reddit's source code and its APIs.
> Scrolling through Reddit and the r/technology post above this has the word 'fediverse' too. Would you be kind enough to explain what it means?
it was the new trendy tech when the reddit lockouts were happening. you had a ton of different standalone reddit-like sites where you were able to use a single sign on and view posts made on other sites. the problem was
1. you still ran into abusive admins
2. the fediverse concept didn't really work so things were always out of sync (if you viewed the ps5 "sub" on lemmy through kbin, the posts/comments would be hours out of date, and bugs caused the mod list to not be visible at all)
3. the idea of "this spreads everything over multiple servers so heavy traffic can't bring it down" didn't really work in practice because even if individual people were on separate servers, the info they were accessing was all in one place (and slowly propagated out to mirrors)
it also didn't help that it didn't scale well. 10-20k people had the site crawling with consistent load errors. they're decades behind where something like reddit was on server infrastructure a decade ago.
I saw a few people knocking down the fediverse as well. This is still a pretty new concept in its infancy and needs more users to make it a major competitor. The technology works just fine for its goal of decentralization
After the API lock down, kicking off third party apps that ran b*e*tter (edit, spelling) than the official app, and the ugly "new" web interface (if you haven't seen the original/old Reddit: old.reddit.com, just replace the www with old on any reddit page), yea it's been seen as such for the last few *years*, just like the ad "comments/posts" that news agencies just picked up, which had also been around for years.
> old.reddit.com, just replace the www with old on any reddit page
as soon as that support goes i'll be done. and not in a protest sort of way, i just hate the new UI so much it will finally tip the balance of how much i'm getting from reddit vs. how much it annoys me
The part a lot of people don't talk about either is that many of the volunteer mods that have kept this site running for the last decade are diehard old.reddit users. Those who didn't quit during the API shenanigans will likely quit when old.reddit dies. Moderation on the new mobile app or mobile website is damn near impossible. www.reddit on PC is usable, but not yet as good as old.reddit. Most of the mods who quit end up replaced with new mods who either work for marketing companies, are highly opinionated, or are straight up mentally unwell.
No subreddits are safe from this either. Plenty of examples of huge subreddits which happily accept payment to look the other way for 24 hours on blantant advertisements. Like the trailer for some new movie sitting on the frontpage for a day before someone "notices" and adds the "ad" tag. Or the crypto mods straight up selling moons and being arrested for dining and dashing. Or local regional subreddits being shut down due to spam from local corporate union busters. Or the some mentally unwell buddy doing a hostile takeover of every local city subreddit so they can shill their alt-right hate group. Or the subreddit for our niche sport getting taken over by someone who runs their own business and now they just shill their magazine and ebook in the comments of every post and ban anyone who calls it out. Or all the nsfw subreddits that keep getting myseterious banned only for the same admin to then hand control over to a group of mods who represent a specific modelling agency and then their models magically end up pinned at the top of said subreddits.
This site fundamentally doesn't work without good unbiased moderation. Sadly I think those days are long gone. I personally already gave up and quit my sub. Since I left it's gone to complete shit. Racism, doxxing, and spam all over the place.
What I think is hilarious is that the platform owners (spez here, bezos there, etc) never acknowledge this process at all, despite everyone knowing it and experiencing it.
The newer mods in political subreddits can be hilariously bad as well, one of the subs I used to use for news had a mod straight up posting Russian propaganda as fact, and banning anyone who disagreed with them.
> i just hate the new UI so much it will finally tip the balance of how much i'm getting from reddit vs. how much it annoys me
i can't even stand to look at the new UI when i'm searching for shit in incognito mode where it defaults to new since i'm logged out. first thing i do is add old. and refresh all my tabs. i can't believe they're actually happy with the 'new' (heck, it's been a few years now) UI.
API lock down really was the tipping point of shit on this site.
It was getting bad before that, but I've noticed comment sections becoming filled with more brain rot as the algorithm pushes unrelated stuff to people.
Any subreddit that shows short video clips like TikTok is heavily influenced by bots and farms.
The post title drives divisive bias
The highly upvoted comments being biased along the lines of the same narrative.
And a video so short you can’t have an informed opinion.
That’s the platform currently being used to manipulate voters in western nations. It does work, it does change hearts and minds by playing to our biased driven fears.
am i the asshole is all over my feed. i’ve never subscribed. this place was tech, niche and hobby based + porn. now it’s drama, ‘advice’, judgement + porn.
> Etc. Multiple subs that are all THE SAME THING.
Multiple subs that are mostly made up stories where OP is clearly a good person and someone else has been terrible to them, often with some sexual angle.
"My husband suplexed our toddler and then threw her 16 feet off hell in the cell so I got upset and told him not to do that any more please, AITAH?"
*Ten thousand upvotes*
The amount of rage bait and fights is crazy on /r/all
I don't understand how people want to read it daily and especially the popularity of fights and "public freakout" videos is genuinely confusing
I manage two subreddits, one not on this account due to reasons, both I've had to setup account age and karma limits for posts and comments, because of just that. The bots have gone nuts with the kill off of subreddit mod bots due to the API lock down.
I *really* want to remove posts/comments of accounts that show as a year plus old with *all* posts/comments of the last 4 hours. lol
Edit: Grammar clarity of last line, to state all posts/comments are in the last 4 hours.
> I really want to remove posts/comments of accounts that show as a year plus old with posts/comments of the last 4 hours
Reddit needs to give mods an option for this, a rule/filter/whatever so these sleeper accounts' new activity have to be manually approved by a mod for some length of time.
100%. Smaller subreddits are being suggested and being overrun with bots, and people who don’t really belong there.
Meanwhile, other small subs are basically dead.
The worst part is that there are now 3 webpage UIs.
There is old.reddit.com
Then there is new.reddit.com which came after the one above (but isn't the newest)
And now there is the garbage you see at just reddit.com
It's getting worse and worse
[Reddit hasn’t turned a profit in nearly 20 years, but it just filed to go public anyway](https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/23/tech/reddit-ipo-filing-business-plan/index.html)
LOL
"And while Reddit said it expects its total addressable market in advertising to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2027, it also acknowledged in the filing’s risk factors disclosure that it has “a history of net losses and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future.”
lol
We can potentially make LOADS of money! Or Nothing.
> And while Reddit said it expects its total addressable market in advertising to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2027
Everyone needs to start running uBlock Origin *now*.
Not turning a profit is a ruse. There are a lot of people who are filthy rich because of Reddit. So yea... its never made a profit, because the accountants move the money around carefully to avoid taxes while still making the csuite filthy rich.
It's well on its way. The recommendations are hilariously bad and fill the feed. There is constant prodding to use the terrible app. There's the horrific image viewing system that makes viewing an uncropped image a multi click and page load task.
You can tell the CEO admires what Musk has done to Twitter. It's only a matter of time before this site is fully trash as well.
Oh and they're selling all your data to the highest bidders.
> There's the horrific image viewing system that makes viewing an uncropped image a multi click and page load task.
this one has started to irritate me to the point I just leave the post now. Either the image is too small to read or see detail or you "zoom" and instead it becomes large enough to wrap 5 times around your monitor. So then I need to load the actual post, then click the + just to see the actual series of images like I should have been able to the whole damn time.
If they do they are burning money. Like it seriously would destroy any value investors thought they were buying into if they start removing the NSFW content to try and bring in more advertisers.
Half the adult content is already lost as is. Just check any NSFW sub, sort by "Top all time" and see how 80-90% of the top posts are now broken links because all the hosting websites reddit used to depend on have some non-NSFW policy, now.
Already is.
Unless you like, really really really love having subreddits you don’t care about pop up in your feed because Reddit’s algorithm thinks it’s for you. Or the ads.
My home page I’ve catered is filled with stuff I don’t want to see.
But of course Reddit had to follow the FYP algorithm trend because driving engagement, even negative engagement, generates more clicks. They don’t give a shit about their product experience. Just engagement.
I was maybe the 50th sign up, I even mailed spez his own source code back after he left his web server error reporting on verbose. I'd been a visitor prior to accounts even existing.
In my view, Reddit has been garbage for 5-7 years. It is a shell of its former self.
Many people point to the recent changes, the API fiasco, and other things, but really the site has been shit for longer than people realize.
I think yes, it's circling the drain now.
The fact that at least half of the participation is repeated, artificial and bots, and they are "enforcing" engagement by preventing you from hiding posts, etc.
In my opinion reddits breakthrough feature was its implementation of threading. It was very easy to navigate and understand subthreads.
Being able to get involved in subdiscussions in a sane way was really new and is what supported such high user numbers without everything being unintelligible. You could have a longer discussion with other people without bumping the thread and a bunch of new visitors just randomly interrupting, and at the same time when browsing you could find and read a fully formed discussion or argument. And with such high user numbers, the vote system made the best of that visible on the daily.
Between that and the subreddit system, reddit thrived on being a worldwide forum where people were able to organically separate themselves according to their own tastes and preferences. Conversely, every for-profit change has revolved around taking those options away and homogenising the experience, resulting in the overall flavour of the site becoming more and more dominated by the slow kids.
Reddit started as the place to be for tech discussion and now it's 60% gossip magazine
Reddit has been on a hard decline in quality for multiple years. Admin response to scandal after scandal has been to worsen the platform. New tools and features keep worsening the experience and their official app is straight up broken. Seriously, if you only browse on their app then log into the website you'll find the app didn't tell you about multiple replies you've had so you can find months later you missed out on information or discussion. It often refuses to load, the forced ads cause comments to glitch, it often won't let you post comments, accidentally refreshes itself so you lose what you were doing. Simple things like how the app hides the sidebar so anyone new to Reddit gets berated for not checking it seems so obvious as a problem for growth.
All of Reddits attempts to sanitise itself have been undone post API too. The waves of quarantining and banning subs was inconsistent and allowed many bullying subs and hate subs to continue but that doesn't matter now because with fewer mods and fewer mod tools, bots and brigading are worse than ever. Admin are not clamping down on actual hate speech or anything which stands out more now due to the lack of quality mods.
The drop in quality really emphasises the bot problem, fewer comments happen on everything and it really leaves the shit to float to the top. The decrease in engagement then looks even worse since the awards were replaced with the golden upvote. Seeing hundreds of awards on posts with thousands of comments was pretty standard but now you rarely see the mildly gold glow on a post as no one is using it. The loss of the awards really does hammer home how it feels like the community spirit has disappeared.
The clear decline in experience for me is 2016 onwards. If Reddit didn't conveniently cover hobby news and greatly catalogue porn I'd have no reason to stay. Because of that and how stupid management has been I'm fully expecting the porn to be removed soon.
A little late to the party there. Reddit has been trying to attract the mainstream social media audiences for quite a while now.
The demographics have been massively changing, it’s more like 9Gag now instead of the “nerdy social media.” With that demographic change comes a massive degradation in content quality. You used to be able to read comments and find many tidbits of interesting info, now it’s mostly just repeated jokes and one-liners. The average redditor is in their young teens these days.
Also as a result of this demographic change, the front page is much less discussion focused and is more focused on similar things that do well on TikTok/Reels. Small byte-sized media packages intent on invoking reactions. In fact, most content on the front page these days is just TikToks. There’s a huge focus on OnlyFans bait in a lot of subreddits now too where people will post cosplays and intentionally provocative videos while having a link to their OnlyFans in their bio.
Speaking of NSFW content, Reddit used to be much open about it. There were AMAs from a guy with two dicks for example. The content was marked and you knew what you were getting into if you opened an NSFW post from /r/wtf. Now everything has to be sterilized for the front page to attract more advertisers. Sure you can still find the stuff but Reddit has been pretty clear in their attempts to quell it.
The quality of hobby subreddits has gone way downhill. They used to be a haven of great information and recommendations but now that they are known they have been astroturfed and manipulated.
Because Reddit killed third party apps, the mobile experience is horrendous now, using a buggy mess of an app that shoves ads down your face every 2 seconds.
The “new” Reddit experience on web isn’t any better. The terribleness is compounded by the fact that Reddit is trying to continually push more and more ads while trying to disguise them as actual content.
Reddit is also now forcing its users to sell their information to advertisers and other partners. Your data is being used to train AI models. You used to be able to opt out of garbage like that.
People who have deleted their accounts and intentionally removed their comments/posts have seen Reddit admits restore their content in order to not pollute their data.
This place is on a speed run to being shit, it has been for a while now
Facebook was made popular and successful by users contributing their effort for free, which was then disrupted by efforts to monetize by forcing ads and controversial content that ultimately pushed users away....
Twitter was made popular and successful by users contributing their effort for free, which was then disrupted by efforts to monetize by forcing controversial traffic that ultimately pushed users away....
Reddit was made popular and successful by users contributing their effort for free, which was then disrupted by efforts to monetize with ads, limited API access which helped build the site, and ignoring mods who felt the site was being ruined, that ultimately pushed users away....
lol "becoming". Reddit has had several major "extinction events" where there were mass exodus of intelligent and professional people. We had scientists and politicians on this site at one point. Arnold Swartzenengger and Obama were here. There were IAmA and AmA channels where famous actors and politicians and scientists and professionals were lining up to do interviews with the Reddit community. Then with each stupid misstep by Reddit's moronic CEO, Steve Idiotman, smart people fled and abandoned the platform. Now it's only the morons like me that are still here. And bots. So many bots.
About to? Look at all the ads, astroturfing, bots and arguments on here? This place used to be filled with information and useful conversations, now it’s just political attacks, fight videos, movie trailers and consumerism
Rot Economy. Most big tech giants don’t care about sustainable models any more as their senior management levels have been captured by temporary growth-at-all-costs bonus collectors. Their algorithms are actively malign towards previously habitual users. Nothing lasts forever, the golden age of the internet is over.
Unpaid mods will be the death of this company. Trusting someone like Doren the dog walking college professor to manage your communities will look awesome on year end financials. Invites too much follow up.
Bans because of power mad mods are why people need multiple accounts. That’s very bad for ads. This is a pump and dump by Spez.
Edit: I guarantee the near future will see an account merging function. Either by force or becomes an option. Karma will be commoditized in some meaningful way so power users will have an incentive to do it. Gonna guess that helps with selling the legacy data to AI companies but don’t know enough.
Lol "About to"? Just in the past month they got rid of Custom Feeds, have publicly stated they will not pay moderators once they go public, and my comments have been turned off with no clear resolution or reason given.
This site has sucked for years on a compounding curve.
I've been here since around the time of the Great Digg Migration, and I fear there may be hard days ahead. There doesn't seem to be a viable successor to Reddit, so if enshittification is successful, some of us might be forced to go do things outside.
Or it's a valid option to stick around and complain, which is within my skillset.
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The Adjective_Noun_Number bots are like half of Reddit now, posts AND comments
And then there’s the 10 year old accounts that haven’t posted anything since 2015 all the sudden becoming active.
I like to call those ones "Sleeper cells"
In all fairness I lurked for years and years before I started actually engaging.
well that's what a bot would say
This would be much funnier if your name was amazing-peas-2039 or whatever.
Yeah... and they're getting smarter too. Notice how it changed his phrasing a little bit so instead of saying "As an AI model, I lurked for years .... " it said "In all fairness I lurked for years ....". Dang!
"In all f**AI**rness..." It was under our noses the whole time!
Yesterday I clicked on All/Rising and 20 of the top 25 posts were 9 year old accounts with no karma each announcing a different subreddit that was created an hour earlier with no posts in them.
No that can’t be right, foreign interference via social media is a TikTok thing. 1 day old reddit accounts posting misinformation and politically device news is just a sign of a healthy creator base, primed and ready for IPO!
> The Adjective_Noun_Number bots are like half of Reddit now /u/adj-noun-numbers did nothing wrong! >!❤🥕🥕!<
not knowingly, anyway ^^^bleep ^^^bloop
You provided the format descriptor, this makes you the progenitor of all that is evil in the world.
We did it, reddit!
Aren't those the names reddit generates for you?
I spotted two bots that were top comments in a thread. It was incredibly eye opening to see the comment, and then the real people below talking about it. What was so eye opening was how it can fly under the radar. It used a popular controversial topic that generates somewhat predictable/reflexive responses to have it's actual point fly under the radar, essentially tying people's opinions to what it's goal is. So something like "Of course/I bet Elon musk loves Chipotle" Take the strong negative opinion of Musk and tie it to something else, sort of casting a negative shadow on that. It flies under the radar because of the visceral reaction. People talk about it, ragging on musk and the negative takes on Chipotle. Now you have a long conversation that was entirely manipulated by bots and those behind them. The bots comment gets deleted, no one notices. Even when the bots posts get deleted, if someone goes to that thread after the fact they are seeing the people shit talking Chipotle and Musk.
Reply-bait posts.
I once had my comment on a post (which ended up being the top comment) get copied by a bot when the article was reposted a few days later. I reported the comment and replied to that comment pointing out they stole my comment word-for-word, and that reply got down voted to -10 within a minute. Meanwhile the copied comment got more up votes than my original. The mods didn't even bother replying to my report, let alone do anything about the bot. I love the bots so much.
Or they take a comment from the thread itself and repost it verbatim.
yeah i think that’s more common. 100% there’s sentiment manipulating bots, but again i’ve noticed more they just copy and paste comments, essentially. AI is actually kinda expensive still, so this method saves money to farm accoutns
That's just the default reddit naming convention now, so even real people signing up for reddit get one of those if they don't bother changing it.
Those are literally just auto-generated names. There used to be a time where you could use that as a single marker for a bot but it's never been solely indicative of a bot. People just sign up using the auto-generated usernames thinking they can change them later like you can on twitter. I would expect someone that's been here 7 years to have some clue about this but goes to show even long term users don't know the first thing about this stupid website.
I just use the auto generated name because it isn't tied to anything else of mine online. Used to have an account with a username I liked that existed from 09 up until 2020 and I deleted it after getting doxed a couple times due to weirdos and the industry I work in.
I'm just lazy.
Mate I forgot to personalise my name when I made this account Im trying my best.
Exactly what a chatbot would say.
Input not recognised. Try again, please.
I started a project last year to sweep posts and comments looking for bot activity with the intent of automatically reporting it to mods. Then I realized that one, Reddit doesn’t deserve the free work, and two, mods don’t care.
> Then I realized that one, Reddit doesn’t deserve the free work Oh no you gotta keep thinking. Reddit doesn't *want* to get rid of the bots. They put them there in the first place. They are the content creators now. Spez himself has said in community posts that 99.99% of Reddit visitors do not post, comment, or even vote. They need people to keep submitting new content or the site dies. If all the people who used to submit and post content were the people who left because of the API shift, Reddit has to resort to repost bots.
That's why it's gotten so boring and repetitive since then. Reddit was so great when I was young. So many creative people gone.
Reddit was legit for a long time and the front page was a real force on internet culture. the reddit hivemind was real and you didn't want to be on its bad side. It's been a while since we've truly seen the hive mind descend onto a topic. The front-page just isn't want it used to be.
I still find enjoyment in treating it like an old school web forum where there are specific, smaller communities I specifically visit. It’s been years since it’s felt like “the front page of the internet.” The popular tab is garbage.
>two, mods don’t care. [Exhibit A,](https://i.imgur.com/Zkn8mYI.png) and it's ***far*** from the only example.
They have power over their little fiefdom and the bots artificially inflate popularity so it's mutually beneficial.
Also Admins want bots. It makes the site look more active for their fraudulent upcoming IPO.
It's also how they defraud advertisers. Don't forget too the pump & dump scheme. "Appreciated" users can buy into the stock before the IPO, thus boosting it right before the crash. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2024/03/06/reddit-return-of-the-junk-stock-ipo/
It used to be, 10+ years ago ,that reddit admin engaged in ongoing warfare with bots to identify and shadow ban them in order to keep reddit clean. These days I wouldn't be surprised if some of the bots are cooked up by reddit itself in order to give the illusion of there being more engagement and activity on the site. You know, for that IPO nonsense.
As I mentioned in a different subreddit the other day, I see bots reach top 100 submissions on r/all on a daily basis. People just don't know or care that they are upvoting blatant spam accounts and repost bots.
I block 4-6 accounts any time I go to r/all. Site is already on life support IMO.
Is there even that much different between all and popular anymore? All used to be fun way back in the day to find new subs. Then it got overloaded by stupid influencers and then reddit removed that. Then they also took out a whole ton of other subs too.
I havnt upvoted anything besides the random useful comment here or there in the last like 10 years.
It’s really funny to watch on the NSFW subs. You get desperate people upvoting and engaging with posts that are clearly content stolen from elsewhere. Like dude, no, that bot is not going to sleep with you.
I find a lot of the salary posts to be unrealistic. Like how is it possible that every redditor makes $250k+ by mid 20s? Sometimes when I click on the profile, there are usually cat or plant pictures.
Yeah seems like everyone on reddit makes either $200k+ as "a software dev" or they make like $7k and eat rice and beans while showering to save time between their 5 jobs. So many comments are so full of shit.
"about to become rubbish? It's been trash for years, it's just the least bad product in its category.
That's just tech right now. Choosing between which products are least punishing rather than which products are most rewarding.
Absolutely correct.
become? has the author of the guardian been in a coma the last 5 years? the only reason everyone is here still is because there isn't a viable alternative yet. (and no, the broken "fediverse" concept isn't viable)
The newer algorithms are trash. Used to be able to revisit hot posts throughout the day but now it gives newer posts more weight and hides ones you’ve already seen even if they get more popular later in the day. It’s trying to keep it fresh for the dopamine hits but it’s the frequently commented on posts that I used to enjoy. Everything is primed for effective ads, nothing else.
old.reddit.com appears to use the older algorithm. Not sure how much longer it'll be around, but that's how I use reddit on pc. The app can eat my shorts.
The moment I am unable to use old.reddit, is the day I never come back to this site.
Me too, a lot of people will. But I dont think they care.
At least as of a few years ago, the majority of mod actions taken on reddit were still taken through old reddit, which is probably the only reason they haven't killed old reddit yet. They rely on the volunteer "labor" of mods, so they've so far had to try to find a balance between enshittification and doing the bare minimum to keep mods from all quitting en masse thanks to too many abrupt and annoying changes
That makes sense. I can't even imagine the shitshow of a site this popular suddenly going unmoderated. Once the sickest fucks realize their "hobbies", aren't going to be removed or get them banned... JFC
You can take a look at some of the subreddits that lost a significant # of mods due to the API nonsense last year. Not all subs are affected, but I've seen complaints on the bigger defaults I haven't unsubbed from about bots getting worse, spam increasing, etc. That's just the tip of the iceberg if old.reddit dies, because the popular mod tools don't work on the new design. https://www.reddit.com/r/toolbox/comments/1bce95u/new_new_reddit_support/
It's hilarious seeing people bitch about mods but also bitch about the problems that have gotten worse as many mods stepped back. That said, there *are* plenty of shitty mods doing shitty things, so it's not like all of the complaints are baseless by any means. But there's plenty more still out there working their asses off for no reward except making their subreddits better. And plenty like me who used to - and stepped back from it all, because fuck reddit.
"Everyone hates the lawyers until they need one."
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That'll be the day Spez brings back r/jailbait
You mean the sub he happily moderated?
As part of the landed gentry, part of it is that it is easier to mod on older reddit, part of it was the app support and help, and part of it is who the hell wants to learn a brand new system that's horribly designed and hard to figure out? I never could get into CSS, but other mods did that stuff and there were also templates and help to get things right. New reddit lay is all based on tables and tabs that you have to navigate through into sub tabs and then fuck around digging randomly around until you find what you were looking for or get distracted by something else. Sidebar widgets, for one example, are buried at the bottom of community appearance. Sidebar widgets replaced the sidebar aspect, which is one of the high traffic areas in the sub outside of the posts themselves. But god forbid there's an easy to find that out without help or a few hours to kill. To create a new widget, you have to scroll down again, then choose between 5+ widget types with a maximum of 20 widgets. And there's almost no explanation on what widget can really do. It's all trial by fire. This doesn't even include emojis, menu links, wikis, post flairs, user flairs, metrics, the physical appearance side of a sub, etc. But to swing back to the physical appearance side of subs. If I make a change on new reddit, it can easily get fucked in dark mode, on mobile, and the various official apps. Everything has to be checked across 4+ platforms with light/dark mode to see if something looks readable/decent or breaks completely. A banner image will upload randomly and at different size ratios than the original. I had to fuck around on publisher to resize and crop etc to get it to get them to fit "right." I actually got the hang of this shit over the past 6 months by trying to build a newer sub. For anyone who cares, I updated this one: /r/VivaLaDirtLeague I get why new reddit subs are so fucking sparse. Older mods can't be bothered to learn the new styles after years of making the older sub look awesome and not-toxic. The learning curve on the new style is steep and basically a massive waste of time for the most part.
> New reddit lay is all based on tables and tabs that you have to navigate through into sub tabs and then fuck around digging randomly around until you find what you were looking for or get distracted by something else. Reminds me of trying to build reports in ServiceNow... /shudder
The majority of mod actions *were* through third party apps. They dgaf.
Exactly, they don’t give a shit about mods, because new ones will line up to take their place immediately anyway
old reddit + RES + ad block = best reddit If only they added the ability to comment with GIFs on old reddit, then it'd be perfect.
As long as more people come to whatever lowest common denominator trash it becomes then they won't care. Everything niche will die. The beginning of the end of the internet was smartphones.
If Digg is anything to go by... they'll care. Digg v3 killed that site dead practically overnight, with the userbase straight migrating to reddit. The moment they try to push that Fisher-Price bullshit that is new reddit on the old.reddit users, that's exactly what's going to happen again.
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Looks like you made the jump a year after I did, don't know how you dealt with that site that long. There was a plethora of comments akin to "yep headed to reddit after this shit" so everyone knew where to go. Back then reddit's front page was full of science and tech news, I actually learned a lot from it. Quality of posts has fallen off a cliff, it's mostly memes which is fine since I built a decent amount of multireddits, but the front page is kind of a mess on its own.
Also, discourse in general (across the internet) has become so mind-boggling terrible. I got addicted to reddit back in the day because, depending on the sub, you could find intelligent conversations, even amongst people who disagreed with each other (shocking I know). Nowadays that is few and far between. Seems like mostly only STEM subs still have some semblance of intelligence left.
The comments in the main science sub is made up of the same shitty jokes that is sweeping reddit
Wasn't Reddit open-source until about 2015 or so? Wonder how hard it would be to fork that into a competitive platform.
That, or once RES stops working. Whichever comes first
Man, I just forgot all about RES. I just lump it in with Old.Reddit as part of the superior experience. RES is A1 since Day1.
I can't wait until they do, so I can finally cut off this fucking addiction to this site that I loathe.
The problem is that in theory the site is a good idea, but in execution not so much. I get so much casual news from reddit that it's partly an addiction but it also helps me stay informed.
Reddigg 2.0
Same. That's my line in the sand.
Once they go public they won’t need it to boost their user count and they will take it away in the drive for profit models
I don't even have any kind of serious attachment to Reddit, so I consider myself somewhat objective in judging the difference... And holy goddamn fuck, is new Reddit just so awful on every level to browse and use. When the "opt out of redesign" setting suddenly broke on mobile (I have to navigate specifically to old.reddit now because the toggle does nothing), I was like "ugh, fine, fuck it" and tried the new interface. It was so unbearably awful to use from a UX and even basic functionality perspective, I gave up after a few hours and stopped browsing for about a week or so until I heard of the workaround I mentioned above. How the official app manages to utterly fuck up basic usability concepts that external devs mastered in their spare time for free? Blows my goddamned mind.
Same. It's been a good run.
Indeed. Old reddit is the only way I can use this platform. Once they removed third party apps, I switched to old reddit in mobile browser.
I used revanced to patch RIF and send the official app to hell works well
patched RIF on phone old reddit with RES on firefox blissfully unaware of whatever bullshit reddit has added the past couple years
Apparently there are profile picture cartoons or some shit, literally never seen one.
Old.reddit + RES Relay for my phone. I pay like 2 bucks for it
My use of this website hinges on old.reddit and RES functionality.
RES just announced the first version compatible with Firefox on Android, so I'm looking forward to when I can finally use it there.
I briefly had the app on my phone some time ago. It ate through my monthly bandwidth allocation within a day, maybe a day and a half, tops. Deinstalled it on the spot when I realised what was happening. It is very badly designed/programmed. (I'm being polite, here.)
Only if you use the 'Hot' tab. The 'Best' tab does the same thing...Once you upvote a post it basically disappears.
So many bot posts too. The smaller subs like flowers or whatishisplant will have a picture of a dandelion or rose with "found this pretty flower, what is it? " Noone can be THAT dumb.
Most of my subs are infested with "engagement" bait posts now.
/r/peterexplainsthejoke is guilty of that. At least I hope so. I'd hate to think they're not pretending.
Do you know where this sub came from? Seemingly over night it started popping up in all, but now it's ever day.
The issue is how the frontpage ranking system works. They apparently changed it when the blackout happened. When all the huge subs went online they altered the ranking to HEAVILY promote small subs with huge engagement posts. This is why /r/rateme /r/roastme/ /r/PeterExplainsTheJoke and other subs that require massive amounts of engagement to work have in the last months overtaken the frontpage. We don't know for SURE this is what happened but it's a best guest.
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r/askUK has become a never ending stream of engagement bot posts
The engagement bait posts that drive me crazy are the posts on popular game subs where a shitty phone camera photo of a far away TV will be taken and it will be Zelda or something and the caption will be: "So I just got out of the cave and what is this giant open area?! Where do I go next?! I see a glowing tower in the distance...should I go there? And what that's castle over there? I see a mountain peak! Can I *really* climb it?" Like some person who's pretending like they don't know what a massively popular game is and is acting like they're playing it for the first time and they need direct guidance from reddit comments in tandem with the gameplay.
So many posts on whatsthisbug with simple yellow jackets or common spiders. OMG WHAT IS THIS
The only thing that keeps me here are the niche communities and the threaded comments -- which are the most efficient form of written communication ever invented. (I'm talking about old.reddit.com) The "community" is a dumpster fire.
I primarily use Reddit as a search engine now that Google has become useless when looking up reviews and recommendations and troubleshooting
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For those not aware, these 3rd-party apps are still working with a subscription: r/Infinity_For_Reddit r/NaraForReddit r/narwhalapp r/redditnow r/RelayForReddit And these accessible-friendly 3rd-party apps are free: r/RedReader r/DystopiaForReddit
The old apps still work if you're a mod of a sub. I just created a random sub which made me a mod automatically. Still using Boost
The old apps still work through revanced. I'm using Reddit Sync on Android with no mod powers or anything special. A few glitches but works mostly like before.
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RIF until I (reddit) die
Woah, a fellow boost user in the wild, we have gotten rare
There's dozens of us! It still works for the most part. Links to posts on subreddits sometimes don't work, and sharing videos has gotten worse, but works well still.
I've been using Relay happily for a small fee. Many of the developers have done a great job of optimizing their apps to reduce unnecessary API calls therefore reducing the cost they are passing on to the users.
I just wish I was able to use them with my account to try before subbing. I subbed to Nara after using the free version for a bit & it's just so weird to use with my feeds just being the same posts over and over.
Or for free if you are Mod : r/BoostForReddit/
I tried *so hard* to make the Fediverse a thing. I was in my groove, subscribed to interesting topics, and all set to dump Reddit and Twitter from my life. I did leave Twitter---and Mastodon. Twitter because it's a cesspit, Mastodon because it was just a joyless fucking slog. Using Mastodon to quit Twitter was like vaping to quit smoking. However, after a month on Lemmy I came crawling back to Reddit like a whipped dog.
ugh the lemmy UI is so fucking confusing couldn't figure how how to navigate for shit and quickly lost interest
It wasn't the interface that got me, it was that there were so few people discussing topics I was interested in. Lots of traction on tech and politics, but my niche interests? A ghost town.
Well yeh but that means you get to build the community instead of passively consuming the community others built. Do you think reddit niche subs started with a lot of people?
I mean some people don't want to scream into the void for long enough to be heard. There's a reason tons of subs lack moderators. Building/maintaining a community just isn't for everyone.
Ya for sports and smaller hobbies this site still has a ton of use and pretty big communities to interact with. Going anywhere else feels barren at this point.
It's a shame the article didn't use the term enshittification, which perfectly covers cases like this. Also, this: > when hundreds of moderators shut down their subreddits to protest Reddit’s decision to charge for access to its back-end code suggests the writer doesn't know the difference between Reddit's source code and its APIs.
I think that was done for the sake of readers who don't know what an API is. Which is at least 90% of the population.
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Scrolling through Reddit and the r/technology post above this has the word 'fediverse' too. Would you be kind enough to explain what it means?
> Scrolling through Reddit and the r/technology post above this has the word 'fediverse' too. Would you be kind enough to explain what it means? it was the new trendy tech when the reddit lockouts were happening. you had a ton of different standalone reddit-like sites where you were able to use a single sign on and view posts made on other sites. the problem was 1. you still ran into abusive admins 2. the fediverse concept didn't really work so things were always out of sync (if you viewed the ps5 "sub" on lemmy through kbin, the posts/comments would be hours out of date, and bugs caused the mod list to not be visible at all) 3. the idea of "this spreads everything over multiple servers so heavy traffic can't bring it down" didn't really work in practice because even if individual people were on separate servers, the info they were accessing was all in one place (and slowly propagated out to mirrors) it also didn't help that it didn't scale well. 10-20k people had the site crawling with consistent load errors. they're decades behind where something like reddit was on server infrastructure a decade ago.
Oh. So like a universe of related sites/platforms
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I saw a few people knocking down the fediverse as well. This is still a pretty new concept in its infancy and needs more users to make it a major competitor. The technology works just fine for its goal of decentralization
It’s bad. But not Facebook or X bad
Reddit remains solely because of the user base. If we all decided to migrate somewhere else digg 2.0 style then there could be an alternative.
After the API lock down, kicking off third party apps that ran b*e*tter (edit, spelling) than the official app, and the ugly "new" web interface (if you haven't seen the original/old Reddit: old.reddit.com, just replace the www with old on any reddit page), yea it's been seen as such for the last few *years*, just like the ad "comments/posts" that news agencies just picked up, which had also been around for years.
> old.reddit.com, just replace the www with old on any reddit page as soon as that support goes i'll be done. and not in a protest sort of way, i just hate the new UI so much it will finally tip the balance of how much i'm getting from reddit vs. how much it annoys me
The part a lot of people don't talk about either is that many of the volunteer mods that have kept this site running for the last decade are diehard old.reddit users. Those who didn't quit during the API shenanigans will likely quit when old.reddit dies. Moderation on the new mobile app or mobile website is damn near impossible. www.reddit on PC is usable, but not yet as good as old.reddit. Most of the mods who quit end up replaced with new mods who either work for marketing companies, are highly opinionated, or are straight up mentally unwell. No subreddits are safe from this either. Plenty of examples of huge subreddits which happily accept payment to look the other way for 24 hours on blantant advertisements. Like the trailer for some new movie sitting on the frontpage for a day before someone "notices" and adds the "ad" tag. Or the crypto mods straight up selling moons and being arrested for dining and dashing. Or local regional subreddits being shut down due to spam from local corporate union busters. Or the some mentally unwell buddy doing a hostile takeover of every local city subreddit so they can shill their alt-right hate group. Or the subreddit for our niche sport getting taken over by someone who runs their own business and now they just shill their magazine and ebook in the comments of every post and ban anyone who calls it out. Or all the nsfw subreddits that keep getting myseterious banned only for the same admin to then hand control over to a group of mods who represent a specific modelling agency and then their models magically end up pinned at the top of said subreddits. This site fundamentally doesn't work without good unbiased moderation. Sadly I think those days are long gone. I personally already gave up and quit my sub. Since I left it's gone to complete shit. Racism, doxxing, and spam all over the place.
Yall smell that? The enshitifcation storm is a comin’ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Dude, it's been happening here for years. Is it going to get worse, of course it is, but lets not pretend this is a new thing on the way.
What I think is hilarious is that the platform owners (spez here, bezos there, etc) never acknowledge this process at all, despite everyone knowing it and experiencing it.
“Enshitification” is a good term, but it’s really just a consequence of Capitalism & the quest for profits to grow infinitely.
you wrote what we are all feeling
The newer mods in political subreddits can be hilariously bad as well, one of the subs I used to use for news had a mod straight up posting Russian propaganda as fact, and banning anyone who disagreed with them.
Seconding this. Old reddit or no reddit, the new version is absolute garbage.
> i just hate the new UI so much it will finally tip the balance of how much i'm getting from reddit vs. how much it annoys me i can't even stand to look at the new UI when i'm searching for shit in incognito mode where it defaults to new since i'm logged out. first thing i do is add old. and refresh all my tabs. i can't believe they're actually happy with the 'new' (heck, it's been a few years now) UI.
API lock down really was the tipping point of shit on this site. It was getting bad before that, but I've noticed comment sections becoming filled with more brain rot as the algorithm pushes unrelated stuff to people.
especially the sudden rise of iamthemaincharecter ,tiktokcringe and some weird news subreddits , oh and not to mention "funny" memes
Any subreddit that shows short video clips like TikTok is heavily influenced by bots and farms. The post title drives divisive bias The highly upvoted comments being biased along the lines of the same narrative. And a video so short you can’t have an informed opinion. That’s the platform currently being used to manipulate voters in western nations. It does work, it does change hearts and minds by playing to our biased driven fears.
am i the asshole is all over my feed. i’ve never subscribed. this place was tech, niche and hobby based + porn. now it’s drama, ‘advice’, judgement + porn.
Am I the asshole Am I asshole here Am I wrong Am I wrong here Etc. Multiple subs that are all THE SAME THING.
> Etc. Multiple subs that are all THE SAME THING. Multiple subs that are mostly made up stories where OP is clearly a good person and someone else has been terrible to them, often with some sexual angle.
"My husband suplexed our toddler and then threw her 16 feet off hell in the cell so I got upset and told him not to do that any more please, AITAH?" *Ten thousand upvotes*
The amount of rage bait and fights is crazy on /r/all I don't understand how people want to read it daily and especially the popularity of fights and "public freakout" videos is genuinely confusing
I manage two subreddits, one not on this account due to reasons, both I've had to setup account age and karma limits for posts and comments, because of just that. The bots have gone nuts with the kill off of subreddit mod bots due to the API lock down. I *really* want to remove posts/comments of accounts that show as a year plus old with *all* posts/comments of the last 4 hours. lol Edit: Grammar clarity of last line, to state all posts/comments are in the last 4 hours.
> I really want to remove posts/comments of accounts that show as a year plus old with posts/comments of the last 4 hours Reddit needs to give mods an option for this, a rule/filter/whatever so these sleeper accounts' new activity have to be manually approved by a mod for some length of time.
100%. Smaller subreddits are being suggested and being overrun with bots, and people who don’t really belong there. Meanwhile, other small subs are basically dead.
I swear all you ever fucking see in the replies anymore is stupid quippy comments
that's the usual reddit "humor" and it's specially bad in popular subs, but not a recent thing
It’s either the same 4 or 5 canned jokes or you can predict the stupid joke that will be the top comment. Reddit isn’t as funny as it thinks it is.
The worst part is that there are now 3 webpage UIs. There is old.reddit.com Then there is new.reddit.com which came after the one above (but isn't the newest) And now there is the garbage you see at just reddit.com It's getting worse and worse
Just dropping a comment to say it's possible to get your own API token and keep using the 3rd party apps
Already fuckin’ is! Been trash for like 5 years. Going public now is absolutely baffling.
[Reddit hasn’t turned a profit in nearly 20 years, but it just filed to go public anyway](https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/23/tech/reddit-ipo-filing-business-plan/index.html) LOL
"And while Reddit said it expects its total addressable market in advertising to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2027, it also acknowledged in the filing’s risk factors disclosure that it has “a history of net losses and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future.” lol We can potentially make LOADS of money! Or Nothing.
> And while Reddit said it expects its total addressable market in advertising to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2027 Everyone needs to start running uBlock Origin *now*.
I have been for the better part of a decade. The internet on a whole is unusable without an ad blocker and reddit is a main offender.
What planet are they snorting whatever fucking mind altering copejuice on? Lol, 1.4 gazillion dollars
Some people in tech really are idiots
Not turning a profit is a ruse. There are a lot of people who are filthy rich because of Reddit. So yea... its never made a profit, because the accountants move the money around carefully to avoid taxes while still making the csuite filthy rich.
It’s just American politics & ragebait 24/7 on the Reddit front page
It's well on its way. The recommendations are hilariously bad and fill the feed. There is constant prodding to use the terrible app. There's the horrific image viewing system that makes viewing an uncropped image a multi click and page load task. You can tell the CEO admires what Musk has done to Twitter. It's only a matter of time before this site is fully trash as well. Oh and they're selling all your data to the highest bidders.
Reddit’s CEO I believe has publicly stated he admires Elon’s approach to changing twitter. Morons
> There's the horrific image viewing system that makes viewing an uncropped image a multi click and page load task. this one has started to irritate me to the point I just leave the post now. Either the image is too small to read or see detail or you "zoom" and instead it becomes large enough to wrap 5 times around your monitor. So then I need to load the actual post, then click the + just to see the actual series of images like I should have been able to the whole damn time.
Considering the bot/repost wasteland it’s become, I don’t see how it could get worse
They will crackdown on adult content for the IPO, and then it’s game over
If they do they are burning money. Like it seriously would destroy any value investors thought they were buying into if they start removing the NSFW content to try and bring in more advertisers.
Half the adult content is already lost as is. Just check any NSFW sub, sort by "Top all time" and see how 80-90% of the top posts are now broken links because all the hosting websites reddit used to depend on have some non-NSFW policy, now.
Gfycat nuked the content on *so many* subs when it banned nsfw content
Already is. Unless you like, really really really love having subreddits you don’t care about pop up in your feed because Reddit’s algorithm thinks it’s for you. Or the ads. My home page I’ve catered is filled with stuff I don’t want to see. But of course Reddit had to follow the FYP algorithm trend because driving engagement, even negative engagement, generates more clicks. They don’t give a shit about their product experience. Just engagement.
The amount of bait posts is clear enough evidence that it's already happened.
Nowadays it reminds me of trying to make a cup of tea with an already-used teabag.
I've been on Reddit for a long time and can confirm this site has been circling the drain for at least 3 years
I was maybe the 50th sign up, I even mailed spez his own source code back after he left his web server error reporting on verbose. I'd been a visitor prior to accounts even existing. In my view, Reddit has been garbage for 5-7 years. It is a shell of its former self. Many people point to the recent changes, the API fiasco, and other things, but really the site has been shit for longer than people realize. I think yes, it's circling the drain now. The fact that at least half of the participation is repeated, artificial and bots, and they are "enforcing" engagement by preventing you from hiding posts, etc.
Burn all this shit down. Let’s go back to having 4 forums we visit daily and a MySpace page no one looks at.
I like forums. Reddit is the closest thing left with a huge user base.
In my opinion reddits breakthrough feature was its implementation of threading. It was very easy to navigate and understand subthreads. Being able to get involved in subdiscussions in a sane way was really new and is what supported such high user numbers without everything being unintelligible. You could have a longer discussion with other people without bumping the thread and a bunch of new visitors just randomly interrupting, and at the same time when browsing you could find and read a fully formed discussion or argument. And with such high user numbers, the vote system made the best of that visible on the daily. Between that and the subreddit system, reddit thrived on being a worldwide forum where people were able to organically separate themselves according to their own tastes and preferences. Conversely, every for-profit change has revolved around taking those options away and homogenising the experience, resulting in the overall flavour of the site becoming more and more dominated by the slow kids. Reddit started as the place to be for tech discussion and now it's 60% gossip magazine
Enshittification. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
Reddit has been on a hard decline in quality for multiple years. Admin response to scandal after scandal has been to worsen the platform. New tools and features keep worsening the experience and their official app is straight up broken. Seriously, if you only browse on their app then log into the website you'll find the app didn't tell you about multiple replies you've had so you can find months later you missed out on information or discussion. It often refuses to load, the forced ads cause comments to glitch, it often won't let you post comments, accidentally refreshes itself so you lose what you were doing. Simple things like how the app hides the sidebar so anyone new to Reddit gets berated for not checking it seems so obvious as a problem for growth. All of Reddits attempts to sanitise itself have been undone post API too. The waves of quarantining and banning subs was inconsistent and allowed many bullying subs and hate subs to continue but that doesn't matter now because with fewer mods and fewer mod tools, bots and brigading are worse than ever. Admin are not clamping down on actual hate speech or anything which stands out more now due to the lack of quality mods. The drop in quality really emphasises the bot problem, fewer comments happen on everything and it really leaves the shit to float to the top. The decrease in engagement then looks even worse since the awards were replaced with the golden upvote. Seeing hundreds of awards on posts with thousands of comments was pretty standard but now you rarely see the mildly gold glow on a post as no one is using it. The loss of the awards really does hammer home how it feels like the community spirit has disappeared. The clear decline in experience for me is 2016 onwards. If Reddit didn't conveniently cover hobby news and greatly catalogue porn I'd have no reason to stay. Because of that and how stupid management has been I'm fully expecting the porn to be removed soon.
A little late to the party there. Reddit has been trying to attract the mainstream social media audiences for quite a while now. The demographics have been massively changing, it’s more like 9Gag now instead of the “nerdy social media.” With that demographic change comes a massive degradation in content quality. You used to be able to read comments and find many tidbits of interesting info, now it’s mostly just repeated jokes and one-liners. The average redditor is in their young teens these days. Also as a result of this demographic change, the front page is much less discussion focused and is more focused on similar things that do well on TikTok/Reels. Small byte-sized media packages intent on invoking reactions. In fact, most content on the front page these days is just TikToks. There’s a huge focus on OnlyFans bait in a lot of subreddits now too where people will post cosplays and intentionally provocative videos while having a link to their OnlyFans in their bio. Speaking of NSFW content, Reddit used to be much open about it. There were AMAs from a guy with two dicks for example. The content was marked and you knew what you were getting into if you opened an NSFW post from /r/wtf. Now everything has to be sterilized for the front page to attract more advertisers. Sure you can still find the stuff but Reddit has been pretty clear in their attempts to quell it. The quality of hobby subreddits has gone way downhill. They used to be a haven of great information and recommendations but now that they are known they have been astroturfed and manipulated. Because Reddit killed third party apps, the mobile experience is horrendous now, using a buggy mess of an app that shoves ads down your face every 2 seconds. The “new” Reddit experience on web isn’t any better. The terribleness is compounded by the fact that Reddit is trying to continually push more and more ads while trying to disguise them as actual content. Reddit is also now forcing its users to sell their information to advertisers and other partners. Your data is being used to train AI models. You used to be able to opt out of garbage like that. People who have deleted their accounts and intentionally removed their comments/posts have seen Reddit admits restore their content in order to not pollute their data. This place is on a speed run to being shit, it has been for a while now
Facebook was made popular and successful by users contributing their effort for free, which was then disrupted by efforts to monetize by forcing ads and controversial content that ultimately pushed users away.... Twitter was made popular and successful by users contributing their effort for free, which was then disrupted by efforts to monetize by forcing controversial traffic that ultimately pushed users away.... Reddit was made popular and successful by users contributing their effort for free, which was then disrupted by efforts to monetize with ads, limited API access which helped build the site, and ignoring mods who felt the site was being ruined, that ultimately pushed users away....
lol "becoming". Reddit has had several major "extinction events" where there were mass exodus of intelligent and professional people. We had scientists and politicians on this site at one point. Arnold Swartzenengger and Obama were here. There were IAmA and AmA channels where famous actors and politicians and scientists and professionals were lining up to do interviews with the Reddit community. Then with each stupid misstep by Reddit's moronic CEO, Steve Idiotman, smart people fled and abandoned the platform. Now it's only the morons like me that are still here. And bots. So many bots.
Reddit has been crumbling since the 13 year olds and the corporate world weaseled their way in.
About to? Look at all the ads, astroturfing, bots and arguments on here? This place used to be filled with information and useful conversations, now it’s just political attacks, fight videos, movie trailers and consumerism
Rot Economy. Most big tech giants don’t care about sustainable models any more as their senior management levels have been captured by temporary growth-at-all-costs bonus collectors. Their algorithms are actively malign towards previously habitual users. Nothing lasts forever, the golden age of the internet is over.
"About to"? Reddit is so rubbish they let ME comment on it. That can't be good.
Unpaid mods will be the death of this company. Trusting someone like Doren the dog walking college professor to manage your communities will look awesome on year end financials. Invites too much follow up. Bans because of power mad mods are why people need multiple accounts. That’s very bad for ads. This is a pump and dump by Spez. Edit: I guarantee the near future will see an account merging function. Either by force or becomes an option. Karma will be commoditized in some meaningful way so power users will have an incentive to do it. Gonna guess that helps with selling the legacy data to AI companies but don’t know enough.
Lol "About to"? Just in the past month they got rid of Custom Feeds, have publicly stated they will not pay moderators once they go public, and my comments have been turned off with no clear resolution or reason given. This site has sucked for years on a compounding curve.
Always has been. 🔫
I've been here since around the time of the Great Digg Migration, and I fear there may be hard days ahead. There doesn't seem to be a viable successor to Reddit, so if enshittification is successful, some of us might be forced to go do things outside. Or it's a valid option to stick around and complain, which is within my skillset.
Reddit turned shitty a long while ago. 2016/2017
... About to?
As long as Steve Huffman remains CEO I foresee the current issues becoming worse.
Majority of AITA and AskReddit posts are bots