‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit::A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever
“We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private,” he said.
They respect it so much they forcibly remove mods to make them public again. That’s so respectful.
“We will teach them our respectful ways. By force.”
Come on now, give him some credit. He waited a whole few days before completely going back on his words.
I used to be a daily Reddit doomscroller, but now I just vibe on Lemmy. I only ever visit reddit now to experience my niches that don’t yet have a community here, and that’s just to watch, not contribute.
I look forward to the future, where communities aren’t corralled into one website, where different interests can be free of anything overarching.
I somehow end up doom scrolling here on Lemmy. Seems all my feed is news and technology is doom and gloom. I wish there were more discussions and jokes in the comments like ask reddit had. I participate every once in a while but I miss lurking and reading this type of content on my phone.
Doomscrolling bad news is really bad for your health. https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/what-is-doomscrolling-and-why-is-it-bad-for-us/143139/
Bad news is also literally addictive and it is important to break that habit https://www.fastcompany.com/90269566/how-to-stop-your-brains-addiction-to-bad-news
I’d suggest subscribing to some of the more positive news threads on Lemmy. I ended up blocking those ones that only seem to post negative stuff. The world is a bad enough place as it is without Lemmy ramming it down my throat to. I’d also suggest regularly visiting other positive news sites to remind yourself that there is good news happening, you just don’t hear about it from the normal places. Certainly helps put things into perspective. https://www.groovnow.com/blog/where-to-find-good-news-online
It’s important to try and stay happy, friend, now more than ever.
Doomscrolling being bad is literally implied in the name.
Just block the news and politics communities. It’s good for your sanity.
Completely stopped using Reddit since they blocked third party apps in July 2023. I never accessed Reddit through other channels than smartphone.
Exactly. This wasn’t a protest as far as I’m concerned. They shut me out. So I no longer visit reddit or moderate any of my subreddits. It’s that simple
Yup. Both the desktop website and the official app are garbage UX. With no third party app option, I could not use Reddit even if I wanted to.
old.reddit is still usable, but I’ve also pretty much stopped using reddit since the blackout.
You can still get to the compact interface with /.i on the end of the URL. But they are making it harder and harder to not use their terrible default interface, which is clearly focused on ad delivery not UX.
None of the Reddit interfaces were ever any good IMHO. The service was only usable thanks to third party readers that redefined its user experience. Without them it’s about as pleasant as gopher.
That’s why I’m here too 🤝
Same. 3rd party apps made reddit tolerable. Without that method of access I chose to live without reddit.
Author didn’t seem to have a clue. Many of us didn’t protest or leave because of the fact that they implemented charges for their API - nope, was totally open to that! - it was the way they started charging.
I don’t think I’m alone either here. So many were open to paying fair prices for usage. But reddit repeatedly promised it’d be fair and reasonable. For months. And then when they finally dropped pricing info it was outlandish and would be taking effect before third parties had a chance to make appropriate changes.
This amounted to a power play meant to drive mobile users back to the reddit app. Why? Money and control. Bad for mods, users, and developers, it was a selfish play I will never forgive them for.
How did the author not know this, or if they did, why was it not front and center? Feels like they were parroting company talking points.
Exactly. The app developers were willing to make changes but they didn’t give them nearly enough time to do it. They dropped the changes at the last-minute and then lied about what they and the developers said in their private conversations. Then they got mad at the Apollo dev for recording it to cover their ass. It’s like getting mad at your partner when you cheated on them lol.
I’ve been slowly getting back into reddit lately. While I want Lemmy to thrive and will keep contributing to help it do so it’s still hardly a replacement for reddit. Compared to it, Lemmy is basically a single moderately active subreddit. If I had to name a type of person Lemmy at its current state is ideal for I’d say a left-wing activist type whose into tech and politics. While that has some overlap with what I’m interested about it still leaves out all my deepest passions and to be honest I feel really uncomfortable knowingly being in such an obvious echo chamber. I’d really wish there was more of the kind of users here that most of you probably dont want. Just to even things out a bit.
My problem with Lemmy is that it seems/ feels empty.
This might be a me-issue, not doing something right but all I see is technology & politics articles.
I’m subscribed to many communities (like multiple anime communities) and I barely to not see them). I quite miss the conversations on Lemmy.
However going back to Reddit seems to be no point either, everyone just repeat what another one said - or just people fighting each other.
For example; saw a Reddit thread about relationships. Everyone just echo-chamber “leave the relationship”. But what happened to adults just communicating to each other? Lol
I didnt participate in the anime polls but remember that moat of it was episode discussions or fan art.
Also remember that the subs there were in the millions with probably high 50-100k posters and remaining lurkers.And God forbid you’re anywhere right of Marx himself or you’ll get people telling you you’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Like come on, we want 95% of the same stuff, let’s just work together and have some productive discussions and enrich our political mindsets instead of flinging shit at people who are basically on the same side as you.
I’d say a left-wing activist type
Which is cringe inducing in looking for certain types of left-wingers. There are more tankies here than in other Internet forums I have seen. I’d be rich for penny I get for meeting tankies in Lemmy. They call out American imperialism, but then simp for Russia and China. Two wrongs don’t make a right and they expect to have one but not the other. Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if Russian bots have also infiltrated Lemmy to sow disinformation.
whose into tech
Doesn’t sound different from the early days of Reddit.
I see way more comments complaining about tankies on a regular basis than actual tankies
Americans are pretty right leaning. So anything leftish is unfamiliar. I think tankie has become an all encompassing term for anything left of “normal”, or unfamiliar.
Ehh once you see it you can spot the Tankie arguments pretty fast. Usually it starts as some sort of nitpick or factual correction regarding Russia, China, or another country in their sphere of influence, then some overarching opinion that sounds okay on the surface but the moment you put more than a few seconds of thought in you realize its wrong, sprinkle in some vague and slightly conspiratorial-sounding references to not falling for propaganda, then usually it devolves into pointing out something bad the US has done as a false equivalency while conveniently avoiding the finer points on why it’s a false equivalency. Oh and they never mention the Nazis because their arguments so frequently are perfect arguments to also defend the Nazis, but they at least know it’s a bad look to align with Nazis.
Personally I will call out racism/apologism/transphobia with a 2 reply limit then block, because I do not want that to be normalized, but also people posting such comments tend to be trolls who enjoy arguing in bad faith. I did also block the entire hexbear instance on my account (it’s an option the settings now!) because that’s not just random redfacists but an echo chamber for redfacists to continuously reinforce their beliefs.
Is your defederated from hexbear and lemmy grad? They’re all pretty concentrated there
blahaj lemmy is indeed defederated from hexbear, idk about lemmygrad
Yeah I agree. The apologia for Russia, China and just communism in general (or what ever you want to call it) fucks with your mind a bit. If Lemmy is the only social media you use it quickly starts to seem like this kind of thinking is far more common than what it really is and it can make one question their own sanity when reasonable sounding critizism of this is met with huge flood of downvotes. Especially if the discussion is happening on a place like lemmy.ml. As an outside observer I find it interesting as I haven’t really met people like this before but trying to engage with them is one of the most frustrating things I’ve experienced especially since a mod is going to ban you mid-discussion for “misinformation and bigotry” or something similar while it’s clear to everyone it’s just CCP level cencorship to silence all dissidence.
Yeah, some instances turned to be haven for these tankies. It took me a while before I realised that lemmy.ml is pretty much run by them.
Not one mention of where said moderators who left went to…
A lot of which were good mods too. I’ve noticed a lot more racism and otherwise right wing posting being left alone/unmoderated since the protest, in the subs I used to browse actively - nowadays I just check in with them every now and then without an account and the intentional or not lack of moderation is making me want to stop doing even that.
Probably depends on your subs. Most of mine have went far, far left and have become a tiresome dog pile of virtue signaling from behind keyboards and screens.
And I’m a leftist. There seems to be a huge difference these days in being a leftist and being a “this is now my only personality trait” leftist through which all views must be fundamentally filtered. Even non-political/non-social. It has made some subs unreadable for me, specifically my state and city subs.
Edit: I guess where I am going with it is that the extremes are becoming more extreme and seeking out new frontiers now that moderation is light.
I started an entire instance - https://lemdro.id - to provide a home to Reddit subreddits such as r/Android and r/Google Pixel (and other technical stuff)
It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren’t just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or was I just so used to it before that that I’d never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself ‘well, that’s just reddit’. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
I’m not claiming the fediverse is perfect or free from that sort of shit but either through the practicalities of federation, or better moderation or a smaller userbase or a more mature userbase or a mix of one or more of those things it doesn’t feel exclusionary to me. I often see on posts like this some people calling Lemmy a left-wing echo chamber and whilst I do agree there’s more people of a left-wing bent on here I think echo chamber is a bit much and is a phrase maybe used by those who live in a country without a functioning left-wing political party. I’ve not encountered a communist or tankie since Hexbear fucked off back to their kindergarten.
As for the Guardian article, they’ve fallen into the same trap as I’m concerned the fediverse might fall into by federating with Meta - assuming high numbers equal success or victory. If you have corporate/economics based mindset I can see how that works, but to me success equals a popular, useful community site entirely free from algorithms and other forms of manipulative control. One that isn’t gathering data via ads and tracking on its userbase to sell on (lets remember that reddit weren’t upset that AI were scraping reddit, they were upset that the company weren’t seeing any money from that). A community that grows organically, with all that that implies - sometimes growth might be very slow, it might stop entirely for awhile, maybe even reverse - but the emphasis should be on the people making the community better.
Reddit forgot somewhere along the way that it was the users who made reddit what it was. Look at the stats for r/askreddit - in particular the posts per day and comments per day - look at the trend since 2020. There may well be the same amount of users on reddit, but we all know a certain percentage of them are bots and even if they weren’t, just looking at those two graphs tells you everything about people’s level of interest in participating on reddit.
The only thing high user numbers guarantee sites like reddit is ad revenue. Nothing else.
You say, “I’ve not encountered a communist…”, like that is a good thing. Let me fix that for you
I’m a communist. Companies would be better off if they were owned by workers rather than rich people. You know, workers owning the means of production, instead of capitalists?
Hopefully this hasn’t ruined your Lemmy experience!
I mean workers could own the majority of company stocks and be the share holders in a twisted sense of communism.
Sort of along the same vein - as unions grew weak in Australia a different way to represent workers was needed. Industry Superannuation funds were created. Workers pay into these retirement funds which in turn invest in the companies. These funds now represent the investors interest in the companies the investors work at.
Yes, this is the popular side of lemmy communism. When people say they are bothered by Lemmy’s politics, that’s not what they are talking about. They are talking about tankies and campists who seem more interested in simping for shitty autocrats and making tyrants into folk heroes than engaging seriously with anything resembling contemporary political science.
Basically, as a leftist, I am annoyed by the part which is legitimately indistinguishable from right wing trolls trying to make leftists look stupid, which is unfortunately a large and vocal part of many leftist communities here.
Wow, this stats website is interesting. I checked a number of subs I used to frequent: r/thenetherlands, r/idiotsincars and r/Europe . All of them see meteoric rice in subscribers, but number of posts goes down significantly since 2020-2021 (r/idiotisincars is the outlier here, you can clearly see the pandemic, but once it resumes the trend is downward again).
On occassion I also go back there and some comments of mine felt like were downvoted way harder than I felt usually about reddit.
Granted they were bad takes but I felt like responses were way harsher.Lemmy feels more direct in a sense that the discussions are more fact based instead of the aspects you already mentioned.
It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren’t just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or was I just so used to it before that that I’d never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself ‘well, that’s just reddit’. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
Am I taking crazy pills or something? Subs and users get put down HARD over that sort of stuff (See r/politicalcompassmemes). I haven’t seen content like that unless I actively searched for that sort of stuff due to morbid curiosity. Would you mind sharing the subreddit/posts in question? Not to deny what you’re saying but I find it hard to empathize without any evidence.
I also don’t understand this infatuation with “old reddit” when that allowed subreddits like coontown to exist.
Well said! I agree with almost everything, except I still want algorithms. I think I’d say “free from algorithms that serve corporate interests” instead. Algorithms that help me find content I genuinely enjoy are sorely missed.
I think algorithms can certainly be useful tools, but if they can somehow be made client-side, transparent in what they do, and customizable/replaceable, that would be ideal. In that scenario, they’d actually be working for the end user instead of the platform owner.
I only use reddit for tech related inquiries, but besides that I quit it.
I went from 8 hours of screen time a day to an average of 2 to 3 hours and Lemmy often isn’t on the top. For me it has to do with a lack of content at some point, but I started enjoying it like that. If there’s nothing new, I shouldn’t have a reason to stick around in an app
Weird how it feels manageable to keep in the loop on Lemmy compared to Reddit. I like it a lot more.
Exactly. I still occasionally land there due to google searches for obscure tech issues, but that’s only to read and lurk. I used to be a regular poster, (I had ~1.2m karma between all my various accounts) but haven’t even commented since the API lockout.
Same here. Spend several hours a day on reddit since 2014, but haven’t logged in since the API shutdown. Only the occasional Google search brings me there.
Reddit having a huge audiences feels more like a disadvantage than a advantage
Well that’s the issue. Reddit as a tool/service is fine. The only thing that I have an issue with is the api / third party app stuff and their leadership. Subs like Homelab , league , etc are ones I used heavily and they still function the same more or less. I just lurk more and use Reddit in browser with an extension that helps.
Lemmy and the various instances and apps are cool, but the lack of content(or content creators rather) is what makes it a little depressing. Outside of memes and discussions like this, it doesn’t replace Reddit because the user base is like 10+ years behind. I can show up and find posts from days ago which just leads me to keep using Reddit and rss for new content
Same. The UI got so much worse on mobile.
I used to love Reddit, but I’ve totally abandoned it. It’s not one particular reason, but the broad effect is that I and many others no longer feel welcome.
We lost a lot of good users; people who contribute to topics, make good posts and comments. We also lost good moderators; people who cared about the content quality and vibe. The Reddit-appointed replacement mods by and large are not people who ran or SHOULD run communities.
Add in the fact that both subreddit mods and Reddit admins are going hog wild with the ban hammer on both subs and users, and it’s hardly a wonder that users aren’t having it. They’re trying to turn it into a gentrified Disneyland and that’s not what we want.
I’m hoping we can grow the Fediverse and prevent it from getting fucked by people with bad motives.
While traffic has not changed substantially, many users report the quality of content and the kinds of posts that are surfaced on user homepages now seem different.
While traffic has not changed substantially
has not changed
It’s long write up with a misguiding title. No numbers to back anything after a protest phase. And with problems with API access, there won’t be any from unaffilated sources.
I did found my favorite communities dropped some in activity and I myself access it just like once in a week or two from a desktop, signed off. But it didn’t die. Default subs can’t care and most NSFW posters are still there.
The important thing though is that Lemmy grew a lot. And it’s now enough to have a hit of that reddit poison. And, arguably, it feels a little bit more personal.
It feels a lot more like Reddit used to be, back in the old days. It feels less like social media and more like actual people are here.
This. While yeah at times it certainly feels a bit empty, Lemmy feels like old Reddit or maybe even the days of Forums before. Interesting, engaged discussions, rather than vapid one-liners that reddit ultimately became.
Crickets on the fact that so many users of 10+ years left, deleting their content on the way out? Seems writer didn’t dig very deep. Not that Rodent would give them accurate numbers or anything.
Yeah, I browse Reddit sometimes. I come across the mass-edited comments very often.
I’d heard that Reddit was going around undeleting stuff.
I think that conspiracy grew out of bugs in the mass-deletion tools. I found and reported a few on my way out. I wound up rewriting big chunks of an FOSS tool because Reddit was quietly throttling delete calls to the API. The requests would return 200 codes, but the payloads themselves would include ambiguous “error” text about the throttling behavior. So while the mass delete tool insisted that content had been deleted, large chunks had NOT.
Once I got the scripts running it took nearly a week for the scripts to fully delete and replace all my content.
Do you have evidence or just conspiracy theory gossip?
Here are some comments about this occurring: https://programming.dev/comment/6051878
Yeah, I don’t see anything there about reddit undeleting their deleted posts/comments. Many of us burned our profiles to the ground when we left, but I hadn’t heard of them reverting our edits. I would expect that news to blow up as much as the last time Spez did something like that (may the gods erase his soul and the people forget his name).
In response to such critiques, Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”
Never before has the sheer inevitability of enshittification been so aptly summarized.
What’s the saying? “You can’t control what you can’t measure.”
I think the most important problem with how this worked out is that many of those who left Reddit by deleting their content didn’t find a place to transfer it to on Lemmy or other platforms…
I personally have been intentionally starting conversations recently…
Reddit had a good run for over a decade, but as always with the internet, now a better thing will take its place.
As always with the internet… a better thing takes it’s place?
Friend. That isn’t usually the standard.
I still mourn Portal of Evil. It was my reddit before reddit.
my pre internet was Sensible Erection. which also got destroyed through a lack of care. eventually it was dying and I moved to Reddit. Lemmy is my Reddit methadone.
Reddit was a major part of my day for almost 8 years.
You got a couple names of the improvements? Not that I don’t like lemmy but… Numbers are small.
Numbers get bigger.
While traffic has not changed substantially,
This is a terrible thing for most social networks, which are expected to grow continually. When the IPO hits, who wants to buy stock in a stagnant social network? Especially one that has been described as stifling creativity?
