That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
Reddit will die off in stages. Slowly.
First the power users are leaving now. These are the mods and the major content creators (think Minecraft leaving)
Eventually they will piss people off again and the more common content creators will leave.
Then after reddit has worse and worse content, the users who just comment will leave.
After that there will be nothing worthwhile for the lurkers and they will leave too.
Reddit will then be a wasteland.
This will all take quite a while. Even Digg took time to die off.
I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won’t be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.
As a person who really gets stuck in his ways and hates having to change things if I don’t have to, here I am on Lemmy. I’m ready to settle in.
Joining this was easier since I haven’t been on Reddit since the 12th
Got past the habit stage. Now I’m onto alternatives
I’m the same! Although I’ve even tried to avoid clicking search links to Reddit as well
Unfortunately for me, one of my favorite uses for reddit has been live game threads for various sports and that really only works with a larger user base. For instance, I follow the Seattle Mariners and I have found two different Lemmy instances for them. The one with the most subscribers (44) hasn’t had a game thread posted in 13 days despite the Mariners having played like 10 games in that stretch. The other one has 9 subscribers, although it looks like someone has set up a bot to automatically post a game thread and a post-game thread; however, every single one I looked at has 0 comments.
I’m not gonna be able to pull the plug on reddit entirely until Lemmy gets a serious increase in users.
Hi! I’m an admin of fanaticus.social. I’d like to apologize for the game bots disappearance. It’s back now! I made pinned a post about it, which you can read here.
We’re working hard to iron out the kinks in the game bots but I apologize for the inconvenience. I was on vacation last week and because of a bug, the choice was between keeping the fanaticus servers up or putting the bots to sleep.
The live game threads were some of my favorite parts of Reddit too. I can’t do anything about the small user base but porting the game bots over to lemmy and posting content is the best way I could think of to start attracting users.
Lemmy is something like .02% the size of reddit
Let’s change that!
What do you propose? Lemmy is significanly more difficult to understand, sign up for, and use, with far less content than Reddit. And the majority opinion seems to be ‘fuck those kids that don’t understand how to use lemmy, we don’t need them’.
I think as more powerful apps are created with simple sign up UIs that auto subscribe to the communities you request etc, and pull content from multiple sources (kbin/Lemmy/mastodon) all on one page… It will become easier for the less technically inclined to join. Just give it time and keep participating here instead of reddit.
I blocked reddit the day they announced the API changes, so no problem there!
I think it is very much a case of developers building, or expanding apps. It’s easy to forget that many of these apps are in their developments infancy, because so (technically speaking) is the server software.
There will also, inevitably, be an interplay between app developer and server developer. Work arounds producing accepted items that other apps need to include (for those that remember, think text colour codes on IRC, mostly driven by mIRC (short have history, YMMV, etc etc)
Mind you, I’m wondering if all this federation will bring people back to IRC…
A big part of the problem solves itself with a larger userbase. More content generated, more exposure, search engines show lemmy instances in results, people learn. Lemmy is not that hard to undestand. You can join an instance and explore from there, maybe stay within you instance and be satisfied by your experience. Maybe you’ll learn in time about other communities in other instances. When I first joined reddit 10 years ago I didn’t understand it either but I kept using it because it was interesting. What I propose is that we keep making content and commenting and that will attract more people and communities will grow.
Fair enough.
And the majority opinion seems to be ‘fuck those kids that don’t understand how to use lemmy, we don’t need them’.
I see that too. I suspect that will go away with time. Possibly not very much time tbh. You often see that sort of attitude when a community based around new software is very small and new as culturally it is heavily influenced by people either involved in development or who pride themselves on being early adopters. Neither group is usually very good at understanding the significance of the barriers to entry for most people. Right now we’re seeing an influx of people who couldn’t care in the slightest about poking at new technology, but who are willing to do so because they want to explore a valid alternative to Reddit. That influx will naturally shift the culture and I’m pretty confident that going forward the general vibe will be that accessibility is an important thing (especially as blowing up accessibility for no good reason is at the core of why a lot of the new people are leaving Reddit.)
I disagree that it was harder to sign up for. At least on Lemmy.World (which I’m confident will become the default instance over Lemmy.ml) you just put in a username, email address and password and you’re in.
It does have far less content than Reddit. However, it is largely more active users who create and moderate content who are moving over. It’ll take time but they will grow the communities into places with a lot to offer new users. By the time that happens, it’s likely Reddit will do something to upset and displace their users again and they’ll find growing and thriving communities with increasingly compelling content to greet them. (and hopefully, even if Lemmy hasn’t become much easier to understand by then, the explanations and the guides and all the other “welcome new person” stuff will be more evolved by then.)
undefined> I disagree that it was harder to sign up for.
You are correct, and I misspoke. By ‘harder to sign up for’ I was referring to not just the actual sign up process, but the steps involved before the actual sign-up process (deciding on an instance, which itself requires learning what ‘instance’ means, as well as at least some research into what federation is, and what the differences are between instances).
That I can relate to. It definitely slowed me down a little when I was looking at trying Lemmy out. I think with all of those sorts of concerns it is inevitable that there will be better and better support for making the onboarding process as easy as possible as time goes on. What sort of resource do you think would have made getting into Lemmy easiest for you?
I started using reddit only an year ago. I’ve tried to use it even earlier, however I didn’t understand how things work. It was after i lurked for a while that i figured out things. And Infinity for Reddit app. Lemmy also is taking the similar time.
Do you think that number would change significantly if one were to discount bots from the calculation? I swear 3/4 of comments on some subs were bots, I’d like to think that it’d take a chunk off the actual reddit user base
Yeah Digg didn’t die in a day. It takes time. I joined lemmy today, but I looked into it a few weeks ago first. It wasn’t worth the effort then, it is now. Having an Apollo-like app is a big help too.
Every previous major exodus had the problem that it was the people everyone was better off without leaving. Maybe you hated Reddit in 2015 and were pissed at their decisions, but the alternative was a place dedicated to mocking fat people and saying slurs.
Comparatively lemmy just kinda has a similar vibe to Reddit. Like I need to look for equivalents to some spaces I miss, but it’s not the people we said good riddance to
I’m in the same boat, I just joined today and I’m surprised but Lemmy already scratches the same itch that reddit did
It’s been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.
And it’s due to things the users said not to do
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I’m not sure if Reddit will “die off”. There seems to be a significant portion of users who don’t care about the API debacle or protests - they just want to scroll through memes.
I would definitely like to see Reddit experience more pain, given how cunty they’ve been to users and moderators. But we live in a world where big companies act like shit and get away with it.
no memes to scroll through if there is no one to post the memes
When I’ve checked the Reddit home page in the last few days (using an ad blocker of course, or sometimes an alternative Reddit front-end), it looks like stuff is still being posted.
Hopefully Reddit will feel more pain that persuades it to change course at least a little bit. But I won’t believe that the pain is happening until I see it. Unfortunately it seems to me that there are some Reddit users who just want to watch the funny videos and don’t care about Reddit’s poor behaviour.
it’s still too early. These things take time.
True I suppose things could change over time. We’ll have to see.
After being a Lemmy lurker for a few weeks, I submitted a request for an account on an instance that manually approves accounts earlier this week. Just checked and confirmed that my account was approved. This was based on calls for engagement to help grow the community. While I’ve been here for a bit, here’s my first participation. Ayo!
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Good job on not only lurking!
“That’s why we’ve spent the past few weeks threatening and strong arming them. Now please, shut up and get back to work.”
Also: we’re still not going to pay you, but treat you worse. And if you quit, and the people after you keep quitting… we’re going to have to replace you with PAID moderators… and if you play your cards right and we forget who you are, you might be one of those paid mods, so uh… shut up and get back to work for free!
Reddit CEO calls unpaid moderators’ concerns “noise”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOm_UKGyrZg
This is abusing volunteers. If there are 140,000 active subreddits and if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits. They can close the subreddits, pay someone to moderate, try to pawn them off on a new sucker, or have bots run the subreddits. The question is, in the meantime, will the spammers abuse Reddit like their mods are being abused by Reddit? Let Reddit deal with these problems. If you’re a mod, why are you giving your time away for free to a company that doesn’t care about you?
If you’re a mod, I get that you care about your subreddit, but why waste your talent on someone who thinks your concerns are just noise?
The Minecraft Devs left Reddit:
Leave Reddit? To quote Din Djarin, “This is the way.”
if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits
Not exactly. Most subs have more than 1 moderator.
Plus tons of mods moderate many subreddits. It’d be a much more complex statistic
That’s a big point. There are a lot of VERY prolific moderators, especially on the more popular subs.
Spammers must be salivating, like “Yes Splez! We would be happy to take over this sub for you!”
I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product’s users and mods to be a winning strategy.
I don’t think he knows what he’s doing… in his mind he’s running the last meter of the finish line to the IPO when all these “problems” are cropping up for “no reason” and he just wants to finish the race
I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product
s users and modsto be a winning strategy.FTFY.
The users are the product being sold to the advertisers. Framed that way, it makes it even more clear how idiotic driving away users is.
If they’re that important then pay them.
One of the comments on the Verge article, that I agree with:
There’s nothing wrong with the mods being volunteers. Reddit just needs to respect them (and the other users) more. In fact if the mods were paid employees there’d just be even less standing in the way of these administration deuchebag moves. And I think that if they were paid hires there’d be less assurance that the mods were truly interested in the subject matter of their subs - I’m just hypothesizing there. Anyway I don’t think the volunteer model wasn’t working. It’s the admin layer outside the mods that’s broken.
Yeah I was a mod. I didn’t want pay, I wanted appreciation, assistance, and to not be fucked over. I appreciated the free duolingo though. Paying me would’ve made it a job and it’d be a job well below my actual job pay rate.
Wikipedia is proof that volunteers are very useful. But when you build a site like that, is better to keep your profit obsession low, be glad you are leaving something useful for humanity while living a comfortable life.
Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone
The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money
But what if they had turned around and said, “fine, we’ll start hiring you guys. You’ll get paid hourly, but you’ll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs”?
Most of them wouldn’t be into it - they don’t actually want to work for Reddit, they just don’t like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they’re not doing a job, and they generally don’t want to be (there’s a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)
When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don’t try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don’t break their tools and ask when they’ll get back to work
No one needs to pay them. Not being treated like garbage is sufficient.
If the company is treating you as an employee, they are required to pay you. There is precedent for this.
The TOS definitely gives them quite a lot of leeway there. While TOS obviously don’t supersede actual law, if unpaid internships that are clearly doing actual labor are generally allowed to exist, I’m skeptical that what is explicitly called a volunteer moderator position would run afoul of the law.
AOL had volunteer assistants. Ultima Online had volunteer assistants. The courts ruled that those were employee positions based on the way those positions were managed.
Don’t even get me started on unpaid internships.
Fair enough, I wasn’t aware of there being any precedent there. However, at least from those two cases, it seems that they were both settled out of court, so there hasn’t actually been a legally binding ruling on this kind of issue.
To be clear, I’m not saying that unpaid internships etc. are good; only that I’m not sure a court would find them to be literally illegal (regardless of whether or not I think they should be).
Unpaid internships are legal so long as the business receives no value from the intern, and the courts would uphold that, if ever a case came before them about it.
In practice, the only people who have the option of taking an unpaid internship - where they have to spend many hours a week in a workplace that doesn’t pay them, to the exclusion of spending those hours in a workplace that does pay them - are already finanically stable enough to do so, probably because of generational wealth. AOL and UO were exceptions, probably because people wanted to participate in those communities in their spare time, as a kind of hobby.
Those people are being inducted into the system that propagates that generational wealth. It’s not in their best interest to protest not being paid when they should be, because the repercussions of doing so would be being excluded from that system. So it’s highly unlikely that any real “this should be a paid internship” case would ever be filed. The amount of hours which would be ordered to be compensated, even if it was treble damages, wouldn’t be worth the cost of going to court, let alone being excluded from whatever industry.
You think those “open or else” threats are taking Reddit closer to that conclusion?
IANAL (oh yes, I do): As soon as Reddit The Company started exerting unilateral control over subreddits and their moderators for business purposes, and not legal or liability purposes, they most definitely were treating mods as employees.
I think they are getting closer to else
Or, I know this is crazy, don’t piss them off when you already make their money?
Moderators need to understand that Reddit doesn’t care if you’ve been in charge of your /sub for 10 years. They have, can and will tell you how to run it. There’s nothing for you to “negotiate.” As far as Reddit management is concerned, it’s “my way or the highway.”
Part of ending a toxic relationship is figuring out that it’s time to let go.
The mods need to understand that the admins see the mods just as the mods see the users.
They can be gotten rid of on a whim and no one will care
Well, we former Reddit mods don’t need to understand anything in that regard. Fuck Reddit in its entirety. I’m not wasting time considering their point of view. I understand that they’re pieces of shit. I did negotiate - they doubled down and so I carried through and walked the fuck away, revoked my registered copyrighted material and took the first steps to litigation when they reposted it. They’ve taken it back down after the DMCA was filed, we’ll see if it goes back up.
An ultimatum is a negotiation.
The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever. There’s a real problem of Apathy in today’s culture when people are just jonesing for their fix of daily content/memes, or at the very least nothing that disrupts the status quo. They don’t give a fuck about “ideals” or what corporations do or farm from them so long as their instant gratification and daily intake of said content remains unchanged.
Reddit will REALLY be good when those apathetic users are all that’s left to produce content and moderate subs! /s
Let’s be honest, reddit had already gentrified itself internally into subs that either
A) act like mob rule is cool
or
B) so libertarian it hurts
The B users can’t stand A and the A users can’t stand B, sadly, the A users are the ones who only care about “content” and don’t care about much else.
There’s actually another group— people who just haven’t figured out where else to go. There are subreddits for neurodiverse folks, as an example, that are really active, and I’m trying to decide whether to post and say, “Hey, folks, here’s where to move this group to!”
People just need to change their attitude for how they interact with Reddit now. Gone are the days of good faith and honest interaction. I’ll happily lurk and absorb content and provide no interaction back, not wasting my time curating / generating content for them anymore.
I’ll happily lurk and absorb content and provide no interaction back, not wasting my time curating / generating content for them anymore.
Same here, on old.reddit only, with adblocker enabled of course. On my phone I will not go to reddit at all.
I deleted my account, have been on there for troubleshooting drivers and other pc related stuff last week I confess. The times I f5’d reddit out of boredome for the latest dank memes or drama has passed tho. I can’t handle the attitude from the uberstaff.
I think you overestimate the willingness of people to stay in a Spam, porn, and bot infested hellhole (if you think it’s bad now you haven’t seen nothing yet), especially as public consciousness starts to realize that. There will be a point in the future where Reddit will be seen as about as respectable as an adult video site, there are people who would be willing to stay through that but there are plenty of people who wouldn’t either.
Another good thing to remember is that most of the people on Reddit are the kind of people who laugh and upvote stuff, they’re not the kind of people who are going to be making high quality posts. So when the people making high quality content leave the only thing that will be left is the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t really bode well for the continued survival of the platform, at least as a place that people are going to want to go.
My hope is that you’re right, but my fear is that I am.
I completely understand Reddit wanting to be as profitable as possible, however it’s the approach to the users, developers, and blatant lack of care, respect and transparency that got my back up - suspect a lot of people may be the same. Communities always move and change, no platform is too big to fail.
All they had to do was allow Reddit premium users to access the site using third-party apps.
Yup. I was plenty happy to pay to keep using BaconReader. Give everyone a few months to set that up and I think things would’ve been fine. Instead, we get basically the most ham fisted way it could’ve gone.
Ohh interesting. Thinking about that, yah I would of signed up probably.
I’m with you. I get needing to make money, but needing to go public and become just another cringe social media platform is just sad. RIP Reddit. Hello Lemmy.
Not only this, but this has happened before. It was called Digg back in 2010.
I was waiting it out until I heard mods were being threatened. That’s the final call.
I’m going to be replacing posts with links to my never used socials because who cares if I’m spamming at this point.
Man i really hope Reddit dies and people move onto decentralized networks, in time I’m sure we can figure out how to index a decentralized network for search engines completely replacing Reddit.
If the content gets great enough, that will happen. Going to take time, but it will absolutely happen. Especially with so many people deleting their comments and Reddit having their feet held to the fire with people making complaints about them violating GDPR.
Lemmy, Mastodon, and the entire Fediverse are really what the internet was supposed to be. I am glad to see the pendulum swinging back and I hope it continues. I am mostly really excited about the mobile apps being developed for Lemmy. Those are coming along at lightening speed and I those will be THE THING that makes Lemmy happen.
You’re right about the apps coming great, I just downloaded Connect for Lemmy and it took all of 5 minutes for me to transition from baconreader. This app is smooooth too. What other apps are there though?
I’m using Liftoff. Just switched yesterday after Jerboa completely blanked out on me. So far, so good! The dev seems to be actively debugging and improving the app, so I have high hopes for this one. The reddit Sync developer is also in the process of making a Sync for Lemmy, with a hoped-for release in six weeks.
Connect seems really good so far.
Big thing is time for now. The Devs of some of the largest Reddit apps are onboard with making Lemmy apps but given Reddit’s disgustingly short timeline for the API changes they’ve not really had the time required to do much.
I’m certainly waiting with for Sync for Lemmy as I used Sync for a decade and am more than happy to wait and support the dev.
Sync won’t be the only major app either.
It’s easy to index decentralized networks is literally Google. Every website is decentralized from every other website the fact that Lemmy/kbin/Masterson sites can communicate with each of the doesn’t really make any difference.
I wonder if search engines will see content duplicated across multiple instances and derank them thinking it’s SEO spam. Or maybe I’m overthinking since google is already full of SEO spam.
You can use Lemmy Explorer to search through all 900 or so Instances for the communities you’re interested in.
Damn right. The admins I’ve worked with over at Reddit understand this, but spez seems to think he can get out of this without causing an entire mass exodus… and just let his communities bleed off and die. The community team at reddit understands how important both the users and the mods are, why doesn’t spez?
My theory is he’s heard Musk brag about how he’s made Twitter profitable, and only lost bots and scammers - the users and advertisers all came crawling back (without releasing numbers)
No way that’s true, but every owner of social media seems to have paid attention. They want to believe it - there’s growing pressure to turn a profit now, so when someone tells you “the users might get mad, but they’ll come crawling back if you stand firm” they pay attention
It’s pretty easy to convince someone of something so convenient
It seems like it’s a common blind spot for all tech bro types, they have no idea how communities work, both online and IRL. That’s also why they want to get rid of government.
Hasn’t Musk also laid off like 70-80% of Twitter staff?
Forget power users and mods. Shouldn’t Reddit worry about their admins jumping ship before it goes down? If Steve is copying Musk’s playbook, there’s no way he would skip that “crucial” step, so they might as well get out now.
All good points!
Have you seen spez? I wouldn’t be surprised if he worships Elon.
My fav comment so far is “He’s really giving ‘breastfed till he was 8.’”
Honestly in my opinion Huffman isn’t the brightest bulb in the bunch, he also seems to have a problem with understanding the consequences of his actions. He thinks that we’re stupid, he also thinks that users will stay on Reddit no matter what. I’m sure some will after all there were a small minority of users that stayed on digg right up until the bitter end. However a large majority of users aren’t going to keep up voting and posting there as the platform slowly devolves into a spammy mess. Maybe he thinks that that won’t happen, after all they do have the audacity to think they can reliably prosecute “ban evasion” when in reality they can’t, especially for bots.
I take issue with the next part of the quote: “it’s a symbiotic relationship”. No, it is not. Reddit gets value from the moderators, but the community the moderators have on Reddit could be anywhere.
As soon as the threat was made all the mods should have quit. An unmoderated reddit would collapse in hours. It would have been glorious.
This is true. I suspect for many mods the power they have to push their ideas, ideals and beliefs and punish who they see fit more than makes up or the fact that they do it for free.
Mods like that probably exist. There are also many quiet mods, particularly in smaller communities, who try to govern even handedly. I never engaged in any protests or pushed any agendas until the recent API changes, and am trying to set up an alternate space to help ensure a space exists for the content/community.
Quite honestly, I don’t like moderating or leadership and sort of fell into the role. Now that I’m here though, there’s a sense of duty/obligation that makes it hard to leave.
You don’t even notice the quiet mods. If they’re doing their job right, it can seem like they’re not doing anything. If they ban your for misspelling Ganon on a Zelda sub or demand you write an apology essay for pointing out that Joe Biden has been creepy on a politics sub then they are doing doing it for power.
I really doubt many mods see it like that.
Obviously their biases come out in their moderation, but I’d assume the majority think they’re doing a service and what users want.
Except the puppet mods on news/politics subs whose day job is pushing a narrative for someone. Those ones know what they’re doing.
Digg still exists as of today. The lack of moderators and content creators will probably lead to a bot / meme / political agenda factory.
Twitter is still here as well, without much moderation.
The platforms survive. Interactions just get a lot worse. But most people still refuse to leave.
I don’t want to be a part of that system anymore, which is why I’m here even though I don’t necessarily believe this form of federation social network is designed very well.
What is a well designed social network according to you?
(Not trying to pick a fight! I’m just interested in hearing what other people are after)
Whenever I’d contemplated systems like this I had assumed that the communities and the user account stuff would be seperate to one another. It seems off to have first order and second order communities based on the instance you join. I think it would make more sense to join an instance that has no real communities (other than stuff like instance related news) and then connect to the instances that have communities you care about. I’m a bit too tired to articulate why exactly right now. I would not be surprised if we end up there eventually though even if it’s not enforced by design.
This article explains it pretty well. Though it focuses on Mastodon and similar Twitter clones, which all suffer from being clones of a dog shit idea for social media.
Op-ed: Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out
Largest shortcoming is that in order to see any content, you (or someone else on your instance) needs to follow someone/thing else from a different instance, and the only way to do that is to pour over hundreds or thousands of other websites. This means that objectively, the best experience for a new user is to join the largest instance available, which kind of defeats the purpose of federation. Also, 99%+ of users couldn’t care less about federation and there aren’t (m)any other selling points so nobody cares to leave the platforms they’re already established on.
This is a good criticism of federated social media. I must spend much more time finding cool stuff. But after being stroked on the back by algorithms that are pretty good at guessing what I’m into, I’m too lazy do do all that jazz by myself
To be fair, a lot of Reddit was starting to turn into that anyway. Not the more niche subs, but many of the bigger ones had been going in that direction for a while now.
Yes, r/all felt like bots responding to bots lately. Multiple times people “steal someone’s comment”. Niche subreddits are definitely not that though
Interested, so I went to have a look.
Holy shit, it’s…not great.
Verge should give up on Reddit like we all did. It’s a waste of energy.
