Ever been on /r/lounge? If you have you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what to expect from these subs.
What an incredibly uninteresting sub that was.
Reddit has been shit since 2014, some would argue since its inception. It never properly replaced serious forums that specialized on their own niche, like PC hardware, gossip, cars, or whatever. The subreddit replacements always felt like lower quality EVEN THOUGH Reddit mods are (in general) more trigger happy than those running proper forums. The astroturfing, the deception, the lack of respect for its users, the UX dark patterns, it has all been getting worse and worse. Some haven’t gotten the memo yet, that Reddit serves no one but itself, it’s a cancer.
dictionary
astroturfing = “Public relations tactic using fake grassroots movements” (used by, among others, corporations, politicians (remember the Trump 2016 campaign on Reddit?), and governments)
UX dark pattern = user experience dark pattern = “A dark pattern is a design feature that subtly encourages users to perform a specific action.” (like Reddit’s “Howdy paddner” error if you use a VPN so that they can de-anonymize you)
The amount of hatred I feel when I’m on my PC using a VPN and trying to look up something on reddit since it’s first in search results.
I can totally relate to what you are saying.
Reddit is just borderline unusable because of the API thing… The app is unusable, and Red Reader is just too bland to use.
The official Reddit app and new Reddit layout drive me crazy… The amount of suggested content and the confusing algorithm for best sort really turned it into facebook. I find myself much happier here on Lemmy. I understand the algorithm. I’m even pleased to see that posts can last more than a day at the top of the “active” page. I think it means that Lemmy encourages discussion and going back to a topic even if it is a few days old. Probably better for our collective attention span.
Not to mention bloated and loads like crap on older mobile devices.
Red reader is perfect. I wish they would add Lemmy support.
there’s no way to monetize lemmy, right?
just making sure i’m on the right liferaft…
This site isn’t going to get popular enough to worry about. It’s large, sure, but people go to reddit because the sheer volume of users means your chances of catching breaking stories or real contributions by witnesses to events, is just much higher, there’s more of everything, and this is why they want to bleed it dry.
there’s probably a way to monetise everything but with the numbers of Linux people (yes we know you use arch shush) and anti-capitalists, i think we’re safe?
Just don’t get too attached, Reddit was Digg’s liferaft… Once Thing go to shit, move on.
Maybe yes, but realistically no. It’s open source, so anyone could make their own clone of it with whatever monetization methods they want. If you ran an instance, you could also charge people to post on it. That said, with the way Lemmy is organized, people would just leave the offending instance for a different one.
Reddit’s mechanics are not the whole story about why it became the juggernaut it is, the platform of people making their own forums isn’t new. What happened was a few major sites like Digg, Somethingawful, Fark, 4chan and a lot of old-school staples on the internet from the 90’s on through the 2010’s suddenly lost popularity as their user base matured at the same time reddit moved in. There were other factors, sure I was around during it all but it’s all quite complicated, but I’m pretty sure if reddit broadly started returning 404’s tomorrow, Lemmy would see a slight jump in users but people are just going to want the next new thing and it would be some entirely new thing that captures the world’s online browsing.
I’ve never seen a website replace another by copying it’s layout and mechanics. I’ve seen a lot of popular platforms die, but never resurrect in the same form, people always want something novel and they want to feel like they’re getting in ground-floor on something special. Reddit still offers that by giving users a chance to contribute early to conversations about current events, but if there were a new system that gave people a similar system and found some other way to give users a little serotonin boost like the votes do, then it would slay reddit pretty handedly.
Goodbye Reddit, Hello Lemmy.
Hello friend.
Here, take this:
Thank you
Enjoy our !taneggs@lemmy.ca
2 hours fresh out of the oven!
Yes let’s put a site that consists pretty much entirely of user-created content behind a paywall, what could possibly go wrong?
Quora did it. I don’t go there anymore.
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Once upon a time, Quora was okay, before they started paying people to generate a bunch of yahoo answers questions / AI slop questions, and then fucked with the UI and made their site into a virtually unusable mess.
Anecdotally, I remember using it for answers to things about probably business, government, and certain how-to’s. I also remember when the pop-over banner started covering up half the answers and that’s around the time I stopped.
Here’s a post discussing quora from Dec 2018.
all philosophical views aside, there are some really core issues that got me to stop using Quora and unfortunately the case to stop using it is made by the site itself:
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The content quality has deteriorated significantly since the site’s inception. The content is far cheaper than before and far less interesting in very obvious ways.
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Moderation systems have not done a good job of growing the site as a community. The site has lost the character that drew many people to it in the first place.
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The machine learning models terribly over-fit to user signals, creating a frustrating experience.
These 3 core issues with the site are what got me to gradually stop using it as someone who was initially an early adopter.
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Don’t lie. When 70% of your search results are Quora, you are going to click, you are going to encounter the login banner, you are going to rage, and you are going to click away.
This why it pays to use a search engine that lets you blocklist sites
Any recommendations?
At the risk of sounding like a shill, I like Kagi.
Or use the ublocklist extension, this puts a button besides all search results to perma ban that domain and allows URL lists like this for automatic garbage removal.
So like Google 15 years ago when it was still kind of not shit?
Even when the login banner doesn’t appear, lately all the answers are “Hm, it appears that you are trying to do [question title]. To do [question title], [basic bitch advice]. Hope this helps!” Style AI slop.
When it isn’t the built-in AI helper doing it, it’s the users blatantly copying from different chatbotsNope, those “answers” didn’t help even once, so now they’re filtered out of search results, and DNS banned. Quora does not appear on my devices.
I’ve had some help from Quora, but overall I feel it wastes my time a lot more than not. And I’ve never had an instance where only Quora had the answer.
Isn’t it mostly bot-generated content?
Well, Spez is a special kind of stupid.
I think people who are content with Reddit being the way it is deserve someone like Spez.
The users still on reddit are even dumber than him
holy shit what is this from, i swear i saw this 20 years ago. what is it, george of the jungle??
Yep.
damn i nailed it!
Good. At this point reddit is just a weak sauce place for bots/marketers to post where other bots/marketers scrape them. It’s rumored that 10% of their revenue is from content deals with Google. At this point, most of the interesting communities on reddit have gone elsewhere and it’s long ago jumped the shark.
It’s clear that the corporate goons in charge are busy just trying to squeeze any remaining nickles out of the userbase. At this rate it won’t be long before a private equity firm buys reddit and you start seeing articles “Reddit: what happened?”
Too bad, it was a site that used to be so good and was sold out 5 ways to Monday and the corporate overlords have fucked it again. At least lemmy is around… it doesn’t have the scale of reddit but it’s way better in a lot of ways already.
My understanding is that they want to offer monetized subeditors for content creators and influencers, a mush up between Patreon and onlyfans
This is amusing, in the day and age where everyone is tired about subscriptions everywhere???
here’s hoping reddit crashes and burns. Not that it matters, spaz and co got their payout when they ipo’d.
Forever growing profits and money to grow the IPO this is the logical choice. I saw this comming. I left reddit a few months ago. Never been happier.
So the same MO as always. To take a stranglehold of the internet. “Creators” or “influencers” or whatever buzzword will be all over this as it’s an opportunity to monetize. I’m sure reddit corporate will be taking their piece of rent seeking of course.
The bigger implication that everyone always ignores is that this is going to lock users into the walled garden. Up to now posters have been driving people off site. The comic artists are a good example. They post their comics as image posts. They direct people off site to access more content. They will no doubt jump on the chance to have a paid subreddit. This is an attempt to kill off whatever sites the artist use. If they had some other service providing monetization then that company is probably panicking a little right now.
So people will start using reddit alot less than they do anyway.
