cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
I kinda miss the size from reddit actually. So many niche communities blooming. But still, no way I’m going back
Size is what makes a network attractive to commercial exploitation. An open network like the Fediverse might not be commercially exploited by its infrastructure owners, but any participant can do so.
Reddit basically has fucked over their voluntary mods. If you have a bigger subreddit with several millions of users modding that is nearly impossible. You’ll get all those trolls, crazy people, nazis and fanatics with too much time. You’ll have to deal with astroturfing campaigns from companies with millions of dollars of budget and state sponsored desinfo campaings. You also will have do deal with all that cultural war bullshit. You subreddit can be about cute baby cats, but you will have to deal with MAGA bullshit, somebody will bring the war in Gaza into your place or post Putin with a cat. Karmafarming bots. Users will really insult you and accuse you of powertripping and being a Nazi.
You will have to do everything in your free time. Reddit will not pay you. Reddit will not really support you. You are alone responsible to build a mod team. You can’t pay them either. Spez will laught at you while earning millions. He will insult you if you speak up. You can’t close your sub. And then you will get burned out and leave. The sub will then be overrun by absolute trash.
Reddit has many problem. You touch on some of them here.
Another is how moderation is handled. Free moderation is fine up to a point, but then communities get large and it becomes a job and Reddit starts monetizing you without paying. That and one sweaty dork with an ax to grind holding ultimate authority over multiple communities. Reddit is another multi-billion dollar company (/wave Meta) that should be hiring and training hundreds of moderators but figured nah, a worse service and slightly larger yacht instead.
Even if you block the ads and ignore them the site is so heavily botted with these bots pushing all sorts of products.
One of the most useful aspects of reddit used to be getting other perspectives on products you were interested in. This is no longer useful because of the massive networks of bot farms. You simply can no longer tell what’s real on that site and what isn’t.
The accounts posting fake product reviews to promote products are usually not bots. They are either actual people from ad agencies/brands, posting as a part of the campaign and other people from the agency upvoting (sometime also using engagement farms).
I don’t know how much activity on reddit is bot driven, but logically it makes little sense to me to run bot campaigns there. Until 2020, reddit was quite small and insignificant in terms of how many people you could reach. And now, reddit has made their API increasingly more expensive, making it prohibitive for large scale bot posting. Even scraping data is hard and very expensive, let alone posting at scale.
There might be engagement farms and content farms mass posting, but that is manual, not bots, and happens on all social media platforms.
I don’t buy it. Reddit is a prime target, and has been for a very long time.
Reddit allegedly had 400 million unique monthly users back in 2012 already: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reddits-visitors-skyrocket-in-2012-with-37-billion-page-views/
Even if those numbers are inflated (which they almost certainly are), Reddit has had a very large audience for a very long time, even if it wasn’t fully recognized as mainstream.
And now, the price of pushing fake reviews has done nothing but drop. API calls to Reddit and LLM providers are surely cheaper than an engagement or content farm of real people.
There’s no way that the platform isn’t riddled with bots these days.
Hi, The article mentions 400M unique visitors for all of 2012, putting MAU at 400/12= ~33-34M MAUs?
Facebook it seems was doing a billion MAUs at this time, so 1000/33 = ~ 30. So reddit was approximately 30 times smaller than Facebook.
Now Facebook as far as I remember has always been a logged in experience. Back in the early days of reddit a lot of visitors did not sign up (because it was a link sharing website like digg), and I am not sure how good cookies and user attribution was back then but surely a lot of those 400M unique views weren’t unique people. But this is just my guess. Ignoring this stil makes reddit much smaller than fb.
Marketers btw, still consider reddit to be a niche social media. Look at this post here - https://www.reddit.com/r/redditstock/comments/1vj4i4i/just_learned_reddits_ad_revenue_is_lower_than/
Reddit get less money from advertisers than Bing and Yahoo in 2026. You might tell me that marketers are not paying for ads and instead using bots to pay for free and even that is the case, it’s much much smaller than other mainstrem social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok)Good catch on MAU, my bad. I knew that seemed a bit high.
That being said, point still stands. Reddit was a big deal well before 2020 even if it was not at the top of the social media food chain.
Certainly large enough to target back then, and even more so now when such a campaign is cheaper and easier than ever.
Yep it used to be you could hop on and get great guidance on products. Now you never know what’s real
apparently indian bot farms of BJP (modi) is very heavy in indian subs, maybe thats why we are seeing alot of indian content.
That and their banhappy atitude towards real users.
that’s an internet wide problem though.
I agree and it boils my blood. I have to calm myself by puffing on a smooth and mellow Marlboro Extra Deluxe Cigarette.
There was a quiet exodus during the_donald era. That whole time from 2016 - 2020 was very strange. Nobody talks about it. Except for the minority of us from the before times.
For reddit corporate there was a serendipitous confluence of events.
- Right wing US politics trolls caused a quiet exodus.
- A pandemic happened causing everyone to be stuck at home doomscrolling.
- Reddit was doing a relaunch, with a new site design and official app.
- They were preparing to IPO.
Basically reddit corporate got a free reset. One that Digg could have only dreamed of. Much of the old unprofitable userbase left. Ragebaiting trolls overran the platform. Fresh userbases flooded into the site. Social media psychological manipulation/addiction mechanisms had a field day on those unsuspecting doomscrollers.
You old timers ever notice how reddit’s demise is a perpetually sliding window? You can tell when someone started using reddit based on when they think it was good and when it went bad.
Most users today talk about relaunch/redesign era as the good times. They think only relatively recently has it turned bad. None them have any clue about the pre-2020 era because they had no clue about reddit before.
All that being said. I don’t think it’s only commercialization that killed it. The type of users killed it too. That isn’t mutually exclusive from userbase size.
Commercialization relies on engagement tricks like ragebait. That requires users who will engage with that too. The old reddit userbase was more skeptical and cognizant of commercialization tactics. The userbase today doesn’t hate it. Some even seem to relish in it.
They like the tabloid posts. They like the emotional clickbait. They like to gossip. They like the drama.
Hell, for better or worse, I remember when the narwhal still baconed at midnight.
There’s academic articles proving negative posts get more interaction. Some people just want to fight, they love the negativity. Life’s hard enough ffs. It’s disappointing cos it used to be a great place to hang out
politics any of the variant subs, and news subs, is where people get most if not all of the bans. the faux ragebaits are aita, and dinnerdiaries.
Reddit was always shitty from when
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The only reason the jailbait sub came down was do to main stream media pressure - if you missed jailbait was a “SFW” sub for posting reveling photos of other people’s children to be gooned over. It was voted “Subreddit of the year” in 2008
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the mod who ran jailbait was an ICON on reddit for years and he also modded dozens of other equally questionable subs
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The insane redditor backlash to them banning FatPeopleHate sub - which for those who missed it was a sub dedicated to posting photos of overweight people without their knowledge so the internet could mock them. This was mostly made up of - yes you guessed it - mostly photos of fat women getting mocked.
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Leaving up the BeatingWomen sub that is specifically for posting videos of women getting beat up for 10+ more years after jailbait came down.
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leaving up the Creepshots sub, a sub dedicated to upskirt and down-shirt photos of unsuspecting women, for YEARS and only taking it down due to to it hitting the main stream news and forcing their hand. This sub was also modded by the Jailbait mod.
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the RAMPANT sexism and racism as thinly veiled intellectualism that has gone on for DECADES
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Ghislaine Maxwell was a moderator on worldnews- I cannot back this claim up so I am removing it.
The API thing and forced logins is probably one of the least shitty things this site has done.
At least back then they didn’t ban you for suggesting nonces like trump should be fed into woodchippers or that its time for guillotines.
the RAMPANT sexism and racism as thinly veiled intellectualism that has gone on for DECADES
This what I came to associate with reddit.
This kind of very super shallow toxic intellectualism that consisted mostly of call-and-responses opinions play-acted in weird rituals really wore on me. Even the more organic conversations were more like people just slapping opinions at eachother.
Not that we’re immune to ANY of this. Our smaller scale and decentralisation sidesteps the issue a bit, though. For now anyway.
I dont think it is likely to deteriorate in the same way. The mainstream service algorithms reward engagement and make no value judgments about the type of engagement. Since its easier to get engagement by spouting bombastic false claims and unsupportable opinions, that is the bulk of what you see.
Lemmy barely rewards engagement, if at all, so the perverse incentive to be a jerk on purpose is simply just not there. Surely, drawing a broader audience will shift discussion toward humanity’s lowest common denominator, but it doesn’t actively encourage that particular bad behavior, at least.
The API thing and forced logins is probably one of the least shitty things this site has done.
Cannot agree more. That was shitty, but the turds had already filled the bowl.
Anyone remember how redditors thought the „most evil“ subreddit on the site wasn’t any of those but „ShitRedditSays“ which made fun of them while pointing out how awful they were? What a website.
Wasn’t that mostly just rimworld or kenshi comments taken out of context?
SRS was awful itself. the OG meta ragebait subreddit.
It’s a self perpetuating cycle. Abuse justifies abuse justifies abuse.
SRS wasn’t exactly some paragon of virtue and good judgement, a lot of their posts were ‘gotcha’ stuff taken out of context or joke posts taken seriously. I was on SRS myself a few times, usually due to sarcastic/sardonic comment that SRS users took literally. They often fell into the ‘bonsai kitten’ trap.
I also used to get in fake arguments with other users on one sub, for fun. And people also took us seriously and would ‘report’ our comments as horrible and abusive. The mods didn’t ban us though, because they understood the context, we were taking the piss out of each other and/or roleplaying.
Tbh Reddit was bad because of lack of censorship is a take. Reddit is bad now because of censorship. It is a really great example of a time when slippery slope was not a fallacy.
The issue is really that it’s not really possible to do good moderation (i.e. censorship) at scale.
When the site is centralized, all users have to get the same basic experience. That means someone needs to decide for the entire world what’s allowed and what isn’t. It isn’t just whether you’ll have porn or no porn. It isn’t just whether you’ll have hate subs, or subs dedicated to violence. It’s where you draw the line at politics. Is sexism allowed? What if it’s just a sort-of sexist joke? Can people talk about Nazi ideology? What if it’s a sub for historians?
What makes something like Lemmy better is that each instance can make their own choices of where to draw the line, and other instances can decide whether to federate with them or not. That way an instance running in Germany might have different ideas of where the lines is when it comes to Nazi imagery, and sex, and violence. One in New Zealand might have completely different ideas. If you’re a user from NZ the NZ instance might match your tastes better, but if not, you’re free to sign up for the German one.
Subreddits basically acted like that in the early days of Reddit. Nobody is making anyone go to any subreddit no?
You’d still see them pop up in /r/all or similar spots that showed big posts from other subs.
Yep.
And lots of the users on your site will be idiots with think historians talking about Nazi Germany are Nazis and have a idiot extremist stance that any reference to Nazi Germany must be wiped from the history books or something.
The whole feddit thing awhile ago was wild. It’s German hosted, so abides by German laws, and people here accused them of being being biased/censoring content, but it was literally illegal for them to have Nazi content, but folks were spamming Nazi imagery as criticism of Israeli, and when the admin/mods took it down they were ‘pro genocide’.
the world has changed. the free speech idealism of the 2000s internet is dead. reddit was founded by people with libretarian ideals, but those quickly change when money replaces ideals.
If anything our broader culture has seen ideal erosion across the board, as money has taken supremacy as the only ideal worth pursuing.
Yeah - Reddit is a scammy company and spez should be in jail for what his company has allowed to happen there.
You forgot the Slavetrade sub. Where they’d post pictures of women that appeared to be have been tortured in cages for sale.
I didn’t know about this sub but now am horrified and unsurprised.
SVU shit happened there. It wasn’t just actors or consensual bs from some freaks. It was, compare that girl to the girl on the missing posters on vicap and the fbi missing people posts shit.
Then the Arabics found the place. They began auctions of their “concubines” giving their real cell numbers.
you realize that’s like a whole fetish thing right?
Totally - “jailbait”, beatingwomen, rapingwomen and creepshots were also fetish subs. The more you know 💫
No, women/men getting in cages and acting like slaves is a fetish thing. It’s part of BDSM practice for some folks, including the physical abuse. Some folks like being hit. I’ve dated women who I had to break up with because they wanted me to beat them, spit on them and etc. and treat them like a slave, and that wasn’t my thing.
But keep equating it to abuse, if you want? Just because you find something distasteful doesn’t mean it wasn’t produced by consenting adults who actively seek it out and derive pleasure from it.
I am sure it was the content from consenting adults that got the sub banned https://www.reddit.com/r/slavetrade/.
Listen - I am not saying you can’t have fetishes and consenting adults cannot enjoy fetishes together, I am saying reddit is a cesspool of people trying to play off horrific abuse as fetishes and this is very well documented.
reddit is made of people, yes.
do you think those types of things were unique to reddit or something? i just get so confused when people make these things, like… what is your thought here? reddit should have never allowed this stuff ever in the first place, and that they ever did at all ever, means reddit is forever awful and horrible, and so is anyone who ever used the site, even if they lurked?
or are you just morally grandstanding here or something?
I used to buy guns through r/gunsforsale.
wait what the fuck? they’re all crazy, but you must be making that last one up.
Internet search on “Ghislaine Maxwell Reddit moderator”
i did. seems like i was right to be suspicious.
ok, I’ll stand corrected on the one count that the only convicted pedophile of the Epstein class was moderating on one of the largest socially acceptable pedophilia sites on the internet. But some might be able to guess how i lean on that unfounded claim.
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Every now and then I end up on that site (usually from searching for something and then absent-mindedly clicking to the homepage from there) and get whiplash at just how horrific the whole front page is even on its default logged-out setting for racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and other far-right talking point news stories.
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
Reddit got bad long before they restricted API access. That’s what was the final drop for many people, but it wasn’t the beginning at all.
I agree that growing would be a benefit for Lemmy though. While I wouldn’t dismiss the dangers of a growing community entirely, we can just defederate from or block problematic parts in theory. So I wouldn’t say we’re in quite the same danger as centralized platforms.
mostly with the political subs in 2017ish they started banning people like crazy the next year. cant even say anything on some niche subs without someone getting mad and reporting you.
We know… we were there.
We know…
Just amused by the juxtaposition, obviously they weren’t contradicting you (or replying to you). lol.
I’m easily amused. :)
Hehe
reddit is still great
what did you get ejected for?
reddit is still great
My Reddit account is 18 years old and I can tell you that Reddit hasn’t been “great” since 2013; the year of Drumpf vs HIllDawg for US President. Heck I still have over 2 years of “Reddit Premium” from the zillions of tokens I got back when they gave those away.
I was never ejected, still haven’t been, and I moderated some noteable subs. The API debacle and the shutdown of unofficial apps was my last straw. I removed myself from all the mod teams I was on and bailed over to Lemmy.
Reddit still has some cool communities but as a platform it’s best days are long gone. At this point its coasting on inertia just like Facebook.
“Sad”
:::shrug:::
Reddit is genuinely terrible now. Have you visited recently? All is removed, posts and comments default to sorting by best instead of hot (which mixes minutes-old posts with week-old posts), there’s an algorithmic For You feed, there are constant popups to log in or use the app…
And after all that, the content you’re looking at was probably posted by a bot.
The amount of AI generated content on Reddit is egregious.
I never got ejected and afaict I was never banned from any communities - I left voluntarily during the Rexodus, back in the before-times, prior to most AI moderation and posting.
When someone (Huffman) tells you who they are, it’s best to believe them the first time.
I think it’s a mix of both. Commercialization is why the admin staff sucks. The popularity and size of the site is why many users suck. It’s hit with both capitalist enshittification and Eternal September.
i dont see any goofy self promotion videos on lemmy the way reddit has them. there is just less HailCorporate crap here. and the fixed-by-the-duet garbage that is just really uninteresting except WHEN LOUDLY YELLED AT YOU.
I don’t know, size made it pretty bad. Subreddits with hundreds of thousands or more users create environments where no one is trying to have a discussion. People are just vying for attention. That creates an environment where comments are either all jokes, or all snark. It’s really, really hard to have anything that resembles a human experience in a place like that. People stop recognizing each other as people, and just treat everyone as an audience.
That makes for a pretty bad experience.
First
This.
Avast! Hello! I said with a smile!
To claim my spot at the top of the pile
For my words were brief but my thoughts aligned
So that everyone knew I was always online
yes, assuming you are there for a discussion and not entertainment.
most folks are on reddit for entertainment, let’s not kid ourselves. very tiny sliver of the users were there for discussion.
I was so many splinter-subs deep at the end, having jumped ship dozens of times for each sub I liked, as it got full of “regular folks”. Or more often, insufferable people and mods.
It always went something like:
r/albinobathats>r/realalbinobathats>r/therealalbinobathats>r/albinobathats837>r/fruitfriends>r/fruitfiends>r/withgreatbatscomesgreatresponsability>r/beancurdexpansionists>r/cindysplace>r/colonyofyewoh right, yeah i remember, truereddit, truetruereddit, etc.
truereddit was great when it was interesting articles, then it just became mainstream press slop.
one sub i recently visited talking jobs/layoffs got meme-fied recently. because happen tor each the front page a couple times, it drawn into many trolls and bots.
Reddit started becoming shitty because people are shitty.
It started long before the API restrictions, long before the commercialisation.
No, it started failing when the influx of new users grew exponentially, but the systems to support it didn’t.
Subreddits were no longer communities, they became information and discussion hubs.
With the influx of people, further moderation was needed. But mod vetting isn’t that easy, and a lot of people who had absolutely no business moderating communities, let alone social hubs, got a whiff of power that drove them crazy.
And that leads to splinter communities, some abandoned, some forced to give up, and an overall mess to this all.
it started around 2017, and who was in the wh around that time, and when the gop was demanding platforms stop blocking right wing content.
Splinter communities are one of the simplest, easiest ways to solve issues associated with growing too large. It’s incredibly frustrating that FOMO apparently drives users, turning splinter communities either into deserts or just the new overcrowded space.
100 spaces with 500 active users are more active, more interesting, and more manageable than 1 space with 50,000, but users seem to think their choices is to subscribe to one big group, or 100 small ones, and not just the one small one that vibes with them best.
It’s incredibly frustrating that FOMO apparently drives users …
Yes I think you’ve put your finger on it there. This obsession with being able to see EVERYTHING in some kind of omega feed.
Like I was showing a friend lemmy and he was like “how can I see ALL the communities [in the whole world]?” or “what if there are duplicate communities?”
He didn’t get that it’s GOOD that you don’t automatically connect to every single lemmy server, or that it’s actually fine if two servers have the “same” community. They’ll just end up being their own thing.
That’s been an ongoing frustration for me here. People have wanted to merge communities, even to the point of trying to organize formal community mergers, or merge duplicate posts in the client, all of which works to reproduce the culture and structure of Reddit.
But, like, c/politics on lemmy.ca and c/politics on midwest.social are going to be wildly different communities. And c/technology on programming.dev and lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml should probably be having very different discussions, even if they’re about the same article, and trying to force those discussions into the same space doesn’t really make sense.
But people want it, because heaven forbid they miss one of 90 boner jokes.
Totally. It’s like people miss what reddit “used to be” (I get it, I was all-in like 10 years ago) but don’t realise what we’ve got here is already an improvement over that.
Yup. And there’s so much talk about the “old internet”, while ignoring that the old internet was small.
Small and spread out! Yeah.
the subs i was involved would add mods via the ‘who is the least offensive and the most popular’ criteria… which let to awful mods, because those folks were ones who had no idea how to mod and basically were like ‘if someone doesn’t like it, it’s bad’. which basically led to them not moderating on rules or principles, but purely on their own personal preferences.
it’s amazing how many communities were so great, and then immediately some new mod would come up and start banning all the previous users and posts they didn’t personally like. oh, and if the mod was friends with a abusive user? they had free reign or would grant them mod. sometimes it was so bad and egregious users would revolt, or other mods would have to remove the new mod. one sub I was on had a well-known rapist who was never banned because they had done the mods personal IRL favors, basically to secure their hunting ground and anytime a new victim posted about how this person drugged them, the mods would immediately remove it and cover it up and deny it, and then when another use posted the police report(s) that person was banned… this rapist user would also regularly go on rants about how men are all rapists and rape is terrible and try to report others for ‘rapey’ comments… and the rapist in question was a poly woman, so you had the whole ‘women can’t rape anyone’ ‘she’s so progressive, she can’t rape people’ nonsense come up and that was the ‘line’ one of the mods defending this person would claim.
reddit worked when mods kept apart from the users and didn’t have personal relationships with the users. but people are shitty and can’t help themselves. for all the good stuff that came from those subreddits, they all had dark sides full of shitty awful people who were using the community to exploit and abuse other people IRL.
Size and commercialisation generally go hand in hand. After all, how do you keep something running with infinite users submitting infinite content for free?
This is a big issue for everyone, it’s important that the fediverse understands that size might some day increase the importance of sensible business models or proactive funding initiatives to counter the growth. This doesn’t mean harmful profit models necessarily, but it does mean keeping revenues under control for individually run nodes or for archiving services for old fediverse domains that might not exist forever.
Wikipedia is proof you are wrong, it is possible to run large-scale services with no profit
They do ask for funding from time to time, though. It’s definitely not cost-less running a big website.
yes, of course, but it’s not a business model. Which means decisions aren’t driven by profit. The issue isn’t about money, it’s how/why it flows
Just like having buying and selling things is not necessarily capitalism, an organization that gets and spends money is not necessarily a company.
Reddit awards was how the servers were funded back in the day, so it was possible to keep reddit non-commercial.
RIP Aaron Schwartz
Swartz*
Imho, “submitting content” is the language of commercial sites. Like we are working for free for a business. But people post their ideas, hang out with friends, and share their art and code freely because they want to connect with other people. Some people have the means and knowledge to maintain a server allowing that to a limited number of people. It costs money, sure, and time, but this is also a thing people do for fun, sometimes with the help of voluntary donations.
I mean, I agree. “content” is extremely an airquote situation, as an abstraction. I also dislike the term, but need some kind of catch-all for describing the ever increasing demand the fediverse has for space and processing. It’s a real problem, though one that many people (not me) are actively working to solve and I’m grateful for that work.
My concern about fediverse space has more to do with inter-connected federation storage issues, such as caching content from other instances. Having seen how even small instances balloon in costs, it has completely scared me away from even attempting to host a small instance. I might have this wrong though, but I’ve heard horror stories about space requirements due to the caching-heavy nature of the federated internet.
Oh yes, that is a real concern if the fediverse grows big. I wonder of a fedi CDN is theoretically possible, or if we by design are stuck with pushing the same content (I wish we had a better word) to thousands of instances in parallell?
The way I feel though, is that I’d rather have the decentralized non-commercial social media, even if that means that my instance has size restrictions to limit costs. Maybe we have been conditioned to assume that it’s trivial to send large 4K videos as a baseline standard, when that is actually quite expensive. Idk, what is the way forward, frugal content, or cdn efficiency without losing control?
