this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Yep, I'm a former Digg user who left at the v4 launch because of this exact thing - they made ads indistinguishable from normal user posts.
People are saying this isn't that big a deal, that Reddit won't just die after this. The thing is, Digg still exists but it's a shadow if its former self and nobody cares about it. It's present, but its presence isn't relevant. This change is likely to push more of the users who submit quality content to Reddit away from it, degrading the site community even more than last year.
Lesson not learned, apparently.
Right, but weren't there a bunch of other changes at the same time that other people didn't like? This seems like more frog boiling.
Plus digg wasn't as ingrained and established as Reddit is now.
Plus Reddit had some really clear things about it that people liked better.
And while there are some actually really good Reddit alternatives now, most don't have a BIG draw for most people. And a bunch of people still complain about lack of content being the big problem (same with why millions of idiots are still using Twitter)
I mean, look how few of us actually moved over permanently after the Great Migration last July, and that pissed off way more people than this probably will (with mass protests and everything).
As far as I'm concerned, so is Reddit. The only reason to go there anymore is for Q&A that get SEO spammed on Google. All the communities I was a part of either died after they changed the API (the only people left are the lurkers and low-effort posters) or had their mods replaced by boot lickers who immediately proceeded to not moderate the subs (which made them dead or full of spam).
But hey, now it sure looks like Reddit is alive and well! Just look at all those ~~ads~~, ~~bots~~, ~~AI replies~~, totally legit user posts!
It wouldn't surprise me if there was some internal discussion at Reddit of what happened to Digg, and in preparation for alienating large groups of users they intentionally put some things in place to artificially inflate user activity.
Prepare the instances!!!