this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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I've never been sentimental about a social media site but it's sad for me to see reddit so clearly killing itself. Pushshift is already banned and Apollo is soon to follow. Reddit will either pivot fully to a mainstream audience or die out. It's just sad for me to see it doing it to itself.

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[–] BobQuasit@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit isn't so much killing itself as rather being killed for money.

This is why I hate capitalism. It ruins everything, including the planet and the future.

Pity we can't have a social media site that's a public service!

[–] darkwing_duck@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Run by who, your friendly neighborhood local government?

No thank you. I think Lemmy is great. Hopefully it catches on sufficiently for niche communities to really develop.

The fact that it's a teeny tiny bit more technical than reddit is a nice barrier against utter stupidity.

[–] BobQuasit@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Governments are at least answerable to the people, or should be. Corporations are answerable to no one except their major stockholders.

As for the learning curve for Lemmy, I think that's been overemphasized. People can learn. And at the same time feedback from the increasing number of users will help the devs to smooth out the rough edges, making Lemmy easier to use.

I remember when practically nobody knew what the internet was. Now everybody's walking around with the internet in their pocket, using it all the time.

[–] hamtooth@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I have pre-grieved

[–] RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I mourn what it was, yes.

There was a recent comment I read about how it's become this incredible resource for the most obscure tech issues and they were reluctant to delete their posts and accounts because they'd receive random messages of thanks years after a tech resource post was made.

And it's true. Reddit has become an invaluable resource for these kinds of things. Not only that, but it's one of the few places that exists on the web where cohesive and coherent discussions even exist. It was always the community and discussion that made reddit great and they want to turn it into yet another swipebait infested serotonin sponge. I sincerely hope lemmy can take its place, but there are going to be some major growing pains if we get big influx of "redfugees."

It almost makes me think that when something becomes such an enormous and invaluable public resource, there should be a legal compulsion to archive it before doing anything that will compromise its accessibility.___

[–] Nullroad@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

In a way, I mourned for reddit a long time ago. I stumbled (literally, stumbleUpon'd) reddit way back before the great Digg migration, when it was still mostly a haven for techies. The site went through a great many changes. Some good, some bad, some just... different.

At some point it got a little much. I've known for a number of years that I was growing increasingly alienated from it. Part of it was the Nazis and Reddit's inability or unwillingness to deal with any of the hate and bots. Part of it was the pervasive meme / low effort image culture. Those things were always there, but there was a time it'd get you the stink eye and an annoyed upvote.

Besides Hackernews (which has always been full of a certain Silicon Valley type), there wasn't really too many places to go. I've just been kinda waiting in the funeral parlor, hoping a ride to something else would come while I mostly browse the niche subreddits.

It's my hope that this incident starts the seeds of old forum culture as expressed through multiple lemmys. That's a pretty ambitious hope, but still. It's well past the time for the big social media networks to break up.

[–] Skooshjones@vlemmy.net 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't mourn Reddit, but I am sad that it's another example of the commoditization and corporatization of the modern internet.

Hopefully federated networks, P2P protocols, and FOSS software/frameworks are able to provide a robust and healthy web going forward into the future. The era of the free general internet is over, has probably been for a long time honestly. Now if massive companies want to stay afloat in that space, they will need to make huge profits. Everything as you are seeing nowadays, is being monetized and centralized.

Maybe this truly is late stage Capitalism and the collapse of it all is on the horizon, idk. But as long as I have an internet connection and things I am interested in doing on there, I will be trying to resist the corpos.

Long live the free and open internet!

(PS, power to the users, and I can and do contribute to the products and services I use from these wonderful people in our communities <3)

[–] JohnQuincyKerbal@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am absolutely going to miss RIF. That app provided such a clean filtered experience to the content I was interested in on Reddit for years.

[–] Dee@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Same RIF was so good, I had to uninstall it a few times because of how much time I spent on it.

[–] DiscoShrew@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

I think, at a fundamental level the Reddit I am mourning isn't Reddit as it exists now, but perhaps how I imagine it did ten or so years ago, the so called "Early Days". We're all here now because Reddit at is now is unsustainable and actively hostile against it's users. The contradiction between the need for monetization of the userbase and the userbases disgust at being monetized. This isn't a recent occurrence but sometimes we need to get a bit of a kick to realize how bad its been, in retrospect.

I do know, as many fellow tech people do, whenever I have to look into a problem I haven't encountered before, appending "Reddit" to the search often leads me closer to an answer. I will miss that, as it had become so well indexed. Lemmy isn't there yet in terms of being indexed.

[–] President_Pyrus@feddit.dk 1 points 1 year ago

I am beginning to mourn what reddit was. Not what it is or what it is going to turn into.

[–] Senseibull@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

No I don’t mourn it, it became mainstream around 2014 and went downhill from there imv. The front page was full of rage politics and the comments became really toxic. Everyone got drowned out, spreading that audience across multiple sites might be a good thing in the end. End the hive mind

[–] klemptor@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Honestly, yeah. Reddit has been part of my daily routine for 12 years now. Sure, a lot of the content is junk food for the brain, and reddit has changed a lot during that time, but I've also learned a lot of cool things and had a lot of interesting conversations there. Lemmy looks promising, but it's still very nascent. The userbase is small, it's missing a lot of the niche communities that you can find on reddit, and the tech is glitchy. Overall it feels a lot more like tinier than reddit (which duh, of course it does).

Reddit is also a bad habit that I've wanted to reduce for a while now, so maybe this is the shove I needed.

[–] sprocket@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah for sure. I was on reddit for 13 years, there were users I recognised by name, people I was friendly with, people I'd have intense debates with, many, many, many subreddits I loved.

But nothing lasts forever, and this place seems nice so here's to new beginnings 🍻

[–] jursed@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Heres to new beginnings!! 💖🥳🥳

[–] lvxferre@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've mourned more for the shells of the eggs that I broke today. That was a tasty omelette.

I'm genuinely happy that Reddit is dying. Yes, it'll lead to some information loss and that's bad, but we've been stuck in that abusive platform for too long. Now at least saner alternatives will get some room to grow.

[–] pridefulofbeing@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I don’t mourn Reddit, I mourn the people and ideas I enjoyed engaging with through it. But, I’m glad people chose to find another way to engage (such as Lemmy) vs. staying in that toxic system. :)

[–] belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I'm mourning the communities i found, but not reddit itself. Spez has been a turd forever. I saw him at a tech inclusion conf like 6-7 years ago and they knew then he was such a shit they didn't even allow questions from the audience. He said nothing useful and basically said "we keep the donald because both sides" and not so subtly that they keep everyone for add views.

He sucks ass and is only concerned about IPO and will likely just change the r/all to whatever is left and declare the IPO a victory as users bleed away.

Hoping to find more of my old communities around lemmy with hopefully less bigots.

[–] latte@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i’m mourning it a bit, but to be honest i think it’s going to be a bit difficult for me to get off for a while until other places (aside from facebook, which i’d much prefer to avoid over the current iteration of reddit) have the same amount of niche communities. for example, i’m in a private pregnancy subreddit with other people with my same due date and it’s reallllly useful in comparing notes and feeling like i’m not going insane at any given symptom and i think it’ll take a while for a place like lemmy to have an audience big enough to build niche communities like that.

[–] Limeade@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's really cool that you've got a due date subreddit. I was on a pregnancy/parenting forum ages ago and it was really nice to have a group of women to chat with who were going through the same thing. So much of pregnancy just isn't taught in schools and I was the first in my offline friend group to get pregnant, so I had nobody else to turn to with "is this normal" questions. My kid just graduated high school, so this was before Reddit was around.

For a community like that, I'd probably be willing to suffer through Reddit's bad changes for a bit longer.

[–] latte@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

yup! i'm still off of it because i can't figure out whether or not the blackout is over and i wanna be supportive but i have definitely missed complaining about hyperspecific pregnancy symptoms on reddit this week haha. i have the same thing where none of my offline friends are having kids yet (if ever) so an online community is sooo helpful!

[–] jezebelley@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll still be browsing it with Reeder 5. When they shut off RSS then I'll be completely gone.

[–] hotstove@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How does that work exactly? I’m still interested in Reddit for my sports subs like F1 to follow comments during live races. Does RSS work well as an alternative?

[–] ax28@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don't think RSS would work for that (it only seems to pull the content for the post itself, not the comments), but I've always used reddit-stream.com/ for live comments 😊 you can just take any link to a live thread (e.g. https://reddit.com/comments/145upmt/) and replace 'reddit' with 'reddit-stream' in the URL. It shows a live (updates every few seconds) feed of comments, and you can still comment if you link your reddit account.

That way you're still not on the reddit site or giving them ad traffic, and it's also a lot nicer to use as a bonus! I'd still prefer a fediverse alternative but it could be a good option for now

[–] hotstove@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

That’s awesome I’ll have to check that out. Thanks!

[–] cark@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like reddit dying could be a positive thing for me. For years now I have felt the negative influence that its toxic environment - fueled by impersonal, discordant interactions - had on me. Not to mention the complete destruction of my ability to concentrate caused by the micro dopamine hit targeting of social media UX. I'm hoping that moving to a smaller platform will help with some of that pervasive anger I feel as a result of constant reddit usage.

[–] brandon@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absolutely, me too.

There were good things about Reddit, but I recognized a while ago that it was having a negative impact on my mental health. I had already been trying to use it less. On the other hand for the last few days when the Reddit drama has picked up I've found myself scrolling through lemmy more, and not necessarily in the positive participatory way that I'd prefer.

We'll see how it all shakes out in the medium to long term I guess.

[–] cark@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree that Lemmy could end up filling the same negative voids that reddit does. I suppose my hope is that by restricting the conversation and limiting bad-faith arguments, there will be less toxicity here relative to reddit.

In the end, addicting us with anger and outrage in order to drive participation and clicks is the end-stage of all social media, and that cat is out of the bag. But perhaps there's a little temperance that can be found if we don't see social media foremost as an opportunity to harvest data but as a way to interact and share ideas.

[–] hydra@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

At least Lemmy doesn't employ secret proprietary algorithm pitting, ad injection, dark patterns to funnel people to the bloated battery draining mobile app, shadowbanning or session tracking techniques. Even if I disagree with the politics of this instance I do appreciate a space to actually discuss without corporate interference in a federated platform. I really really hope this kicks in.

[–] GreenCrush@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think what I'm most sad about is losing easily searchable information. Finding an obsscure thread about some weird question I had is great. Maybe that will be preserved somehow. Idk. That and the more unhinged reddit posts and copypastas throughout history.

[–] SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Shame about those two broken arms.....

[–] GreenCrush@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

How long until we get the first Lemmy poop knife-level story?