I’m sure it’s nothing and everything is fine. Now, who wants to buy some of this Reddit stock? I’ll cut you a special deal so you don’t miss out! … Anyone?
I was interested in buying a share just to be in for the ride, but then they asked for my real name to be associated with my handle. It’s like they never understood what reddit was about at all.
Reddit has never been about privacy or anominity. Think of all the celebrity AMAs.
Who were the specific individuals asking questions in those?
AMAs weren’t celebrities on Reddit originally my friend, they were real people with interesting jobs or in unusual situations at first.
The timing DOES seem Auspicious…
Reddit isn’t dead. There’s plenty of posts and traffic, way more than here. The problem is that that quality has plummeted. Bots posting divisive political shit, bad memes, and toxic commenters. Angry people spurred on by bots and no valuable discussion
As anything with Reddit, it depends on what you subscribe.
It’s perfectly possible that this person sees the site completely dead. Personally, every time I go there it’s full of interesting comics raised by some bots that keep reposting old things, and really really bad comments, but still plentiful.
They made some algorithm changes a bunch of years ago (2015?), and migrated away from the concept of “default subs”. The front page drew from every sub with an algorithm.
TheDonald was very good at understanding and abusing that algorithm, resulting in it overrunning the front page for everyone. They had to tweak it a bunch as a result.
IMO, this resulted in a great homogenization of communities. People participate in communities without really understanding the communities. Why should they? The “community” is just “the Reddit front page”.
As soon as any community gets popular enough to hit the front page, it becomes hive-minded, predictable, and bland.
Lemmy actually has this same structural problem… Evidenced by the fact that as I write this comment, I actually have no clue what community this post is in.
I think Lemmy just hasn’t been overrun w/ bots (yet), isn’t being as heavily invested in by bad faith foreign state actors (yet), and is mostly composed of people who moved from Reddit who want to actively participate in a way to keep it from having that same Reddit “flavour”.
Just my take.
In 2021 I wrote a story “The Typo which saved humanity” on Reddit and it exploded to 3000 upvotes in less than a day. A couple of years later I wrote a story “Day of the Fat Man” which got 50 upvotes. Everybody I ask considered the second one the better one.
Then I reposted those stories on Youtube and Facebook and both got around the same upvotes, around 5k+ on each.
Yes, Reddit has become quite dead.
But to be honest, my stories on Lemmy got like 50 upvotes so… meh.
50 real people is still better than botted updoots.
I don’t think its just an issue of bots.
After the '16 Trump bombing of the site, the admins got incredibly aggressive in their site-wide banning policy. You could get a site-wide ban for minor infractions, there was no appeals process, and they got fairly good at identifying and banning secondary accounts such that you really needed to want to be on the site in order to keep evading consistently.
Then they rolled out the new reddit front end, which forces you to sign in if you want to see certain channels and posts while blowing up your email with engagement bait messages that… lure people into posting in a community where you can very easily get site-wide banned. At which point you’ve got a giant red “YOU’RE NOT WELCOME HERE” banner on your front page, even if all you do is lurk.
Its just a nakedly hostile website. That’s before you get into mod-politics and people harassing one another in PMs and the general obnoxious nature of their native advertising.
Here’s a theory…
After the API implosion, so many active and posting users quit that the gap was filled with mainly bots.
Whether intentional or not, this gave the impression that Reddit was still active on paper… The numbers said there was no significant change after the exedous.
When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots, they decided to chase the money before the site tanked completely.
This led to Reddit trying to cash in on the remaining users with more ads than ever, cash in on their advertisers, and cash in on the platforms (until recent) good image. Most people have at least heard of Reddit at this point, so going for an IPO now, when almost everyone knows that it exists, and only regular Reddit users are really aware of the enshittification happening. So they can demand a high price for the IPO, and collect a bunch of money before the enshittification is more well known, and the company tanks.
IDK, but that seems to be the way of things.
Facebook has been enshitifying for years and the stock has gone to the moon.
A lot of what enshitification is, is fucking the users to increase shareholder value.
Well, with a mostly anonymous platform like Reddit, there isn’t the same user lock-in, so alternatives, like Lemmy can be shifted to more easily.
With Facebook, you’re dealing with IRL friends and loved ones. Those connections lock you to Facebook. Since you’re locked in, advertisers are locked to you through Facebook’s ad systems, and they can enshittify the whole platform without losing much engagement.
I don’t know of anyone who uses Reddit to stay in touch with friends. Sure, we’re almost all on there in some way or another, but not for that reason.
So abandoning the sinking ship that is Reddit, can be easily done, unlike Facebook where you, and your friends, and their friends, and your family, and your families friends, and your families family, all pretty much have to unanimously agreed to leave Facebook for another platform all at once. That way everyone can stay in touch.
Organizing an exedous of that scale and magnitude is essentially impossible.
With Reddit, users can kind of trickle over individually or in groups as they see fit. Not tied to Reddit for their social interactions among their friends. Most creators, even those with subreddits, can easily post on different platforms and for the most part, they do. So users can enjoy their favorite creators away from the Reddit shitstorm, if they want. So there’s a lot less user lock in on Reddit compared to other platforms, making enshittification a good reason for many to leave.
Bots can’t keep the site running and popular. That’s just not how this works. So, as people figure out that competing services (again, like Lemmy) exist and migrate away, Reddit will eventually tank and go under.
At least, that’s what I’m seeing.
Depending on how that money is (mis)managed, the death spiral could take years or longer. If there’s enough mismanagement, it may be much less. We’ll see.
Unfortunately a lot of smaller subs havent fully transitioned yet, so I’m stuck on reddit for Rimworld content like I occasionally have to log in to Facebook to keep up communication with family. I think at this point though its literally just Rimworld for me. I dont play enough Terraria anymore for the Terraria reddits to keep me there, and tbh I havent looked into Kenshi, but that might be another occasional pull based on what I fine. Sorry for the ramble, I guess the tldr is that there are a FEW pulls reddit still has even though anonymity eliminates most of them
I don’t mean to imply there’s no user lock in, it’s just significantly less than a platform like Facebook. For many it’s not a problem to migrate to another site.
Obviously it’s a thing each community will have to deal with, and honestly, that’s fair. Bluntly, once the community creates a consensus on what the next platform of choice will be, there won’t be much holding those users to Reddit.
Regardless, I’m just speculating. Who knows what will actually happen.
When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots
Just fyi, bots use API calls. Thus, Reddit has ALWAYS known exactly what percentage of users and posts are bots, and which bots are Reddit’s own.
And it’s not the first time. You could almost say it’s what Reddit is built on. When Reddit was first launched, the founders used alts to build numbers; now it’s bots.
My own personal view is that they’ve used bots all along. More recently, they made up for drastically reduced numbers last summer with bots, and that’s when the writing was really on the wall for Reddit because at some point it becomes a serious legal liability to continue to sell ad space and accept ad money based on numbers of users and posts that simply do not exist in reality.
So the IPO has to happen sooner rather than later, and RDDT will tank as soon as it goes public, which is why they’re trying to sell the rubes as many shares as they can at a guaranteed pre-IPO price: that’s free money for them, which they will take and go while Reddit implodes.
I like how the user claims 2016-2019 as good years. From what I remember, the 2016 election was when reddit started turning to trash with the political astroturfing and right wing trolls making bad faith arguments. When was the crazy with the totally-not-staged crazy doorbell camera videos?
Wait what. Right wing presence was gradually purged from 2016 onwards. The main change that period is the site having become a hyper American left-wing echo chamber. And the American part is important since leftism in other traditions tend to turn eyes at American progressives
Maybe because all the power users left lol
Short short short short
Honestly the executive comp is outrageous for an unprofitable company, and yes, anecdotally it does seem to be shrinking, if not in sheer user activity, certainly in quality.
