Been thinking of making a post like this for some time, apologies if some of this is not completely relevant: this community seems more like it’s about Reddit the platform/product than Reddit the social “thing”, but I’m sure a lot of people have similar experiences to mine. Maybe on some instances more than others.
Here’s the one of the last comments I wrote as a regular Reddit user, on the eve of the blackout (almost a year ago to the day), under a post titled “Will your participation in Reddit change”:
My comment
I will keep searching Google for Reddit help threads, but as a cultural and news aggregator I think this is the end for me. Maybe I will check it every so often. On desktop. On the old site. Until they sunset that too.
I wouldn’t be against using the first party app if it wasn’t so awful to use.
It’s a massive shame that we’ve all collectively agreed that Reddit is the de facto way to create open communities online. There were so many forums that could fill the void left by Reddit for things like tech and art and they’ve all shut down in the past decade.
I try not to be too negative about the evolution and constant growth of the userbase of the site and of the internet as a whole, but I’ve really felt like things are moving in a direction I can’t even be cautiously optimistic about lately.
I think of all the mod tools that will be defunct. The commonly cited example is that people who comment excessively on adult subs are automatically barred from commenting on the teenagers subreddit. Sure the admins can whip up functionality to do this, but this site was built on custom tools and custom CSS and all that. I think the API was one among the many secret sauces that give Reddit this staying power. These sites and forums I talked about - I used to hop from one to the next year after year. Until I found Reddit a decade ago.
I like that I choose my subs and that I don’t get algorithmically ordered sludge designed to game the algorithm on my homepage. Yes the sensibilities of the lowest common denominator redditors are gamed by people posting, but that’s (in my opinion) acceptable.
Frankly if they kept the old Reddit Gold pricing (4 bucks per month/30 annual) and gated unrestricted API access behind it I would have been inclined to finally give Reddit money. I use it a lot, I don’t mind paying now that I can afford it. But something about how it’s all going down really doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I’ve been trying to write a post about this for a while now, but I haven’t felt like it was relevant. Thanks for asking here
Reading through this is a bit funny, in retrospect, seeing how Reddit-centric my understanding of the internet had become at the time. I am happy to report that I have checked the home page maybe a half dozen times since the blackout, instead of once or twice a week like I expected. I suppose the disgusting state of the heavily astroturfed worldnews sub was a big part of it as well: for me Reddit was the one big online platform where the average visible user didn’t seem to be very misinformed about Palestine (at least not by default), and it was frankly very sad to see where it got in the past few months.
I do miss Reddit, I haven’t been able to replace it outright. I’m from Lebanon, and Lebanese Twitter is (if you can imagine it) even more of a toxic cesspool than regular Twitter. I’m not on Facebook (also cesspool here), I’m not on Instagram - my point is I don’t get anything about my country on ostensibly user-curated social media. /r/Lebanon was very far from perfect, but it was nice to get a trickle of local news with users who were more in line with my own politics. The local news outlets focus on a lot of irrelevant crap, the sub’s news feed was a bit more interesting.
One thing I loved about that subreddit was that users with more mainstream views in my country (eg. transphobia-as-default) were allowed to spout their bullshit in the subreddit with little mod pushback (if it’s just JAQing off etc, not harrassing people obviously). Then the regulars would dogpile on that user’s post - very refreshing! And very validating I would imagine for anyone who is used to hearing this shit everyday.
I was applying to be a mod to help keep the sub moving, at one point, but hey. Maybe that headache was never worth it. Still, I felt like I lost one of my online homes.
More generally, I have enjoyed my first year on Lemmy, although the experience has been lacking in many ways. For one, while Reddit has a reputation as a meme cemetery, the memes here are generally a bit moldier. But that’s okay. The fact that there’s fewer posts I think isn’t necessarily a bad thing either, I think we all preferred Reddit’s slightly slower homepage in 2013 than the one we left in 2023, that would regurgitate more and more from the bottom of the barrel if you were willing to keep scrolling.
I’ve toyed with opening a Lebanon community here on dbzer0, having opened one on FMHY that nobody used. But it wouldn’t be the same, and I wouldn’t know how to populate it. I posted maybe 2 non-question posts on Reddit in my decade+ of being a regular user, but I wrote tons of comments. It also helped keep my English sharper, I think.
I’ve reactivated my old Instagram account and it’s pretty ass out there. The ad/post ratio is just egregious, and they’ll just serve you random posts from random pages. I want to see my friends goddamn it, isn’t this what your platform is supposed to be for? For those of you who don’t know, the app will also send you a notification once or twice a day suggesting you look at “today’s top reels”. I have never watched a reel of my own will, fuck off.
Point being, the main platforms people use online haven’t been up my alley. I can only hope the zoomer dumbphone pushback keeps expanding, and that social media starts being seen as something for older generations. Wishful thinking?
This is just a post about enshittification, everyone’s favorite word, but every time I think about it for more than 2 minutes I can’t help but miss a simpler internet. Some part of me was hoping it would kickstart me “growing out” of spending this much time online per day (not everyone spends a ton of time online), but it hasn’t.
Also every time I ask something longer than 20 words on Discord some middle schooler will reply “yap”, even in the channels designated for questions. Discord has had its uses (yes I know there’s privacy concerns), but it’s hardly a replacement for Reddit, or forums. Both of which are/were searchable. But enough yapping from me.
Thoughts? How has the exodus been for you? Is this how Digg users felt?
I wish I could be like some of the other commenters here and say that leaving Reddit has been good because of the time suck that it was, or that I’m self-hosting xyz, but I can’t. And I am truly jealous.
I’m still looking to scratch that itch and there’s…nothing. I’m just very bored now but I haven’t gone back because I’m so angry at the way it ended. I do like Lemmy a lot, and Mastodon since I also gave up Twitter, but for better or worse they were a big part of my life and I’m not doing amazing things and coming to wonderful realizations now that they’re gone. It’s just depressing all around.
I volunteer in disaster response, and hurricane season started today and Reddit and Twitter were huge resources for us. Do you know how much of a loss that is? That can’t be replaced…entire communities, regions, parishes, counties, cities, states…they aren’t going to magically swap from one service to another because spez and Space Karen are assholes.
I’m sorry for the rant but enshittification sucks and I am sad.
TLDR I agree with you, OP.
In terms of boredom, it’s a healthy thing! Boredom is what pushes people to learn new skills, find new hobbies, and just generally do things. I think the demonization of boredom is very bad for society.
In terms of disaster relief, that sucks. If you have to use Reddit for that, then so be it. People getting the help they need in an emergency is more important than sticking it to spez.
Reddit is dead and buried, what’s left are bots and teenagers. Those yappy discordians now run the show, most of us 10+ reddit veterans either came to lemmy, or gave up on “the internet”. I’m pretty sure you’re not the only one who considered reddit to be the internet at that point.
Most power users, myself included, spent 5+ hours per day there, at times more so than at their paid careers. Especially the mods (I’ve been moderating 6 subs, two of which had over 1M and 5M users).
I do miss some of those communities. I don’t miss modding. Leaving reddit showed me what ungodly amounts of time I sunk into that platform, now that I had to fill other means to close the gap. With Lemmy it’s 20-30 min a day, often spread out over 5+ sessions since there’s not much to say or see that takes me more than 5 min at a time.
I’ve stayed on some of the moderator discord channels since those are fine folks, and chat with them in the off-topic rooms. Which shows me that reddit has gone off the deep end once and for all. With many decent folks leaving, ads and bots exploding all over the place, only the die hard shitposters and radical opinion leaders stuck around. They might not have had a digg moment, but are going the way of tumblr, which is arguably worse.
What I’m trying to say is that while Lemmy isn’t the arch we wanted it to be, going back isn’t possible either since the harbor burned down.
Personally, I’ve started a PhD just about a year ago at the time I left, and it does plenty of filling the gap in my daily calendar…
Werid, I brought up the notion that I don’t agree with transgenderism and was permabanned from Reddit admins. I didn’t said hate or kill or die or insult them, just don’t agree with it.
I much prefer the people on reddit, but hate the company, admins, and most mods. Ads and bots are getting worse, more and more communities are getting banned because advertisers don’t like them, it’s getting enshittified.
I love the software here, the whole open source federated system is genius, but the users are so awful. Everything is fucking star trek, linux, and communism. The only women here are trans women. People say shit like “just ssh the root config distro” or whatever the fuck like it’s just everyday conversation. Literally every joke has to be explained. Everyone here is either mentally a know it all teenager, or literally a know it all teenager. Don’t you dare say any one thing that could be taken slightly the wrong way or some asshole will start attacking you over it, no matter how irrelevant it is to your main point. And don’t even get me started on tankies.
I’m hanging around in hopes that there will be a wave of normal people at some point.
Just wanted to back you up on this. I’m also very outside the techy core of people on here and have been hoping for more diversity to join as well. There’s at least two of us!
I am a very “techy person” (in fact Y-Combinator’s Hacker News has been a partial Reddit replacement for me), but like you, I too cringe at Lemmy’s constant stream of shitty star trek memes, repetitive “this is what living with ADHD is like”, and posts with days-old news items from 3rd rate wannabe-journalism sites. I mean a quarter of this site is literally screenshots of Twitter posts.
The obvious answer to the shitty content here would be to stop complaining and just start posting the things I’d want to see. But there’s a sense of futility in throwing good things into what feels like a giant pool of detritus.
Anyway one of the great things about old reddit was that, overall, the site (or rather the reddit hive brain) did a decent job at pushing the good stuff to the top. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, that doesn’t seem to be happening as much here on Lemmy.
12+ years on Reddit. Walked away in disgust after the API fiasco and killing Apollo. Found Voyager here and that really helped the transition.
I miss the local subs, especially related to current events, and game day threads of local baseball team. Haven’t found a good replacement (the Athletic has them but they’re harder to navigate). On current events, unless it’s a really big national news story, not much.
Between the loss of Reddit and Twitter, I feel like I’m getting less realtime news. But in retrospect, it didn’t really matter. I’m actually fine reading about something two days later once the outrage has died down.
My daily usage definitely dropped, which is a good thing. I’ve been reading digital and physical books more instead of mostly a diet of audiobooks and podcasts. If there’s some idle time, I dip into a book instead of reflexively checking social media.
FWIW, Lemmy has the same vibe as Reddit 10 years ago. I’m planning on sticking around and contributing more.
Like many commenters here, I am glad that I left Reddit because of the enshittification, but I do miss some of the communities that were there that didn’t want to move. I don’t think Lemmy has completely filled that void, but it’s done a good enough job that I’m here to stay.
I’ve basically stopped using all other social media except for Mastodon (which I actually like way more than Twitter, even if there aren’t as many users) and I feel like my life is better for it. I spend less time mindlessly doom-scrolling and more time doing things I actually enjoy. Since the Reddit blackout I’ve read 60 books, played more videogames, and spent more time outside.
TL:DR touch grass sometimes, it can help
What do you like more about mastodon than Twitter? I always end up bouncing off microblogging sites but I still haven’t tried that one.
Sorry for the late response, I don’t check my notifications very often.
To answer your question: I like that you can follow specific hashtags instead of people. For example, my feed is a combination of #nature, #astrophotography, #hiking, and #catsofmastodon. There are hashtags for just about any interest, and that’s all you have to follow if you want.
That does sound like an improvement. Have you tried Bluesky at all? I dipped my toe into that one and was just curious how you thought it compares if you have.
I haven’t tried that one yet. Heard of it, but Mastodon has kinda stuck with me so I haven’t really moved on to something else.
