Technology

Spez resigning and free API access to all third party apps as it was before.

Honestly though? Lemmy is reminding me of old reddit and I'm enjoying it so who knows if I'd even go back if this site keeps growing at the rate that it is.

I think many people were looking for a reason to leave but kind of felt stuck seeing all the alternatives being either dead or abrasive.

Lemmy seems to have captured the soul of what a significant portion of people have already been looking for.

I'm done.

The subs I moderated have either gone dark, or are going dark in the next ciuple days.

And with that I let the mod teams I was a part of know that I am moving on. I hate what reddit did to the community, and my time feels better spent where it will be appreciated.

CEO resignation. A big fuck you to IPO? Apollo continuing. None of this will happen though.

Reddit is not what it ought to be. It's overwhelming toxic environment just ruins what could have been a great forum. But it is what it is and for that reason, I'm out.

Going back at this point would be like returning to an abusive partner and thinking that the relationship could actually be better this time.

At this point, me run out of alternatives worth trying. Just signed up for a lemmy instance today, and liking what I'm seeing so far (even if communities are quite a lot smaller than I'm used to at the moment), but there are other sites that might scratch the reddit itch that I'll try even if the fediverse stuff doesn't take off. Reddit has shown that that they're a) greedy, and b) incompetent at being greedy. And I'm not going to contribute to them again until I'm well and truly out of other options.

if reddit becomes federated I'll consider subscribing

i kind of want reddit to die now. people talking to one another shouldn’t be monetized or debased through some spyware algorithm run by antisocial dickheads.

A week ago: Bring down the API costs. I’d have begrudgingly accepted paying a few extra bucks a year for Apollo Ultra.

Today: Nothing. Reddit admins acted like smug children in the face of the Apollo Dev’s good faith questions, then the CEO and admins pulled the stunt of trying to act like the dev threatened them. Then the CEO doubled down on that story in the sham AMA. I don’t want to feed that machine anymore.

I have edited and then deleted all my posts and comments except for a few final ones that will go soon. I will keep the account but only as a point of contact for some people until I get them all contacting my email instead.

As someone who really only went on Reddit for memes and techie discussions, I think I can say this: for my use-case, there was nothing special about Reddit itself. In fact, one thing I have realized is just how little the nature of the host matters beyond ease of use. Sure, certain formats lend themselves better to certain use-cases, but ultimately humans are social creatures, and even in the most inconvenient of circumstances, we find a way to make it work.

And once you realize that, it becomes less about the medium, and more about the people who lead the discourse. From what I can gather, Reddit lost that discourse a long time ago. And as such, their downfall was only a matter of time.

Reddit was dead from the day Conde Nast bought it. Every day since then was a roll of the dice as to whether they'd attempt to seize more profits and ruin it, or not. This happens to essentially every public or aspiring public company eventually. The need for perpetual growth warps decisions and guts the original mission in the end.

We call it "autosarcophagy" or "self-cannibalism."

As I understand it, Reddit also took on a lot of external capital investment, which only makes the pressure to perform financially even greater. I can't fault them for making the decisions they have to make to keep their jobs, keep their executive salaries, and so on.

Long live the sustainable, community-driven, community-funded future! Nobody can screw this up for us if we are the ones footing the bill.

At this point, it's only going to get worse. It's a very large Venture Capital backed company, on track to IPO.

Large VC/public companies goals will follow more of what we see with "mainstream" sites and social media. It'd be against their goals and their business to have less ads, less agorithms showing what their partners want to see and not what the user wants to see, less bloat on their front end. Even if the CEO wanted to go that way, he'd quickly be replaced.

It's a self sustaining movement of capital now and users are annoyances that they have to deal to achieve their goals.

I'll be honest, I started using redding decade ago because most forums were very niche, specific, with weird to follow rules, very low on users, and reddit seemed to always have a community for each topic I had an interest on. It still does, but the end is approaching fast, and I don't want to search Discord servers, social media videos, or even ancient methods that are alternatives like IRC servers, mailing lists ; search results are useless in Google due to SEO and already affect other search engines

It all comes up to finding one or more sites that don't look ancient or too mobile focused, and if enough people are going to use it and stick to it. Otherwise it'll just be another corner of the web filled with a few crazy users

Return in all aspects to how it used to be in 2014 or earlier, but it will never happen because enshittification cannot be reverted.

That includes the bloated inefficient new design that includes an intentionally hostile mobile website that shits the bed on 3G connections, the echo chamber machinery, random layout shifts, NSFW login walls, automated censorship and shadowbanning, the privileges for the big subreddits and the big sponsored powermods.

Honestly I really don't see much of a future for profit-driven social media. Time and time again we've seen that power over communication is just too much power for an individual company to have. The fediverse makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure if it's the ultimate end state. It would be very nice if it were

while i have been liking my time here, i can’t say i’ll never go on reddit again. i’d like for lemmy to become my primary browsing platform, but there simply isn’t my favourite niche communities on here- in particular r/namenerds, r/battlejackets, r/posthardcore, and all the bullet journalling subs. unless those communities migrate, i’ll still go on reddit (yes, mobile) to engage with them, since those are some of my favourite hobbies, even if i’m hoping to spend more time with lemmy.

I never considered going back. Lemmy is forward. More power to the users and the community and less from greedy shareholders. This is the way.

Hard to say... the resignation of Spez and withdrawal of plans for an IPO would be great, as a start. Commitment by leadership to focus on users and mods instead of chasing $ is also on the list.

Nice try, /u/spez…!

But seriously, I guess none of any further actions to try to fix the whole thing would change that bad gut feeling of being held as a fool that I now have. Mostly due to how they treated Christian Selig.

become a 501(c)(3)

bring Aaron Swartz back to life and make him the CEO

I've only been here for a day, but the lack of homophobia and transphobia here compared to Reddit has been a breath of fresh air. I'm not afraid of posting here like I was on Reddit, where I'd actually have to debate with myself for a minute or two before posting. It's like finally leaving a bad relationship; now I'm starting to see how bad that all was for my mental health.

It's quite the opposite at this point. Reddit isn't really in control anymore. Rather, something drastic would have to happen to Lemmy to cause me to leave. Reddit is no longer the default choice.

Today's AMA was something else. I honestly don't know how a founder of reddit doesn't understand reddit users.

I really like/liked reddit. I've been on it since digg v4 happened. Rif dies, I'm done using reddit on my phone. I'm not installing their app. If old dies, then I'm completely done with reddit. I'm not using new. Chances are I'll use reddit less and less anyway though.

For me, it is too far gone at this point. The events of the last ~week just highlighted something that I was willfully ignorant of in that it has not been the website I joined back in 2007 for a very long time. VC-backed focus on monetization, profit, return on investment, and ipo (and everything that comes along with that) has ramped up tremendously in the last few years and I think this is now the tipping point of Reddit doing a Digg.

It's a bummer, but not shocking or surprising as it follows a long line of exactly the same pattern, across tech. I'll have fond memories for sure, but have accepted it and am ready to move on to something new.

Also, this is my first post. Happy to be here!

Reddit as an entity is just frustrating. Not just the recent debacle, but the pattern of getting slightly more awful with each passing minute. I'm hoping I enjoy my stay here well enough that I never feel the urge to go back. Unfortunately, it's less about what Reddit can do to get me back and more about what the Fediverse can do to keep me.

I liked seeing and engaging with unlimited new things with each passing moment. It would not be very satisfying for me to lose that. Time will tell.

I'll go back if Reddit:

• Makes it feasible for 3rd party apps to continue on the platform. This could be a revenue-sharing agreement, a set price that's not prohibitively expensive but still fairly compensates Reddit, a flat-out exemption from the Enterprising Pricing, doesn't matter. These apps have been around far longer than Reddit's own app, and provide tools (and general polish) the Official App has yet to match seven years in. They deserve to stay and to make a living off of their continued contribution to the community.
• Restores parity access to NSFW content via the API. It's essential for moderation bots to combat spam, it helps 3rd party apps stay afloat, and it serves a large part of the community. I get that Reddit wants to sanitize the site in preparation for an IPO. I get that advertisers are wary of NSFW posts. That's not an excuse for removing it from the API. The official ad-supported Reddit app will continue to serve up porn, and the currently proposed API prevents 3rd party clients from using ads anyway. Reddit is making a bad-faith argument that harms moderation bots' ability to do their job, and cripples any 3rd party app that isn't driven from the platform based on price (including 2 "accessibility only" apps they were forced to allow during the AMA).
• Apologizes to the Apollo dev for Spez's libelous statements, and starts a good-faith negotiation with developers to open access for things like the enhanced query system that the 1st party app enjoys, usage statistics that will help devs improve API request efficiency, and revenue sharing where devs can monetize using ads or any other method they choose so long as Reddit gets a cut.

Yes, these demands go further than a simple rollback of the new API policy, but at the same time they don't. Reddit's originally stated goal for this change was to keep 3rd party apps around because they add tremendous value to the ecosystem, while stopping the LLM training bots from getting off rent-free when they try to train their AI models off of our hard work. I love that goal. It's something we can all get behind. I just wish they'd actually do it.

But at this point, even if I go back it will be with one foot out the door. The dam has broken, and I plan to campaign hard for alternatives and switch to whichever one hits critical mass first.

First and foremost, get third party clients working again. I am used to RiF. I tried the official app. It was very busy but showed much less useful information per screen. I could not even even leave it installed on my phone. It kept spamming (shitty) notifications to try to goose my engagement, even after I disabled them.

Anger about bad corporate decisions fades, but if I cannot comfortably use a site, I cannot come back.