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Ban the handful of moderators who run hundreds of subs between themselves, along with those responsible for moderating AgainstHateSubreddits and ShitRedditSays. Both communities in particular have done tonnes of damage to Reddit as a platform.
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Add clear house rules that make Reddit a better place. Banning things like sexualised content of minors, involuntary/revenge porn, racial hatred, etc shouldn't come as a result of the press generating negative publicity and hurting Reddit's bottom line, they should be basic humanitarian requirements to run a social media platform. I mean look at the reason why they banned /r/NoNewNormal, they quoted some bullshit jargon statistics about vote manipulation and used that as a basis to ban them rather than doing what any sane person would do and forbid medical misinformation.
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Make the official app actually good. There's a reason why tonnes of people use BaconReader, Apollo, Reddit Is Fun, etc, and why almost every web user prefers Reddit's old minimalistic UI, and it says a lot when a fediverse clone has a better rich text editor than the 'Fancy Pants Editor' of New Reddit...
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Spez resigns and brings in somebody more like Aaron Swartz in terms of their beliefs on free speech to run the company.
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!
if reddit becomes federated I'll consider subscribing
Honestly I don't think I ever will. It was already causing me issues in terms of addiction and cutting it to of my life has already had a positive effect. I'm not planning on installing Beehaw/Lemmy on my phone which also limits my time. I know its a small community but everyone has been so welcoming to all the Reddit refugees
I don't think there is anything they can do to get me back anymore. I have a lot of issues with the culture that exists on that site, and that's not something that can be fixed by walking back the API stuff or removing a few problematic individuals.
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.
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.
That's quite simple, actually. It would need to go back to what it was. It doesn't really have to be open source, it just has to be a site where its CEO's only focus isn't milking money but rather improving the site
The worse thing is that he's not even milking money for sheer greed, but because apparently they are still hemorrhaging money, mostly due to lack of a clear product direction (it's not like they actually have much to show for all the money they are spending).
They wasted money and resources developing things that not only they don't need, but also unreasonably increased costs, like hosting images and videos, without a strategy to pay for it. Meanwhile all features that would actually benefit the users were left to the 3rd parties that they are now sabotaging.
I'm still using it because old-dot-reddit-dot-com still works, and until it doesn't, I probably will. That said, I'd rather the fediverse thrive than the increasingly corporate-beholden reddit does, so I'll favour what sparse engagement I make to a lemmy instance first.
I think what's hardest to replace from reddit is the absolutely monstrous archive of posts and discussions, which seems to be a bit of a two-edged sword for them (if the official statements are to be believed) - it costs a tonne in hosting, but makes them the most relevant source for real human discourse. This needs to be handled better, and ideally I'd want to see:
- Some sort of archive-dot-reddit-dot-com. Minimal, flat html, ideally anonymised as much as computer-ly possible to help with the inevitable privacy issues this would raise.
- Some sort of mobile-dot-old-dot-reddit-dot-com, as they seem incapable of making an app without bloaty (both visual and bandwidth wise) "features". Call me a boomer, but if I can do something without a specific app, I would rather do it that way.
- Separate i-dot-reddit-dot-com and v-dot-reddit-dot-com into different companies from the main reddit, reddit should be link aggregation and discussion, content hosting seems like a costly thing to try and monopolise.
- If it really costs so much to run the APIs, I'd rather see more user-based rate limiting than price gouging to discourage bad actors. I do not think that is why they are price gouging, but am trying to assume good faith on their part for discussions' sake.
I know I'm an idiot, and some of these are possibly already done and I just haven't looked hard enough, probably some are impossible for obvious reasons I haven't seen. Though even if reddit as a company turned around and tried to become a curator of the discussions it holds rather than milk it's current audience dry with ads, I'd still rather see lemmy out-compete it. Protocol > Platform.
I'm wiping my account tonight and will be doing an account delete bit right before the black outs.
I honestly don't think anything would get me to go back. I don't think I'll miss my doom scroll app. Lemmy feels much more easy to actually be apart of, and my account can interact with other fedverse stuff, heck yeah.
The only subreddit I'm going to miss that I haven't seen an alternative of is r/196, so I hope that pops up.
Too late, found something better.
Start with canning Spez. Dude's been a walking liability for them for at least the 12 years I've been on reddit, and everyone knew it back then.
This was the final bloodletting of my trust. There is no going back. That's why I deleted all of my content and my account
Reverse the api changes, convince Selig to keep Apollo going, fire spez. Than MAYBE.
Implement ActivityPub, or I I suppose another protocol like Nostr, Ostatus, pump.io, or Diaspora*, and join the fediverse. Preferably publishing their code under the AGPL, but even if they kept it as non-free software I'd still probably get back on. I suppose if they did end-to-end security truly decentralized, like Scuttlebutt or Status, I'd do that too.
Too late, I've invested too much time, money, and effort into setting up my own Lemmy instance so I can share the love of open source and federated projects with others. What happens if lemmy.ml is overloaded? Go somewhere else and set up an account, and you can reduce the load on their servers.
Pay off all my debt. And take me out to a fancy dinner. Wine and dine me, Spez. Then I'll use reddit again. (I would still use lemmy secretly on the side)
I haven't completely left, and to be honest the only way I'd completely leave is if the niche communities I cared about died (or were active here). That being said I've noticed my reddit usage has plummeted over the last week. I used to basically live on that dumb site and now I only check it maybe once or twice a day for a couple minutes
Nothing. They've burned too many bridges and have lost all faith the community had in them. Without a community, they are nothing.
Be usable and intuitive on mobile, including NSFW, no subscription (one-time purchase is ok), no/limited unobtrusive ads, no excessive data consumption. That's what the 3p app I used was.
I don't socialise on Reddit. Whenever I do, I almost always regret it. But I do kill time while in queues, or on the bus, or on break at work. That needs to be on mobile. Or to 'kill time' at home. That needs to include NSFW. And I want to be seeing the content I went there to see, not miles of ads and promoted posts. And I definitely don't have the budget to pay for it over and over and over. Mobile data is also capped and very expensive here.
It's still usable on desktop, but... I don't use desktop on the bus. It's still available on mobile, but... I don't want to load 5 different resolutions of each video on my limited mobile data.
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.
Speaking of me, nothing. I erased my history, deleted my account.
Reddit should go his path chosen, don't hold back travelers.
I absolutely loved reading wholesome content like this. That's a great idea! We should collectively work together to shape how we want our future year to be!
I'm not gone yet and I don't know if I actually will be. No matter how frustrated I am with the platform and have been for years now, I don't feel that anything else is ready to replace it.
I wish Lemmy the best but I have my doubts as to how well it'll take off. I remember when Digg died, Reddit was already popular enough to make jumping ship a no brainer for just about everyone. Lemmy is not there yet, and I don't know if it ever will be. It's much smaller than Mastodon/Fediverse, and that's been very slow to pull users away from the even more hated platform it wants to challenge. Can Lemmy achieve the critical mass it needs to succeed?
What's mainly keeping me on Reddit is certain small subs for niche hobbies. Only on the largest platforms is it possible to find people who share my microinterests. Reddit and Discord are it, and Discord really only works as an ephemeral chatroom, it's terrible for news or threaded discussion. Not to mention how much of a problem it is that Discord isn't indexed by search engines.
Even if they revert the API changes, I know It's only going to get worse when the IPO happens, so I don't think I could ever come back. I also like the federated approach more anyways 🤷
I like the idea of federation, but worry about three things:
- What happens when the instance I'm a part of pulls a Spez? With a federated system, it's easy enough to join another instance or spin up my own. However, it now means that I've got to keep an eye on dozens of community policy statements instead of just one, and none of these tiny fiefdoms are large enough yet to have dealt with the moderation growing pains that truly sink sites.
- How do they get paid? If even a small fraction of Reddit migrates to Beehaw, we're talking about several orders of magnitude more server fees. What does it mean for data privacy when all these fediverse sites finally start thinking about sustainable funding models? What does it mean for moderation when Beehaw is large enough to attract bots, shills, and corporate interests?
- Privacy. The only thing keeping posts and DMs private in the fediverse is a handshake agreement that if you run an instance, you won't leak things you're sent from the other instances
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'm honestly not "gone" yet, this is my first day on Lemmy. I'm still a little uncertain. Here's what's on my mind:
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Reddit isn't, and never has been, profitable. That means that things we don't like are only going to get more and more likely for them to do, because eventually investors will stop paying for them to do the same thing, which we mostly do like.
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Lemmy looks like a good alternative, and I'd really like to see reddit die faster so all the content I like moves here.
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At the same time, decentralization isn't a silver bullet. It doesn't mean my experience on Lemmy will get better, it just means the individual server I pick has a lot more control over me. Will I lose my identity / get booted off the server because someone decides to stop operating it? Or doesn't like a comment I write? Etc etc
For a while I thought "fire Spez", but after giving it some more thought....
NOTHING! and I'll elaborate on why. The community of people makes or breaks social media platforms (see, Twitter as prime example). If the owner(s) aren't interested in the well being of the community / communities, then I have no interest in being there.
I think the platform is too far gone to regain my trust, I don't think I'll ever go back
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.
I've been enjoying reddit less and less for a couple years already, the site is too big and there is so much junk on there to wade through
it is refreshing to see a smaller community elsewhere, and I like the concept of a fediverse more and more
I'm going to replace the subreddits I used to visit with communities and people on lemmy, mastodon, etc
reddit served its purpose (a digg replacement back in the day), now is the time for a new replacement
At this point in time, they have a lot to prove to get me to go back. The site itself has already felt like a lot of recycled content is coming up more and the conversations in some of my favorite subs have already become less deep and engaging. The recommendations and discovery have become kind of subpar and don't even get me started on the native app and website. I work in the development field and the treatment of the third party developers has been garbage, unless there is a major overhaul of the leadership and some really sincere apologizing to those that have mistreated, I just don't see an avenue back at this point.
I am the founder of a mental health support subreddit, so I kinda permanently tied to Reddit to continue to provide support there. I did however make the same community on Lemmy. World, so shall see what the future holds. I will probably have to be active on both
At this point - nothing. I've been less and less happy with that place lately, and this is just the final push. Hopefully I'll find a lot of the same things either here, or somewhere else, or just not at all I guess.
Technology
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