I read a post somewhere that really vibed with me. It said that they use Apollo and Reddit was just a backend. When Apollo died, Reddit did too for them.

Ah, yes, typical reddit addict having withdrawal syndrome.

Don't look back...

I've only been back to visit a small, private sub, but I've seen a lot of posts here saying that a high percentage of bot content is obvious. The conjecture is that there's always been a lot of bots, but they were somewhat less obvious because there was more human content. With a lot of big content creators leaving, it's more apparent when a lot of posts and comments are from bots.

Plus some people think Reddit has increased bot usage to astroturf against the protests and to give the illusion that traffic isn't down.

I love the sound and view of a good trashfire, so I sometimes go look and see how hard it's burning.

So /r/madlads Mods did what madlads do: They made everyone a moderator just like /r/politicalhumor did from the beginning of the protest. I brought the idea up to the /r/pics mod just to let them know. Would be funny as hell.

Postwise, Bots started reposting content from 2-3 years ago, ChatGPT was spotted multiple times as a replying user and smaller subs returned to normal, but are slowly drowning in spambot posts or switched to approval-only due to the failing tools.

EDIT: A major antispambot on reddit closes down today by unbanning EVERY SINGLE SPAMBOT on reddit. Did I mention that I love watching things burn down?

To me it feels like the whole ordeal shook reddit quite a bit and made maybe the top 10% of the users drop out of the bucket this way, going to the Fediverse (flavors: lemmy, kbin, mastodon) as far as I can tell right now. Tildes and squabbles got some users, too, but IMHO those seem to be not doing well so far.

I'm jumping between Reddit and Lemmy. Some subreddits have all of their mods booted out (r/GoCommitDie and r/OpenAI are two I can think of). Some subreddits have decided to flag their subreddit as NSFW but are being threatened by Reddit to reverse that move, and many have returned to business as usual.

Let's face it. We've lost the API protest. All we can do now is make Lemmy popular and make it attractive to other users. Give people an incentive to actually join here. Our job here is not to make Lemmy a copy of Reddit. We need to make Lemmy different (in a good way!).

And here's an unpopular opinion: we need to make Lemmy easy to use and understand. If normies find Lemmy difficult to use or understand, then we're fucked.

My personal opinion is that normies might get confused by the fediverse and might be turned away by thinking they need to make an account on every single instance in order to participate in them. I am not proposing that we get rid of federation. What I am proposing is that we somehow make it clearer to everyone that all you really need is one account and you can get access to everywhere. I don't know how we can do this, but I'm sure there is someone who knows.

I would check it here and there the last few weeks. It’s completely barren. Most subs are just gone and the popular page is just askreddit or food posts. It’s awful. This is my new home!

My favorite thing over there right now is r/videos, which only allows text descriptions of the video you were going to post. It's way more entertaining than it has any right to be.

I mean, half the good subs are still gone. I can't even use my home feed anymore, its half just video game subs now. Places like r/interestingasfuck were regular features in my feed that were pretty important to it being a pleasant experience overall. I balanced that shit.

Now its all fucked. I still have my account and still go there, to poke around and participate in some of those video game subs, where reddit is still clearly dominant. But hanging out has gotten kinda lame.

Reddit has made it easy now that my mobile apps are gone. Also, my main account got permananned on Tuesday apparently out of comment posted 5 years ago about spez. Also, a niche sub I followed was taken over by a Nazi when the historical mod got kicked out by reddit and now that's gone too.

Reddit has slipped into being irrelevant very quickly.

You can see a lot of communities being closed or not back to normal. My feeling is that this whole thing will leave a big scar on reddit for a long time, and it will probably never heal, because it was mostly hitting core users who were there for a long time. Maybe they calculated that most users are lurkers who use mobile, and the rest is people using old reddit?

The problem is that it's not a good idea to upset the mods, but reddit also works with content, and it's a complex chemistry between people who post new things and how the mods regulate it to make sure their sub has quality. I guess that a lot of mods don't care, or maybe they don't care now but will care later? Maybe new subreddits will open with other mods.

Eitherway, reddit is ready to sacrifice a good fraction of its quality and trust to extract money out of it, but reddit users are not instagram users.

It was more and more difficult to make reddit interesting by avoiding some subreddits and searching for subreddits that were more and more niche, but at some point you feel that something is lost after the whole "increase quantity, dilute quality" phase.

Reddit is also getting more polarized and politics have really poisoned the site to a degree never seen before, Trumpists were present there for waaaaay too long, and it attracted a lot of conservatives and right wing users who don't fit with the usual reddit crowds. It managed to survive after a looooot of drama, but after all this, maybe the core users of reddit are just tired, and might slowly quit the ship, and maybe reddit will see the same problems twitter is currently having, with conservative etc running rampant.

I wish reddit would have stood up with its core users who are mostly liberals/leftists, instead of compromising and letting fascists thrive there.

I use my country's subreddit and it seems the right wing phase is being felt more and more, I'm feeling even the mods start to get tired because of it. every month I'm surprised by the opinions of the comments I see on this sub. Maybe it also reflects world politics, but I'm not sure. Sometimes I get paranoid and I imagine that astroturfers are often around to leave a mean comment, or downvote things that doesn't fit their agenda.

The upside is that reddit still managed to hold up for much longer than digg.

Do not protest reddit. Boycott reddit for good and live in the lemmyverse.

If your lemmy instance gets unbearable, there will always be another lemmy instance to go to.

If you do use reddit, it should be to post and comment about lemmy to inform the current redditors to move to lemmyverse.

How would I even access it without rif?

/r/all has top posts from very obscure subreddits now

My Frontpage has much much less churn.

As long as we keep making this place good and active, it will be attractive. With the increased spam bots and degraded moderation, people will start looking elsewhere

/r/Pics and /r/videos are still rebelling. /r/videos is only allowing text descriptions of videos and /r/PICS is still nothing but John Oliver

I haven't been on for a couple days because boost is finally dying, but the front page is shit, it's 90% anime and doordash.

R/cyberpunkgame turned NSFW since, you know, the game features such things as a dick slider for your character and fully rendered sex scenes with prostitutes, and reddit is hilariously trying to turn it back into being marked as SFW.

Reddit still has better porn, for all other things I do not give a f**k.

r/linux is turning into a noob subreddit where people copy and paste rule #1 (no support, it isn't a support forum) and then try to offer support because nothing else is going on.

You know, the way you tell your cat to get off the table by giving it a nice piece of chicken and telling the cat it can't get chicken by coming to the table again.

What infuriates me are subs that act like nothing is happening. I can understand not wanting to get involved with drama but actively supporting the devs by pretending everything is fine is vile to me.

To those people who looked back and are shocked by how horrid that place is: yes, it was always that bad, full of hatred and despair, you just never realized it until you've experienced something good here.

The most important thing for us then is to keep this place good. It's not going to be easy, but we'll try.

IMO the protests are having an effect. I haven't been on there for 2 days (full disclosure: was given 1 week suspension under dubious pretense while I was mass editing + deleting all my comments), but, before then there was a huge undercurrent support for the protests but a lot of outright hostile naive complaints regarding them. At this point it feels like the majority of those that are willing to leave have left, and the rest is a dumpster fire of increased hostility. Everyone is angry for seemingly ridiculous reasons. You can't post anything without somebody saying something absurdly contrarian within a day or 2. TBH I really think there's a 'instill anger' bot program (and its replicants) running amok now and the moderators can't (or are unwilling to) keep up with it.

Noticed quite an increase in bot posts over on r/titanfall to the point where a retired mod wanted to return to their position to help deal with it. Given that I'm kinda moving away from Reddit I gave them their position back so that I can start moving on.

For me, I check reddit like once or twice in a day where I just check what on popular and on r/all for like 5 minutes on my desktop. Also to checkout r/OMSCS and that's about it. Lemmy is where I am at most of the time now lol. I used use the official app and its so garbage but it was so addicting for me to use before the Apollo drama. Now that addiction isn't quite there anymore and Lemmy hasn't been super addicting for me and I like this feeling a lot.

seeing a shit ton of spam

I have been going back to tell people about alternatives like Lemmy. It's weird, if you just visit surface level it looks just about the same but looking more closely things feel off. Things feel a little bit more stagnant and it seems that less content is being generated. Bigger subs that have made efforts to protest seem to be more missing from popular, but others are pretending nothing is wrong and largely are unchanged.

That being said my front page is completely ruined. Like half the subs I was part of have gone quiet or are full of protest posts so it's very noticable.

Theres on going drama with subs going nsfw. For what I know NCD was forced to go into sfw mode, along with serveral other subs.

Good luck explaining to your advertisers why their ads are shown along side fighter jet hentai, mobnik cubes, and nuclear and dam schizoposting.

Content on r/all has been garbage the last few days

Hmm, i checked out the FP and a few of the subs I used to frequent. Front page seems to have more TikTok style crap than ever, like "guy gets punched!" or "someone makes annoying food!". Relationship advice: "get divorced!!".
City subs seem about the same as before. Medical subs I used to read seem about the same and holy shit, am I glad I'm not reading those every day. Same questions and memes that have been rotating through for like 5 years, and the confounding pattern where the community consensus on issues changes from week to week or post to post. One week it's "this term is offensive and I hate it" and 50 people are "YEAH! That's right!" and then the next, "don't you know about this term, it's perfectly valid" and 30 people are "YEAH! Use your brain if you have one broo!!". And the questions like "does anyone else with this condition suffer from these extremely common effects that are listed in every medical article about it?" So anyway whether reddit has gotten worse or not, seems like I was ready for something different.