Paywalling the API and therefore killing 3rd party apps killed reddit… banning anyone with an opinion killed reddit…
No, Reddit ruined Reddit for everyone. The AI slops are simply what replace the people who left.
The day they got rid of reddit gold and started cash grabbing hard was the day the writing was on the wall.
They got rid of gold?? When?? I left reddot and came to Lemmy in the third-party apps exodus and haven’t even looked back
Oh, I’ve looked back. It’s hard not to rubberneck at such a horrendous train wreck. Especially when I was just a passenger on that very train.
I left reddit during the great API massacre as well, then I went back to only be taken out by the great Trump massacre of '24 where they banned a huge chuck of the community that had any anti-trump sentiments in their profile history…because Trump threatened them.
Now I have been banned 6 more times, just by AI detecting language it doesn’t like and its catalogue of dislike only continues to grow.
They pretend that humans are reviewing ban appeals, it is clear that they are not. The AI is banning more people than they could possibly keep up with. Now, more often than not, there is no reply to ban appeals whatsoever.
Spez is a spineless coward who threw the reddit community overboard a long time ago and continues to do so whenever it suits him. Reddit exists only to shit money for him now.
It has been left twisted and corrupted in favor of the conquest for money and controlling public opinion
I’ll be back to fight the good fight just as soon as I can create a new account and switch VPNs
Wasn’t spez the pedo sub moderator?
Ages ago - they tried to make it all these flairs and sparkles and whatever. Maybe it’s back lately?
It was when they fired Victoria for me
Yeah, also the people. The comment sections are cancer. Lame jokes from dickheads that don’t add anything.
This is key.
If there weren’t bots…Reddit would make its own bots. Reddit dances a fine line of allowing the population to be a certain proportion of bots because they increase real engagement by picking fights with its real users, as well as creating never-ending “content” for people to read and vote on. They only ban bots when real users notice they are bots - which is less and less frequently - even though Reddit has the tools and information to ban them long before that point.
Reddit could easy eliminate almost all of them, but that would be expensive and they’d lose real users as a result.
Exactly. This is like blaming rats and cockroaches for dirty town.
No, they won’t be there (as much) in a cleaner town.
Yeah, after reading the article, it was like, oh, so the same fake stories but actually grammar corrected?
Also, most people who sre like “i have this tells tl detect AI” would not know at all whether something is AI or not lol
Reddit ruined reddit for everyone. AI has nothing to do with it. Well except Reddit making a deal with google to sell everything on their for training AI. But again that is Reddit ruining Reddit.
Agreed. And this has taught us some things about communication. About how it works when it’s hooked up with capitalism, government and/or the general population.
I personally think it works better without that stuff.
spez ruined reddit for everyone
What? What did the moderator of r/jailbait do now?
That one always rung a big hollow to me because of the timeframe of it. At the time he was made a mod there, invites didn’t exist. Folks could just be added to subs- it was actually a method for trolling. At the time, I could add Steve to r/SteveLovesDiddlingKids, for example, and he’d have no say in it. They changed it to an invite system after a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That said, one can quite readily say that spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years knowingly (Including it being a subheader for reddit on google searches, and it getting nominated for subreddit of the year along with several votes for it.) and only got rid of it when Anderson Cooper did a report on CNN about it.
a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That’s absolutely hilarious.
spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years
spez did not work at reddit between 2009 and 2015.
On one hand yeah in that timeframe, on the other hand it’s not like his homies weren’t there. Further, subreddits came to exist in 2006, and people could make their own in 2008, so he had a year’ish of r/jailbait existing to do anything about it, and chose not to.
I don’t especially want to be in the position of defending either spez or r/jailbait, but I was on Reddit at the time and I do think I should explain how 2008 was a different time on the web.
There had been a number of attempts to censor and age-gate the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People involved in creating internet tech and building its culture were almost universally against anything that even smelled like censorship. Much of the early userbase migrated from Digg in response to Digg censoring a leaked DRM key. The only sitewide rule on Reddit was “don’t break Reddit”.
When r/jailbait finally did get banned in 2011 and Reddit’s first content policy was imposed, that decision was unpopular among Redditors even though most thought sexualizing young teenagers was disgusting. It signaled a change to what Reddit was, and people rightly feared that it would lead to significantly more restrictions. Now I have to enforce a rule on r/flashlight that people can’t sell flashlights designed to be attached to guns, and I don’t want to make or enforce such a rule.
Creepy little shit.
reddit already ruined reddit for everyone long before AI was a concern.
I mean that’s why we’re here…
People still use reddit, thought it was a bots only network
And yet it still had room to get worse, and it’s still not even in its shittiest form.
Reddit is already ruined and has been for a while. And it’s been ruined by the greedy Reddit CEO.
Also the turtle fucker that is a mod everywhere. I’m so curious how they make money being a shitty person.
Yeah AI had nothing to do with it. Ruined waaay before AI took hold. That’s why I left.
The UI was becoming unusable, the policies were unreasonable, the greed got to them, etc, etc.
Yep. It was headed downhill with the bots, reposts, karma farmers, hive-mind, troll farms, and of course the reddit c-suite “purging” the site of things like WPD, morbid reality, spacedicks (yeah, not subs for everyone, but noetheless…not hurting anyone), getting rid of Victoria, getting rid of mods and leaving petty power mongers and sycophants in place, and allowing shit like The_Donald and similar subs to run unchecked. The forced commercialization, crushing of protest and reddit app was the final straw.
Yeah, that happened way before the current AI slop bubble.
Yes it did. Making up variation of the same story in order to farm upvotes used to be done by humans.
But the strategy of throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks has now been industrialized with AI, because the machine can produce tons of cheaper, faster, smellier shit.
Reddit and generally socials are basically the perfect application for AI. Unreliable results are not a bug but a feature. You have thousands of humans helpfully training it for free by up or downvoting the result. And the AI companies get a machine trained to persuade large groups of people of any made-up story.
Don’t need ai for that. Before AI, bots would simply copy top post from a year ago to farm up votes, and then sell the account to marketers.
The AI slop is just extra piss in a lake full of piss.
Reddit was ruined long ago, this just accelerates the decline.
Letting gallowboob “moderate” the basically the whole front page was an insane decision. Some of those guys were selling product placement.
The centralization of power to few mods was always a problem, but smaller communities got by.
The huge quality drop came when Spez felt he missed the IPO wave around 2018 and decided to growth hack the site. Then they finally killed most of them too with the API drama.
Popular and moving away from hot to best was also bad. They horribly failed to discipline abuse from the_donald for years…
New reddit is still not even usable from a phone. It crashes frequently and i swaer to God it only shows like 8 posts and just fucking loops through them (how have thry not noticed this, I only check 4 subreddits and its unbearable).
The dysfunction of the mobile website is most likely on purpose, to drive users towards the dedicated program
Which I can’t even (be bothered to) install as it sends you to the play store. Which doesn’t exist on Amazon fire tablets.
Niche communities that simply don’t exist on Lemmy. If your only hobbies are tech, lemmy probably covers all of your bases, but there are nearly no niche non-tech communities here.
but there are nearly no niche non-tech communities here.
And if they do exist, there are 4 subscribers and zero posts in the last 6 months.
Yeah. I help mod the Washington Capitals hockey team sub, and recently I looked through every other NHL team’s sub, and we’re the ONLY ones that post game day threads. And even with us, it’s basically only one or two of us commenting on the games. Compare that to dozens or even hundreds of people commenting on every game in every team’s reddit sub.
I tried to revitalize the sens community last year during the playoffs. I haven’t been able to watch this season much because of crazy timezone differences enduring my vacation…
Yeah. Maybe I’ll see if I can get the gdt bot working again…
And regional communities. There’s not nearly enough people in the fediverse to support city or state communities. And only the most populous countries.
Tbh most regional subreddits feel like they’re full of right wing chuds.
They did exist before reddit as forums, however they where fragmented across different languages and websites. At some point Google started to show reddit more often, because it was more search engine optimized and mobile friendly. This means new users found reddit first, and old users where slowly pulled away from their forums into reddit.
r/kitchenconfidential
Yeah. I’m not saying I like it or that it’s how it should be. It’s just how it is. I basically go to reddit last these days.
Can’t lie I miss r/sneakers. As an avid collector I miss the engagement
There’s also fun bullshit communities that refuse to migrate too. I listen to some of them on YouTube as they read the stories from there while I work on other things or drive.
I tried creating a community here but never got others to post their show too.
Some are pretty limited even in reddit too
Right now I don’t have a reddit account and I just lurk there, but if I really wanted to talk about, say, a specific TV show I like, or a Movie, or Anime, or a Book… that would not exist on the fediverse. It’s either just Reddit or maybe Discord.
If I wanna talk about stuff from a non-white perspective, the best place I’d really find my people outside the great firewall is Reddit.
I mean I the amount of Cantonese-speakers on Lemmy is like… single-digits
As long as people keep going to reddit instead of starting a post about the latest episode, or movie, book, etc. there will never be anything here for people to talk about.
I use redlib to lurk.
I find the drama subs like /r/AITAH entertaining. I know its all fake, but the groupthink responses are intriguing.
Let’s not blame AI for everything: Reddit had a lot of problems before AI became big. Repost bots are so common that you’ll see the same posts over and over again. Some of those twitter screenshots must have been posted hundreds or thousands of times. OnlyFans spam also works without AI. And we have had those bots spamming the same stupid comments before people were even thinking about GPTs.
Repost bots should be built in to Reddit tbh
Just take whatever was the top 5 a year ago and repost it at the same time
Karma guaranteed
5 years? I see the same reposted on a daily basis. One guy was reposting his own rainwater drain video, different angle every week.
Lately there’s been someone chopping chives every day and posting a photo of the result.
There was a bit of a drama when someone noticed that the same photo was reused from a couple of weeks back.
The poster said they didnt have time to do it that day but wanted to keep the streak so they just re-posted an old one hoping no one would notice.
It was just such an amazing and engaging sequence of events and I feel fulfilled having been able to follow this roller coaster of emotion /s.
Oh yeah the one that ended up getting corporate sponsors.
While I agree being shitty is a human problem, shitty people are using AI to be shitty faster.
We can absolutely blame AI for everything. The reason AI took over Reddit is because Reddit fired their human moderators in favour of AI moderation. It’s basically a vicious circle of bots learning how to avoid being banned, and auto moderation learning how they’re avoiding being banned…repeat.
…the obvious problem being that bots are valuable to Reddit because they increase real engagement…if there weren’t bots, Reddit would make its own bots to do basically the same thing. Reddit only wants to restrict bots to a certain proportion of the population, rather than eliminate them.
I used to have a reddit account and truly enjoyed it - but I quit when it became obvious that most of the site is simply run by bots that aim to stir the pot and divide people. I still read various reddit posts - but there is no longer any real knowledge to be gained. Mostly, I now just experience frustration, mistrust, and disappointment.
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I suppose it’s the way of so many sites: Initially, they pursue some higher goal, which attracts users. Once people start participating en masse, the focus quickly shifts and it becomes all about making money - which is fine as long as there is a balance. They lose out once the scales tip too much in the direction of profit while the initial purpose becomes more of an afterthought.
Reddit’s founder and investors killed reddit, the method they used is immaterial.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
And fuck his weird teeth.
Reddit was the good place after the fall of Digg 2.0. Now Reddit has become the bad place.
Nazi sympathizing has already ruined Reddit.
That shithole has been sanitized for advertisers, which means banning anyone who talks about resisting the fascist slide America is currently in but allows /r/conservative to exist for foreign actors to spread misinformation from.
Fuck Reddit, fuck Spez, those Nazi fucks will get what’s coming to them if we’re lucky.
