Their warrant canary is gone, they've banned tons of subs that were barely controversial, and they added a way to block people you don't like making it an echo chamber.
I'd say I want to hack on a federated Reddit clone, but looking at the state of federated social networking, I already feel it'd be dead in the water.
Having to opt-out of tracking feels like another nail in the coffin.
I hate how Reddit is still viable after removing their warrant canary, having a CEO edit comments, and banning thousands of subreddits. Now they're acquiring a new video platform? I hope they become less and less relevant.
But it's already like that. They removed the API that allowed RES to show you individual up/down votes per-post. They've banned tons of subs for varying levels of controversy. They removed their warranty canary. Their CEO was caught changing comments and they weren't asked to resign; got away with just an apology?
I realize that Voat is a cesspool, but anonymity -- real anonymity -- tends to let you see peoples' real dark opinions (hence all the chans .. and why Google requires real profiles for YouTube comments now).
I think Reddit filters a lot more than people realize; more than just the banned subreddits and edited comments. It's been a filter bubble for quite some time.
In anycase, I've given up on Reddit .. and Voat. I guess my big addiction now is Hackernews. :-P
Them going closed source is one of the many, many changes I have seen on that site. It used to be somewhat cool back in the day but Reddit feels like it is trying as hard as it can be to be FaceBook these days. I had to leave because it feels nothing like it used to be.
Just to add to the sample size, I abandoned Reddit as it got increasingly user-hostile, and I have been enjoying the fediverse. There's a lot of cool hackers on there, and I feel like I have a really good signal:noise ratio. Sorry to hear it wasn't a good experience for you tho.
I gave up on reddit partially after they removed the warrant canary and almost entirely after they were was caught editing comments, and the suit responsible was not asked/forced to resign.
I'll occasionally read /r/mechanicalkeyboards and other communities I enjoyed, but as a whole, I find most of the site has turned into an echo chamber.
I tried voat for a while, but that pretty much degraded into a cesspool of racism.
I’m done with Reddit. It was a nice ride, but now it’s officially over. They’ve been trying to turn reddit into Facebook, a personal data vacuum, but now it’s going to get ugly.
Considering the valuation, remaining as an unpaid moderator for a reddit sub, is absolutely crazy. Hopefully all the mods up and leave, nothing like letting others get rich from your free efforts.
Even their mobile site and app has become more hostile and laden with dark patterns.
At this point, I can't even treat Reddit like a collection of community forums anymore... They make it impossible to read a thread when you come in from a Google result (unless you know the cheat code, change www in the url to old) and their content filtering is something out of a dystopian novel written by a schizophrenic bot. Trying to find any specific piece of info? Good luck.
Their redesign combined with the incessant harassing app crap turned me from an hours-a-day-and-modding-some-decently-big-subs redditor to visiting for 15 minutes a couple times a week when on the dunny. Their entire site is so user hostile now it’s actually bordering on funny. They’ve become a parody of everything they set out to defeat.
Many of those I frequented are now privated, many have been banned for having no moderators, discussion quality has become abysmal (i'm very glad that HN has collectively managed to resist reddit-style "humor" comment chains so far), the frontpage/default subreddits are full of politics, bots, karma farmers, sob stories and ragebait.
I've been using the site for ~14 years and watching its decline has been quite difficult. I really like the premise, but it clearly hit the limits of its system many years ago. I recall reading some commentary from one of the founders near the beginning. They were working on research to exploit crowd-funded effort. Effectively incentivising users just enough to encourage them to work for free. They came up with the distributed moderation system. Give egoists just a little bit of power and they'll spend 12 hours a day moderating Reddit for free.
This worked fine with smaller communities and the ability for competition when moderators overstep their mandate and make their communities a bad place. Unfortunately, for many reasons, this is all failing.
1. Reddit management has made their political leanings clear: if you are conservative, you are unwelcome. When I say "conservative" I'm not referring to the far-right. I'm referring to mainstream conservatism about family values, hard work, religion, etc. No example could better encapsulate their position than their "Anti-Evil Operations" team, which bans people for any and all reasons, including unpalatable political positions. Admins/staff on this team have been quite candid about their desire to ban conservative views. This aligns well with Reddit's announced IPO. Sanitising discussion to be advertiser friendly will help their bottom line.
2. The user base leans heavily left. It seems certain large websites have a theme now. When one considers the kinds of discussion which happen on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, we all know which way those sites lean. Reddit is pretty hard left now. For example, the /r/Science subreddit is 24/7 "Study finds Trump voters have low IQ." The Joe Rogan fun subreddit is 24/7 "Does anyone else think Joe Rogan is Hitler?" There is zero space for nuanced discussion except in some very niche subreddits, and they are all inevitably taken over by a power mod who purges nuanced discussion.
3. The anonymous mod system is just not equipped to deal with tens of millions of users in a single subreddit. The top mod is the dictator, and they always end up enforcing their biases on the sub; overtly and subtly. This is exacerbated because of...
4. Subreddit squatting. A perfect example of this are the country name subreddits. Everyone from said country new to Reddit subscribes to these subs. They are all cheerleaders for a particular political party within each country. If you don't like that political party, you're marginalised and usually banned. It's not as simple as creating a competing country subreddit because few people will ever find it. No one thinks to search for "TrueCanada" if they're looking for "Canada." Of course, the the original subreddit automatically removes any mention of the competing sub, and bans anyone discussing it.
There are just too many issues to discuss them all, or in much detail. IMHO, Reddit is ready for a Digg-style exodus. People are just waiting for a clear alternative.
Reddit is done, I deleted my long time reddit account last month, it has become a circle jerk and even small subreddits are mostly useless. I remember when it was a real source of interesting news and comments. Hacker News is my online forum now and sometimes I even check slashdot for all times sake.
I browsed it recently and the major change was the checkmark. So many trolls have them now. And it seems their content is boosted higher. It’s pretty bad.
Old reddit is still superior to hacker news. It was the perfect forum. Now it's a social media laced whale driven place filled with a single viewpoint. To the point that negative comments don't even show up anymore.
I'd agree with this if Reddit didn't ban literally every single subreddit their vocal minority didn't like. Reddit used to be a fun hybrid of Fark and Slashdot. It was far better than both of those and had a niche audience just a little larger than the HN community. It was great. Now it just feels like a perpetual tumblr ready to silence the reason why their users are even on their platform.
A few months back, I had my account of ten years banned for something I never bothered looking into. I've used the site probably a dozen times since then, using site:reddit.com.
Reddit was as close as I got to social media, and it sucked. The longer I spend apart from it, the more alien and irrational the ideas seem. People repeating themselves over and over in every thread, all it takes is one prompt for the conversations to derail - it's like a poorly tuned 7B LLM.
I knew it was "awful", but I guess I'd developed an immunity to it. They're doing future models a great service by limiting their API.
I'd say I want to hack on a federated Reddit clone, but looking at the state of federated social networking, I already feel it'd be dead in the water.
Having to opt-out of tracking feels like another nail in the coffin.
reply