I know I’ve been kind of going crazy with my posts, but I’ve just been thinking about this a lot. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that Reddit is probably trying to no longer be a forum board.
As people have pointed out, Reddit is making it increasingly difficult to actually post or comment on their platform. Firstly, half of the subreddits have stupid karma or account age requirements which makes it so you can barely post anywhere. On top of that, even if you do meet these obscure requirements, half the time the automod will flag you as a spammer or something and take it down instantly.
I won’t go too long on this, but obviously banning is a big thing too. Reddit just indiscriminately bans everyone nowadays. They don’t even need to give you a reason, they’ll just permaban you for nothing and that’s that. And they enforce their rules with absolutely zero mercy. No warnings, no second chances, all infractions regardless of how tiny or massive they are carry the same exact punishment and that is a lifelong ban from the entire platform. Not to mention their AI is so advanced that not even going into witness protection could hide you from their ban evasion detection systems, so good luck trying to dodge that.
You know what’s super easy though? Scrolling through posts. There are absolutely zero hiccups or roadblocks when you scroll through the front page. It is only when you try to actually contribute to the site that Reddit basically makes it a full-time job for you to work out their systems.
I can only assume that Reddit is seriously just trying to eliminate actual human engagement from their platform. Why? Because if someone is posting on a sub or commenting on a post, then they aren’t scrolling, and if they aren’t scrolling, then they aren’t getting ads. Reddit is just taking the Dead Internet Theory to the extreme basically. No human engagement, just scroll scroll scroll. It has literally become the exact opposite of what a discussion board is supposed to be, and basically is becoming some amorphous Instagram wannabe where you just scroll endlessly and never actually engage with any content on the website. Who knows though who’s gonna actually be making posts once all of the actual users are gone, probably just AI?
Anyway, there’s my rant. It’ll probably be my last post for a while on this topic, I am just so sick and tired of Reddit. It has put the internet is this stupid stranglehold where there is no forum board that is even remotely as populated as it, but simultaneously eliminating all aspects of it that give me a reason to use it, so there is just this black hole right now that Reddit refuses to fill seemingly. I’ll keep an eye on Lemmy and other platforms for now and see how they grow, but for now I probably just won’t be using any discussion forums anymore because they basically don’t exist for what I want.
Thank you everyone for commenting on my posts and teaching me about this side of Reddit, and sorry for this insanely long post!
For a decade I was in the “power user” metric of commenting and making content I wasn’t doing it for any reason just enjoying my communities but I’ve caught a permanent ban after nearly two decades on reddit… for upvoting content and making two joke comments… it really does feel like an active purge. If you’re not on either end of the political spectrum there to stir shit and tell your side the people you disagree with literally aren’t humans anymore and start drama or a lurker idk what there even is to do there anymore
What sucks is that Reddit has killed most other hobby related discussion platforms. Now that Reddit doesn’t fulfill that role either anymore people are pretty much stranded. Lemmy is a godsend fr.
They arent stranded.
They migrated to Discord.And yes, that’s worse.
Reddit sapped small forums and discord finished them off.
Would it be that hard to revive them? If enough people are fleeing Reddit, these platforms could be built again.
Sure. But you need.
- A person/group motivated enough to start a forum
- (Probably) A technical person to maintain/update/secure the server (backups in particular)
- Moderators/Staff to keep the forum aligned with it’s purpose (e.g. a US-football forum shouldnt be about golf or football (for the US: soccer))
- The critical mass and engagement to keep it alive and worthwhile to visit.
- Be financially sound for the service they rent and/or host on. Not everyone could host it at home or pay a VPS or rent a service to host on. Sure there are free plattforms to host forums on but the community is at the mercy of the supporting plattform to keep it free (probably by being ad supported). What happens if they switch to a monetary problem?
Yeah that’s the issue, Reddit is the only platform to actually have that infrastructure built up. Quora is not nearly as good, and Discord is Discord, so once Reddit purges you off the site there is basically nowhere to go because places like Digg and Lemmy just simply do not have enough people.
IMO lemmy is already flawed in regards to discoverability.
You can have 100s of r/memes spread across as many federated servers. And all that without any mechanic for deduplication or discovery.
Best case for that would be a consolidated community that any federated community can join to have a single feed of that community topic.
If a server misbehaves thwy could be still defederared or blocked.
I’m sure there’s gonna be replacements eventually but the web has changed quite a bit so idk where things will go.
I just got suspended for quoting TV show Hardy Bucks (I’ll schlap his face asunder, hai - if you know you know)
Appeal denied even though it’s clearly an error. Honestly happy they did it, more incentive for me to bring my posts here.
Maybe they are trying to get rid of discussion, but it seems shortsighted to me, the discussion is the whole reason I went there at all.
Yes. They want to be Imgur, insta, tumblr.
Regurgitated shit
I noticed that when I go from the first page to the next (on old.reddit.com), I see almost the exact same posts. So nowadays I’m done after one page. It’s pretty convenient.
My pet conspiracy is that there’s been such a drop-off in text-only posts on the popular subreddits (maliciouscompliance, pettyrevenge, etc.) that reddit themselves is running AI generated age bait on those subs now to increase engagement.
AM I Overeacting seems to be none stop women with the same shitty boyfriend.
The lack of critical thought on all those types of subreddits drives me insane. People post self serving narratives that no one seems to even try to read between the lines of, there is no consideration for the other party’a perspective. People seem to want validation, they almost always get it, and any attempts offering nuance or getting more details are met with derision.
It wasn’t always like that. Reddit has become such a shit pile.
Someone should archive all of the good knowledge for future sharing after AI takes it all over and charges a premium for what should be free.
I think you’re onto something, they want to be a quick like and share platform
You are correct and I don’t mean to shame but it has been their goal for 7 years now since the redesign in 2018.
Yeah it’s gotten really bad, a part of me was actually relieved when I got my perma-ban
Stop caring about reddit
Stop thinking about reddit
Stop talking about reddit
It is a fascist hellhole and it will only get worse
Fascism should be called out and fought against, not ignored because it’s annoying in your feed.
I roughly agree with everythibg you said, but this is a “Reddit” community after all. What did you expect when you subscribed to it ?
I like watching things die.
Um are you aware what community this is
Yes, the best place to get the most people on-topic to consider memory holing that site forever
Reddit is a publicly traded company now so they must have infinite (read: unsustainable) growth to their Shareholders®. This means that what you’re seeing now is a trend that’s only going to get worse. Their entire app is designed around the infinite scroll of the Meta clones, that’s incentivized to show as many ads as they can between posts.
They can probably make it worse, like popup ads when clicking on a thread. If they’re trying to chase advertisers to the maximum then it could be as bad as those free mobile games. Maybe that’ll make people leave Reddit lol.
I’ve been off it for over a month and I suddenly got an advertisement for Reddit in my weather app. They are thirsty
If they want to populate the site with ads then honestly they should just make you watch an ad before posting or commenting something. Sure it would be a PR nightmare, but it would be far better then the shady user purging they are doing now, and at the end of the day, at least everyone would be able to post
Lol everyones just going to keep an eye and not post anything because years of reddit mods/automods deleting posts/comments have people shy to post or comment here, or small communities never getting visibility there (the posts from smallest subs still have high potential of visibility here)
They lowkey trained us not to post, because itd get removed for some arbitrary rule violation, making it so we wouldnt populate some other site.
I found the general culture on reddit pretty discouraging, too. You post an answer to a question and all the contrarians flock to it, twist your words or just sift through your profile in order to find a gotcha. “Haha, you wrote X but three years ago on subreddit Y you mentioned you’re Z, so that means you can’t possibly know anything about X!” Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s necessary in order to point out trolls and liars, but I often found it exaggerated. It made me not want to participate in discussions. Not to mention attacking people for their grammar and spelling when a large part of the platform doesn’t speak English as their mother language.
sidenote, think wed actually benefit from repeated posts/questions here, like weekly discussion threads not confined to the community feed since its small enough, I’m always curious about what new/old thing ppl are reading, self hosting, playing, etc. but ppl were already getting upset over repeated posts here lol
I remember trying to post multiple things on reddit thatd get taken down so a mod could post it, like episode discussions, game releases, trailers, etc. so I have no urge in my body to post/share that here because in the past I would go through the effort just for it to get removed.
That’s probably why they don’t like me in the end. I don’t post for karma. I just post for engagement.
Edit: and I post/comment quite a bit
Reddit has never been a discussion forum first. It’s always been a media/link aggregation platform. It can’t shift towards something it’s always been since its inception.
Yeah, but what made Reddit worth using was the discussion. Link aggregators weren’t a new thing before Reddit. Reddit’s ranked and nested commenting system is what kept people active on the platform.
What made Reddit worth using was Digg, a better link aggregator, turning to shit.
When the focus of Reddit also shifted to its users not the content, that was the start of its decline.
“Keeping people active on the platform” isn’t the great thing you think it is when 1% of it was the good discussion you’re remembering, and 99% of it was quoting canned response memes like a college kid in 2007 quoting Anchorman.
Boy, that escalated quickly
Well. I’d like to point out that Zionists have taken over Lemmy and are silencing any dissident against Israel. So there’s plenty of shit to fix here. Before we worry about Reddit.
My man, 80% of my front page is pro-Gaza content and I’ve not done anything to achieve that.
Are you talking about this one German instance that did not want to get in trouble with German laws ? That’s the neat part about the fediverse, each instance can have their own rules, and one instance can update its rules to comply with local laws without requiring other instances to do the same
That’s not really possible on a platform level. Particular instances maybe but not Lemmy as a whole. Lemmy.world is kind of notorious for their mod policies so maybe that’s what you’re seeing.
You may be right, but at least you can post in general. Maybe you have a post here and there taken down, but unlike Reddit, it’s actually possible to post, and you won’t be Thanos snapped from the website so they can artificially reduce human engagement
