“I wonder what we did to drive away engagement.”
I don’t browse Reddit since I switched entirely to Lemmy the day the API migration happened, but I did still reluctantly have to reference reddit on occasion. Now I can’t even do that for niche issues I run into. I am so upset that millions of people donated their time and energy into making Reddit the place it was just to have all of that entirely gated off. I know we’re likely all in the same boat, but there really are no words for what spez did. He ruined a really great place for community and knowledge and turned it into a slop fest.
but there really are no words for what spez did.
Profited. That’s the word.
Let’s mods indiscriminately block users for arbitrary reasons; why do we keep losing users??
Is this a real thing? I can still access both new and old reddit via both mobile and desktop without being logged in. FWIW, I’m hitting it with Firefox + uBlock Origin on both.
People have been reporting it quite a bit. If i were to guess A/B testing.
It depends on your location and who you are.
A while back, I did an experiment. Reddit started asking me to log in to scroll, so I closed the window and didn’t try again that day. Next day, I tried to scroll reddit and the login to view popup appeared again. So I closed the window and didn’t look at reddit for a week. After a week, I went on reddit and magically it no longer worried about me logging in…for about a month.
I had that for a while. Then yesterday I got a lockout message.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m almost glad Reddit permbanned me two months ago. It’s a shame Anonymous hasn’t tried to DDoS u/Spez. Reddit needs the Ol’ Yeller treatment.
They have screwed it up so bad I literally find myself on Facebook more often then Reddit and that’s after being gone from Facebook for like 20 years lmao
CEO Steve Huffman said, “These deals aren’t binary. They have to make sense for Reddit, but there are many ways, I think, for the value to return to Reddit.”
lol - “The value has left Reddit”
-/u/spezWho could imagine when you piss off:
- third party devs who make the apps your best contributers use
- your unpaid content creators
- your unpaid moderators
…that the “value” would leave 🤣
I actually got an award as being in the top 1% of reddit karma earners for 2022.
In 2023 they banned me because I didn’t buy stock when it was being introduced.
You’d think they’d want me there. Creating content. For free. I’m sure they thought I’d just create a new account. Nope. I just came here.
Weird thing is, I’ve had two main running jokes for years. One is being obsessed with corn. The other is calling George Clooney a smug bastard.
I was also invited to participate in the IPO (in 2024) due to my “top tier” karma.
Didn’t get a ban for not participating but wouldn’t have given a shit if I did.
George Clooney really is a smug bastard.
Reddit never was the same after the whole API/Mod fiasco. Many subreddits simpy died. Old users that made the site what it is left and there were new ones, but the whole vibe shifted.
Yep, it was the API thing that finally did it for me, but looking back, I should have seen it coming after all of the other stuff.
For me it was the way they treated the Apollo developer Christian Selig leading up to the whole API thing. Absolutely heinous.
Third party apps made Reddit a dream on mobile, a big part of its success were the passionate people. And they showed us all the middle finger
I want that sticker!
And continuously piss off 99.9% of your uses
It’s fucking laughable “us daily users metric dissapoints”. What the fuck do they expect when they ban their long time users permanently with no appeal process, make it so you can only view the site through the app censor any revolt and start bringing on nazis.
It’s literally the antithesis of how and why reddit became so popular in the first place.
It is genuinely impressive how unusable Reddit has gotten in the last 6 months, especially. Login walls, no All, Best instead of Hot default sorting, constant popups to use the app (RIP RIF, you were the best), obvious AI posts everywhere. Really speedrunning the Digg experience.
Yeah, I stopped going there regularly a few years ago like most people on Lemmy, but I still occasionally go there for niche topics I can’t find anywhere else. I only lurk, not post, so I just used old.reddit.
I tried using it this week after they turned off old, and holy shit!! It is unusable. Like you said, it’s impressive how bad it is.
Makes sense, Reddit feels like a shell of it’s former self.
After the apicalypse many subs seems to have died, also the new UI that has been pushed for a decade or so, seems to promote consumption of content and discourage creation of content, further reducing new content.
Reddit has been many, many times by AI companies, why keep scanning if the content stays 98% the same, with most new content being of mostly lower quality, simply due to people posting AI shit.
This was a very predictable outcome.
As soon as Reddit’s history got scanned by AI models, it lost 98% of it’s future value.
Never forget that they killed the API for a mere $60M AI deal.
Like, if spez apologized and restored API access, and made an effort to kick fascists off the platform, I might consider going back. But as is, I will watch with glee as he fucks over everyone stupid enough to buy his IPO.
60M USD is insanely cheap for that data, remember, it was categorized and structured into threads and subthreads in specific categories, not to mention all different languages already being mostly sorted and ready for consumption.
They could probably have got a few hundred million USD for it if they held out longer.
Besides apologizing and changing course, spez would need to leave before I considered going back. The way he behaved during the API BS ended my capacity to trust him in any way. Reddit as an organization, maybe they can turn things around and return to their purported values, but spez is not an honest person and will do or say anything if it serves his own interests.
Most of the people who bought during the IPO probably already cashed out.
Don’t forget that you can’t use VPN now, use the web version on mobile, and most accounts gets banned as soon as they are created by the automod.
You also cannot view it without being logged in now. Which gets a groan from everyone in chat when a friend shares a Reddit link.
I have no clue why they decided chasing off users and being less useful was somehow going to help them. Particularly when they were the place to go for huge segments of the population.
You can still browse anonymously with red reader. Suggest getting it off f-Droid, but it’s also on the play store. No iPhone version though.
Another reason to switch to Android/GrapheneOS.
They fingerprint your device, if you get a new phone or reset i (you can restore, just logout on safari and clear cache, use a new user, etc. google automatically logging me back in to an alt that got banned alongside my main got it banned) I’d just quit and find better hobbies, reddit feels like it isn’t a waste of time but it really is.
Yeah it is a waste of time and I have been seeing that more since switching back to the fediverse.
Also thanks to the mods of /r/worldnews for helping kick my reddit checking addiction since I got banned and keep getting flagged as ban evasion lmaoooo
Fuck spez and etcetera
Just within the last week or so old.reddit.com was effectively disabled and stopped working. (I think it might work if you log in, but i quit doing that 3 years ago). It was a nice resource and it’s said that it’s such a shell of what it was. Right when the internet is really needing human voices too
They are only doing one segment of users at a time and I’m guessing their metrics are telling them 90% of those users don’t play ball and just stop visiting. I’m guessing they might go back on it in a bit.
I swear Reddit started changing as soon as Trump won. I think reddit did such a great job of exposing Republican lies and grifts that some rich ass hole just said we will express interest in investing if you start censoring your content and now here we are
They pushed donald and conservative to the front page constantly with less upvotes/comments than any other post there
/r/the_donald was one of the most active forums pushing Trump.
Was always going to happen.
The most valuable data is always going to be on open platforms that prioritize ease of use, because that’s where people will go. But then the company starts looking at all that data and how much it’s worth.
Before they can charge people for it, they have to make sure no one can get it for free. But in doing so chase off the users who were making that content.
Leaving them with a locked down worthless ecosystem.
Nothing is meant to last forever tho, and reddit won’t be the last.
Your last paragraph is a major point that I think a lot of people don’t think about, and I’m surprised Reddits executive team didn’t bail as soon as the AI was finishing the scrapes.
They didn’t need to bail since they did the IPO and could just sell their shares. I haven’t kept an eye on how much insider selling has gone on but I am sure they all have made bank over this past year, it is public info if anyone feels like looking it up. I would expect if the stock prices continues to tank and stays down you will start seeing executives abandon ship for greener pastures.
They have their own AI, but it’s an eyesore that undermines searching in a mobile browser. They added it after an update further deteriorated the Reddit App experience.
So they:
- further enshittified the app,
- put AI in the search bar.
And that’s within the last year or so.
Why would AI want a continuous deal with Reddit? Don’t they get all the data they need the first time? I doubt the new content is worth as much as the previous deal… maybe I don’t understand what these deals are for.
Half the joke is that Reddit was ground zero for AI slop even before AI had gone mainstream.
The company got harvested back before the AI firms were overly worried with cross-contamination.
Presuming they took all the data, a one-time deal would only be good if knowledge gathering actually stopped after the cutoff year- but for recent things like tech and news, the models have to keep learning and adding to their repositories.
The returns on that value sharply diminish, of course, but I think they’re still necessary. Which will leave everybody in a bind that is very funny.
Why do they need a deal? Can’t they just steal it like the rest of their training data?
The API restrictions and login requirements are meant to make scraping hard enough to make a deal worthwhile.
Probably because Reddit has lawyers, and money, and a little willingness to lock down their content. Unlike individual creators, they can actually file a lawsuit
Other than that, probably it’s a licensing agreement that makes AI trainers keep paying if they still using that dataset.
Good. My wife and I both had our 13-year-old accounts permanently banned with no appeals process - all because we share an IP address and they decided without evidence that we were evading bans.
Fucking morons over there running reddit.
On three accounts now. Third one today. Main account was a 11 year old account. I’m done with Reddit man. So fucking stupid.
Most likely they want new accounts with something like a phone number attached.
To my knowledge companies can’t force legacy accounts into providing that.
But they can nuke those accounts for ba reasons, with the expectation most users will make a new account.
Even if it’s not the phone number, it could be something in terms and services about selling data or advertising.
Like, it doesn’t have to be incompetence, loads of companies use incompetence as plausible deniability for something else.
Are they actually asking for phone numbers now?
deleted by creator
My 15 year old account with 600k karma and impeccable record was banned because I made a harmless joke about Republicans. Reddit has turned into a fucking joke. Every post is engagement bait and every top comment is some stupid fucking joke/ pun.
The cat fuckers getting what he deserves.Most people on the internet are lurkers. Most up votes and comments come from maybe 20% of people who actually look at posts. I figured this out within a few weeks of using the Internet. They’re quite literally biting the hand that feeds them. They’re betting you’d rather make a Redddit account than not visit, except that plan no longer holds water in the AI age.
Now AI is probably pushing engagement up artificially. Fewer and fewer real humans will react to posts on the basis that it may not be real, even if they are. So you have a situation where AI interactions increase in proportion to human ones, while also getting more expensive, and pushing out your income stream at the same time.
This kind of boundless stupidity isn’t even really seen, because everyone else is doing as well. People point it out, but we have no real metric for how bad it’s until the stock price starts the slip. Whatever stock of good faith users Reddit once had, are now a dwindling resource, replaced by people trying to game the system.
We cannot stop this in a way that matters. The only way past this shit AI era, is through it.
lol, ROFL even
Quite possibly lmao
Likely rotflmao
Might need the roflcopter
Thank you sir.
So it’s not even the lowest it’s been this year? Meh
Finally some good AI news!
