Github redlib thread still unfolding. From reddit shareholder letter,
And a key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience.
Most on lemmy know the privacy and bot-infested dumpster fire reddit is. So it’s very easy to think good riddance. But that misses an important point. IMO.
Inspite of the dumpster fire, it also contains a huge body of knowledge not found anywhere else. Example. Many times I have searched for a super obscure error message and the only good hits were a reddit thread in a tech sub. This is formerly open knowledge, accessible privately, now being closed and locked behind logins.
In old web forum days, weird niche info was distributed all over. That made it robust. Big tech social media displaced most of that world. It all got centralized. No matter hjow awful their algorithms are, no matter how toxic, those sites do have riches of knowledge.
We ARE losing something, if open access to niche info created by normal ppl is cut off.
“Ppl will figure a way around” you may say. There is no way to win that fight in the long run.
I don’t think the masses like Facebook. I think they hate it, and hate reddit’s new policies. But they’re also distracted / lazy and ignorant and neither understand the alternatives, nor are willing to invest time to discover and learn to use them. I’m also very sure the average person scores significantly lower on both intellectual curiosity and reading comprehension than the average Lemmy user.
When Trump 2.0 started, there was a massive uptick in people attempting to learn about cyber privacy, public infrastructure and other was to be safer and more in control of their digital lives. But most of them couldn’t sustain it and it petered out after about 8 months. It will probably surge back if fascism does massive, rapid bullshit, but as long as they keep turning up the temperature slowly, the frog will just boil to death while doomscrolling and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.
You can tell reddit got dumber because of posts complaining about ads, which is the bare minimum level needed for tech literacy.
Which is why reddit has turned into being reposts of twitter, tiktok, and facebook as the general userbase became the bulk of the audience and biggest sign is the anti science demographic sharing the space that amazes you that they can even type.
It’s also why reddit has been able to get away with their changes.
Sorry but this is complete cope. I left reddit after the API debacle and even I will begrudgingly admit the site stayed at least as useful as it was before, if not more so. I repeatedly come back to find answers to obscure questions less than 3 years old, I wish there was somewhere else to go.
You misunderstood what I am saying. I’m talking about the general users of reddit and the most popular subreddits that are basically twitter and facebook topics.
Niche subs are still useful, but the masses are what has made reddit worse because they are the largest userbase that willingly puts up with all the reddit changes. So everyone else gets dragged along.
There is a reason long time reddit users stay away from /r/all and stick to their subscribed subreddits.
I didn’t even talk about leaving reddit, but about the shifting demographic as the userbase grew.
I think the way Cory Doctorow put it is Facebook is betting people love their friends and family more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg.
FTFY