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.
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.
Again since you are not getting the point: Reddit has grown more useful than ever before despite all their enshittification. What you said about going dumber is a cope and subjective at best, subject matter communities still find their home at Reddit and neither content or user numbers have shown signs of abating. Shitposting subs are copying slop from other platforms, who cares? It has always been this way, not like X/Insta don’t copy memes from Reddit.