Oh ya, rant time.

I was a Reddit user since 2006. It was my place to be. Endless posts on everything, every niche hobby you can think of, global and often even local news, learning about cool new things... I loved it. It was always crazy to me to decide to read a news paper and find that pretty much everything in it I'd already knew from Reddit, often finding out days or weeks earlier.

It started out an amazing place, it really did seem like a global town square where we could all get together and talk about everything and anything. But like all the cool online and tech companies the focus became more and more on money, which meant controlling what people say and see and harvesting as much data as possible from them. Large companies need income, and if you aren't the one paying then you always end up the product. So they started pushing more and more ads and fake posts and instead of being controlled by the people it became controlled by whoever throw the most money at any and every topic. Since going public they've ramped up the user fucking big time.

Trying to force mobile users to use their app so they can harvest more data? It's a fucking website. The program you use to look at websites is a web browser. Having 1,000 apps on a phone that are virtually all to use websites is not ease of use, or user friendly, or sane. They seem to have toned this down due to backlash, but for a while you literally weren't allowed to browse Reddit using mobile mode. If you tried it had a popup telling you to get the app and that was all. But if you switched the same browser window on the same device to desktop mode everything worked just fine. That's nothing but saying "fuck you" so your user base.

Getting rid of /r/all so that everything everyone sees on their home page is controlled entirely by the algorithms instead of having any potential of it by being what was most interesting or talked about (even though the insane amount of bot up/down votes and comments was already wrecking that? Fuck you. I've seen people say you can still see /r/all if you use old reddit... but it's fake. It's not actually /r/all as it used to be. When you can click through a handful of pages and get told that there's nothing else that's very definitely not "all." As a formerly socially awkward fat kid I'm certain I've gone hundreds of pages of deep before.

For years we had genuine news reports on different groups and companies using giant cell phone farms to spam up/down votes on the posts they're paid to boost or kill off and actually paying rooms of people to work to control the public opinion/narrative on their product/company/political party/country/etc. Shilling went from mostly a conspiracy to something warping everything on the place.

AI has only made it worse since along with corporate/govt approved or disliked posts notably having thousands of up/down votes with only a handful of comments they can now spam comments as well. Humans are a social species. There is always pressure to fit in. When we see that pretty much everyone is saying a certain thing or has a certain opinion we're far more likely to decide the same.

If someone makes a post saying "Israel killing tons of kids seems bad" it can be well thought out and link tons of evidence, but if it quickly has several comments about Israel having the right to defend itself and the constant child murder being fake news propaganda and antisemitism and making fun of the OP then the people who open it and check the comments will be more inclined to feel that way.

A post on "It's crazy that the US did all this awful stuff to Iran" with lots of links to blowing up lots of little girls in school and sending a delayed second hit so anyone trying to help them dies too, actively causing a shortage of USD there to destroy the value of their currency and push people to protest, etc, and it quickly has many replies are all calling the OP a conspiracy nut and saying the US was trying to bring justice and freedom 'cause the evil Iranian leaders killed 100 million protestors.... then most people who read glancingly without checking and considering all the evidence (most people) and who don't have strong opinions on the matter already will be likely to jump in making fun of OP for supporting middle eastern governments 'cause they're all terrorists.

It's something pretty much all big companies and governments do now. They nearly all have large 'social media' or 'PR' departments that focus on controlling the public opinion on topics. For a lot of companies it started out as customer service, helping people out and trying to convince the public they're awesome by doing cool shit. But it warped over time into more like just trying to convince everyone that shitty things about them don't really exist. Loads of subs main mods or full mod teams are employees, and in a lot of places dissent and complaints are quickly deleted.

And finally... the site-wide AI powered "moderation." Posts/comments can be near instantly automatically deleted and the user banned for a while for pretty much anything. It's not something the sub mods can control or do anything about even though the threshold for causing it changes based on the sub and the topic. You can be auto deleted and banned for posting a dark joke in a sub dedicated to doing that. You can spend a month talking about guillotines everywhere with no issues, but be deleted and banned for simply using the word in a post about US politics. Saying that you hope people in the US are exercising their 2nd amendment rights so they can defend themselves if the worst happens or suggesting capital punishment for federal agents who murder innocent civilians is "threatening violence."

Reddit is no longer a social platform for people to communicate with each other. That Reddit died a long, slow death, but it's gone now. Reddit today exists to collect user data, train AI, sell products, and control public opinion and narratives, and it does that by selling out every topic to the highest bidder.

Sadly most people keep using it instead of coming here because it's what they know and they miss what it was. I miss the days when I could browse endless new things just refreshing /r/all there too. It sucks that Lemmy moves so much slower, and the decentralized concept does make it more work to use and more difficult to navigate. But Reddit moves way slower now too. If you try to use their default "home" feed or the new /r/all you typically see mostly the same shit all day. Instead of constantly fresh it's always stale. Hopefully more people notice that and get tired of the bullshit, and we can make Lemmy the new place where conversation is always fresh and there's a home for every niche you can think of.