ruin Reddit
everyone leaves
Why is our stock down? :(
Waiting for the lawsuits to claim users leaving is illegal.
Reddit is a shit show... can I say that!?
I got banned and I see weird posts and replies that is obviously Ai slop.
My friend and I got shadow banned. We have no idea why!?
It used to be good... the future is not reddit.
Ps: I apologize for farting while typing this comment.
They put AI moderators in charge and I have a feeling they're whittling their own userbase down and that that might be having an effect on their stocks too.
I call bullshit. AI didn't eat their user growth.
They sold out the users, making the experience objectively worse. They turned the screws until many of the positive, helpful users left. They became hyper-toxic; now, no one wants to be there, even for the niche communities. They're moderating like they're at war with any half-decent human being, and now they've locked down the free/easy access, ruining the one remaining marketing trick they had (google search results)
Honestly I'm done with the moderation more than anything, I got so fed up with the blatant manipulation on one of the subs I've frequented for over a decade I wrote a script to see what was going on with all the silent removals and so much was just vanishing. Capture all the comments every minute and diff them, you'll see what I mean.
Realised the reddit most of us knew was as good as dead then to be honest. Powermods are a cancer and the only chemo is to leave the place altogether.
I read the writing on the wall when they started clawing back free mobile access.
The first time a 'free' platform makes a desperate move, it's time to relocate. I wiped all my posts and left my accounts open. Then, I went back and wiped them again every time they magically reappeared.
I only left my posts in the sub that helped people understand Fediverse and Lemmy.
I didn't know they put posts back. I went in and wiped all my stuff around then too but I didn't look back.
I spent time over several months hand deleting my post one by one, and they don't show up for me.
But one time after deleting them, someone replied to one of those deleted posts, so I think they're visible to others, but not to me anymore.
They made it so you can't even browse the site without signing up. They're idiots. Fucking morons.
The last nail in the coffin for that site was when they put Spez in charge. Just some dumbass power-hungry moderator of a jail bait sub thinking he can run a website which acted as a public forum of discussion, information, and entertainment. Pure lunacy.
Well, can't expect much growth if every major sub is turning into a christo-fascist cesspit, boosted by bad actor AI bots.
It’s probably because they shadowbanned most of their users
Fo sho. It's weird as fuck to realize someone you're trying to help out with some problem never replied because they can't see your messages. I was the mod of a sub. I had people message me asking why posts/comments were deleted or still up but not there if they logged out, and I couldn't even find them.
I started asking for screenshots and they were posted on the sub from the user's point of view, but whether they said they were deleted by moderators or seemed like a shadow ban even the sub mods couldn't even see the damn things. There were no restrictions on our end on the users. Reddit admin was just deciding some people should be randomly shadow banned in only some subs. Or only some posts they made.
I tested a new account I made using a VPN and had the same issue. Some comments I made in a few big subs like /r/law showed up for all accounts and logged out, but some only showed up when looking as that user. Seemingly random selective shadow banning of only some comments that had to be being done by AI.
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.
You know what else Reddit used to have? More comments like yours. You got it all nailed down in your observations. With intent, thought, and personality.
Same way you wrote a ridiculous yet thoroughly engaging "Elden Ring Journal" here on Lemmy (made my night lol).
That capacity for real people to have both the spaces and freedom to display themselves, whether that was them at their most intent focused in one community, or them at their most relaxed and silly in another, was one of the meta-qualities that their system didn't intend by design but which became hands down the emergent quality that allowed them to even get to being what they became post 2005 and pre-July 1, 2023.
The moment they started doing all the fuckery you rightly noted, they killed the conditions in which that emergent property could thrive.
Reddit doesn't just no longer feel the same because the system's changed, but because the changes were done with no regards for what it did to the organization's spirit, which for a web related property, has always been something defined by its users, and not the creators, all the way back to the first BBS.
I am one of the 90%. I have lurked in online spaces before and since Reddit, watching, and only occasionally sharing any thoughts.
Not because I'm antisocial (ok, maybe a little bit), but because there was always enough spirit to absorb, enough humanity to just bask in the display of shared thoughts between other people, that enough satisfaction was derived just reading, nodding along, and whispering opinions I had no intention to post.
That spirit, that humanity, is utterly dead in Reddit (and most of social media these days), and it behooves us all who care to not see it forever gone, to not see it driven away completely in the face of a dead Internet, to do something about it.
I guess I need to post more on Lemmy until I can return to invisibility, ugh.
Anyhow, great "rant", greater comments, and even greater silly posting, @Abyssian@lemmy.world, thank you for your time and thoughts!
Damn, thank you. It's generally heartbreaking to be a very long winded writer in 2026. It used to be different, but it's like everyone's so used to tiny text messages or tweets that that's become the default post and message length everywhere. Most of us made fun of twitter for the insanely tiny 140 character limit trying to limit online conversation to the length of a single SMS text message... now that's become the bulk of human interaction.
It's awesome to get a lengthy reply back, and even better to hear my nonsense has made you laugh. That's the point. No better way to waste time than trying to make random other humans laugh and feel better for a bit. :)
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.
Even worse, there were plenty of apps that had better UI than the website and incorporated a bunch of quality of life improvements over the base user experience. Then they forcibly killed all those apps to try and funnel everyone into their little data harvesting abomination, and the stupid thing didn't have even a fraction of the polish of the many third party clients that were just killed off by Reddit's greed for that sweet AI money.
Ya, I ditched when the api thing went down. Coming to lemmy was a breath of fresh air tho. I hadn't realized just how much capitalism had creeped into reddit.
I agree with your passion and thought process. In a nutshell, Reddit was the shit, until venture capital got them..
I just learned about the nightclub like takeover of bowling in the US. No wonder it cost me so much last time I took the kids. Venture capital ruins everything it touches.
For sure, private equity groups are ruining everything. Nursing homes, veterinarians, bakeries, housing, healthcare, and I guess now bowling and pretty much every form of human social connection or recreation that can possibly involve money.
A few weeks ago I read a long article about a sudden surge in venture capital buying up local utility companies.
They saw the price people get charged for electricity and water jumping a lot and figured that if they bought the utility companies and added in an extra 30% that was pure profit to them it would just seem part of the data center bullshit already happening.
They're leeches.
Here's your ), you lost it about halfway through
Thanks. Good thing you don't need to debug typos and using the wrong words. I'm dyslexic so pretty much every time I read through something I wrote I'll notice a few words that don't make any sense at all. :)
The fact that I've been a Reddit user for 17 years and I'm reading this on Lemmy says a lot about what Reddit has become.
I was a reddit user for 15+ years... I got perma banned a bit ago. Part of me misses it. But... Whatever.
I had my first account in 2006 I believe. By even 2010 Reddit was becoming kind of shit.
Honestly, I don't want to blame reddit entirely. The entirety of the internet has gotten progressively worse and worse and worse over the past 20 years. At this point I'm ready to nuke the whole experiment.
I wish we could go back to the web of the 2000s.
Golden age for sure. It was the wild West but so fucking fun. Every web page was creative and unique. Every community felt special. Now we're all just funneled into these prefab "experiences" on these billionaire owned corpo platforms. It's so dystopian.
I've been there for 16 years, but I have the same observation.
I don't know how many years I was on there but I was pretty active. The combo of killing 3rd party apps and selling everyone's comments to AI was what made me nuke my account.
Or the real reason Reddit stock is collapsing is due to autobans and users switching to Lemmy instead.
Damn germans and their autobans
Google licensed Reddit's content to improve AI-generated search summaries. Those summaries frequently answer users' questions by drawing from Reddit discussions without requiring users to click through to Reddit itself. The arrangement generates licensing revenue, but it may also reduce opportunities to convert casual visitors into engaged, logged-in users who ultimately become more valuable advertising customers.
lol, yeah, that was a predictable outcome.
All reddit ever needed to do was leave it's users alone and build a functional in house search...
Like, there was a solid decade when I needed to figure something out, I'd search Google and tell it to only provide results from reddit.
If they had licensed a search engine like Google, they'd really have been "the front page of the internet".
It was that fucking easy, instead they did the opposite and let Google use their data without anyone going to reddit or probably understanding the info came from reddit.
They are also increasingly banning anyone and any sub that is "controvercial."
Yeah, I was permanently banned a few weeks ago. It's what brought me back to lemmy.
They're also banning all comments to Lemmy.
Nice Reddit. Really terrified of the competition.
The fact that they do this and actually banned r/Lemmy shows that they perceive Lemmy as a viable threat.
it's as though Reddit is actively encouraging it's user base and potential new users to not use the site. The search results encourage that. "here's the answer from reddit, don't worry, you don't need to go there" or "you prefer old.reddit? welp you gotta sign up for that now!" or the search field that just doesn't search the actual subreddit you're in "you want to search for a specific window manager on unixporn? nope, here's a result from a subreddit about cleaning windows"
Also watch your tongue on reddit! if you criticize ANYTHING that reddit has vested interest in you get a ban.
The site should be studied as a textbook example of enshitification
The nail in the coffin for me was the mobile site becoming completely unusable. That pop-up completely disables scrolling and swiping to go back.
Their decision to abruptly remove third party API access is what drove me here. I wiped all my posts shortly after they started offering that stock buy in bullshit. Definitely made the right decision after seeing them become what they are now.
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