Sure…

Reddit is such a tucking corpo

It is literally a corporation.

A literal corpo!!! In the flesh! With human rights!

Damnit what have we become?!?!?

Incarnate!

Reddit is slowly dying. It will eventually be 100% bots.

When I left Reddit years ago I was already convinced than more than half the accounts were bots.

During the exodus, it felt like 20-30%

Anything with an even mildly AI-adjacent topic is a solid 75% bots right now…

/r/nvidia, /r/amd, /r/hardware, etc, etc…

the “meat” is where all the propaganda can target like the front page subs.

Absolutely. Frontpage stuff like /r/politics has been mostly bots & trolls farms since well-before the AIpocalypse. AI just took much of the burden off the human hand on that rudder.

They ruined r/foss and on a track to finish off r/selfhosted, my beloved. S/selfhosted used to be mega cool place to be. Today it is plain depressing. And an actual user activity there dropped to almost zero.

I’d like to believe it is but I also know that the majority of people online do not give a damn about user experience and things getting shittier. I do not understand these people, but its because of them this shit is still happening. If they all left sites like reddit there’d be no incentive to become shittier and shittier.

Not trying to shift blame though, in the first place its companies like reddit even coming up with strategy who are to blame.

thats whats FB has become.

FB is really garbage.

I want to believe. But X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook are still there. It may be a long death which is indistinguishable from (low-quality) life.

I was chased out by admin in 2024, after a long line of accounts were violated for abuses that were falsely alleged. Because Israel I suspect.

See my Reddit alternative: Zyke Design was inspired by piefed. Had 3k hits last month

Ok…? This is such an odd comment, it’s like you’re not aware of lemmy and piefed etc. being alternatives while using one of them.

It will be Facebook 2.0. A place where boomers and bots dwell.

Reddit never gave a shit about bots. To them it’s something that pumps up their active users numbers to woo their investors. They’re only doing this so they can force people to view their ads that are designed to look like posts.

Who goes on Reddit nowadays anyway?

I still go on reddit often since that’s where most of the game communities I want to hear from are.

Booo

I mostly stick to Lemmy but there are times when I have a question to ask and the larger number of eyes on it does feel better even if it’s just a placebo

i had to ask very specific questions, that Reddit has the niche subs for, that lemmy doesnt have recently.

I go on Reddit read-only fairly often, but these days it’s quite rare that I’ll post or comment. And when I do I always take the opportunity to promote the fediverse.

Same, Lenny isn’t mature enough to have some of the very niche communities yet

Yeah, if I want yoyo stuff, I have to go visit r\throwers.

Pretty much the same if I need mechanic info.

I think what there users who mostly post and users that mostly comment (I belong to the later). Lemmy could try to bootstrap some of those communities (note: to not make it to specific) by just reposting the same posts that are posted in Reddit and see if that could increase activity.

there are plenty of empty communities where the only posters are bots that mirror reddit. it’s clear that doesnt do anything except earn a block

Lemmy never will be big enough without a change in thinking from the feudal nature to a more liberal democracy, alas.

Can you expand a bit? What do you mean “feudal nature” and “liberal democracy”? Do you mean society as a whole or Lemmy in general?

Yes I would be pleased to expand thank you for asking.

Lemmy is a mini reddit, moderators own the space, like a feudal lord. To take off, as an alternative to the feudal spaces of big social media, we need to offer a better alternative.

To that effect, a clear set of moderation rules would help, and for that set of rules to end in a jury trial of members.

Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining

But Lemmy is just software. Anyone can throw up an instance with whatever rules they want lol. So why not spin up your own instance with these rules and jury members?

What I don’t get with this federated software, Lemmy and Mastodon. It’s ripe for essentially, server level verification of identity. And I don’t mean check every ID of every user.

But like, this threat talks about game communities. Some larger company, Microsoft, maybe even Valve with Steam, could easily run an instance, and have “official” forums this way. Any anyone on any instance can subscribe and visit. But that way you know that like, I dunno, lame.microsoft/halo is the proper community for Halo. Sure, there may be others, but it can become the place of record with announcements etc.

Same for Mastodon stuff. But that would be more for individuals. But also stuff. Like you could have movie.studio/tom.cruise and it’s verification that it’s the proper Tom Cruise posting. That sort of thing.

Plus, smaller communities have less potential burden from a few large accounts loading the system down.

Etc.

It’s not even mature enough to support some mainstream interests, like sports.

no laundry community on Llemmy either…

Lol what is this, I’m out of the loop here lol

Lemmy doesnt have a laundry dedicated community anywhere that Ive looked… reddit does however…

So I guess the Lemmings let mama and dada do their laundry for them still 😅

so its nothing more than a community that talks about Laundry? sorry if this sounds dumb but man I had been on reddit since the 2010’s and I am just now learning about this lol

there’s so many things that go into laundry care that mostt people need to know about but will never choose to learn about

Like iif your detergent uses certain enzymes then you cant use that detergent to clean wool clothing…but the thing is that like 95 % or more of all detergents have enzymes in them…so…

Also if you live in apartment building what rights do you have to clean out your washing machines’ filters? What ability do you have to clean those filters?

Also which detergents are asstastically bad scams and should never be considered as detergents? Which detergents are actually good? Which companies have bribed those in the media to make it look.like their laundry based products work bbetter than theey actually do? Which detergents shoupd you consider for different msterials? How mucj will they cost over time? SHould you just make asnd use your own homemade detergents?

also Do homemade eco friendly fabric softeners exist and should you even use fabric softeners at all?

How good are copper and lamolin coated clothing at clesning themselves as both of these substances have been found to have anti microbial properties?

How do other regions that dont have easy access to washing machines and dryers do their laundry? Can we take any advice from theiir methods?

How eco friendly are certain types oof clothingsa and even certain types of washing methods? It has been. shown that some of the biggest polluters of microplastics into our world today are microscopic specks from cleaning aritficial fabrics like polyester

Ar ethere any scam washing machines or dryers in the msrket today? How can we tell that they are garbage at cleaning and drying clothing?

When you hhang dry clothing what types of methods could you use to ensure that you dont promote the growth of certain hydrophobic microbes?

The topics go on and on…

Lemmy has no community dedicated to talking about any of these topics…

hahaha, well consider me one of today’s lucky 10,000 then. Well if you ever decide to start a dedicated laundry community, I’ll subscribe. Sounds like you already have the perfect sidebar material written out already lol. Cheers!

Honestly I dontbhave the time in my average day to moderate the community so who would moderate it? I dont have the time T-T . Others probably do. They can start it if they want and moderate it if they want .

Yah I hear yah, me neither. I don’t have that much interest in Laundry to be honest otherwise I’d consider hosting the community on my instance. Oh well.

That’s the problem with Lemmy. It’s not large enough to have active niche communities like gaming handhelds like Retroid ones, Anbernic ones, Steam Deck, etc.

True. And it sucks.

The way I see it is that as long as Lemmy doesnt become as amazingly terrible as reddit or faceboook or twitter there will be such communities created eventually…may take a decade or two for people to birth them and moderate them but they are almost inevitable to come into existence if the demand for such communities gets big enough.

I think it would require reddit to die off even more than it already has, which just may happen.

🫩 There isnt even an intactivism community here bruh!!! 🫩

🫪Heck there isnt even LAUNDRY community on Lemmy!?! How yall existed for this long with no laundry community yall?!?🫪

That’s the problem with changing social networks.

People goes where people are. So it takes some major scew up from the current networks. Or a newcomer that have some killer feature everybody will want / need.

And lemmy lacks that “killer feature”

Lemmy/Piefed/Etc has a killer feature (or maybe characteristic), but one that only a fraction of users find appealing. Being decentralized makes the network more resistant to many of the problems we see on Reddit and other networks, or at least, reduces their impact.

Yeah, it’s not something lots of people will care about. And some eventually stops at “choosing in instance”.

That killer feature is also very unappealing/confusing to the average user. Very similar to Linux in that regard

They will get it eventually it just takes time for people to realize they need to try again. That’s the main issue is people are just lazy.

But I’ve been through multiple conversions like from slashdot to digg then to reddit and now federated. There will always be slow people that take awhile to figure out there is something better to be had.

I still go on Reddit in some cases because google seo or niche communities that are already pretty small. I mean I don’t login anymore and I’ve replaced all of my 10,000 comments. You can definitely tell there has been a massive brain drain. I still get a chuckle when occasionally people reply to my altered comments saying “aww darn that was actually the correct answer”. All my comments now point to federated communities and call out Reddits awful behavior.

Sites come on and enshitify and then people move on (I’m used to it) bit its just nice to know I might not have to do that here. It’s a little annoying to manage multiple accounts with Lemmy/piefed but it also gives me a layer of redundancy. Reddit blocking mobile anonymous users has actually helped me a lot because I was hardcore addicted to reddit.

It’s not even mature enough to have an active Minecraft community, imagine how’s the situation with smaller or indie games…

What, they’re not on neoseeker?

I joke, but really why not try going back to bulletin boards again? Neoseeker was made for games and it always had plenty of users. It’s at least better than reddit.

You should start a community for those games. Or contribute to an existing one. Be the change

Assuming they have the energy and time to dedicate to it, alternatively they could just go to Reddit with minimal effort.

ew

Unfortunately a good chunk of linux distro resources and troubleshooting, and also many hobby stuff is over there.

Back to stackoverflow!

This one is surprising to me. If there’s one thing that Lemmy has a lot of, its Linux enthusiasts

Yeah, and it’s worse the more niche. I have no idea if Lemmy has a Fortnite community or if it’s active, but I seriously doubt it has a /r/StarWarsDroidTycoon community (a Fortnite mode), which is what I care about. Or /r/FortniteLeaks

Or a specific gamepad brand sub that might have some info for a problem i face, or 3ds hacking resource. Reddit win in this because they have years of discussion on the specific subject.

I think the issue is also related to how Reddit makes money. Reddit makes money from selling advertisement. I would guess they are charging a certain fee based off subreddit activity the ads are shown in. When most of that Reddit activity is bots and fake clicks on advertisement then the company won’t see the return on their investment because they thought a million people would see their ad but only 100k real people actually saw it.

You guys see ads on reddit? I laugh in ublock

the problem with uBlock there is thst sometimes on reddit they post like ‘Advertisement Posts’ …Like actual posts that are not about that niche community in anyway but are nothing more than an advertisement for a comoany and uBlack obviously cant block that.

Ive seen it a few times in the past but its been like 4 years since Ive been on reddit so I dont know if theyve stopped doing that.

They’re concerned about AI scraping. They want to sell access to users’ content for training, not let the AI in for free.

Exactly. They definitely care. They want the AI companies coughing up dough for all that data.

Thankfully redlib still works

Thankfully redlib still works

For now

Yeah definitely not optimistic it’ll keep working

It could also be to make things difficult for redlib, which uses the reddit API.

they never ever did anything to propaganda bots at least not recently, and since trumps 2nd win in the WH it was clear they were banning.

ublockorigin prevents those fake posts from my screen.

I’m banned

Permanently

You are banned for this comment which you can’t see

Bastards!

I use Red Reader to look at reddit for a few specific subs but I prefer hanging out here.

Reddit at one point filtered millions of bots monthly and transparently filed public reports on the actions they had taken, even citing the source of these bot networks if a notable number of them came from places like Russia, China, Myanmar, etc.

That was a long ass time ago, though. Before they killed off the free API access in 2022, and the 3rd party apps and accessibility layers with it.

Obligatory Fuck Spez

I think he might've misunderstood a message and thinks there's really that many people who want to have sex with him...

Fuck Spez

Don’t fuck Spez actually, there’s no doubt in my mind he’s a terrible shag.

Greedy little pigboy

Fuck that twat. He did get me off of reddit, so credit there.

Yeah…

AI bots….

That’s why.

its clearly a combination of shitty decisions frrom the executives at reddit, the mods, the massive invasionn of bot users and restricting API access.

I thought this was what they did a few years ago.

The reddit community that I’m still sort of active in relies on RSS in order to run and judge contests. We have a portal which sucks comments in via RSS because they revoked the API key which was used for the same purpose.

Without RSS, we’ll either have to come up with some other way to pull in reddit comments, or force everyone to use PieFed.

My vote is for the latter, of course!

They’re very much making it hard to be a mod. I wish my community would follow me here.

reddits plan is to have AI mods to fully automate subreddits eventually. enough witht he pesky human ones that soured them in the past.

Yeah I can definitely tell. I’ve gotten so many messages from people about why things have been removed. I have no idea all I can see is “removed by reddit.” I don’t even know what your posted.

There’s a public API?

Yes, but what was left of it after killing third-party apps was basically just advanced search functions. Nothing in the API was still usable as far as browsing/posting.

Bots my ass

reddit dies more every day than the day before and it’s already long dead

What is reddit? I thought it died in like 2023. I know I haven’t used it since they killed the third-party apps for it.

I’m guessing AI companies are going to start promoting piefed and lemmy.

I knew it was time to go after the “He gets us.” Jesus banner ad.

because of AI bots

because they want to charge people for the privilege to have their users data

Thanks for fixing it

Imagine thinking that a super intelligence is going to emerge from reading reddit comments.

Today in “no fucking shit news” reddit continues to suck and water makes things wet. Next week on “everyone already knows this” join us when we reveal our breaking stories “republicans are traitors to the constitution, and spez sucks donkey dicks”

reddit is more akin to psyllium husk, that it took to much and clogging the insides require more invasive procedures to remove it.

If it was bots they’d have to shut the whole site down.

I don’t doubt that it’s because of the bots but it also conveniently forces people into their enshittified “modern” interfaces.

The API was effectively killed off years ago, so no loss there.

I tried visiting old.reddit.com yesterday and it was a redirect to a login page that appeared to be the modern ui. So I guess PC browsing is off the table, Reddit’s modern ui is trash.

You can use the old Reddit extension of Firefox but yeah, the latest changes suck.

it still works on FF. on mobile its a little trickier, you use the old reddit extension and sink it or oldyesterdayreddit extension as well.

Those RSS feeds have been so heavily rate-limited over the past year that they were practically unusable already. I’m glad they’re finally making an announcement about it. No more ambiguity. No more aggressively sporadic 403 and 429 errors.

Go ahead and kill the only reason I ever used your site.

No, they aren’t. The headline is just a giant lie. Why would anyone pretend to believe it?

Reddit was destroyed by bots years ago. So that’s nonsense. But they have two strong reasons to pull public access. First, if the public has access to the data, then companies won’t buy it for AI training. Second, if the public has access to the data, they can prove (as we already knew) that Reddit is full of bots, so there is no reason you would want to buy training data from it.

It’s both. The LLM scrapers are now relentless. They are also closing the door so they can sell the data to Google.

I thought google didn’t want renew the contract since they already scraped everything useful? That’s why reddit is panicking

Ah I didn’t realize that had ended.

Welp I’m sure there will be others trying to get into the game but none likely as lucrative.

and people who buy ads on Reddit thinking it’s going to get a certain amount of views but they don’t know most of those views are bots until after they paid for the ads. Then they have to prove to Reddit they were tricked and good luck with that unless your a corporation Reddit wants to have a good relationship with.

reddit also wants GENUINE human generated content, not AI-generated posts or comments that poisons thier data, thats why the forced logins. im in another forum where the spammers, have to "make genuine’ content to evade thier spam/bot filters.

Lots of people here confusing scrapers with bots making posts. This is talking about the former, which I think we all agree are bad, but most people seem to think it’s the latter, which reddit is happy to host.

Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots itself.

Digg’ing their own grave.

Classic critical hit lol

(annoyed at the copy-paste of a bad title imo)

A mild realization just hit me. Reddit used to come up in daily conversation, even with randos. Now when I mention it nobody even knows what it is, and those that do remember it… speak of it only as this vague place they used to go years ago. “Oh yeah I remember reddit”

E: fyi I’m talking roughly circa 2008-2013 when every last bricklayer, sewer technician, and 7-Eleven worker “found” the platform

Reddit never came up in daily conversation for me. It came up only occasionally, and it actually seemed to do so more often after it went public.

It was a weird coincidence

Extra hilarious because they just invested so much in ads to try and rope in every day people.

Really? Wow. I have no way of really knowing for sure but I am pretty convinced that they reached maximum saturation of their user base 10 years ago… That’s why there was this sudden whiplash pivot to forcing Indian, Pakistani, and the European content to the front page.

I saw that as the indicator that the North American market had been penetrated as far as they were going to penetrate, and they were looking abroad.

Now with what you’re telling me it’s making me question reality, I don’t think there’s a person on the planet that isn’t aware of reddit, I think people just don’t want to use it anymore!

Question, where have you noticed these advertisements?

They were on network TV over the holidays. My family has disney+ and they had ads when I went over their house. I also saw ads on YouTube. It was quite a bit so it was a strong push in advertising.

The only time it comes up in conversations is because my buddy discovered reddit only like 3 years ago, when I had just moved to lemmy. He still sends me reddit links several times a week.

Then there is the tech support side, because name it and it’s been posted on reddit, usually with the solution, but now everybody just AI’s the shit out of that so that has become less relevant.

And that’s it. Everyone else that I knew that used reddit has moved on years ago.

no because they banned so many people, whats left was propaganda bots, and spammers looking to earn money from rs by directing traffic to thier businesses. this effectively stopped or poisoned thier AI data scraping.

Um, excuse me, this post is promoting violence against bots. That’ll be a lifetime ban for you and your old ass account.

I’m in this post and I don’t like it. Reddit is imploding under its own bulk and tech bro fellating. Ya hate to see it. It was so pleasant once upon a time. But alas, “Die a hero or live long enough,” and all that.

It’s like an old pub where you made happy youthful memories, but it closed years ago and the building is now too fundamentally rotten to ever go back to its former glory. Best thing for everyone involved is for it to burn to the ground and be replaced by something new.

i assume this affects things like libdirect, continum,etc.

This will really suck for the niche communities I follow. RSS is what enabled me to follow a handful of communities that don’t exist elsewhere.

I posted on a food sub, saying "that looks incredible* something innocuous like that.

Bot removes my post, contact mode team because I cannot quite believe what I read. Auto mod, (cannot believe it was a human), tells me the same thing. Reddit has profiled me as being disruptive & I can post once I have “improved my standing”

Things like this are a red rag to me, always have been. Anyway, the food sub is muted, & reddit can get fucked, I’ll post my opinions whether any bot likes it or not till I’m inevitably banned for failure to “conform” to their disgusting agenda.

large subs are too infested with moderation and bots.

Reddit has become unusable. It has moderaters that are censorious, sactimonious, petty and do not care about. free speech. Adverts are becoming unbearable and the riculous time limits drive me mad! The inane Avartars are imbecilic too.

It’s ridiculous. The bots ban and then they guard the mods (humans), who could review the case(-s). Support is pretty much non-existent.

I was in a discussion on the post election political situation in Sweden right now and from nowhere my five year old account got flagged as “suspicious” and locked until verified. For whatever reason it refused to hit me with CAPTCHA and the likes. I had no email registered previously and could not verify. I tried a couple of temp email but got no verification sent there. So I registered a throw away at a legitimate email provider and changed it there. Nothing there either.

But I also have mods and at least one admin that doesn’t like me from long ago because I make fun of Nazis. So maybe I am “suspicious”.

There is something new they’re doing. They say you’re a bot, or are spamming, this seems a catch all to shadow ban people anyone that says anything the admin considers contrary to the reddit agenda. You could try contacting the site mods…I got a “bot” ban lifted that way once.

on the shadowban sub, the only way you can actually post every 10minutes, most people dont get a response on why they get banned or thier appeals heard.

I had a very similar experience. I had a reddit account from before they required email addresses. It got flagged as “suspicious”, it forced me to reset the password in order to continue, and the password reset required me to provide an email address, which I refused to do. I asked an AI agent what might have caused the flag. At the moment my account got flagged, I was arguing on reddit with some pro-China people, and I was posting links to the genocide of the Uyghurs. The agent told me that hackers probably made multiple failed attempts to log in to my account and this triggered the flag. Sounds like something similar could have been done to you by people who opposed your political views.

i wonder if reddit accounts to get stolen,.

I wondered the same. As far as I can tell, in my case, hackers (presumably pro-China activists) simply made multiple failed attempts to log in to my account. They probably had no chance of getting access, but they knew that it would cause the account to be flagged. They probably did not know 1) that reddit did not have my email address, and 2) that reddit required that for a password reset, and 3) that I was not willing to provide it - so effectively they locked me out of my account.

that flagging your account as suspicious happened the moment i was using a different browser. its really mean they were already going to ban you.

Eventually, all these tech companies scale up to a size where they don’t have to give a shit about people anymore. They only care if you’re a celebrity or somehow manage to create a big PR show that they have to respond to. But at this point, regular people are just like blades of grass that will eventually get mowed down somehow and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Now it’s dead and time to move on.

Horribly accurate. I remember the good old days when imgur was to all intents & purposes a porn site, now it’s some sort of self help horror show where the appearance of a nipple is tantamount to a crime against humanity.

“platform decay” aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

on reddit, BILL gates was on the sites for a few years, and then he vanished around epstein getting arrested, hmm guessing epstein news was potentially going to out him too, thats why he stopped. even his “covid vaccine” philantropy was a vaneer of what he wanted.

now another celebrity, GARY sinise suddenly was on reddit alot, starting right before trumps 2nd election, suspicious i think not. providing military propaganda for conservatives on the site, he also seems like he acts as he was a vet himself. then on youtube saw his “im leaving hollywood” interview, he said it was his SON that was the cause, but im thinking the winds were changing and his republican whom he announced publically on election year was going to cause him to lose roles in hollywood. hes has a wierd obsession with vets.

Sooo Reddit is doing this to get rid of bots… except the only users they have left are bots… weird.

spammer bots, and propaganda bots, utilizing AI posting or using hundreds of account at once by 1 entity.

Because israel primaralily, but now expanded to protect all power players, because fuck you (me especially,) that’s why.

Their automated filters seem to be designed to ban people and leave bots. 🤭

🫩 That feeling when you get banned from a community cause you typed in “Im a Black man” and the auto mod banned you for the world “Black”… 🫩

They own those bots though most likely.

Just like the same endless crap keeps showing up on my meta feeds from bot accounts because it gains traction

they also allow propaganda bots from russia, israel , and palantir to run free to astroturf comments.

Will someone explain to him that RSS was designed for scraping?

Reddit said in the next few months it will limit access for logged-in users to those who have used Old Reddit in the last 6 months. (The company changed this from 90 days to 6 months, just as their news went out.)

wouldn’t want anyone using old reddit?

they also dont want Lurkers either, they want those log-in. people lurk now due to reddits AI moderation being so ban heavy, and its heavy handed. they need the content to be scraped by AI.

So, if you haven’t logged into Old Reddit in 6 months, or are a new user after the change takes effect, you’ll just never be able to use it ever again? Holy shit that’s nasty

True, but i can be banned for one flippant comment taken out of all reasonable context, but another comment that is perfectly fine is judged based on a trend across multiple subs?

It’s just ridiculous & indicative of a race to the bottom of the sump.

Reddit feels like where “the old free internet” I used to know, has gone to be slowly euthanasised, by drowning it in ai slop, bots, & people offended that the sky is blue.

How sad that Aaron Swartz was there for the creation of RSS and Reddit. Like spitting on his grave by removing access to data and putting up walls.

I often think about Swartz, and I wonder if he did what he did because he saw where we were heading and knew that they were never going to let him near a computer to fight it. I hope that he’s at peace.

only to have the alien hybrid spez to thirst for musk and destroy reddit.

Stopped using and producing content for reddit a long time ago.

Long live Lemmy.

From enshittified to literal shit. Now they even self-isolate that shit. Good. It will stink a bit less on the net. 🤭

Next: reddit is killing its HTTP interface to stop AI bots

This seems likely? I’ve had several services that I used to use, which deprecated their website in favour of their app 🤮

I’ve been wondering about something like this for years. Websites have been aggressively enshittifying for a long time now. Everything defends against accessing their content via any unapproved means. Getting a full resolution image from anywhere via image search becomes more difficult every day. If a search engine lands you on a site, the site deliberately withholds the content that brought you there and dangles the carrot to keep you using the site for as long as possible, always making sure you fall just short of what you’re after so you keep looking. Most links that you share directly from your URL bar are littered with telemetry data so that unless you first sanitize the link, sharing it on social media means that now the site is able to link your session to the account that shared the link and map your social connections on platforms they don’t even own.

I have a foreboding of a future internet where everything, even the structure of URLs themselves is obscured behind a layer that is opaque to the end user. People will be completely locked in to only using the site in an approved manner from an active account in “good standing” with the platform. You can use the site as normal as long as you’re logged in, but the URL itself would only ever be something like website.com/sU6ecjejfE32Jy7w94. You could share that link as normal and people could click it and be directed to the thing you want to share, but they can’t view the content without logging in, and even if they don’t log in, the mere fact that they clicked it still links the two of you together in the user map. Nothing ever escapes the sandbox and nobody is able to share content from the site unless they accessed it from approved means, and they can only share it to others who are also using approved means. The more websites adopt this model, the more user-mapping takes place until eventually anonymity on the internet is completely dead. Every single site knows exactly who everyone is and every social connection that they have. Everyone who refuses to submit to this new paradigm is blocked from accessing the site at all, yet they are still mapped all the same. Making a new website that’s this restrictive would probably mean that it never gets off the ground, but making that change on a platform where users are already dependent and tolerating increasing levels of enshittification just might work. If one major platform pulls it off, others will follow.

You could share that link as normal and people could click it and be directed to the thing you want to share, but they can’t view the content without logging in, and even if they don’t log in, the mere fact that they clicked it still links the two of you together in the user map. Nothing ever escapes the sandbox and nobody is able to share content from the site unless they accessed it from approved means, and they can only share it to others who are also using approved means.

Me: [presses PrntScrn, shares the result of that]

The world wide web a legacy platform at this point. It’s treated as such by both the tech industry and average people. Most people use social media through apps. All the government organizations and banks are consolidating their services to apps. Nobody makes their own websites anymore.

The reality hasn’t sunk in yet for the rest of us, but it’s happening. We assumed it would be a forever thing once it was created. It turns out the world wide web is going to be brief historical period at the turn of the century that you tell your grandkids about.

Maybe some day the PC will go back to being a novelty appliance found in few living rooms. Where you have to power it up, sign on, and browse the few handful of websites in existence. When you’re done, you turn it off and go about your day again.

apps are so much more terrible to use than the browser, much more limited ui and features. like your bank and healthcare apps is so not intuitive.

That would be one way to force people to use their shitty app.

I mean yeah they literally will and force everyone onto the app.

the APP gives them more data, like your components, and whatever else they are getting on your phone.

Good. Quit using corporate social media.

They just need to die & let either open-sourced, decentralized & federated social media platforms like Lemmy, Discuit, Loops, Pixelfed, PieFed, PeerTube & Mastodon thrive, or bring back old school, traditional forums that were popular befote the big, social media boom that had happened since 2010.

This might actually kill reddit, I am currently still using sync with my api.

When I look back at reddit I liken it to being on the Titanic and several hours before hitting the ice berg a group of people in a rowboat come alongside the ship and I ask to go with them because that guy is driving the ship too fast. I suck at allegories.

The hitting of the iceberg is the death of Aaron Swartz.

or when spez hatched from his alien cocoon after metamorphosis.

more like them being on the titanic, that being reddit when its about to hit the iceberg, they keep taking more and more people onto the ship, overfilling it.

I thought public API access ended years ago?

Nope: developers.reddit.com/docs/…/reddit-api

Only for us plebs providing reddit with free high-quality content.

I know we all collectively hate Reddit here - no sarcasm on my end -, but I hate to think what it’s gonna be like 10 years from now.

The sheer amount of good information I’ve obtained from Reddit over these last 15 years: mental, physical health, nutrition, tech, jobs… all for free, as it should be! It’s insane when you think about it.

Imagining a world where I’ll have to get charged to search every little thing, and yet get biased information due to ads and marketing… All of this sucks so much.

How are you guys gonna cope with this? What do you intend to do in the future I mean.

Ending the public API also prevents reddit users from deleting their post history without manually removing each post.

If you want to scrub your post history and prevent reddit from profiting from your input, use Power Delete Suite while you still can.

github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

It is unlikely that reddit allows users to delete their content from the backend but this at least keeps your posts out of search results, which is a large part of their value.

Note: Use this Suite, but do not delete your account. Check back regularly to make sure your posts stay deleted. When I did mine, they were restored multiple times.

Another option is connecting with vpn or talk bad about Trump and you’ll get shadow banned straight away.

im using that powerdeletesuite, you can poison potential AI scraping by changing your comments.

I guess I will continue to hang out around here. There aren’t many places on the internet left for such a broad range of topics and conversations with real humans. The sad reality is that the specialist forums are dying and being replaced by closed platforms and the large aggregators are getting shittier every day. The Fediverse seems like the only worthwhile investment of my time.

When those niche communities are no longer reasonable at Reddit, those people will find new places. As much as I’d like them to land on Lemmy, there is no shortage of places to go.

What I miss most from reddit is probably askhistorians. . . Such an incredibly wide and authoritative accumulation of knowledge and skilled interpretation. Ah well.

no time like the present to create it on lemmy and recruit in DM’s :)

best yet, you could DM the historians with the best mannerisms.

Once you get a number of reasonable posts on this side, you could ask people on their site for assistance on questions from here :) lowkey advertising until they shut you down over there.

Hmm that’s not a bad idea actually. . .

So. Early, early on I did reach out to a couple of them.

Unfortunately, there are some frankly terrible communities on Lemmy who engage in some pretty awful hatred and historical denialism, and they weren’t interested in moving to a community that wouldn’t dissociate with that, much less one that is actively run by the same people.

And like, we can repeat to the end of time that Lemmy is a distributed community and each instance’s choices don’t reflect on others. But the reality is that people do look at the largest instances not shutting that crap out, and it does color their perceptions.

Yeah, early on, conservatives beat up Wil Wheaton and made him despise the platform, too.

Yeah, unfortunately a lot have moved to closed spaces like Discord.

Never forget what made sites like Reddit popular in the first place. That can always be rebuilt. Reddit can die without it meaning we have to give up what Reddit was.

If only there was some site like Reddit but not centrally controlled by a corporation.

Hmmm yeah. I know! FARK

You always have something like Lemmy & Discuit.

Ofc, I was being silly when I said that seeing as we are on Lemmy.

The information will still be there as long as they don’t remove entire posts by users who have deleted their user names and keep an archive going.

Someone should be making a reddit archive site. Like an exact read-only clone to retain all the information people have access to before they remove it all to accommodate Ai on their servers.

The majority of its value is in currency, meaning current. The historical value is present too, but it’s but a drop in the ocean relatively. If everyone left Reddit, Reddit would very soon cease to exist. Wherever everyone went, they took the value with them.

I just realized the redundancy in my comment 🤦‍♂️

It’s useless if you can’t access it without an account, though, and they’re banning accounts left, right and centre over the stupidest reasons.

i would avoid anything related to current events, politics or news, thats where the bans are. im on solely niche topics after a year ago i got banned, made a new account recently and only ask question in a very niche sub.

I am not prepared to make a new account, because fuck Reddit. If you try to browse without one, you immediately get a popup telling you to log in or create an account, so I don’t even do that any more.

Never forget what made sites like Reddit popular in the first place.

you mean r/jailbait?

The one Spez was a moderator on? That one?

being a news and niche topic aggregate site helped it becoming big. because all the other forums either died or declined, or were too hard to ask a question in.

Numerous subjects & communities of subreddits is why. There’s Public Freakouts, News, Video Games, Health, Television, etc.

People said that about Digg 15 years ago.

Things come and go, people make solutions

Yeah, I also find a lot of my most useful and specific web searches take me to reddit. Unfortunately, I don’t see a solution. Hopefully a similar depth of information will start to accrue here, but if it happens it’ll happen slowly. And it’s hard to search.

How are you guys gonna cope with this? What do you intend to do in the future I mean.

Books and that kind of stuff, for some of that. Most of the useful information on health, nutrition, sports and the like came from people because it came from books (that people read).

For the rest, hope that more people to community bootstrap.

I mean reddit was just the domain name where real people shared that info. The real people who want to share knowledge are still out there, just wont be on reddit much longer.

Reddit bridged so many understanding gaps for me while i was in my early 20s things you could never talk about in real life. It was honest people talking in good faith. Now i look at the same places and they’re full of the worst info and worst takes.

That’s because the people that were willing to help you along have mostly left Reddit.

This. It was a golden age of information and community availability, and it’s going to be hard to put that back together. Especially since the prior eras of distributed sites, we had functioning search engines.

And yeah, sure, it can be rebuilt… but there’s going to be a long time of awful isolation until it is.

I don’t hate Reddit, but it seemed to hate me and banned me for the most spurious reason.

They do seem to be making some baffling decisions against their own interests, though.

same thing here. certain job industry, which is worth getting into, how hard it is to apply,etc. and all the other subs. the least useful ones were politics and news. they had subs for people wanting to join the services, but could not find a place where they can discuss because it was originally concentrated in certain forums only.

got an appliance problem of a specific model, or electronic issue, the subs have it.

People forget that before reddit became the default for this stuff, Quora and Yahoo Answers filled the same niche

I’m genuinely concerned that this is considered newsworthy. Enough of you still frequent that shit hole for this news to be handy?

Reddit is bigger than ever. It’s mainstream.

Lurking at it when I get redirected to it, it’s not. It has been getting less valuable activity since then. Niche communities have died because of this

Yeah but that’s not because of fewer visitors, it’s because they shat all over their contributors.

I keep an eye on some communities to find when do they move over to fediverse or to classic forums. it ain’t much, but it’s honest waiting.

Well there goes my last line of local content outside facebook.

I used the rss feed to check what going on in local community.

I also noticed the youtube rss feeds are returning 404s now as well.

I also noticed the youtube rss feeds are returning 404s now as well.

They are still working for me. Example: www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC5rT…

EDIT: This is the command I use to convert YouTube channel URLs into RSS URLs:

curl --silent "https://www.youtube.com/@thecodyreeder" \
    | grep -Po '"rssUrl"\s*:\s*"[^"]+"' \
    | cut -d : -f 2- | tr -d \"

Yeah they work sometimes. I tried to add a new channel to my rss reader and I got a 404.

My existing feeds still work but sometimes stop to.

BTW, instead of getting the channel ID using curl, you could also just click the “Share channel” button in the channel description.

But then I’d have to open the URL in the browser which needs a minute to load, and then I have to click away several cookie banners or wait for an extension to do it for me. Opening a YouTube URL always feels like I’m installing an app.

because of AI bots

We all know they really were just looking for any excuse

I’m glad to hear that from someone that’s as anti-ai as you

Honestly like I hate AI but I still use it

there are some very narrow uses where AI is actually useful. Most of what it’s used for is junk though. The early internet was the same way, but at least that was charming about it. I doubt that a website comprised of 1200 clipart hamster gifs and a pitch toned clip of a song from Disney’s Robin Hood is going to hack a competing Sites mainframe looking for ways to inflate its page veiws.

The AI bubble will burst, companies will actually sit down, pull their heads out of their asses, and actually apply it to something useful, as it was originally conceived.

It’s technically true. They want those bots to pay for that access.

They’ll still allow AI bots. Only the ones they authorize though. Without them their paying customers will realize how many people have left.

They killed access to old Reddit without an account a couple months ago. Also i saw some people can’t access the new one without an account but i guess they are rolling out that one slowly.

They’re making the website viewable only with an account.

Doesn’t matter, social networks are way to boring now.

I’m never going back to reddit

I do not miss Reddit at all.

The only thing I miss about reddit is access to the comments. There was often valuable troubleshooting advice in the comments for a myriad of issues. It’s a real shame that they’ve taken this stance. Just another mistake in a long line of mistakes that is going to result in the death of the platform.

It’s true. One of the things I miss was subscribing to the subreddit related to the car I bought because I was going to get a lot of valuable info about maintaining and fixing that car.

if someone else would please make an instance focusing on the 2008 nissan Xterra preferably maintaining one over 200k miles thank you

You do. It lives in your head rent free.

I do. But not in the way you might think. I was on reddit since nearly the beginning. It was such a great place. But then spez ruined it :(

It’s like this: fuck spez.

spez decided to run his mouth, that he liked MUSK and money more. and has heeded to every MUsk’s concerned about when reddit is making musk look bad.

I finally got around to setting up a lemmy instance just because of this. Cant stop what you dont control…

I tried but the last time I made a website was in the 2000s and I gave up when I couldn’t figure out what “Docker” was, or why I needed it. What happened to simply slapping everything together in Notepad, uploading the files via FTP, linking it up with your MySQL database, and it all just works?

You can still do that i think lol – docker is basically an engine, the docker folks make sure docker is compatible with all different sorts of hardware, and you just make sure your software is compatible with docker.

Yeah kimd of. Docker is a container management system. Like a Virtual Machine except it isn’t a whole OS being used to host each “virtual machine,”. it connects a closed container to the kernel. So you have a container with a specific stripped down app inside it that you can connect to.

Architecture has to match though.

Right, no i know my comment was a gross oversimplification, just tried to explain it in a way someone who doesn’t know anything about it could start researching more about it.

You can totally still do that. Docker is a thing to bundle shit up. If you’re not doing that kind of thing a lot, you can skip it. That’s not to say is not useful, but it’s definitely not necessary.

join-lemmy.org/docs/…/from_scratch.html

Thanks, I tried that guide but it might as well be gibberish as far as I’m concerned.

Why do I have to tap into the command line on my web server? What happened to GUI installers?

“PostgreSQL”? What happened to MySQL?

What the hell is “Rust”?

So much has changed in 20 years and I feel like an old man trying to navigate a modern smart TV.

How much does it cost you to host?

nothing. I run a few small pc “servers” at home for homelab stuff anyway. I just set it up because I could. I could always use someone elses instance but it was a fun thing to do.

Lol Reddit

I actually forgot about Reddit in the same way I forgot about Friendster… Which I want to point out is also still around and being used by real people, somehow.

I wish Lemmy was more popular. I still use Reddit for niche things; for example, I’m getting a new Pebble watch and I want to see posts about that. Here, the whole community has a small handful of posts. On Reddit there are new posts every day. Sigh!

I’m finding that Lemmy and the Fediverse in general isn’t good enough for normie stuff, like TV and movies. Frankly, i think videogames too now that i think about it. I’ve seen news about videogames, but never people talking about a videogame. Even anime and manga is very limited.

I don’t think that’s inherently a platform limitation though. Maybe an initial hurdle for people to join, but once you’re on here, you’re free to talk about whatever you want.

The real issue is that AI fucking scans everything you ever post, so most people don’t want to give out anything real anymore because - surprise - people like privacy.

That huge chunk of people who are aware of what’s going on in the world (weird conservative global takeover) and are tech literature is basically a circle, so you don’t get a ton of people on here divulging their hearts out.

Tldr basically, conservatives ruin everything.

And the types of anime/manga you’re allowed to like on Lemmy is also very narrow.

tv and movies used to be a larger community, until the last big instance shut down. people decided to scatter to different platforms or instances, thus diluting how much topic we get on entertainment.

It’ll get there just in time for the IPO

A lot of the subreddits i used to frequent have virtually dead (less than one post a month on average) mirrors here, or none at all.

Lemmy won’t ever become bigger than what it currently is. I’ve been waiting for years but the reality is that Lemmy will forever be a niche platform for left wing politics that’s banned on Reddit and tech bros.

There’s right wing politics too. Don’t be weird bro.

On here? Where?

There are a few communities. One example: !conservative2@lemmy.today

Bruh, it’s dead. The last post was made over a year ago

I’m sure there are others. That’s just the one I thought of off the top of my head.

But your claim isn’t that self proclaimed conservative communities technically exist, but that right wing politics are prominent to some degree on Lemmy as a platform… which they are very much not.

because their own mods are ai bots

“Hear hear” god damnit

The reason why I sent up a lemmy instance. I like rss and having everythign in one place.

Ditto.

They even banned /r/Lemmy. The nerve lol

on what grounds? Thats insane to ban a community just because its a competitor.

Not the first time, there have been many migrations and the ban the sites that gain traction against Reddit.

First thing claude recommends when you ask about a reddit alternative is Lemmy. They are fucked boy.

No idea, just think it’s hilarious. Just checked and yep…

Doesn’t suprrise me. Spez is such a fucking snowflake.

Yah he reminds me of a weasel for some reason 🤔

Did they ever need a reason?

kinda obvious, they dont want competition, and people to jump ship.

because of AI bots

Is it because they want it to be only a.i. bots, because that seems to be where it’s heading by making it more and more hostile to humans.

I mean, “because of AI bots” is technically correct, but it’s more because they want to control the sale of their own users’ data rather than letting other bots scrape to sell.

That also means there’s a strong incentive for the remaining human users with two brain cells to rub together to not provide anything for the scraping bots to use. Certainly not for free.

hence the lurking.

Cutting into their margins eh?

i stopped missing them when i found this place

Translation: RSS feeds allowed users to access reddit posts without logging in which is a huge no no for data collection. It also enabled 3rd party open source reddit clients to function which is again a huge no no. For these reasons, we (reddit) are ending rss feeds

Reddit is killing reddit

reddit been so far gone for years it is kinda strange this happened now and not in 2022.

Reddit is also killing itself lately. I hope it goes down forever and good platforms like Discuit or Lemmy become the mainstream thing.

Right. They’re much better than Reddit these days.

I’m not so sure.

I’ve been on Reddit since more or less the beginning- think pre-Digg-migration. Reddit was better then for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest was the self-selecting userbase. in general Redditors were a certain kind of people, and had a very strong sense of fairness and right/wrong. I remember hearing that a friend had started dating a new partner, and when I heard they were on Reddit I immediately made a handful of good assumptions about them (which turned out to be spot on).

The Digg migration was the start of the downfall- Reddit going mainstream. Over the last decade or so, conversations have gotten less intelligent, the noise and spam level have increased. The leadership has if anything encouraged this and rewritten the website and the app to be ‘yet another scrolling app’.

Now let’s say Reddit goes away. Let’s say all the investors and the admins tomorrow decided to pack it up and go home. What happens to those masses of low-effort morons? They go elsewhere.

So I say long live Reddit. I wish for Lemmy to grow faster if possible, I want to be able to have all the good conversations I need here and not rely on Reddit. But if Reddit implodes tomorrow, then I see a future where all the unwashed masses migrate to Lemmy and other platforms, just like the Digg migration. Not only is Lemmy not prepared for that much traffic (I’m talking in terms of moderation, mod tools, spam filters, etc) but it would reduce the overall quality of discussions and the average intelligence level here.

I’m happy to keep Reddit mainstream if it keeps Lemmy good.

Of course I’d love a future where centralized platforms like Reddit are the exception rather than the norm, but I don’t think we’re overall ready to flip that switch overnight.

Reddit is also killing itself lately

lately

They did it for like like 10+ years, firing Victoria from AMAs is the first call I remember.

Reddit is insufferable. It’s impossible to get an interesting convo going and the vast majority of posts are slop. Even the subreddits for hobbyists are affected. I’ll save a sad memory for the glory days but it’s time to move on.

There is a single silver thread in reddit these days— there are multiple subreddits dedicated to posting info about the epstein files. A subject US media has no interest in following.

They’re JUSTIFYING it with AI bots. Very different.

Definitely to stop their userbase using 3rd party apps and force them to use their godawful ad-hell

Well, this is it. Time to make my online residence on Lemmy permanent.

Tbh I hope they inevitably go down. I had been on Reddit for years before they permabanned my account without warning. I literally would just post pictures of soaps I make and interact with other subs that caught my interest. I tried appealing but it was denied and I keep being ignored. Reddit is killing their user base with their AI bot BS and I miss when they weren’t so corporate

When I search for things at work, and reddit may have the top result, I stopped clicking them becasue they want me to log in.

When I search for things on my phone, and reddit is one of the top results, I stopped clicking it because now it won’t let me read it in browser, and forces me to use their app.

They got rid of old reddit.

Clearly they are trying to pad their logged-in user counts.

I’m done. I’m sorry to say that I’d rather have an AI-generated answer (that likely is citing the right answer on reddit anyway) than to give reddit the satisfaction of making me open their app or log in.

Fuck them.

Fuck spez.

RIP AaronSw.

They got rid of old reddit

They didn’t. You need an account though.

It’s the same thing.meme

Potato potato. They are joining the shit tier of websites that have “the result” you’re probably looking for, but won’t let you see it without logging in or using their app.

Same reason I fucking hate Instagram.

Oh look, reddit removing features and making the platform worse? Anyone remember when tech got better as time went on?

Enshittification continues

Everything is being pushed to Discord, and not by the people, by corporate entities.