"What’s behind the move: The user discussion platform company’s latest earnings report did not announce any new artificial intelligence data licensing agreements, disappointing investors who were expecting more revenue opportunities from AI partnerships.
Revenue of $804.9 million beat estimates of $731.8 million. However, US daily active users came in at 53.2 million, just shy of expectations of 54 million. The company’s total daily active users grew by 18% to 130.3 million versus estimates of 130.07 million. "
Lmao. 53.2 vs 54, and the headline says that’s why it’s tumbling? Nah, it’s gotta be just the AI. I bet most of the reddit investors were also invested in AI stock and wanted to use reddit to pump the others. Hilarious. The entire value of Reddit is human UGC.
First off, that’s a difference of 0.8M, not 1.8M. So you’ve got that significance overestimated by more than 100%.
The stock dropped 22%, which a metric missed by 1.48% does not at all explain. I don’t think it’s substantial at all. They essentially hit the target. Meanwhile revenue was $70M more than expected, which would be the main value of users anyways (aside from data selling, but then of course we get into the other factor…) So how does that possibly equate to 22% price drop? It could only be because the AI partnerships were essentially the only concern. Hence why I said the only value was human UGC. Because AI corps aren’t willing to pay for that UGC, Reddits value plummets.
I’m talking about the annoying trend of stock market articles to try to explain things that hardly make sense. It’s trying to make it sound like reddit’s user count is in trouble when it’s clearly not.
The user discussion platform company’s latest earnings report did not announce any new artificial intelligence data licensing agreements
AI scraping was a one-time deal, Reddit chased off a huge portion of their users, and AI companies need pre-AI comments, not the current AI-infused comments.
and that 130million users arnt real people either. at least of half of them are propa bots, or bots used by people to drive traffic to thier own “business/marketing” sites, 1 person or an agency can use hundreds if not thousands of accounts at a time, something reddit most targets for bans, and is why they are aggressive with it, and yes they sorta ignore propaganda ones.
CEO Steve Huffman said, “These deals aren’t binary. They have to make sense for Reddit, but there are many ways, I think, for the value to return to Reddit.”
lol - “The value has left Reddit”
-/u/spez
Who could imagine when you piss off:
third party devs who make the apps your best contributers use
Remember when YouTube started having AI narrated posts from r/askreddit in its shorts? And how that slowly morphed into the AI generated slop stories about how one family member give the rest of them their comeuppance because the Henderson account valued results instead of random cheap business practices involving Sgt Menendez and his cheating ex girlfriend?
(This stuff is like candy to Boomers because it mirrors the reader write in sections of Reader’s Digest.)
I should have noticed this earlier, but it dawned on me a few weeks back.
Caught my father in law who’s addicted to youtube watching a video about some WWII pilot that knew how to shoot at enemy fighters from his time hunting hogs in Kansas. It was entirely AI generated, the video, the voice, and the narrative. That person didn’t exist and it didn’t survive scrutiny if you know anything about guns. But damn the comments were just boomers gooning over military wank.
Sorry, was in a hurry to GTFO of work when I posted, but yes, it was a limited run on etsy. I’d reach out to the maker and ask for them to do another run though.
Reddit never was the same after the whole API/Mod fiasco. Many subreddits simpy died. Old users that made the site what it is left and there were new ones, but the whole vibe shifted.
The vibe is still similar in some places. I get a lot out of lurking on some of the trans subreddits for instance. But yeah, anything outside of small niche communities has been enshittified into another Instagram.
it wasnt the same when they used the banhammer on “illicit subs” during trumps first turn, every sub just had political elements in after that, and that was the same time russia started thier trolling, and the bannings began then.
2023 they banned me because I didn’t buy stock when it was being introduced.
I had several mod accounts (smaller subs - I made new accounts for each one) and didn’t buy any stock. Wasn’t banned. Did they explicitly say this to you?
He sees the content and interacts with it on his own instance so he is not in fact “here”. Unless you are trying to somehow claim ownership of this community because it’s hosted on the lemmy.world instance.
Revenue of $804.9 million beat estimates of $731.8 million. However, US daily active users came in at 53.2 million, just shy of expectations of 54 million. The company’s total daily active users grew by 18% to 130.3 million versus estimates of 130.07 million.
Makes sense, Reddit feels like a shell of it’s former self.
After the apicalypse many subs seems to have died, also the new UI that has been pushed for a decade or so, seems to promote consumption of content and discourage creation of content, further reducing new content.
Reddit has been many, many times by AI companies, why keep scanning if the content stays 98% the same, with most new content being of mostly lower quality, simply due to people posting AI shit.
This was a very predictable outcome.
As soon as Reddit’s history got scanned by AI models, it lost 98% of it’s future value.
You also cannot view it without being logged in now. Which gets a groan from everyone in chat when a friend shares a Reddit link.
I have no clue why they decided chasing off users and being less useful was somehow going to help them. Particularly when they were the place to go for huge segments of the population.
Firefox (including the one on Android) has extension called libredirect which… redirects to those privacy oriented frontends for lurking.
I was heavily addicted to Reddit and I’m glad they allowed me gradually get off of it with the API (never installed their app) and now blocking read only access (which made me use libredirect).
Given that content quality is also degrading I never felt urge to to use the app, now I don’t log in (using the lurking portals makes it more disruptive to leave a comment, I always log in using private tab) and I suspect I eventually will stop using even that (there’s only few subreddits that I am still interested in).
You can without being logged in, but not old reddit. If you’re getting the “join the most alive place on the net” (lol) popup, ublock has optional anti-annoyance filters that fix it.
Just within the last week or so old.reddit.com was effectively disabled and stopped working. (I think it might work if you log in, but i quit doing that 3 years ago). It was a nice resource and it’s said that it’s such a shell of what it was. Right when the internet is really needing human voices too
They are only doing one segment of users at a time and I’m guessing their metrics are telling them 90% of those users don’t play ball and just stop visiting. I’m guessing they might go back on it in a bit.
They fingerprint your device, if you get a new phone or reset i (you can restore, just logout on safari and clear cache, use a new user, etc. google automatically logging me back in to an alt that got banned alongside my main got it banned) I’d just quit and find better hobbies, reddit feels like it isn’t a waste of time but it really is.
Yeah it is a waste of time and I have been seeing that more since switching back to the fediverse.
Also thanks to the mods of /r/worldnews for helping kick my reddit checking addiction since I got banned and keep getting flagged as ban evasion lmaoooo
Your last paragraph is a major point that I think a lot of people don’t think about, and I’m surprised Reddits executive team didn’t bail as soon as the AI was finishing the scrapes.
They have their own AI, but it’s an eyesore that undermines searching in a mobile browser. They added it after an update further deteriorated the Reddit App experience.
They didn’t need to bail since they did the IPO and could just sell their shares. I haven’t kept an eye on how much insider selling has gone on but I am sure they all have made bank over this past year, it is public info if anyone feels like looking it up. I would expect if the stock prices continues to tank and stays down you will start seeing executives abandon ship for greener pastures.
The most valuable data is always going to be on open platforms that prioritize ease of use, because that’s where people will go. But then the company starts looking at all that data and how much it’s worth.
Before they can charge people for it, they have to make sure no one can get it for free. But in doing so chase off the users who were making that content.
Leaving them with a locked down worthless ecosystem.
Nothing is meant to last forever tho, and reddit won’t be the last.
reminds me of how Gaia Online’s user run economy crashed so hard due to Admin mismanagement that it became a cautionary tale in economy textbooks. youtu.be/vyzQnsa8SA0
I actually walked away when i got big into Minecraft and mostly switched to reddit because the Minecraft community is truly gargantuan over there. Infact, it’s one of Reddit’s main pillars of user engagement and the de facto off game community connection. I rewatched that video and the whole time I was going “Reddit is doing the same thing! Reddit is making the same mistakes! HOLY SHIT HISTORY IS REPEATING!!” When the owners of any social media platform stops listening to their user base, or worse, thinks they know what’s “better” for them, it’s the beginning of the end. It’s like all those Celebrities that start resenting their fans or think they (the fans) OWE them (the celebrity).
I wonder? Just before I was banned, I used a third party app to scrap 14 years of my data and delete it all. Not long after that I was banned for some truly innocuous post.
Never forget that they killed the API for a mere $60M AI deal.
Like, if spez apologized and restored API access, and made an effort to kick fascists off the platform, I might consider going back. But as is, I will watch with glee as he fucks over everyone stupid enough to buy his IPO.
Besides apologizing and changing course, spez would need to leave before I considered going back. The way he behaved during the API BS ended my capacity to trust him in any way. Reddit as an organization, maybe they can turn things around and return to their purported values, but spez is not an honest person and will do or say anything if it serves his own interests.
60M USD is insanely cheap for that data, remember, it was categorized and structured into threads and subthreads in specific categories, not to mention all different languages already being mostly sorted and ready for consumption.
They could probably have got a few hundred million USD for it if they held out longer.
At this point, I don’t trust any corpo platform. If I don’t already use it, I don’t need it. My efforts go where it matters, not to sites that don’t love me back
I swear Reddit started changing as soon as Trump won. I think reddit did such a great job of exposing Republican lies and grifts that some rich ass hole just said we will express interest in investing if you start censoring your content and now here we are
Along with chapotraphouse but the Donald did quite a bit of damage. I swear the Donald was pushed as a honeypot to enrage users who hate the fucking right to get them to engage and then get banned
I didn’t understand CTH so I never joined it. The only reason I knew of it was due to the dollop podcast and they don’t even reference that much. I think I just saw it mentioned in a comment
Oh I never listened to the podcast, it was mostly a refuge for people who got banned from LateStageCapitalism for whatever garbage reasons. (In my case, it was suggesting that just because North Korea was at odds with the Capitalist West didn’t mean we had to take their propaganda at face value.) So it was a place where non-tankie leftists accumulated. Mostly meme trash and simmering resentment.
The r/AskRedit thread that got me banned permanently was asking how people thought the Trump presidency would end. You could tell by the amount of “Post deleted by user” and “post removed by reddit” that the general consensus was that eventually someone would hit the bullseye and finally ventilate this sack of shit’s skull. I observed that it’s telling that they are so against even discussing threats of violence, that it makes the mods complicit in the crimes of the regime. Fun fact/spoiler alert: The mods did not like getting called out like that.
because the admin are secretly right-wing sycophants or Neoliberals who think every political problem can be solved by “talking out our differences to find a middle ground.”
I’m no tankie, and I do always hope that a peaceful solution can be found, truly I do, but the cold fact is that the most effective cure to actual, demonstrable fascism is BULLETS. Preferably “early and often.”
But this is veering into politics so back to discussing reddit
trump the 1st time actually. thats when they started banning heavily, also the same time russia realized reddit was ripe for stoking division/infighting. remember all those subs that were considered illicit by the gop.
It feels like the decent into fascism started there in general. We need to backlash so hard we make up for lost time and then some. Fuck conservatives for subjecting us to this, and fuck “centrist” liberals foe enabling them every step along the way
I hope they purge piracy, roms, emulation. Currently that is a huge valuable resource, and getting rid of that might lead to those users coming here. Those types of contributors are the ones who add value with their content.
they removed the r/nsfwrandom search string, and banned hundreds of the NSFW subreddits due to “lack of moderation.” You can still go to many of them, (that remain) but you have to actively punch the subreddit into your address bar, and then you can only link to other related subreddits through the Subreddits’ own link list (which is only up to date if you’re lucky). Searching for them is still possible but access is a crapshoot due to the aforementioned subreddit bans.
i heard many of them got purged from anotehr forum. some people make it a business to “spam” or promote thier content/agency. funny how reddit target these people and not the propaganda bots.
What? I remember years ago when making maps of Reddit community connections was all the rage. On the maps weighted by posts and subscribers, it looked like Reddit had a sizeable NSFW section. On the ones weighted on traffic it looked like Reddit was a porn site with some other special interest forums.
They killed off the old ones by timebombing the subs with strict requirements for activity. They started complying with takedowns, which nuked wide swaths of NSFW reddit. The death of gfycat was another sudden and massive removal of content.
The NSFW part of reddit didn’t go away though. It’s transformed into OnlyFan spam. So it’s not really porn. It’s redlight district ads. Hot local girls want to meet you!
Makes sense, Reddit feels like a shell of it’s former self.
man, reddit was fucking awesome when it was open source and they actually card about users. Spez has made his billions. He really doesn’t give a fuck about reddit anymore. Just milk it for whatever is left.
It pains me, because I was on reddit since a year after it was founded, and i left when they blocked TPA. It was such a big part of my life for so long. And now it’s just bots and AI. Fuck reddit, and fuck spez
Redit is Fun app was the best times. When they killed off third party apps it pushed me into a lurker, since I refused to use the official reddit app and didn’t want to go to the effort of patching old third party apps to get them working.
It IPO’d at $34. Even tanked it’s at $142. He’s not hurting, except in þe “I’m slighly less obscenely rich than I was yesterday” way. It needs to be driven sub-IPO, and even þen it’ll be overvalued.
Why would AI want a continuous deal with Reddit? Don’t they get all the data they need the first time? I doubt the new content is worth as much as the previous deal… maybe I don’t understand what these deals are for.
Presuming they took all the data, a one-time deal would only be good if knowledge gathering actually stopped after the cutoff year- but for recent things like tech and news, the models have to keep learning and adding to their repositories.
The returns on that value sharply diminish, of course, but I think they’re still necessary. Which will leave everybody in a bind that is very funny.
Probably because Reddit has lawyers, and money, and a little willingness to lock down their content. Unlike individual creators, they can actually file a lawsuit
It’s fucking laughable “us daily users metric dissapoints”. What the fuck do they expect when they ban their long time users permanently with no appeal process, make it so you can only view the site through the app censor any revolt and start bringing on nazis.
It’s literally the antithesis of how and why reddit became so popular in the first place.
they ban your current accounts, because they participated in posts that got you “banned” in one or more subs, and even if lifted. but apparently they allow for future accs but you have to wait a long time. another post on lemmy said they mad an acct after shadowbans, waiting months to a year using a different browser/fork , this assuming you wernt using hordes of accounts that got ban though.
Good. My wife and I both had our 13-year-old accounts permanently banned with no appeals process - all because we share an IP address and they decided without evidence that we were evading bans.
I don’t browse Reddit since I switched entirely to Lemmy the day the API migration happened, but I did still reluctantly have to reference reddit on occasion. Now I can’t even do that for niche issues I run into. I am so upset that millions of people donated their time and energy into making Reddit the place it was just to have all of that entirely gated off. I know we’re likely all in the same boat, but there really are no words for what spez did. He ruined a really great place for community and knowledge and turned it into a slop fest.
My usecase is this: To see what both they, the people in power want us to see, and to see what users say in reaction to it. I see a lot of luigiposting on the comments, a lot of pro-socialism, a lot of pissed off reactions to bad corpodem takes, and I see way, far less pro-Trump or even middling takes on the front page, at least. I’m sure there are still righty/tankie subs, but it ain’t 2024 anymore.
You guys scarecly change your opinions, most of us are leftists, were when we got here and if we werent, we are now, in some shade at least. Reddit goes in flux a lot and seeing how much bluer their community is than 2024 does make me grin a little.
Is this a real thing? I can still access both new and old reddit via both mobile and desktop without being logged in. FWIW, I’m hitting it with Firefox + uBlock Origin on both.
A while back, I did an experiment. Reddit started asking me to log in to scroll, so I closed the window and didn’t try again that day. Next day, I tried to scroll reddit and the login to view popup appeared again. So I closed the window and didn’t look at reddit for a week. After a week, I went on reddit and magically it no longer worried about me logging in…for about a month.
They do A/B testing where they put one feature in front of some folks and a different feature in front of others so they can gather data about what people will and won’t tolerate. Between that and the massive tracking they do with IP addresses for people going around account bans, and there’s no real way to know if they were targeting you through cookies/IP, or if you just fell into different groups.
I don’t think they put a lot of thought into what’ll that do for some of the subreddits that are for desperate people looking for advice since two people back to back won’t get the same advice. There’s no way to swap notes, no reddit-of-record, and now all that good advice (and some of it was good) is locked away. It warms my cold dead heart to see their stock tank because they don’t deserve the best of their users.
Essentially yes, my thinking was simply that it’s A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H…etc testing.
I had reddit accounts in the past, though I deleted them all and stopped participating about 2-3 years ago. My assumption is that my passive scrolling was connected to previous accounts through IP, device ID, proximity to other devices, other accounts, typing cadence, etc., and I fell in the category of “maybe we can entice them back”.
I also agree that reddit likely made the decision to sacrifice a lot of high quality low engagement content for the purposes of mass market engagement farming. It’s sad as shit. I’ve got copies of wikipedia from back in the day, but I never thought to download reddit.
Edit: Uhh, maybe there should be a group doing annual backups of lemmy. It’s a nice place now, but so was reddit.
Edit: Uhh, maybe there should be a group doing annual backups of lemmy.
I’m sure there are a bunch of people who are a lot more knowledgeable about it, but it might be as simple firing up your own instances and just federating. By not allowing people to post you’d just be in readonly mode and would get passed all the posts, maybe. With every other kind of archive process like this the images/videos/audio are the long pole. A full 100% backup of “what did everyone see back then” is out of reach; even youtube (or especially youtube) goes back and edits old videos for newer compression or a change in copyright rules.
My only real thought on it right now is an annual back up is waaaaaay too slow. I’d want to see more about what the ActivityPub stream looks like. I’d want to hear from an owner of an instance about how quickly their storage requirements go, and I’m now curious about whether there’s any evidence of anyone else such as Three Letter Agencies already backing it all up.
I would assume that the entirety of lemmy is being scraped by three letter agencies and their global equivalents. Hell, I assume that a small core minority of the tankies are actually state actors pushing statist propaganda, as lemmy does skew pretty left.
OK, I’m curious first about the data requirements.
If people are posting just to stir up shit then that would be something that would have to be handled at the community level or at the individual level. If we don’t agree with someone’s opinion then just ignore that person. If people are coming around trying to stir up violence that’s a different story. The bar is lower than ever for firing up a lemmy instance if people are into that kind of thing.
Link to the nazi bar story. If anyone has a better place to link to please let me know:
I can scroll comments for about a minute before that pop-up comes up saying you need the app. But I rarely visit reddit anymore unless it’s something I need some information on that I can’t find anywhere else.
Is Reddit just bots talking to eachother now?
Soon bots will make trades on the prediction market apps and the stock market. Bots will be allowed to own money and become billionaires. Then our human billionaire overlords will be replaced with bot ai billionaire overlords. Then they will remake the Terminator movies, but with the humans as bad guys. John Connor goes back in time to murder a roomba while one of those Chinese falling over robots tries to stop him.
yea they are talking to each other to make it look like theres engagement. the fact they allow people to hide thier comment history, means reddit allows and encourages this and to hide the true state of bots to users ratio.
It is genuinely impressive how unusable Reddit has gotten in the last 6 months, especially. Login walls, no All, Best instead of Hot default sorting, constant popups to use the app (RIP RIF, you were the best), obvious AI posts everywhere. Really speedrunning the Digg experience.
Yeah, I stopped going there regularly a few years ago like most people on Lemmy, but I still occasionally go there for niche topics I can’t find anywhere else. I only lurk, not post, so I just used old.reddit.
I tried using it this week after they turned off old, and holy shit!! It is unusable. Like you said, it’s impressive how bad it is.
Honestly what would it take to get more people on lemmy. I only found it by someone saying the boost for lemmy app. I didn’t understand the rest of the technical jargon. But it works. Just the interests I have there are either no subs for or very few users.
Banning valuable subs like piracy, emulation, and roms would get at least those people. The subs that provide valuable guides and resources like that would have to get purged for users to be forced to seek out alternatives.
Also weird bot comments that are long and tedious and somehow you only see the same 20 posts over and over. I remember when reddit was a tenth as big and it would have more new content being shown on the front page than it does now. Like I used to be able to scroll it for hours and now I’m done with it in like 20 minutes.
reddit made sure that you see the same post from yesterday, or the exact same post cross-posted to different subs. certain subs, like news about trump stopping 1bn medicaid/care payments to blue state stopped, magically sotp being posted , they were all posted 1 week ago, and then it just vanished.(seems like a big topic to talk about
So is Reddit still good for porn? Redgifs is still pretty popular from what I see, and sites like Scroller and Reddtastic are still usable for browsing porn.
they changed the default search settings a while back to exclude “adult” results. then they realized this effectively doubled the searches and then they went back on it real quick…
Most people on the internet are lurkers. Most up votes and comments come from maybe 20% of people who actually look at posts. I figured this out within a few weeks of using the Internet. They’re quite literally biting the hand that feeds them. They’re betting you’d rather make a Redddit account than not visit, except that plan no longer holds water in the AI age.
Now AI is probably pushing engagement up artificially. Fewer and fewer real humans will react to posts on the basis that it may not be real, even if they are. So you have a situation where AI interactions increase in proportion to human ones, while also getting more expensive, and pushing out your income stream at the same time.
This kind of boundless stupidity isn’t even really seen, because everyone else is doing as well. People point it out, but we have no real metric for how bad it’s until the stock price starts the slip. Whatever stock of good faith users Reddit once had, are now a dwindling resource, replaced by people trying to game the system.
We cannot stop this in a way that matters. The only way past this shit AI era, is through it.
Using reddit’s stock price to estimate what fraction of the users are people. Sounds like a plan. The stock price is like a CAPTCHA for social media platforms. Are you authentically human or an empty husk of clankers gabbing at each other?
Ultimately the only thing that will stop it is advertisers fleeing the site. They won’t be able to tell what portion of the ad views they are paying for are bots, but it sure will show up in the sales conversion figures. Bots don’t buy products that advertise to them.
My 15 year old account with 600k karma and impeccable record was banned because I made a harmless joke about Republicans. Reddit has turned into a fucking joke. Every post is engagement bait and every top comment is some stupid fucking joke/ pun.
Not who you messaged, but the “advocating violence” thing gets massively abused by conservative mods on r/politics. For example, on January 6, right as it was happening, right as a mob of thugs was storming the capital building trying to steal an election? I wondered out loud why this place was so unguarded. Why aren’t there machine gun nests opening up on the mob? Sorry, but if you try to form a mob to overthrow a democracy, that’s what you deserve. That’s how countries have dealt with such violent uprisings since time immemorial. You try to overthrow a lawfully elected government? Lethal violence is absolutely justified in such a case, and any reasonable person should acknowledge that. Violence is a tool governments unfortunately sometimes have to use. But the site policies do not acknowledge this. Violence is ultimately the core function of the state. See monopoly on violence. Discussing how the government will use one of its core defining functions is perfectly reasonable on a politics sub. Blind “do not advocate violence” policies are idiotic. And it’s not like it ever gets applied to people advocating for the US to bomb other countries. That doesn’t count as “advocating violence.” Oh, and of course the conservative subreddits never get banned even after openly encouraging an armed insurrection against a lawfully elected government.
Later we learned those troops were not stationed at the capital because Trump ordered them away. Didn’t reverse my ban though.
seems like they target pre-2024 accts more often then newer ones, to get rid of legacy users? something tells me they dont want specific people commenting on the site anymore. hence the read-only site.
They have screwed it up so bad I literally find myself on Facebook more often then Reddit and that’s after being gone from Facebook for like 20 years lmao
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m almost glad Reddit permbanned me two months ago. It’s a shame Anonymous hasn’t tried to DDoS u/Spez. Reddit needs the Ol’ Yeller treatment.
It’s easy to see the effects of users moving to the fediverse. Reddit has been sad since it nerfed /r/All. In fact, it seems like a thinly veiled attempt to control what its users see under the guise of providing a more tailored user experience. For me, the overall effect is that it’s homogeneous, boring and I don’t want to be there anymore.
Ehh, I don’t know if we have that big of an effect on Reddit. I’d see more of their older, more traditional users going back to their ubb hobby boards for whatever their main interest is, which are very still out there.
I appreciate lemmy/Piefed being here as an alternative either way.
1% of people actually contribute. Many of those 1% have left or were banned for criticizing the president and ICE. The comments I see lately are becoming more like instagram. Just easy observations and drivel. Some of them are like paragraphs of AI slop that hurts my brain trying to comprehend.
Well yeah, everyone trained off the data there already. Reddit (or heck, any social media) is just the same old cyclical shit. The AI deals were not a sustainable long-term model, and I’m surprised no one at Reddit, or these companies selling their users data against their wishes, could see that.
Like that was the shortest term cash flow they could’ve gone for, and now their reputation and trust is in shambles.
Well I was banned for saying there’s never a bad time to punch a nazi in the face in response to a screenshot of Indiana Jones doing just that. So good. Fuck reddit.
Punching Nazis is a specific thing that has gotten a lot of people banned, myself included. Which is weird because it’s something I’ve said for years, but I think it was after the DOGE incident they really started clamping down on it as “inciting violence.”
Yeah, I think this is a common experience. I quit a couple of years ago when they did the API thing, but the impression I get is that loads of people have been getting banned for similarly ridiculous reasons. Seems kinda self destructive. I left voluntarily, but I’d been there a long time, over ten years, think I had almost a million comment karma. This is also the case for many of the people getting banned - users who’d been there a really long time and who were mostly people who contributed content and comments. Maybe management thought they don’t need the old school users now they have bots, and bots that can slip in product endorsements and try to manipulate political opinion. In fact, a lot of the people who’d been around the longest and contributed most were probably more likely to notice and complain about the huge influx of bots and bullshit.
Still seems self destructive, though, but I guess after the IPO short term gains are more important than community. Their loss is Lemmy’s gain. Like you say, fuck em.
Yes, my longest running account was also banned for using a slur after I used an offensive word directed at homophobic redditors abusing the first openly gay professional footballer in Australia. I was banned, but they were not. It’s a consistent theme on reddit; what matters is how you say things, now what you actually say.
Losing the account was not the problem for me, it was that only certain types of hateful/offensive language were punished. I’d rather have a free for all like exists in some Lemmy communities than a shit in between like that.
The future Reddit users are AI agents, being exposed to ads created by “Agent Engine Optimization” experts. The AI users might automatically trade tokens (the future of currency) to Agentic Entities for the service being advertised.
Humans have no place and will continue to be banned.
“We’ll have robots! Robots to do the product placement, robots to tell them how to think, robots to tell them which political candidate to vote for. We don’t need these human users - they complain a lot and, believing they’re come to the site to socialise or learn, they frequently disappoint when it comes to those three core strategies.”
“But who will do the shopping, the thinking, and the voting?”
“Why, the robots, of course! They’ve been doing a lot of these things for some years now, and quite successfully too. Which is why my tech portfolio is up and trump is president.”
“Hmm. When you put it like that, I guess we don’t need humans at all.”
“Alas, there are some areas where the tech isn’t quite there yet. Remember Sarah complaining about the state of the ladies bathrooms the other day? ‘An abomination of blood, shit, and hair’ I believe she called it. The robots just aren’t ready for that, we had to call that immigrant fellow from maintenance. Still, give the tech another couple of years and I imagine we can get rid of him, too.”
Reddit does not have the goal of being tolerant so the paradox does not apply, the goal is avoiding legal consequences so blanket banning all violence regardless of victim is a solution that works well
I earned my first perma by saying Ann Coulter is a racist, and the account I made to bypass that ban got banned because I illegally used sarcasm while criticizing SCOTUS. Their moderation bots have the site so locked down that you can’t even have a normal conversation, and they’re surprised that they’re losing visitors lmfao
In the wake of the Luigi Mangione shooting, bans went into overdrive. Even using the name Luigi in any context could get you banned. I’ve seen people get their account nuked for posting Luigi’s Mansion gameplay footage.
That place is an utter clown show at the best of times.
Yeah, kinda like a long, slimy tail. Dragging on the ground when he walks down the street, getting dirt and cigarette butts stuck to it. He’d have to kinda throw it over his shoulder to keep it from getting stepped on, so occasionally it would fart sadly, right next to his face.
Every time I use it now I usually get into trolly arguments with others. It’s just not a happy place anymore. “Reddiquite” (spelling) died a long time ago.
The biggest issue I have is the big “subreddit” gatekeeping. Realistically at this point, every major “subreddit” is purely controlled by the core corporation. There is not decentralization of Reddit at all, and all the “mods” are just working for free pretending like they’re in control because they can do some things. The smartest thing Reddit did is make “mods” feel like they have some control.
I just browsed /r/nba for basketball news. A couple of days ago they started throwing up unavoidable popup overlays after a few seconds. This was helpful because it made me realize that I don’t really give a fuck about basketball news. Buhbye /r/felicia.
Have you considered trying out redlib? It’s clutter-free, minimal, privacy-respecting proxy for Reddit. You can also subscribe to subreddits without signing up.
I personally use redlib.catsarch.com, but there are a couple more instances of Redlib from different people
No dude, it’s not about that. It’s an indication of how active I was, and how engaged I was with the community. It means I was one of their best members, but they chose Musk over many people like me, who built Reddit into the powerhouse it became.
Now they’re suffering, as a direct result of deliberately executing their most enthusiastic members, like me.
don’t worry, my account got disabled too, maybe after about 7 years I think?? I instantly created an account on lemmy and never looked back, fuck reddit, to the grave.
Just a daily reminder that if you want something great, especially if it is made great by the contributions of hundreds of people, it can’t be owned by a profit oriented business. If you don’t want that great thing to be taken away and/or used against you, the ownership has to remain in the hands of the people.
Maybe reddit should not have banned users that have been on the platform for years, contributed heavily but got kicked out because they disagree with the current US regime.
Spez sucks Trump’s mushroom.
they gave sub mods the tools to do the similar thing reddit does. which is a double whammy chance of getting banned. also they will get rid of “subreddits that are poorly moderated too” usually its the porn subs.
i find they were mostly concentraded in worldnews where the majority of israeli posts were, and pics where people were posting during the election about the “palestine getting killed, and biden/wont vote for him” posts were.
Pao was a patsy who did exactly what they wanted. Tons of subreddits got banned or hijacked. She gers all the bad press. They replace her to mollify the mobs but leave all the changes.
I mean obviously. All they needed was a single deal to get all the data. The funny thing about digital goods is you can copy it. Sure you miss the updated messages but that is less and less interesting as time goes by.
It’s even less interesting when all of the content is just reposts made by bots and all of the comments are made by bots. All of the original content has already been copied.
It was a bummer to watch it it all happen over time. I remember using reddit in like 2010 and it was great. It stayed great until maybe 2015. Then it slowly started to become too popular. It started to get targeted with fake viral ad campaigns. Those worked, and then from there it was fast downhill.
Oh well… I remember when AOL was cool too. So I guess that’s just she way she goes.
Everything has its time in the sun. Just like many before. They get born, grow, mature, get old, and then finally die. It will happen here too. I’ve seen more than one forum go through the process.
Happy to see it. I would love a new platform to show up and replace reddit. I dont think its going to be Lemmy but something where the creators actually care about great discussions rather than money.
Why not Lemmy? I think it’s way better than reddit. Unfortunately it lacks enough users. I don’t think starting from scratch will offer a better solution.
It really isnt better than reddit unfortunately. But it depends what you are looking for. If you want to find a replacement for a popular reddit community here, you are out of luck most of the time. But if you are happy with memes, you will like this place. Its chill and relaxed and has humor and no algorithms.
I guess because of server costs and stuff like that. I am sure Lemmy currently can’t handle the amount users Reddit has. And without ads there is no income stream of money to handle the costs.
In my experience if you start a niche community and tend to it then people will eventually come and start filling it. Not as much as on the mainstreams but still enough.
it may lack the same number of users, that’s true but it means it’s largely bot and wanker free which is nice
it may be slower but thats not a bad thing
I don’t honestly think reddit was any better than the old bulletin boards which themselves were just a variation on usenet newsgroups
any large site is going to end up in corporate control, that’s the sad and honest truth
There was initial good curation on the frontpage, and by that I mean it wasn’t product placements and right-wing or divisive narratives being pushed. You’d see people making sweaters or doing woodwork, an actual worldwide community of people building trust.
Lemmy is good, but it has no frontpage and suffers greatly as a result
Which is literally why lemmy is the only possible replacement. It’s the only path for users to choose not an evil corporation. Hypothetically reddit could operate an instance, and we could all give them the finger and block/defederate from them. We have to foster the growth of niche hobby, community, and activity boards though. It can’t all be left leaning politics and meme shit posting. We need to encourage those who share expertise to come contribute. That lemmy is the defacto aggregate forum. It is the only form factor corporate ownership can’t swallow up.
I think at least for the bigger and for the less niche communities moderation needs to be democratic.
The upvote brought democracy to content ranking. It’s possible to bring democracy to moderation.
And this will still leave the option of private despotic moderation available. Both styles of moderation can act as a check on each other. The same community can be reproduced twice, with private and with democratic moderation. Then if the tyrants are out of control you can escape to a democratically managed community. And if the so called “mob” is out of control and the privately moderated space is nicer, you can escape there. The whole system will eventuanly self-regulate to a nice daily hum.
Reddit is just Ai trash these days and the effort needed to block the Ai garbage bots near daily is insane. I come to Lemmy and feel happy seeing new shit. I go to Reddit and it feels like nothing but garbage.
the large subs you see in r/all or popular is mostly that in one form or another. the niche subs are less likely to have it. reddit is nothing more to be used by Google/openai to train thier AI.
A small blip. Not enough to trigger a sell-off, but also if it was a reason that would be the stated reason not just ‘no new AI deals’.
As a user, the decline in DAU I think is representative of a series of user-unfriendly policies and changes that the users have clearly communicated dislike of but management insists on anyway.
Reddit the company or Reddit the platform? Or both?
Personally I still have a lot of love for Reddit as a community, which extends to as a platform. I’m not a big fan of the current corporate leadership, they seem to have enough sense to not piss off users completely but it also seems pretty clear they have a vision to turn Reddit into another mindless scrolling app, and the users (many of which have been with the platform for a decade or more) are useful as free moderation staff and content producers and don’t have major influence on the direction of the platform or company.
Problem is, let’s say Reddit ‘dies’. What exactly does that look like? It’s not like the site would just shut off and go dark and everybody goes home. It is now a publicly traded company worth $30 billion. Spez is accountable to the board of directors who themselves are accountable to the shareholders. And if Reddit fails, none of them are just going to sit there and do nothing while that happens.
You might get very very very lucky, the board of directors might replace company leadership with someone interested in preserving what made Reddit great. I’m talking somebody who would bring back /r/all, roll back a lot of the new Reddit style stuff, etc.
More likely they would say if spez isn’t making them money they will find someone who will and you’ll get somebody who has no understanding of the community and decides to turn the screws on monetization.
Or if the company loses a lot of value it would just be bought up by a private equity firm that would ring every last dollar out of it and run it into the ground in the process.
All I’m saying is, think of wishes like that like a genie in a bottle, you make a wish and there’s a good chance it will backfire.
I liked the community overall. Spez and the mods in general though are what I dislike. Centrism and zionism are king there. So its a propoganda site and thus needs to go away.
The current system has folks raising cap-ex by selling bits of control in their company, but this is a thread about how that system has failed to both expand capacity and increase the utility of reddit. So. IDK, they could raise money with bonds or grants or something. It doesn’t really matter too much because the current system simply doesn’t work in practice either.
I’m a big fan of employee owned companies and I think that should be encouraged.
At the same time, there IS a place for investors.
But all 3 factors of production (land, labor, capital) are supposed to have equal seats at the table. In recent years capital owns the table and chairs and decides when land and labor are allowed to speak, which is not what successful capitalism looks like.
delighted for them
got permanently banned for posting a video of sylvester stallone’s sister reacting to trump shitting himself so fuck em
bunch of cunts
A type of cheese shredder used to fill sandwiches. It was popular back in the pulp mills of the 2000s where it garnered popular support amongst cheddar enthusiasts. But then everything changed when they let the Camembert people in, and suddenly cheese shredding played second fiddle to Raclette melting boards
But we figured out that if you melt American cheese with Mexican cheese and let it harden over the Trump phone like epoxy resin, you age it with your own feces and then you smear it on the side of the Lincoln memorial and scream RUSSIA FOR Life while shoving a baguette in your ass, you know what?, I forgot where I was going with this
so they want more of those AI deals that tell you to mix in glue with your pizza cheese or to eat rocks? yeah curious how not more of this has happened…
I love all those “deleted comment” that keeps growing on Reddit. Users are waking up and destroying any contribution to that site, making it ultimately useless.
oh definitely, when I left reddit (ahead of the curve), I made sure to mass edit all my comments and posts and everything I could find one way or another, to leave as much shredded garbage behind as I could. But I still wouldn’t be surprised to find them analyzing the time of such mass edits and preserving a snapshot of content from a user before such an event.
Incidentally, do you know a way to overwrite you comments now? My 15 year account was banned for absolutely ridiculous reasons, but all of the options to blank out my comments cost money or require having a reddit dev account. Which, obviously, I cannot acquire.
Now, they’re banning them, which prevents users from deleting their account and annotating comments as a [deleted] account. So, it may be more dead (of users) than it’s letting on.
Yes. Which is why you shouldn’t deactivate your account should you get banned. If you use old reddit and hit all the saved and replied comments you’ve got, you can remove the stuff that’s archived. The most you can remove now is a years worth if you just go back through your comment history. I’m actually digging back through my own vintage mac posts and copying out my best tips and will reupload them here at some point.
I can’t see any useful application of AI within Reddit although I could see AI companies salivating at the prospect of hoovering up data from the site which could be monetized in all sorts of unimaginable ways.
Its probably going to drop a lot more now that they require sign in to view once public, indexed threads on google. It was a decent repository of knowledge while it lasted
Honestly speaking, freedom of speech is practically non-existent on reddit. How else do you explain automated bans, or mods getting triggered over the smallest things? You are not allowed to think or speak freely, critical thinking is virtually zero.
Whenever I brought up freedom of speech, the reddit mods would mock me with “freeze peach.” Many of the mods and admins are overtly hostile to free speech and hate democracy.
Ironic, because democracy is what made reddit great once upon the time. I remember leaving digg to go to reddit precisely because I felt I had more control and more weight there as a commenter. And they took an axe to everything that was once great.
Needless to say I have been banned on reddit since a long time ago.
As a fellow banee the only thing I truly miss are the niche groups especially to do with menopause and women’s health. The IP band thing just fucking sucks all over. But I’ve decided not to look there because I’m not giving them my eyeballs to make money off of
Runaway negative feedback loop. When you chase away all the good people from your clubhouse, you poison the social aspect, you have trouble getting new upstanding members. Doubly an issue when the clubhouse is run by the members.
I did not know what Lemmy was a couple weeks ago. Reddit pushed me out. I don’t want to be logged in or have an account with the way they harvest data. I got tired of weekly rotating ublock origin scripts and using incognito mode. You don’t want me if I’m not a willing data whore? Fine, I’m gone! I am now actively trying to NOT even look at reddit when a random Google search sends me there!
I tend to still get pulled onto it via search results when the stereotypical specific answer to specific answers are basically from there. But Lemmy has really grown so much since I first found out about it a few years ago (one of the big ditch Reddit waves of course). Still not at the “magical answer to the very issue I need info on” levels as subreddits, but getting closer and closer everyday. Also really cool to get and reply to sources from other Fediverse projects that aren’t Lemmy if you choose to follow them. Just so fun overall.
I just deleted all my comments, first edited them before deletion with power delete suite. It ran for days, but eventually, as far as I can tell, all deleted.
A few of the big subs kept sending me messages, that my comment was removed because I didn’t have email verification. My account is 15 years old I think, email wasn’t a requirement then. Crazy that some subs now enforce this to post.
I lost my Reddit account because it didn’t have email and they locked me out requiring email verification to get back in to an account that didn’t have email
I was willing to look the other way until I got banned for essentially no reason
Yeah, it’s always not a problem until it becomes your problem. Good on the reddit moderation team for taking the moral dilemma out of your hands and helping you on your way, I guess.
So many comments in here, I haven’t read them all. I have some conjecture.
First, the AI scrapers already have Reddit’s most valuable content … their “virgin” data from the pre-LLM years. All new content is worth substantially less and much harder to differentiate / filter between bots/AI and real human interaction done without AI.
Second, the search engines that used to help drive users to Reddit mostly all have AI summaries / AI answers right there on the main search page these days. A lot of people read those AI results, get what they want right from Google (or otherwise), and never click any links over to Reddit.
Third, Reddit has expanded into other regions besides the western / us-centric world, such as India. The simplest way to put this is that the content and users from those regions costs Reddit US users and by extension advertising dollars.
Fourth, the corporate team’s decision making is bad enough to be harmful / fatal in and of itself. It’s sheer luck they’ve done as well as they have this long. Corporate is not only the worst enemy of users and communities, they’re also their own worst enemy. It’s so bad that if one of them was a competitor or adversary that had infiltrated the company in a covert operation to destroy it or gum it up, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Second, the search engines that used to help drive users to Reddit mostly all have AI summaries / AI answers right there on the main search page these days. A lot of people read those AI results, get what they want right from Google (or otherwise), and never click any links over to Reddit.
Not just that but iirc a decision by reddit causes certain threads to only be displayed in search results without a post title and a description saying “the website doesn’t allow us to show you content” so why would anyone click on the Reddit links in a sea of other links?
It’s so bad that if one of them was a competitor or adversary that had infiltrated the company in a covert operation to destroy it or gum it up, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Fourth, the corporate team’s decision making is bad enough to be harmful / fatal in and of itself. It’s sheer luck they’ve done as well as they have this long. Corporate is not only the worst enemy of users and communities, they’re also their own worst enemy. It’s so bad that if one of them was a competitor or adversary that had infiltrated the company in a covert operation to destroy it or gum it up, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Nah, they just had different goals to what you thought they had.
Did they, personally, make fuck-you-money out of reddit?
Reddit did everything in its power to get rid of the users that made the platform what it is. Or rather, what it once was. It’s barely a shell of the former glory days.
And if you get rid of your power users who make good content and good comments, well, this is what happens.
i’m only here cos reddit sucks donkey dick now. I think they just sold out and in turn have lost support. I went there for the news, before it broke else where. Now I never get breaking news and 80% of the posts I see feel like they are for teenagers. For Profit Pigs
Now that is has been scraped to death and a lot of the best people have moved on, it is just a sad shell of what it was. Fuck Reddit, but I really appreciate everyone who participated.
Yahoo FinanceReddit stock tumbles the most on record as lack of new AI deals, US daily users metric disappointsReddit shares plunged the most on record on Friday after US daily users, lack of new AI deal announcements dissapointed investors.
