• 7 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • It’s literally muscle memory to click the Reddit app just randomly (tbh, I think it’s a full fledged addiction, I derive no real benefit just constantly click it). I could install the progressive web app of my instance in the same spot, but tbh I don’t fully like the idea of PWAs (i.e. if you’re going to be an app be an app, if you’re going to be a mobile website be a mobile website).

    I do find it a little hypocritical when people are constantly posting Reddit links.


  • Very well said. This will eventually blow over, but for a lot of moderators and well known submitters, it’s already too late. This will cause a death spiral where the quality of posts and moderation is way less because of said users leaving, causing more people to leave and there’s less total users/income, causing them to make more decisions designed to placate VCs/investors (killing old Reddit/nsfw), causing more people to leave, etc.


  • Yeah, honestly it seems like there’s no real coming back from this, unless the board gets involved and does a complete 180 (and also fires spez, that guy cannot be trusted at all anymore).

    How are you supposed to have any certainty that your communities won’t just be wiped out or the way you access reddit changed with 30 days notice, which is nowhere near enough time for setting up alternatives, right now most subreddits are going with discord, a bad choice but probably one of the only ones considering a lot of subs already have it set up. I don’t blame them for not choosing lemmy, its in beta, with mobile apps in alpha state (iOS not even fully released its on testflight).

    Its almost like, I’d rather have a slightly worse experience whilst lemmy is developed and there’s less users, than be in constant fear of further features getting removed (mod bots, old reddit, nsfw content)


  • I agree that a small level of centralization is needed. Communities need to be grouped by topic, i’ve heard the term “union” of communities (word which conjures up some good feelings haha). Of which all communities in the union have their posts and all from the others in the union on their community’s page. Idk if you’d call that centralization but you’d have to have some kind of leading or guidance.





  • Yep. Instead of developing things the site actually needs, like accessibility features for low vision/blind users, better mod tools for mobile, a better mobile app in general that isn’t horrible and a million other things, they spent all their money and time developing stuff like NFTs (of course), a video player that is barely even usable just to try and look like TikTok, shiny awards and animations to shill out, etc etc.





  • I know this is blasphemy and I’ve always understood how shit the app is, but I don’t even use third party apps (I tried them before, never felt fully comfortable with any of them idk) and use the official app. So this wouldn’t even totally affect me but I can see how bad this change is and why many people use third party apps because of said app’s shitness and didn’t even consider blind/low vision accessibility before now but obviously that’s a major issue, before the accessibility exception they literally wouldn’t be able to use the site on their phone at all, the mobile website is actually unusable its spammed with 2-3 notifications per page telling you to get the app, and they killed compact reddit which could be used with a screenreader. Also I can see despite spez saying he’s keeping old reddit and nsfw, he’s a proven liar and manipulator.



  • The main 2 changes they want to make before the IPO are killing old reddit (no/less data siphoning, css, no stupid nfts/animations/other dumb attempts at monetization) and removing anything nsfw (not just porn, anything considered nsfw like gore, violence, etc. This means state/police violence gets removed, anything to do with war gets removed.)

    idk how much impact banning third party apps will have, but if/when they get rid of old reddit, that will be much worse for them. right now at least there’s that as the last bastion of classic reddit pre-enshittification. Many subreddits will just outright stop working as they rely on classic css for critical features (as well as bots, the api will eventually be rendered unusable for them as well probably). Also, moderation is hard/impossible on new reddit or the official app. At that point, discussions about moving the subreddit to a custom css lemmy instance start happening.

    then goes porn subreddits. Tbh, those users and that content is actually a net negative on the business in general i’m guessing (no ads served, google/apple/mastercard/visa breathing down their necks). That’s still a hell of a lot of users lost permanently, which is X less on the active user count to show to investors.

    I’m just wondering, by the time they get to their IPO, all of these changes will have turned away basically all veteran reddit users and moderators. I don’t think they’re going to put up with rebellious moderators, they’ll just replace them (there’s already going to be a list of “reddit approved moderators” that can use mod bots, this is the start of that). Will there even be anything left by IPO time? Will there even be an IPO, if the users go down by 40% like tumblr? I mean, they could easily just pivot to a mainstream facebook/instagram/tiktok alternative, but will it work? Those apps already exist. Why would anyone ever go from them to reddit? They’d have to be filling a market gap, like tiktok did after vine got shut down. I just don’t see it happening.





  • When you put it that way, it’s pretty unbelievable they’ve done this. They had many developers willing to make more (and better) ways to interact with the site (wtf happened to “engagement”, isn’t that the literal buzzword these days?)

    They could have literally just either had a fair pricing system, ads in the API, and removal of ads for Reddit premium users (or even all 3). Even if their main concern was AI scraping, just make it so it’s limited and you can’t literally just download the whole of Reddit. It’d be very easy to distinguish AI traffic from user traffic.



  • That was my theory, and as soon as I saw the line about “Reddit approved moderators” having exclusive access to a feature (don’t remember what one, something to do with mod bots I think) it was confirmed. I doubt many very popular subreddits will be permanently disabled anyway (the only way you’d get anywhere, the WGA doesn’t say “we won’t work for 2 days and will go back to work after those 2 days regardless of what happens”) but those that are will just be forcibly re opened and mods replaced.