So, we’ve all had a… time on Reddit lately. And I’m here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the “now what?” conversation.
“I am allowed to hint towards the idea that we may have fucked up but I am not allowed to say how we may have fucked up if we did indeed fuck up which may not be the case. Could you, once again, reiterate what you think we fucked up and how we can fix the alleged fuck up? We haven’t decided to do anything, aren’t claiming fault, and are refusing to bring forth solutions to proposed issues.”
“Now that we have that out of the way, let’s chat!”
Reddit has shown the middle finger to users’ decade-long commitment, ignored all complaints, and demonstrated it doesn’t care, which has destroyed all trust.
Now, Reddit is asking, “Can we be friends now so you can continue to work for us for free? We want to follow through with our plan of cashing in and need your contribution.”
This isn’t a converstaion. This is comments be slung back and forth. I argue you can’t really have a conversation on these kinds of platforms and at this pointit’s pandering at the best and downright insulting any other way as every step the mods attempted to speak out and they ignored everything including forcing them open back up.
Honestly i understand how these folks don’t want to walk away fron communities they helped build, but how bad does it have to get before you do walk away?
Sadly communities rise and fall faster than the tide on the internet. Find something for you that you control and contribute to that, no some douchebag exec that sees you as a dollar sign.
Also there were no answers or conversation there. Just 3 comments from the admin, 1 saying he’d take the feedback on the lowest scored post and then 1 refuting something and the last pointing to that refutinf post.
Hilarious that his first few comments address why the sub is restricted to only allow comments from specific people on a post titled “more ways to connect live with us” then he only actually replies to one other person with some corporate PR non-answer. What a fucking joke.
So, we’ve all had a… time on Reddit lately. And I’m here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the “now what?” conversation.
acknowledge that our relationship has been tested
This is so emotionally manipulative / abusive, and says everything anyone needs to know about reddit/spez. It’s like if someone burns down your house and says “look i’m here to acknowledge that your house has been burned down, but we can still work things out bestie <3”
“I’m done bullying you now! It’s time to move on and be friends again. :)
…
What? You want an apology? Why are you so pigheaded and angry and clinging to the past and unwilling to work things out? We’re all adults here, so let’s be level headed and reasonable about this. Stop yelling. You could at least be civil. You’re the problem, and you pushed me into this. Don’t make me the villain.”
And of course that passive tense “has been tested” so they can avoid claiming responsibility and try to frame it as “both sides” at best. But really more like “me right, you wrong, I have big stick.”
they take note of the mod’s loyalties, depending on what the mod replies to each of reddit’s proposals. then when marked, they terminate the least loyal ones.
Reddit admins: “Surely nobody will actually like Lemmy. It’s like if you took reddit back in time 10 years. Smaller, more niche, less brand activity, pretty much just die-hard nerds. Who could possibly prefer something like that?”
To be fair, at least it’s easy to avoid the Tankies here. Once you realise what instances they congregate in you can just ignore any community on those. Once more normal people join up I imagine they’ll end up defederating to preserve their echo chambers.
The July metrics must have shown them engagement is plummeting, especially content submissions, which have been garbage since the blackout. One look at r/all shows most posts being up for hours and sometimes days at a time - it used to be a matter of minutes. Doubtless this is also reflecting in their traffic metrics as well.
As someone who contributed there since the pre-Digg days, after discovering the Fediverse, I'm never going back. Reddit arrogantly assumed that there was no other platform mods and contributors could go to that would provide what they do. But when it comes down to it, the Fediverse does what Reddit did, with more features, flexibility, and without the threat of centralized mismanagement. The only thing Reddit had that the Fediverse doesn't was an audience of millions, but the audience follows the content, and the best place to create content online is right here, right now, right here, right now, right here, right now.....
Welcome to the next evolution of the web, Reddit, and to the realization that you pushed your audience to evolve past their need for you.
I also did the delete post/comment thing with the delete script before api is gone for good. Put up a browser container before even search clicking anything on reddit.(only search for things that still exist, not even logging in.) I only post engage on lemmy now.
Don’t forget they deleted premium and awards completely. They seem to be making the worst possible decisions at every turn. It’s absolutely breathtaking.
And that one I REALLY don’t understand. They kept saying they wanted to be profitable, but then intentionally cut off a primary source of profit?? Oh to be a fly on the wall for THAT meeting…
Well, that would explain premium at least, but weren’t many of the awards purely vanity? Or were they worried that people wouldn’t buy them because it no longer gives the recipient premium? Either way I’ surprised that their first response was removing them entirely instead of raising prices, eliminating only premium to see if people still bought awards, or like, literally anything else
The cynical side of me thinks that perhaps the recent “enshittification” of large platforms like reddit and twitter is actually part of a larger campaign of class warfare.
There’s been a very noticable discontent among average working class people since the pandemic, when “essential employees” realized that’s just a euphemism for “your health and life don’t matter”. There’s been a lot of noticeable efforts by workers to organize and exercise their power since then – Starbucks, Amazon, UPS, the railworkers etc. The most high profile attempts in recent history.
The common denominator has been that reddit and twitter have been the main hubs through which people have been organizing and raising widespread awareness. And they are movements that are starting to bridge political gaps as even right-leaning people realize they’re getting screwed by hyper-capitalism.
So part of me thinks the destruction of these platforms is not out of incompetence, but is a deliberate attack on that growing consciousness and an attempt by the corporate world to exert control.
Interesting, however I tend to disagree. Although these sites have been good means of organizing, the corporate overlords had to know that alternatives would quickly replace them if they burned them down. Seems more likely that they are desperately trying to monetize these sites, but just way too out of touch with how hard us working class plebes are being squeezed from every angle and literally can’t afford to pay for the most basic form of entertainment like this. Literally, I can hardly leave my house without paying something to exist in a public space. I’ll be damned if I pay more than I already do (a device, internet, electricity) to exist in public online spaces.
Unfortunately Netflix’ plan to squeeze even more out of people seems to have worked though :/ I was hoping for the same effect there, i.e. that people would instead resort to alternatives like piracy… Maybe these are different audiences though? Or is it maybe more important to people to have entertainment to escape real life (like streaming services) than entertainment with a flavor of empowerment?
It’s like… I keep imagining what if I were a Manchurian Candidate CEO and tried to destroy the entire value of my company as surely as possible before being found out, what decisions would I make? And I must say, what spez and musk are doing keeps surprising me at every turn, because even in my imagination I have not come up with schemes as effective as theirs.
Don’t worry they’ve rolled out a subscription now! You can pay $50 a year to see a bunch of reposts and propagand bots while the admins jerk each other off!
Damn that brings back high school memories - thanks! I totally agree it fits as well.
I went with the Fat Boy Slim vid for the evolution theme and the fact that the guy on the bench at the end was the best analogy that came to mind for Reddit in its current state. Jesus Jones seems to be speaking to how I feel after discovering the Fediverse.
while reading you post, I visited reddit. the latest i’ seein on HOT All and HOT Popular is 6hours old post and the oldest is 15 hours. It truly has slowed down over there. and I did not see much interesting original content, most are reposts.
Yep - I watched the same thing happen at Digg after they went down the path Reddit is now. Within 3 months of their infamous redesign, it was a ghost town.
Reddit will likely limp on longer, but I think they severely underestimated how badly they've harmed their own business.
Prior to the API fiasco, Reddit Inc had demonstrated a pattern of promising changes to the mods which they failed to deliver timely if at all. They’ve acknowledged this pattern, promised to do better, then failed to deliver time and again. That part isn’t new.
Then the API changes were announced and the Reddit community gave Reddit Inc the loudest and most decisive rebuke they ever have. That was the feedback conversation. And Reddit Inc went forward with their plan unchanged. No concessions were made. No concerns were addressed or alleviated. Reddit Inc was informed of what this decision would break and they went ahead and broke it anyway.
As a former mod, there is nothing left to discuss. There is no reason to believe Reddit Inc will act on anything that doesn’t agree with what they’ve already decided to do. I’m not going back to that kind of abusive relationship. They had their chance to listen to feedback and made it clear that they won’t.
That’s a great point. The entire last 2 months have been continuous feedback sessions. The Ama with spez is full of well upvoted feedback. There was a simple 5(?) item list with direct feedback and requests during the blackout with steps on how to accomplish it.
Reddit inc proved in the last to months what they do with feedback
Very well said! Reddit’s lack of any response to feedback is one thing. However, to actively act like there has not been provided feedback already is disingenuous and well just more of what Reddit has proven they want to be. If they would come out and actually address the already provided feedback, I still wouldn’t trust them as far as I could metaphorically throw them.
I modded a 10M+ sub for years and years and it is laughable how inept reddit’s engineering team must be when it comes to developing mod tools. They literally have open source teams hacking mod tools into browser extensions and they still couldn’t figure it out.
After a while it became abundantly clear that this kind of boring, iterative feature engineering was just not well funded compared to other parts of the company.
Add comment