676
Goodbye, Reddit: How the Internet’s Front Page Is Eating Itself
(joanwestenberg.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
676 points (98.3% liked)
17698 readers
18 users here now
News and Discussions about Reddit
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
Rule 1- No brigading.
**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **
YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.
Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.
**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
:::spoiler Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I can’t pinpoint when Reddit died in my eyes. But I can say the long road to where it is today started with Reddit Gold.
Reddit Gold was a minor change that didn’t do much of anything besides offer a way to collect money directly from the user base. But it was the start of monetizing the site and every decision by Reddit management after that point furthered that monetization at the expense of everything else.
I didn't mind Reddit gold as a method of paying for upkeep on an ostensibly free site. If well-off Redditors wanted to chip in to help with maintenance resulting in fewer or less intrusive ads then that's grand.
The point when they started losing me was when the Reddit front page modernised into the Instagram feed looking abomination it is today and when they shifted from Reddit gold to the silver diamond thing they have now. No I don't want to make an avatar. No I don't want to follow users or have them follow me.
It started as the last example of old social media like forums and got metric'd into this half-formed freak of a site that seems to actively resent the users that build and maintain their entire platform.
Hell, I chipped in for reddit gold. I'm not well off, I just used the platform loads and didn't mind paying a little for something I enjoyed. Like so many others, my goodwill was pissed on, though, and I am just another paying customer that they lost. The API thing was the final nail in the coffin for me.
Spez and his executives do resent the users. He's on record making statements which make it clear that he sees the user's resistance to monetization as a roadblock between him and his money. The fact that people built all of the content on the entire site for free, doesn't matter to him. He actively hates them for not behaving in a way that gets him more money.
I can pinpoint the exact moment: When the admins actively gave t_d a full pass on anything they wanted to do in 2016.
That single act drove away more users than any previous exodus.
There were even earlier signs of Reddit caring more about profit than the best interests of the users.
2014: buying and crippling Alien Blue. Reddit could've built its own official app and users would have two to choose from; or it could have bought and improved Alien Blue. By doing neither, Reddit showed complete disdain towards user experience.
2015: Reddit fired Victoria Taylor. Except that Taylor did an essential job there, as she was a bridge between Reddit Inc. and mod teams; she was for example the one verifying people for Ask me Anything (back then it was a big deal).
You probably could find even more signs of that, if digging further. And while neither is as serious as the way that Reddit handled T_D, both already show that it was putting revenue over users.
There were a few around that same timer period. IIRC, that’s also about when the whole /r/jailbait controversy happened, and the site suddenly had a really bad reputation among non-users. Like before it had been seen as a weird site, but then it was suddenly seen as outright predatory. Users suddenly didn’t want to associate with the site. Then the t_d stuff happened, which just compounded the issue of users not wanting to associate with the site due to the bad reputation.
Reddit Gold is a great example IMO.
If Reddit's goal was to serve users, instead of profit, it might've still implemented Reddit Gold. A site doesn't run for free, and having another source of income could help to serve users better.
However then the nature of Reddit Gold would be completely different: