Long ago I posted on Reddit that publicly traded companies are the plague for our society as they are pushing to the eternal growth at the expense of their users.

I do agree that privately held companies are also looking for profit but the difference is that they are not subject to the immense pressure to exponentially grow.

And now the Reddit IPO comes to prove just that. I am fairly confident that if not for this IPO Reddit wouldn't try so hard to push those changes and would still thrive.

But at the end of the day, I am happy that it helped me to discover Lemmy and this debacle is why I am here and not there.

For sure the quantity of posts is the same, but the quality has gone down.

You can just feel it all over. My frontpage has little to no good topics anymore. I used to peruse for at least 30 mins easily losing myself. I barely get 5 now before getting irritated with the low effort material.

I mean I try to go on reddit and the content just isn't what I am looking for. I know this is true for all of you. I know the internet is changing and fediverse things are the future. I am glad to be off the mainstream stuff and digging around in the weeds with folks who might give me a ride hitchhiking. I like to think of it like all the reddit traffic are people who would never give you a ride if you had your thumb out, but the people here would be the types that are more willing to take that risk and make a new friend. Overwhelmingly, hitchhikers will not hurt you and everyone has a great time. Dispelling the fear we live with is what this is all about too.

The whole obcession with Reddit is getting a little too much and continuing it is maybe a bit immature.

I mean, I get it: I've left a couple of jobs during my career (now spanning over 2 decades) because they did some pretty asshole things and I had a choice to move to better pastures, yet after leaving I still had a strong want for them to somehow be screwed for being assholes, kept wanting to know how things were back there and would've been happy if I found out they did go somehow screwed.

So it is understandable, IMHO.

However there comes a point when you gotta mentally go "I'm in a better situation now and they don't matter to it, so there's no point in wasting any energy on them" and stop looking back.

Sure, feel free to tell others about Lemmy (for said others rather than because of Reddit), but stop wondering about Reddit.

PS: I wrote "immature" because as I grew older it just became easier to turn another leaf and getting over the "old place", so I reckon it's maturity, but maybe it's just me.

Profit wise, absolutely not. However, they are probably losing their most technical users. Generally the ones that have some sort of tech background or knowledge and see through their BS, and who are also much more likely to support open source alternatives (and third party apps) and have an easier time figuring out the fediverse. Maybe they care about that, maybe they don't (probably don't).

Yes, because it has lost some of its most passionate users. The only effect will be a subtle drop in quality to the site, though, which will be completely unnoticeable to the average user.

I honestly rarely if ever posted on Reddit. I just had an account and used a third party app to keep up to date with some tech stuff. But their behavior so revolted me that I came here and actually got involved being on Lemmy.

While I doubt they ever made any money off the crowd that left (cos let's be honest, we know about ad-blockers, etc.), if the most active users left, their content will suffer, and hence the website's general attractiveness probably also will.

There are small subreddits that are definitively private now. But only very small ones.

The cool kids have left the building and moved on to building the next thing.

Idk, I deleted my account when the protests happened and got a little curious when Brodie posted a video on lemmy.

Towards the end it felt like there were a lot more smart asses, dead jokes, and gate keepers ruining the fun anyway. It may just be me but it felt really unique/full of originality at first and then it really became full of the same thing over and over again.

Lemmy right now is too.. well not clumsy exactly, but it does feel vague with all these seperate iterations like .world or .ml and they are seperate and require seperate logins etc so that’s not handy at all. People are used to ease of use, this is where (for now) Reddit remains king.

I honestly think that Lemmy/Fediverse success is more valuable than Reddits downfall. With current leadership Reddit will continue to stumble and Lemmy will continue to grow. It's just a matter of time and either way Lemmy doesn't need to replace Reddit just become it's own thing. I'd rather hang out with you nerds than with bots and spammers on Reddit.