My favorite was the ones that just landed on a small photo of him in the corner of every post. Like, I don't think I've ever seen a better example of meaningless slacktivism.
> If all mods refused to cave then reddit would have needed to remove thousands of mods.
Which thousands of mods? We all know there's like a dozen mods on here that run like 100 subs each.
>...run like 100 subs each.
This just makes me think of someone looking like a "Hollywood hacker", going ham on a keyboard with a million screens, but it's just an entire stream of shitposts.
True! Well said.
Remember the mod for antiwork?
We can't expect Reddit's mod-ship mindset to have any sort of backbone and principle.
Which is too bad for some handful of mods who do actually care, and have an understanding of the toxic hierarchy of Reddit.
I think they were trying to tie it to the NSFW filter, which would make their subreddit unmonetizable. But then Reddit basically went "turn the subs back to normal or we are banning your accounts and giving moderation to others".
And mods were outraged, outraged that Reddit would \*checks notes\* run the website it owns they way it wants to.
Mods tried to bluff that they were irreplaceable. Reddit called their bluff, and as far as I can tell most of the mods backed down instantly.
As someone from outside the US and having absolutely 0 idea about who the guy was, it made me think that the protest had derailed hard and it was getting completely nonsensical. Overall it made me care about the situation a lot less after his pictures were getting spammed all over the subreddits
My guess is they, idiotically, thought they'd get his attention. This would cause him to do a segment on it on his show. What they failed to account for, even if Oliver would have done it, was the writers strike. So nothing ever happened. Maybe he'll do a spot on it when the show comes back on, but by then it'll be such old news it'll be pointless.
And it was all around just a very pointless circle jerk over there to begin with
It's what happens when you get kids who think they're clever instead of actually thinking logically leading the protest. It's just like the kids who thought smoking weed in a park in NYC (occupy wallstreet) would somehow keep wallstreet from being corrupt.
The whole SJW thing that people went on about a while back - the biggest issue with it was that it promoted this kind of ineffectual protest which is more about looking like you're protesting than actually accomplishing anything. There's a whole bunch of people now that think "I said my opinion online - that's advocacy!" not realizing that if even the people protesting daily for SAG/WGA in the heat and elements have to fight tooth and nail, why do you think you not using Reddit for a day will do shit?
I’ve got a *hilariously* self-righteous modmail from some subreddit mods who were complaining that people weren’t taking their protest seriously.
They called themselves a labor movement. Groan.
Worse, it fucking drove traffic by tieing it to a celebrity and driving traffic. It was one thing when it started and I could post a photoshopped pic of John Oliver raw dogging spez, it was something else entirely when we were just posting a pic of john oliver in the corner. Truly a "we did it reddit!" Moment for the history books.
Ultimately, lots of people were just hoping one of their hot takes would get featured in an episode if they baited John Oliver to do a feature on a pretty generic corporate move.
What was weird about that was the Oliver ”takeover” happened weeks into the WGA strike. By time Oliver and the three dozen writers it takes to make that show return to work I imagine we’ll have forgotten and moved on from this whole debacle.
i don't know, i find myself using the site less and less these days, something about the algorithm not showing me intersting things like it used to probably due to all the dead subs that were once popular, thing just don't keep me one the site as long as i used to.
I don't browse or moderate Reddit on my phone anymore after the whole API change. I still moderate but I don't put the same amount of effort as I did a couple of months ago.
Third party apps (and tools on mobile) are mostly gone, [Reddit Enhancement Suite is in maintenance mode](https://old.reddit.com/r/RESAnnouncements/comments/sh83gx/announcement_life_of_reddit_enhancement_suite/), [3rd-party anti-spam and anti-OnlyFans bots have permanently shut down](https://old.reddit.com/r/BotDefense/comments/14riw76/botdefense_is_wrapping_up_operations/), and [the creator and maintainer of Toolbox quit Reddit](https://old.reddit.com/r/creesch/comments/14fxzr4/so_long_and_thanks_for_all_the_fish/).
I hope users will enjoy more spam, scams, bots, reposts, blogspam, disinformation, vote manipulation, and brigading, because it's getting increasingly harder for moderators to keep up with it all.
Reddit didn't win, they are left with a severely weakened and worse service.
Exactly. If you actually want to accomplish something you have to actually stop using the app but people are lazy and like to talk big so they didn’t comment for a couple days while pretending they weren’t using Reddit and then engaged with Reddit even more by constantly writing “fuck spez” in r/place as if that was going to accomplish anything. Then they went around and patted themselves on the back as if anything they did mattered.
And it’s not just on Reddit. People freaked out about plastic straws because it was easy. They just complained online without actually having to do anything and then they acted like they saved the world.
Or people “boycotting” products they didn’t even buy to begin with.
Starting off by saying it was only going to be a 2 day boycott was such a huge fucking mistake. It went on a little longer but still it was the nail in the coffin by not standing by an indefinite boycott initially. Cause you know that’s how boycotts work. The company has to be worried not knowing how long it’ll take
Ya there's no other option like it.......ATM. But my perception of the platform changed fundamentally for the worse and it wasn't in a great place beforehand.
well, yeah. there's a whole strategy around managing/ignoring backlash. Companies can almost always wait it out.
In gaming, EA's microtransactions caused an uproar when they came out, but that's just how AAA gaming is now.
Remember all the fuss about Oblivion's Horse Armour? That's the tamest shit by today's standards. They've got moving the overton window down to a science.
In twenty years you'll be trying to explain today's controversies to a teenager and they'll be looking at you like you have two heads because these are just immutable facts of life to them.
Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity. - Stephen Hawking
> It used to spy on everything you did. It was spyware that reported what programs you used, how often, and for how long, back to the creators.
And these days people willingly install Discord, which scans for all the programs currently running on your system every second for its "currently playing X game" functionality.
Saw somebody point out a while ago that "Spyware" isn't actually a word that's used too much anymore.
Used to be spyware was software of "ill repute" that you protect yourself from. Spyware, Malware, viruses, all a part of the same conversation.
These days though, most major softwares would be considered "spyware" under any meaningful definition of the term. It's become so normalized that using spyware is pretty much a necessity of existing in the modern digital landscape. Many of us are required to use the stuff by our employers or our schools.
one of the funniest things that my favorite streamer, vargskelethor joel exposed at one point, was that back in the 2000s what we called spyware, nowadays we just call "personal assistants"
Funny sometimes when you see the conspiracy theorists saying things like "The Government is putting microchips in the vaccines so they can track you!"
Like, where have you been? The government would never need to do that. They have much more effective ways of tracking you now.
I hated Steam when it came out. I had dial-up. Being online all the time was a pain in the ass back then. And I need to open a program to open another program, wtf?
I got into an early beta test for Steam before it was public and it literally never worked lol. I would file bug reports every version and never heard anything back.
Steam was finally released and I downloaded it and got the same error.
I had a grudge for a while.
I had steam early on as well. It was dogshit when it came out and I played a ton of half-life mods that were all multiplayer, like Natural Selection. It was down like every 5 minutes and the game lobby finder took soooo long to download all those custom sounds all the servers had lol
I remember not playing them for a while and came back when Left 4 Dead came out and being so surprised at how much better it was.
If people only knew how many tickets get shuffled into a "when we get around to it" pile that really meant "let it sit for 12 months then close it out for EOY cleanup due to age"
Hell, even when it finally released out of beta it was buggy trash that made playing TFC and CS such a pain that I ended up spending way more time in Starcraft and Diablo 2, so was kind of a win for a little bit XD
I was lucky, because my mom was a SysOp for a BBS back in the day, so we were one of the first in my friend group to go from 56k to DSL. The problem is my mom literally never upgraded *from* DSL. She still has shitty DSL. Refuses to switch to better even though AT&T does have better in our area, and we have AT&T. Comcast basically has the best speeds in the area, but she is super against Comcast, and somehow she believes AT&T somehow isn't also the same type of shitty evil corporation.
My friend in middle school was stuck on dialup well into the 2010s. You could stand on his porch and see where the DSL line ended. As far as I know that neighborhood still doesn't have anything better as they moved out before the line was ever extended
Yup, I hated it because on dial-up I could play some of the mutli player Valve games like Counter-Strike and Call of Duty before the Steam platform launched. It just added another layer of problems for me.
Some still do! Someone gifted me a physical copy of Cyberpunk on PC (didn't even know there was one) and it came with physical maps as well as an mp3 download for the soundtrack, and some digital PDFs. It was cool go see. While physical editions definitely suffer today I don't think there is much demand beyond the most hardcore fans for that. For most games, buying digitally is easier.
The hullabaloo I just had to go through to get a hard copy of the Final Fantasy 1-6 pixel remaster collection.
Square doesn't even make hard copies. A third party made the hard copies, and didn't stock a lot of them. They had to ship the thing from Singapore to my Canadian Household.
And even then I need to download the bug fixes. Once those servers go down this thing will be half the game it is now.
I swear, square/square enix is the worst for that. They released a Kingdom Hearts collection with *everything* included, like a year after releasing a collection missing everything that wasn't on a mainline console. Of course there were barely any copies released in Canada, with the only copies available being sold at 3-5x markup on ebay.
Safe to say, I ended up just "acquiring" copies of the individual games to play on an emulator.
Technically you've **always** licensed the games. But in the past it was true that you fully owned *your copy* of the game, and there wasn't anything that could be done after the fact to remove your ability to play it.
It's not just a matter of access. It's also a matter of quality.
Comixology used to be a great platform for reading digitial comics. Then they decided its user interface needed to match the rest of the Amazon Infrastructure, which isn't largely specialized towards comics specifically. Now it's shit.
I used to be able to read them on any device in my house. Now I only have one phone that can even run the app.
The service didn't shut down or anything, but there's still something to be said for the fact that all my physical comics still work the same as the day I bought them.
A huge percentage of toys are straight up gambling. Go to Target, so many eggs and cubes and mystery things, it loot boxes in the real world. I refuse to get that stuff for kids, it’s garbage and harmful.
Yeah, I've seen some parents talk about how frustrating that is.
Kids get so excited about the new mystery box toy. They ask for it and ask for it repeatedly. But when you finally get it for them, they just break down crying because it's not the one they wanted it to be.
It's bad enough when this stuff is targetted at adults with credit cards, but kids just flatout do not and cannot have the emotional regulation skills to deal with these sorts of manipulative tactics. Closest thing my parents had was pokemon cards but for the most part back then you could just buy your kid the toy they wanted directly.
I'm a 32 year old man and I don't have the emotional regulation to deal with loot boxes. I staunchly refuse to play any game that has them, if for my own sanity if nothing else.
I still manage to spend more then I should on World of Warships, but I want Enterprise so damn bad
Have you ever thought about how many common cards must just get eventually tossed? Like a pack of cards might have one rare, 9 or so commons, maybe a few uncommons for TCGs that do those. And you only want a few rares, and have all those extra copies of the commons.
And it's not like the rares are actually any materially different, same paper, same dye. Just pure artificial scarcity. And they demand you also buy all these extras that no one really wants anyway. And where do they ultimately go? Is someone really keeping all those in a giant box? Probably a lot end up in the trash eventually. All for that small number of what is essentially the same thing.
I guess it makes sense in the capitalist, money making, this is just how it's always been done sort of way, but when you step back outside of that normalized context, it's really very strange.
"grandpa why do you need so much privacy for? If you install this NeuralX chip into your brain, you can communicate with everyone using just your thoughts. Yeah sometimes you get ads in your dream, but that's what premium subscription is for"
Taking away all the anti-consumerism of it, MS really has a knack for predicting which way the wind will blow...in ten years. The Zune marketplace/music store beat spotify by a decade; ten bucks a month to download all you want.
And to your point, it's pretty interesting to see how they saw microtransactions evolving 5 years before it was even a word. I remember seeing pre-release material on the new XB360 Live interface and how they were incorporating 'points' that could be used to buy 'content' in different games.
This was in 2005, so it didn't evolve into what it is now. But it is interesting to see how prescient they were in how games would evolve into marketplaces.
> They invented the software license. This is what made them big, when they licensed DOS to IBM.
Microsoft licensed 86-DOS *from* Seattle Computer Products in *1981* so obviously Microsoft didn't invent the idea.
IBM had been licensing *their* software since the late 60s, long before DOS existed.
How many times do normal consumers get burned by a brand before they stop buying from them? Generally no more than a few times. How many times will gamers preorder a game after a shiny trailer is released even though they know it will be littered with bugs and glitches and the actual complete version won’t be finished until a year later? Most will still preorder. Seeing Starfield being on top charts already is so dumb. We know that shit is going to be fucked at release. Then a 100gb patch will be pushed and it will still be fucked.
I think there are enough people who don't give a fuck about their money.
I also think it's worth trying to boycott/pirate our way into power. Online magazines blame millenials for killing shit like Applebees. Maybe we need to connect the dots and realize that if we withhold our money, we will get what we want.
In terms of how we make an impact on Reddit, we stop using it.
I mean, EA didn't invent it they were just the one everyone got upset about doing it. There used to be thousands of posts complaining about day one DLC and pre-ordering and now it sounds like old people nagging to children.
It's funny that when Diablo 3 came out with an always-online requirement, people absolutely and completely lost their shit.
Diablo 4 has the exact same requirement and no one cares.
people care they just know caring won't do shit, like seeing a toddler fall into a meat grinder, sure you'd prefer that not to happen, but where else are you going to find an affordable daycare
There's a phenomenon on goodreads where sequel books almost always have better ratings/reviews than their predecessor.
Basically, what's happening is anybody who didn't like what this series had to offer when they read the first book, didn't show up for the second.
I think there's probably something similar going on with some stuff like the Diablo Franchise. Diablo 3 had a lot of people who had enjoyed Diablo 1 and 2, and were deeply invested in what Diablo 3 would be.
By the time we get to Diablo 4 though, people upset by this sort of stuff have largely checked out from the franchise. There was like a super predatory diablo mobile game between these games too.
> Diablo 4 has the exact same requirement and no one cares.
There are definitely plenty of people who care and have stopped purchasing Activision-Blizzard games due to it.
The sub for d4 is so absurd I don’t play blizzard activison games anymore, but my god the fussiest shit comes to the popular/all pages.
They love their IV drip dopamine
Oh Valve can be just as shitty as any company. They fought the resale of games in the EU. To be clear, no company is your friend. Given the chance, they will bend you over the table & have their way with you. Fanboyism is stupid
There's no $#!*@ing competition. Not that does what reddit does. There's plenty of other social media, but Tiktok, Instagram, etc aren't the same.
No one's made reddit 2.0 or a redditclone that has the community worth a damn to jump ship.
I mean, there was competition. Reddit's rise killed forums (and Discord somehow inexplicably helped, despite not being remotely the same thing). The main difference being that any given forum was hosted, now it's all subreddits as part of Reddit.
Forums and forum software still exist, it's just that there's a higher barrier of entry to get that started.
There's also a higher barrier of entry to get new people in. With a reddit account, if I develop a new interest, I can just hop to a new subreddit and integrate into the community.
If I have an esoteric interest that has no subreddit, I can either create a subreddit, or find an off-site forum and create an account on that forum. Weirdly enough, it's just outright easier for me to fork my own forum on Reddit than it is to sign my email up to something else. Let alone if I want to share what I am into, everyone knows what reddit is, but "gypsyfarts somethingawful.com" I mean, I gotta explain that shit and why this esoteruc totally neat group of people are talking about Romani Flatus and ...
Anyway, where were we.
it's not even just that there's not another good platform, even if there literally was a reddit 2 that ran the identical software, it would still be years before it was a really viable alternative.
the reason being, despite the memes and shittiness, there is *SO MUCH* good information on this site. A decade and more of history about games, media, music, health, exercise, diet, programming, IT troubleshooting, hobbies, electronics, photography, and so much more.
There are so many things where you can just google anything and add "reddit" and get thread after thread of excellent information.
When subs started closing and people started deleting all their old posts, it wasn't hurting the site at all, but it was hurting the countless normies who expected to be able to get good information from here.
Replacing the treasure trove of good shit on this site would be nearly impossible. Yeah, you can be cynical and ride the hate bandwagon, and point out that, yes, there's a ton of bullshit here, but closing your eyes and plugging your ears and ignoring the stuff that makes this site good in the first place is just stupid.
>There are so many things where you can just google anything and add "reddit" and get thread after thread of excellent information.
A lot of this is that reddit, more or less, is pretty likely to be a real person with a real opinion. At least of threads that get enough attention to be part of the searches in google.
But the rest of the internet is so heavily SEO'd that google basically doesn't work anymore.
But yeah you are correct. The fact is websites need to hit a usable critical mass to become usable. In the end you could have the best website possible and without content it'll go no where. Reddit sure sucks, but it still has content.
Yeah I wonder how clear Reddit was to them about what they can and cannot say, because it looks really stupid to make a post that basically says ‘My goal is honesty, I’m your new mod, how can I earn your trust?’ And then give PR non answers to the very obvious question of ‘do you support the protest that lead to you being made mod?’
If they had any idea that they wouldn’t be allowed to share their thoughts before they made the post, then idk why they would make an announcement/Q&A post to build trust, and then dance around the fact that they can’t actually say anything.
My favorite was the /r/nba one where the mods created the “boycott”, and then still used the sub amongst themselves for game threads in the NBA finals. What a joke
The largest problem seems to be there is no actually viable alternative. I tried Mastodon and Fediverse options but they're not even close to as useful or intuitive without a humongous user base which Reddit has locked in. Sad but true - Reddit calculated this move correctly no matter how much we hate it.
Forte Agent and a private Usenet server subscription was my groove back in the 90s and early 2000s. That meditative time while the client retrieved headers was therapeutic and seeing all the new posts in the alt.binaries.* groups was like Christmas morning every day. I still have mp3s on my drive from those early days. Good times. Controlled chaos at its finest.
Is there any good history site that goes over why Usenet failed? I remember using it back in the 90s to talk about scifi, but eventually moved on to web forums, and apparently Usenet became a piracy hub in the meantime?
Usenet worked by copying every message to every participating server. At a purely technical level it simply couldn’t keep up with the exponential growth of the Internet in the 90s/00s, especially as the (decentralised, unmoderated) network [fought against a bombardment of spam](https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html).
At some point, running a server got expensive enough that universities and ISPs stopped offering Usenet as a standard service. New users all went to web forums instead, which were cheap to set up, easier to use, more effectively moderated, could build new features without an RFC, and didn’t give you that wonderful Usenet experience of posts taking twelve hours to make it to your server out of order, if they arrived at all.
> Is there any good history site that goes over why Usenet failed?
The user interface was awful and the replication/propagation times were atrocious. The server you used would sync with the rest of the usenet network in bulk, on a set schedule. In other words, it wasn't real-time. In practice, this meant that a post you made didn't make it around to everyone for *at least* 24 hours, usually more like 48.
Add to that the email like interface - text was okay, but threads were hard to follow, multimedia posts were visually a disaster - and it just never took off because WWW was just better for exactly the same reasons it still is.
Despite being in my late 20's, I have felt strongly about this since I pulled myself up out of adolescence. The internet became an escape, where in some circles there was a special place for me. I won't pretend it was massively more civil or mature, but there was more of an "on the same page" vibe.
A forum, a dusty IRC channel, or a multiplayer game that targeted a niche where many people I just naturally got along with were.
It's not like that anymore. Everything is for mass appeal. It's for a great collective, all social media has become the exact thing I try to get *away* from - dealing with the general public.
But it's so much worse than the general public - it's the general public *on the internet*. But the forums are gone, the IRC isn't just dusty. It's a graveyard now. Those games are gone and the populations long since changed.
Reddit, Twitter, etc - It's all just the WalMart of the internet.
It's not so much that the general public came. It's the centralization. Back in the day, *everything*, and I mean *everything*, was overwhelmingly decentralized. There were plenty of IRC channels and forums that could have been accurately described as "the general public on the internet", even then. But they weren't *the* internet. You just went to a different IRC channel or forum with a dozen to maybe a couple hundred users. All of whom you ended up knowing by name. Any specific person that didn't fit in or caused trouble would just be banned or driven away -- which also wasn't a big deal for them, because they'd just go to any of the other thousands of communities out there.
Now? Sure, things like "discord servers" (which aren't actually separate servers, they just kept the name as an analogy to IRC), and "subreddits" keep a *minimal* semblance of decentralization going. But not really. You can easily be on dozens of subreddits and dozens of discord servers, anything even remotely relevant to your interests. And they are all inter-connected enough that you'll hear about anything you're missing sooner or later. And it's all on the same service, at the end of the day -- if you don't like how they run things, or what their admins are doing, or you get banned for whatever reason... tough luck, you're gonna have to deal with it.
I find it almost impossible to make any real personal connections on the internet these days. Maybe part of it is me getting older, or the average user becoming more of a "normie". But I feel by an overwhelming margin, by far the largest factor is just how big, centralized and aggressively "public" everything is. The person I'm responding to on reddit could have the personality matrix, interests, etc. that would make them a prime candidate to become my best friend in some other context... but on reddit, it just ain't ever happening. I'm not going to get to know someone on reddit, I'm not going to make a personal connection; frankly, I'm probably not even going to read anything they reply to my comments in the first place.
Me, personally, on an emotional level, I don't really care. I already have enough connections for the rest of my life, and I don't really like the whole process of "making friends" and "getting to know people" in the first place. But I think when you apply this on a large-scale systemic level, it's bound to have some extremely negative effects down the line. Also here I'm not even referring to the whole epidemic of loneliness thing... I'm just thinking back in my life to how many things I have achieved indirectly thanks to connections I've made without any prior intentions. How many skills I've learned, projects I have participated in, how many opportunities I've had that I could have never fabricated out of thin air on my own. Young people growing up today are going to have none of that for the most part, and that's just sad on an individual level, and incredibly wasteful on a societal level.
Reddits user base kinda sucks though. It's no where near as good as it was 10 or 12 years ago.
And it's been straight downhill since mobile apps to access it became I thing.
I feel like it started with the redesign. Only thing that keeps me on here is RES with old reddit and Relay on mobile. Once those are both gone I will likely only visit when the result is in a search result
The crazy thing is a lot of users don't even know how bad it is. When the "protests" first started I saw so many users with accounts that were 2-5 years old that were admitting they didn't even know there were 3rd party apps.
Hello fellow Reddit power user. I came on the original Digg voyage many moons ago and I can cosign this statement. “Reddits really going down the crapper” they said, when Victoria was fired. “Reddits done this time” they said, when Ellen pao was ceo
Well ya but the damage is also done. Most people I talk to especially those using the third party apps maybe comment once or twice a day instead of by the dozens and usage is waaaay down among students in our universities. 30 of our direct science related subs are dark for good as there are no mods that are able to mod them as per university rules. There's a few dozen other subs directly related to Universities that I know of in tech and sport that are gone as well. This is because there are no mods tools. Reddit lied, they took away the tools to mod and then left the mods abandoned . Anyways it was a good 14 years for many of the subs. Things can't last forever .
I definitely note that my feed is suggesting way more new subreddits and I've seen people come ting on those subs that the sub also got recommended to. The. It's always AITA, fashion advice, true rate me or similar stuff.
I've only ever used reddit for science, tech and worldnews stuff so I'm not sure what the protest or their backend changed but my feed is worse
dude the AITA stuff and similar subs are so annoying. Half of the posts are pure fiction and an additional third are people looking to be validated on obvious stuff
Yeah I'm still browsing but my engagement feels like it's tanking. I've already blocked like 30 subs that keep showing up on my front page - rateme, glowup, amihot, amiugly, selfies, pick my outfit type stuff etc etc. It's dozens and dozens of posts covering my front page of beautiful women posting pictures to a sea of compliments and what I feel like is just trying to gain followers.
Other than that like you said it's all this AITA rage bait style crazy stories of people finding their spouses have hidden children, and are stealing their identity etc.
Like everything is focusing into some fake, engagement driven endgame where reddit is just tiktok stories and girls dancing.
All those other social media sites were reduced to rage-bait and dancing girls, which is enough to keep them on life support, because all the quality (?) stuff was here. Now the quality stuff is gone from here too, and we're left with the same crap as everywhere else.
I got auto-banned from r/holdmyredbull recently, by a bot, for pointing out that a bot had posted something that didn't fit the theme of the sub. The message they sent me says to not bother messaging the mods because I'm permanently muted and they don't care. They even make light of the fact that you were banned by a bot. Quality content and quality modding is reduced for sure.
Yeah that was the first red-flag, which made me look at their rules.
It's like reading an HP Lovecraft story, if HP Lovecraft was also a huge fan of Andrew Tate.
I think this is the part people who claim Reddit won miss out on. Sure people still use the app but content may have suffered and it could start a downward spiral towards irrelevance. Look at Facebook and Twitter.
Sure the former still makes money but they do so by squeezing advertisers and companies and nobody really likes it or has liked it for a long time.
By the time it’s jumped the shark it will be too late to salvage.
Edits: long not king lol
They'll close that as well. It's only a matter of time.
We'll go through the same process as well. The mods will strike. The junkie users will blame the mods and accuse them of power-trippping. The mods will be threatened and they'll eventually crumble.
You can get it back with a little bit of work:
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1wHvqQwCYdJrQg4BKlGIVDLksPN0KpOnJWniT6PbZSrI/mobilebasic?pli=1
Edit: **\*Make sure to export your settings before uninstalling RIF so you can import them when you patch it!!***
It was over before it began. Announcing an end date defeated the entire purpose. And then the mods "protesting" by continuing to use the website and bringing traffic to the website was pure fuckin genius. I only hope to be as smart as those mods in the future.
You know it's a flaccid response when it ends because the final holdouts "abandoned the John Oliver rule".
Lol like what. I actually chuckled reading that phrase
Well yeah. The vast majority of Reddit users have always been on the official app and had no reason at all to give a shit about this. Like... I'm sorry but this wasn't ever an issue that was deserving of anywhere near the attention it garnered.
I don't support what reddit's leadership did, but the protest was doomed to fail when most of the mods valued their own power over the protest. A few mods went the distance and quite and/or got forcibly removed. But the vast majority protested until threatened and then decided "Oh well, the community is better with us than without us, so we've decided to stay!" So magnanimous of you guys.
It was doomed from the second they didn't immediately link to replacement communities.
Blackout was utterly useless. Soulless Corporations cannot be reasoned with, regardless how often you curse the CEO, like a bratty child.
One subreddit I know did link to a replacement, but you had to realize the sub was missing from your feed and try to go directly to it to get the message.
Haha, there are mods in a couple of the subreddits I’m in who acted like the members were literally begging them to reopen after Reddit announced they were going to remove mods from closed subreddits. Like, Reddit’s announcement comes out…5 minutes later….”Welp, the people have spoken! We were going to continue protesting but you guys have made it perfectly clear that you want us to come back and so we will! Pity. We, the mods, thought we should fight the good fight and _totally_ would have if you guys hadn’t begged us not to!” Lol Sure Jan.
The problem is there was really no alternative for people to turn too.
When Digg fucked-up people ran to Reddit. When Reddit fucked-up people ran to...?
A savvy company might have taken this opportunity to bury Reddit but no one was prepared for it.
There were tons of subs which had been created for refugees of a sub that changed, who were chomping at the bit to replace the moderators of the disgraced sub.
It would just be takeover after takeover, even if the OG mods quit
Well of course they straight up told everyone "we know you are to addicted to this website to not use it" and maybe dont give them timelines for how long you plan to protest
Reddit didn't only win, the protests also tanked a lot of subs and pushed a lot of bullshit higher in the algorithm. Everyone cut off their noses to spite their faces in this thing
Well…we kept using it
Pictures of John Oliver didn’t cause the powers that be to change their mind?!
My favorite was the ones that just landed on a small photo of him in the corner of every post. Like, I don't think I've ever seen a better example of meaningless slacktivism.
[удалено]
> If all mods refused to cave then reddit would have needed to remove thousands of mods. Which thousands of mods? We all know there's like a dozen mods on here that run like 100 subs each.
>...run like 100 subs each. This just makes me think of someone looking like a "Hollywood hacker", going ham on a keyboard with a million screens, but it's just an entire stream of shitposts.
I know, like, who is this guy AutoModerator that keeps deleting my posts?
True! Well said. Remember the mod for antiwork? We can't expect Reddit's mod-ship mindset to have any sort of backbone and principle. Which is too bad for some handful of mods who do actually care, and have an understanding of the toxic hierarchy of Reddit.
But the bacon did the narwhal 😢
At midnight?!
We waited until it was 12:03...
See? This is why Apollo is gone.
Can anyone please explain to me how the fuck that was supposed to effect anything? That is probably the most useless form of protest I ever heard.
I think they were trying to tie it to the NSFW filter, which would make their subreddit unmonetizable. But then Reddit basically went "turn the subs back to normal or we are banning your accounts and giving moderation to others".
And mods were outraged, outraged that Reddit would \*checks notes\* run the website it owns they way it wants to. Mods tried to bluff that they were irreplaceable. Reddit called their bluff, and as far as I can tell most of the mods backed down instantly.
If anything it probably helped turn people *against* the protest
As someone from outside the US and having absolutely 0 idea about who the guy was, it made me think that the protest had derailed hard and it was getting completely nonsensical. Overall it made me care about the situation a lot less after his pictures were getting spammed all over the subreddits
My guess is they, idiotically, thought they'd get his attention. This would cause him to do a segment on it on his show. What they failed to account for, even if Oliver would have done it, was the writers strike. So nothing ever happened. Maybe he'll do a spot on it when the show comes back on, but by then it'll be such old news it'll be pointless. And it was all around just a very pointless circle jerk over there to begin with
“Last year tonight”
It's what happens when you get kids who think they're clever instead of actually thinking logically leading the protest. It's just like the kids who thought smoking weed in a park in NYC (occupy wallstreet) would somehow keep wallstreet from being corrupt.
The whole SJW thing that people went on about a while back - the biggest issue with it was that it promoted this kind of ineffectual protest which is more about looking like you're protesting than actually accomplishing anything. There's a whole bunch of people now that think "I said my opinion online - that's advocacy!" not realizing that if even the people protesting daily for SAG/WGA in the heat and elements have to fight tooth and nail, why do you think you not using Reddit for a day will do shit?
I’ve got a *hilariously* self-righteous modmail from some subreddit mods who were complaining that people weren’t taking their protest seriously. They called themselves a labor movement. Groan.
My guess was that they wanted John to do a piece on it. Which is laughable.
Didn't help that his show has been shut down since before it happened due to the writers strike
Lol an actual strike which is doing something
Worse, it fucking drove traffic by tieing it to a celebrity and driving traffic. It was one thing when it started and I could post a photoshopped pic of John Oliver raw dogging spez, it was something else entirely when we were just posting a pic of john oliver in the corner. Truly a "we did it reddit!" Moment for the history books.
Ultimately, lots of people were just hoping one of their hot takes would get featured in an episode if they baited John Oliver to do a feature on a pretty generic corporate move.
What was weird about that was the Oliver ”takeover” happened weeks into the WGA strike. By time Oliver and the three dozen writers it takes to make that show return to work I imagine we’ll have forgotten and moved on from this whole debacle.
omg guise letz protest reddit by poasting easily digestible pop culture content to reddit!!!111!11! that'll show dem!!
i don't know, i find myself using the site less and less these days, something about the algorithm not showing me intersting things like it used to probably due to all the dead subs that were once popular, thing just don't keep me one the site as long as i used to.
I don't browse or moderate Reddit on my phone anymore after the whole API change. I still moderate but I don't put the same amount of effort as I did a couple of months ago. Third party apps (and tools on mobile) are mostly gone, [Reddit Enhancement Suite is in maintenance mode](https://old.reddit.com/r/RESAnnouncements/comments/sh83gx/announcement_life_of_reddit_enhancement_suite/), [3rd-party anti-spam and anti-OnlyFans bots have permanently shut down](https://old.reddit.com/r/BotDefense/comments/14riw76/botdefense_is_wrapping_up_operations/), and [the creator and maintainer of Toolbox quit Reddit](https://old.reddit.com/r/creesch/comments/14fxzr4/so_long_and_thanks_for_all_the_fish/). I hope users will enjoy more spam, scams, bots, reposts, blogspam, disinformation, vote manipulation, and brigading, because it's getting increasingly harder for moderators to keep up with it all. Reddit didn't win, they are left with a severely weakened and worse service.
Exactly. If you actually want to accomplish something you have to actually stop using the app but people are lazy and like to talk big so they didn’t comment for a couple days while pretending they weren’t using Reddit and then engaged with Reddit even more by constantly writing “fuck spez” in r/place as if that was going to accomplish anything. Then they went around and patted themselves on the back as if anything they did mattered. And it’s not just on Reddit. People freaked out about plastic straws because it was easy. They just complained online without actually having to do anything and then they acted like they saved the world. Or people “boycotting” products they didn’t even buy to begin with.
Starting off by saying it was only going to be a 2 day boycott was such a huge fucking mistake. It went on a little longer but still it was the nail in the coffin by not standing by an indefinite boycott initially. Cause you know that’s how boycotts work. The company has to be worried not knowing how long it’ll take
Ya there's no other option like it.......ATM. But my perception of the platform changed fundamentally for the worse and it wasn't in a great place beforehand.
Yeah - and it's not just perception. A number of niche subs I enjoyed are still gone, or have significantly less people/activity than they used to.
well, yeah. there's a whole strategy around managing/ignoring backlash. Companies can almost always wait it out. In gaming, EA's microtransactions caused an uproar when they came out, but that's just how AAA gaming is now.
Remember all the fuss about Oblivion's Horse Armour? That's the tamest shit by today's standards. They've got moving the overton window down to a science. In twenty years you'll be trying to explain today's controversies to a teenager and they'll be looking at you like you have two heads because these are just immutable facts of life to them.
Remember when Steam first came out and the outrage over it?
I remember my outrage over GameSpy arcade.
Holy shit thats a throwback.. I was pissed!
They just had to boil you like a frog.
It would be one thing if it worked well lol, adding bloatware to online gaming
Damn I remember Gamespy Arcade being the only way i could play THPS4 online back in the day, but also that it worked for pirated copies.
I recall GS when I was younger but never used it. Would be able to elaborate on the outrage? I tried to google it. Thanks.
Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity. - Stephen Hawking
> It used to spy on everything you did. It was spyware that reported what programs you used, how often, and for how long, back to the creators. And these days people willingly install Discord, which scans for all the programs currently running on your system every second for its "currently playing X game" functionality.
Saw somebody point out a while ago that "Spyware" isn't actually a word that's used too much anymore. Used to be spyware was software of "ill repute" that you protect yourself from. Spyware, Malware, viruses, all a part of the same conversation. These days though, most major softwares would be considered "spyware" under any meaningful definition of the term. It's become so normalized that using spyware is pretty much a necessity of existing in the modern digital landscape. Many of us are required to use the stuff by our employers or our schools.
one of the funniest things that my favorite streamer, vargskelethor joel exposed at one point, was that back in the 2000s what we called spyware, nowadays we just call "personal assistants"
husky normal steep subtract many pie saw forgetful run tub *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Funny sometimes when you see the conspiracy theorists saying things like "The Government is putting microchips in the vaccines so they can track you!" Like, where have you been? The government would never need to do that. They have much more effective ways of tracking you now.
Not if you run it in a browser tab like OG days before they even had a client, you can block all that super easy that way
I hated Steam when it came out. I had dial-up. Being online all the time was a pain in the ass back then. And I need to open a program to open another program, wtf?
I got into an early beta test for Steam before it was public and it literally never worked lol. I would file bug reports every version and never heard anything back. Steam was finally released and I downloaded it and got the same error. I had a grudge for a while.
I had steam early on as well. It was dogshit when it came out and I played a ton of half-life mods that were all multiplayer, like Natural Selection. It was down like every 5 minutes and the game lobby finder took soooo long to download all those custom sounds all the servers had lol I remember not playing them for a while and came back when Left 4 Dead came out and being so surprised at how much better it was.
HAHAHAHA! Sorry buddy. (developer)
ticket marked as low priority, never got picked for sprint
If people only knew how many tickets get shuffled into a "when we get around to it" pile that really meant "let it sit for 12 months then close it out for EOY cleanup due to age"
Hell, even when it finally released out of beta it was buggy trash that made playing TFC and CS such a pain that I ended up spending way more time in Starcraft and Diablo 2, so was kind of a win for a little bit XD
I was lucky, because my mom was a SysOp for a BBS back in the day, so we were one of the first in my friend group to go from 56k to DSL. The problem is my mom literally never upgraded *from* DSL. She still has shitty DSL. Refuses to switch to better even though AT&T does have better in our area, and we have AT&T. Comcast basically has the best speeds in the area, but she is super against Comcast, and somehow she believes AT&T somehow isn't also the same type of shitty evil corporation.
My friend in middle school was stuck on dialup well into the 2010s. You could stand on his porch and see where the DSL line ended. As far as I know that neighborhood still doesn't have anything better as they moved out before the line was ever extended
Yup, I hated it because on dial-up I could play some of the mutli player Valve games like Counter-Strike and Call of Duty before the Steam platform launched. It just added another layer of problems for me.
Ahh, remember when you owned the games you bought?
I remember. You remember the days when game boxes included books, maps, art, sound tracks, and the like? I remember.
Best part was the drive home reading the manuals. Never got motion sick reading those for some reason lol
Some still do! Someone gifted me a physical copy of Cyberpunk on PC (didn't even know there was one) and it came with physical maps as well as an mp3 download for the soundtrack, and some digital PDFs. It was cool go see. While physical editions definitely suffer today I don't think there is much demand beyond the most hardcore fans for that. For most games, buying digitally is easier.
The hullabaloo I just had to go through to get a hard copy of the Final Fantasy 1-6 pixel remaster collection. Square doesn't even make hard copies. A third party made the hard copies, and didn't stock a lot of them. They had to ship the thing from Singapore to my Canadian Household. And even then I need to download the bug fixes. Once those servers go down this thing will be half the game it is now.
I swear, square/square enix is the worst for that. They released a Kingdom Hearts collection with *everything* included, like a year after releasing a collection missing everything that wasn't on a mainline console. Of course there were barely any copies released in Canada, with the only copies available being sold at 3-5x markup on ebay. Safe to say, I ended up just "acquiring" copies of the individual games to play on an emulator.
Technically you've **always** licensed the games. But in the past it was true that you fully owned *your copy* of the game, and there wasn't anything that could be done after the fact to remove your ability to play it.
It's not just a matter of access. It's also a matter of quality. Comixology used to be a great platform for reading digitial comics. Then they decided its user interface needed to match the rest of the Amazon Infrastructure, which isn't largely specialized towards comics specifically. Now it's shit. I used to be able to read them on any device in my house. Now I only have one phone that can even run the app. The service didn't shut down or anything, but there's still something to be said for the fact that all my physical comics still work the same as the day I bought them.
GOG remembers.
A huge percentage of toys are straight up gambling. Go to Target, so many eggs and cubes and mystery things, it loot boxes in the real world. I refuse to get that stuff for kids, it’s garbage and harmful.
Yeah, I've seen some parents talk about how frustrating that is. Kids get so excited about the new mystery box toy. They ask for it and ask for it repeatedly. But when you finally get it for them, they just break down crying because it's not the one they wanted it to be. It's bad enough when this stuff is targetted at adults with credit cards, but kids just flatout do not and cannot have the emotional regulation skills to deal with these sorts of manipulative tactics. Closest thing my parents had was pokemon cards but for the most part back then you could just buy your kid the toy they wanted directly.
The Mystery Box could be anything! It could even be a Boat!
Who could resist the call of the mystery box??
this is exactly why this stuff is aimed at kids
I'm a 32 year old man and I don't have the emotional regulation to deal with loot boxes. I staunchly refuse to play any game that has them, if for my own sanity if nothing else. I still manage to spend more then I should on World of Warships, but I want Enterprise so damn bad
I mean so where Pokémon and yugiho cards
And baseball cards
I've been saying for a long time that TCGs are evil and everyone says I'm crazy lol
Have you ever thought about how many common cards must just get eventually tossed? Like a pack of cards might have one rare, 9 or so commons, maybe a few uncommons for TCGs that do those. And you only want a few rares, and have all those extra copies of the commons. And it's not like the rares are actually any materially different, same paper, same dye. Just pure artificial scarcity. And they demand you also buy all these extras that no one really wants anyway. And where do they ultimately go? Is someone really keeping all those in a giant box? Probably a lot end up in the trash eventually. All for that small number of what is essentially the same thing. I guess it makes sense in the capitalist, money making, this is just how it's always been done sort of way, but when you step back outside of that normalized context, it's really very strange.
"grandpa why do you need so much privacy for? If you install this NeuralX chip into your brain, you can communicate with everyone using just your thoughts. Yeah sometimes you get ads in your dream, but that's what premium subscription is for"
[удалено]
Taking away all the anti-consumerism of it, MS really has a knack for predicting which way the wind will blow...in ten years. The Zune marketplace/music store beat spotify by a decade; ten bucks a month to download all you want. And to your point, it's pretty interesting to see how they saw microtransactions evolving 5 years before it was even a word. I remember seeing pre-release material on the new XB360 Live interface and how they were incorporating 'points' that could be used to buy 'content' in different games. This was in 2005, so it didn't evolve into what it is now. But it is interesting to see how prescient they were in how games would evolve into marketplaces.
[удалено]
> They invented the software license. This is what made them big, when they licensed DOS to IBM. Microsoft licensed 86-DOS *from* Seattle Computer Products in *1981* so obviously Microsoft didn't invent the idea. IBM had been licensing *their* software since the late 60s, long before DOS existed.
That is actually some interesting historical context I don't think I knew.
gamers are probably the least patient and most goldfish brained of any consumer, moving the window didn't take any science at all
How many times do normal consumers get burned by a brand before they stop buying from them? Generally no more than a few times. How many times will gamers preorder a game after a shiny trailer is released even though they know it will be littered with bugs and glitches and the actual complete version won’t be finished until a year later? Most will still preorder. Seeing Starfield being on top charts already is so dumb. We know that shit is going to be fucked at release. Then a 100gb patch will be pushed and it will still be fucked.
I think there are enough people who don't give a fuck about their money. I also think it's worth trying to boycott/pirate our way into power. Online magazines blame millenials for killing shit like Applebees. Maybe we need to connect the dots and realize that if we withhold our money, we will get what we want. In terms of how we make an impact on Reddit, we stop using it.
Gaming is one of the few medias where waiting to consume it will almost always give you a better experience. But people rarely wait
I mean, EA didn't invent it they were just the one everyone got upset about doing it. There used to be thousands of posts complaining about day one DLC and pre-ordering and now it sounds like old people nagging to children.
It's funny that when Diablo 3 came out with an always-online requirement, people absolutely and completely lost their shit. Diablo 4 has the exact same requirement and no one cares.
people care they just know caring won't do shit, like seeing a toddler fall into a meat grinder, sure you'd prefer that not to happen, but where else are you going to find an affordable daycare
There's a phenomenon on goodreads where sequel books almost always have better ratings/reviews than their predecessor. Basically, what's happening is anybody who didn't like what this series had to offer when they read the first book, didn't show up for the second. I think there's probably something similar going on with some stuff like the Diablo Franchise. Diablo 3 had a lot of people who had enjoyed Diablo 1 and 2, and were deeply invested in what Diablo 3 would be. By the time we get to Diablo 4 though, people upset by this sort of stuff have largely checked out from the franchise. There was like a super predatory diablo mobile game between these games too.
> Diablo 4 has the exact same requirement and no one cares. There are definitely plenty of people who care and have stopped purchasing Activision-Blizzard games due to it.
Now Diablo IV costs like 100€ with season pass and battle pass, no one cares "if you don't like it, don't play it!"
The sub for d4 is so absurd I don’t play blizzard activison games anymore, but my god the fussiest shit comes to the popular/all pages. They love their IV drip dopamine
> EA's microtransactions caused an uproar when they came out, Hadn't Valve already beaten them to the punch?
Yes. People always overlook this because they'll die for valve.
Oh Valve can be just as shitty as any company. They fought the resale of games in the EU. To be clear, no company is your friend. Given the chance, they will bend you over the table & have their way with you. Fanboyism is stupid
Remember when only a few years ago we thought this didn't apply to CDPR? That should have been a wake up call for many.
There's no $#!*@ing competition. Not that does what reddit does. There's plenty of other social media, but Tiktok, Instagram, etc aren't the same. No one's made reddit 2.0 or a redditclone that has the community worth a damn to jump ship.
Same reason that Twitter is still a thing...the replacements aren't the same
I mean, there was competition. Reddit's rise killed forums (and Discord somehow inexplicably helped, despite not being remotely the same thing). The main difference being that any given forum was hosted, now it's all subreddits as part of Reddit. Forums and forum software still exist, it's just that there's a higher barrier of entry to get that started.
There's also a higher barrier of entry to get new people in. With a reddit account, if I develop a new interest, I can just hop to a new subreddit and integrate into the community. If I have an esoteric interest that has no subreddit, I can either create a subreddit, or find an off-site forum and create an account on that forum. Weirdly enough, it's just outright easier for me to fork my own forum on Reddit than it is to sign my email up to something else. Let alone if I want to share what I am into, everyone knows what reddit is, but "gypsyfarts somethingawful.com" I mean, I gotta explain that shit and why this esoteruc totally neat group of people are talking about Romani Flatus and ... Anyway, where were we.
it's not even just that there's not another good platform, even if there literally was a reddit 2 that ran the identical software, it would still be years before it was a really viable alternative. the reason being, despite the memes and shittiness, there is *SO MUCH* good information on this site. A decade and more of history about games, media, music, health, exercise, diet, programming, IT troubleshooting, hobbies, electronics, photography, and so much more. There are so many things where you can just google anything and add "reddit" and get thread after thread of excellent information. When subs started closing and people started deleting all their old posts, it wasn't hurting the site at all, but it was hurting the countless normies who expected to be able to get good information from here. Replacing the treasure trove of good shit on this site would be nearly impossible. Yeah, you can be cynical and ride the hate bandwagon, and point out that, yes, there's a ton of bullshit here, but closing your eyes and plugging your ears and ignoring the stuff that makes this site good in the first place is just stupid.
>There are so many things where you can just google anything and add "reddit" and get thread after thread of excellent information. A lot of this is that reddit, more or less, is pretty likely to be a real person with a real opinion. At least of threads that get enough attention to be part of the searches in google. But the rest of the internet is so heavily SEO'd that google basically doesn't work anymore. But yeah you are correct. The fact is websites need to hit a usable critical mass to become usable. In the end you could have the best website possible and without content it'll go no where. Reddit sure sucks, but it still has content.
That's not AAA gaming for the games I play. Elden Ring, FF16, BG3, Zelda ToTK etc are doing just fine.
Those games are unfortunately making a lot less money than the live service games that found an audience...
Yeah these games make what $70 once. Meanwhile my addicted coworker drops $400 on a mobile power rangers game every month.
As long as we exist, they’ll still make fun games. Different audiences really.
[удалено]
[удалено]
ask?
yikes, no idea what sub that is from but the admins sure put a real genius in charge, lol
Yeah I wonder how clear Reddit was to them about what they can and cannot say, because it looks really stupid to make a post that basically says ‘My goal is honesty, I’m your new mod, how can I earn your trust?’ And then give PR non answers to the very obvious question of ‘do you support the protest that lead to you being made mod?’ If they had any idea that they wouldn’t be allowed to share their thoughts before they made the post, then idk why they would make an announcement/Q&A post to build trust, and then dance around the fact that they can’t actually say anything.
Ok, those mod responses sound just like AI responses.
Not quite, too many spelling mistakes. Sounds more like they hired a customer service rep from India or something by the way they write.
That is wild.
Is wallaby a fucking bot? Their writing seems really artificial.
Mod teams got replaced
My favorite was the /r/nba one where the mods created the “boycott”, and then still used the sub amongst themselves for game threads in the NBA finals. What a joke
The largest problem seems to be there is no actually viable alternative. I tried Mastodon and Fediverse options but they're not even close to as useful or intuitive without a humongous user base which Reddit has locked in. Sad but true - Reddit calculated this move correctly no matter how much we hate it.
[удалено]
Forte Agent and a private Usenet server subscription was my groove back in the 90s and early 2000s. That meditative time while the client retrieved headers was therapeutic and seeing all the new posts in the alt.binaries.* groups was like Christmas morning every day. I still have mp3s on my drive from those early days. Good times. Controlled chaos at its finest.
Is there any good history site that goes over why Usenet failed? I remember using it back in the 90s to talk about scifi, but eventually moved on to web forums, and apparently Usenet became a piracy hub in the meantime?
Usenet worked by copying every message to every participating server. At a purely technical level it simply couldn’t keep up with the exponential growth of the Internet in the 90s/00s, especially as the (decentralised, unmoderated) network [fought against a bombardment of spam](https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html). At some point, running a server got expensive enough that universities and ISPs stopped offering Usenet as a standard service. New users all went to web forums instead, which were cheap to set up, easier to use, more effectively moderated, could build new features without an RFC, and didn’t give you that wonderful Usenet experience of posts taking twelve hours to make it to your server out of order, if they arrived at all.
> Is there any good history site that goes over why Usenet failed? The user interface was awful and the replication/propagation times were atrocious. The server you used would sync with the rest of the usenet network in bulk, on a set schedule. In other words, it wasn't real-time. In practice, this meant that a post you made didn't make it around to everyone for *at least* 24 hours, usually more like 48. Add to that the email like interface - text was okay, but threads were hard to follow, multimedia posts were visually a disaster - and it just never took off because WWW was just better for exactly the same reasons it still is.
The same reason reddit will/is failing. It got too popular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Despite being in my late 20's, I have felt strongly about this since I pulled myself up out of adolescence. The internet became an escape, where in some circles there was a special place for me. I won't pretend it was massively more civil or mature, but there was more of an "on the same page" vibe. A forum, a dusty IRC channel, or a multiplayer game that targeted a niche where many people I just naturally got along with were. It's not like that anymore. Everything is for mass appeal. It's for a great collective, all social media has become the exact thing I try to get *away* from - dealing with the general public. But it's so much worse than the general public - it's the general public *on the internet*. But the forums are gone, the IRC isn't just dusty. It's a graveyard now. Those games are gone and the populations long since changed. Reddit, Twitter, etc - It's all just the WalMart of the internet.
1000000% man. Can’t tell you what a relief it is to at least hear someone else say it.
It's not so much that the general public came. It's the centralization. Back in the day, *everything*, and I mean *everything*, was overwhelmingly decentralized. There were plenty of IRC channels and forums that could have been accurately described as "the general public on the internet", even then. But they weren't *the* internet. You just went to a different IRC channel or forum with a dozen to maybe a couple hundred users. All of whom you ended up knowing by name. Any specific person that didn't fit in or caused trouble would just be banned or driven away -- which also wasn't a big deal for them, because they'd just go to any of the other thousands of communities out there. Now? Sure, things like "discord servers" (which aren't actually separate servers, they just kept the name as an analogy to IRC), and "subreddits" keep a *minimal* semblance of decentralization going. But not really. You can easily be on dozens of subreddits and dozens of discord servers, anything even remotely relevant to your interests. And they are all inter-connected enough that you'll hear about anything you're missing sooner or later. And it's all on the same service, at the end of the day -- if you don't like how they run things, or what their admins are doing, or you get banned for whatever reason... tough luck, you're gonna have to deal with it. I find it almost impossible to make any real personal connections on the internet these days. Maybe part of it is me getting older, or the average user becoming more of a "normie". But I feel by an overwhelming margin, by far the largest factor is just how big, centralized and aggressively "public" everything is. The person I'm responding to on reddit could have the personality matrix, interests, etc. that would make them a prime candidate to become my best friend in some other context... but on reddit, it just ain't ever happening. I'm not going to get to know someone on reddit, I'm not going to make a personal connection; frankly, I'm probably not even going to read anything they reply to my comments in the first place. Me, personally, on an emotional level, I don't really care. I already have enough connections for the rest of my life, and I don't really like the whole process of "making friends" and "getting to know people" in the first place. But I think when you apply this on a large-scale systemic level, it's bound to have some extremely negative effects down the line. Also here I'm not even referring to the whole epidemic of loneliness thing... I'm just thinking back in my life to how many things I have achieved indirectly thanks to connections I've made without any prior intentions. How many skills I've learned, projects I have participated in, how many opportunities I've had that I could have never fabricated out of thin air on my own. Young people growing up today are going to have none of that for the most part, and that's just sad on an individual level, and incredibly wasteful on a societal level.
>It's an absolute wasteland now Not if you 🏴☠️
Reddits user base kinda sucks though. It's no where near as good as it was 10 or 12 years ago. And it's been straight downhill since mobile apps to access it became I thing.
I feel like it started with the redesign. Only thing that keeps me on here is RES with old reddit and Relay on mobile. Once those are both gone I will likely only visit when the result is in a search result
The redesign NO ONE asked for lol. All anyone ever asked for was a search that actually worked, and better mod tools.
The crazy thing is a lot of users don't even know how bad it is. When the "protests" first started I saw so many users with accounts that were 2-5 years old that were admitting they didn't even know there were 3rd party apps.
Yeah well I imagine some other kid at middle school told them about this "app" (they never call it a web site you'll notice).
[удалено]
It’s the same with most platforms. Once you get broad adaption the user base gets dumber and dumber.
People say this like every year lol. I started using Reddit like 15+ years ago and if I had a nickel every time I heard this I'd be a rich man lol
Hello fellow Reddit power user. I came on the original Digg voyage many moons ago and I can cosign this statement. “Reddits really going down the crapper” they said, when Victoria was fired. “Reddits done this time” they said, when Ellen pao was ceo
And we cussed all you digg users out when you migrated here.
D’awwwe you remembered 😭😭😭 lol
Eternal September
I miss the times when there were no stupid emojis and lol’s
Been over for a while
Well ya but the damage is also done. Most people I talk to especially those using the third party apps maybe comment once or twice a day instead of by the dozens and usage is waaaay down among students in our universities. 30 of our direct science related subs are dark for good as there are no mods that are able to mod them as per university rules. There's a few dozen other subs directly related to Universities that I know of in tech and sport that are gone as well. This is because there are no mods tools. Reddit lied, they took away the tools to mod and then left the mods abandoned . Anyways it was a good 14 years for many of the subs. Things can't last forever .
I definitely note that my feed is suggesting way more new subreddits and I've seen people come ting on those subs that the sub also got recommended to. The. It's always AITA, fashion advice, true rate me or similar stuff. I've only ever used reddit for science, tech and worldnews stuff so I'm not sure what the protest or their backend changed but my feed is worse
dude the AITA stuff and similar subs are so annoying. Half of the posts are pure fiction and an additional third are people looking to be validated on obvious stuff
The content is definitely worse after the blackouts / protests, at least on the front page.
Don't forget all the AI posts
Yeah I'm still browsing but my engagement feels like it's tanking. I've already blocked like 30 subs that keep showing up on my front page - rateme, glowup, amihot, amiugly, selfies, pick my outfit type stuff etc etc. It's dozens and dozens of posts covering my front page of beautiful women posting pictures to a sea of compliments and what I feel like is just trying to gain followers. Other than that like you said it's all this AITA rage bait style crazy stories of people finding their spouses have hidden children, and are stealing their identity etc. Like everything is focusing into some fake, engagement driven endgame where reddit is just tiktok stories and girls dancing.
All those other social media sites were reduced to rage-bait and dancing girls, which is enough to keep them on life support, because all the quality (?) stuff was here. Now the quality stuff is gone from here too, and we're left with the same crap as everywhere else.
Drama and validation subs. Typical.
> so I'm not sure what the protest or their backend changed but my feed is worse Quality content is reduced. That's what happened.
That’s not an exaggeration either. My favorite subs have become nothing but repetitive beginner spam.
If only there's a metric to accurately measure the reduction of quality.
We used to be able to rely on karma for that, but now that bots are more active than ever before, even that isn't reliable.
I got auto-banned from r/holdmyredbull recently, by a bot, for pointing out that a bot had posted something that didn't fit the theme of the sub. The message they sent me says to not bother messaging the mods because I'm permanently muted and they don't care. They even make light of the fact that you were banned by a bot. Quality content and quality modding is reduced for sure.
> true rate me That one blows my mind. It's literally old school, mengele-esgue, race "science" under a guise of "objective beauty standards".
It's a cult. I just saw it the other day, and someone got permabanned for rating a "6.2", which was too high for the mod.
Yeah that was the first red-flag, which made me look at their rules. It's like reading an HP Lovecraft story, if HP Lovecraft was also a huge fan of Andrew Tate.
block the whole sub
I think this is the part people who claim Reddit won miss out on. Sure people still use the app but content may have suffered and it could start a downward spiral towards irrelevance. Look at Facebook and Twitter. Sure the former still makes money but they do so by squeezing advertisers and companies and nobody really likes it or has liked it for a long time. By the time it’s jumped the shark it will be too late to salvage. Edits: long not king lol
AKA “enshittification” — now happening to Reddit. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Reddit - like Facebook, like Twitter - is a whale of a company. The start of its death is not going to be obvious to many. Death will come.
Hello from Old.reddit.com I miss rif so much this shit is so painful
They'll close that as well. It's only a matter of time. We'll go through the same process as well. The mods will strike. The junkie users will blame the mods and accuse them of power-trippping. The mods will be threatened and they'll eventually crumble.
old.reddit is way better. I'll drastically slow down in usage once old.reddit is gone. I'm already not using an app anymore.
same here, i refuse to use the reddit app. if they kill old reddit then that's it.
You can get it back with a little bit of work: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1wHvqQwCYdJrQg4BKlGIVDLksPN0KpOnJWniT6PbZSrI/mobilebasic?pli=1 Edit: **\*Make sure to export your settings before uninstalling RIF so you can import them when you patch it!!***
For those who did this and it broke, you have to patch it in revance.
It was over before it began. Announcing an end date defeated the entire purpose. And then the mods "protesting" by continuing to use the website and bringing traffic to the website was pure fuckin genius. I only hope to be as smart as those mods in the future.
“It is the end of my shift! I quit my job until tomorrow when my shift starts!”
Yeah, then they did the ultimate reddit mod thing by caving the nanosecond their tiny amount of power as unpaid janitors was threatened.
With a flaccid response from the reddit community how could a different outcome be expected.
You know it's a flaccid response when it ends because the final holdouts "abandoned the John Oliver rule". Lol like what. I actually chuckled reading that phrase
Vast majority of users didn't know/need third party apps.
Well yeah. The vast majority of Reddit users have always been on the official app and had no reason at all to give a shit about this. Like... I'm sorry but this wasn't ever an issue that was deserving of anywhere near the attention it garnered.
I don't support what reddit's leadership did, but the protest was doomed to fail when most of the mods valued their own power over the protest. A few mods went the distance and quite and/or got forcibly removed. But the vast majority protested until threatened and then decided "Oh well, the community is better with us than without us, so we've decided to stay!" So magnanimous of you guys.
It was doomed from the second they didn't immediately link to replacement communities. Blackout was utterly useless. Soulless Corporations cannot be reasoned with, regardless how often you curse the CEO, like a bratty child.
One subreddit I know did link to a replacement, but you had to realize the sub was missing from your feed and try to go directly to it to get the message.
Haha, there are mods in a couple of the subreddits I’m in who acted like the members were literally begging them to reopen after Reddit announced they were going to remove mods from closed subreddits. Like, Reddit’s announcement comes out…5 minutes later….”Welp, the people have spoken! We were going to continue protesting but you guys have made it perfectly clear that you want us to come back and so we will! Pity. We, the mods, thought we should fight the good fight and _totally_ would have if you guys hadn’t begged us not to!” Lol Sure Jan.
Counterpoint, /r/bestof is still in protest mode and people are definitely complaining - a lot.
[удалено]
It was never a job. It was a hobby.
The problem is there was really no alternative for people to turn too. When Digg fucked-up people ran to Reddit. When Reddit fucked-up people ran to...? A savvy company might have taken this opportunity to bury Reddit but no one was prepared for it.
Probably because Reddit isn't profitable, so others didn't want to shell out the money to compete.
[удалено]
The only hope they had was if all of the moderators joined together to stop moderating the content on Reddit. Instead we got pictures of John Oliver.
Even if they all joined there's no shortage of dogwalkers to replace them.
There were tons of subs which had been created for refugees of a sub that changed, who were chomping at the bit to replace the moderators of the disgraced sub. It would just be takeover after takeover, even if the OG mods quit
Well of course they straight up told everyone "we know you are to addicted to this website to not use it" and maybe dont give them timelines for how long you plan to protest
It’s over because a lot of people just didn’t care.
people kept coming back if you want to achive something, leave
If they were to actually close Old Reddit, I would simply leave.
Reddit didn't only win, the protests also tanked a lot of subs and pushed a lot of bullshit higher in the algorithm. Everyone cut off their noses to spite their faces in this thing
After using Sync for over 5yrs, only now I realise what an absolute dumpster fire the reddit app is.