The perfect site for reddit admins would be endless bots posting, commenting and viewing adds while said advertisers are oblivious to the con.
The first two have been going on at some level for years. The last? Well, it will be interesting to see the official reddit app's adoption numbers in the coming months.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.
In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.
I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.
What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.
Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.
But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.
And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.
Yup. Moreover, i want clients and implementations that help summarize and reduce doomscroll behavior. Social networks have value (imo), but they also have a cost and i'm tired of paying that. Reddit built a habit in so many of us to go back to it during any downtime, doomscroll more time than we wanted or expected, become overly invested in karma, arguments, etc. Reddit also has zero incentive to fix any of this, as it was perfect for engagement. Reddit is Facebook is Twitter, and i'm tired of those applications drugging my brain.
I definitely do not want Reddit. I want the value we got from Reddit, without the cost.
Some users wonder if the dev will be charged for having it still up, others argue Reddit can't charge him without having signed a contract. Everyone is confused as to why the API change hasn't made it inoperable....
Donald Trump brands US a ‘third -world hellhole’ run by ‘perverts’ and ‘thugs’ ( www.independent.co.uk )
Former president claimed American dream ‘dead’ under Joe Biden during Turning Point Action Conference speech
Reddit seems to be scrambling behind the scenes to try and limit the effects of the migration. Damage control: ChatGPT bots are spamming pro-admin, astroturfed comments ( i.imgur.com )
Apologies if this is a repost. They’re scared lol....
Reddit braces for life after API changes ( techcrunch.com )
Reddit and its communities are preparing for a life after the platform's API changes forced popular third-party apps to shut down.
People in /r/redditalternatives are talking about a "Reddit 2.0" What website would fill that role? ( kbin.social )
On Reddit at reddit.com/r/redditalternatives, people are talking about a "Reddit 2.0." What do you suggest?
3rd party app for Reddit, Boost, is still functioning well after July 1st ( www.reddit.com )
Some users wonder if the dev will be charged for having it still up, others argue Reddit can't charge him without having signed a contract. Everyone is confused as to why the API change hasn't made it inoperable....