I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Everyone is saying people folded, but what I recall happening was Reddit gave an ultimatum. “Open your subreddit back up or we will replace the mods”. And that’s exactly what they did. Then after killing third party apps they enshittified everything in the web/mobile web version too to try and force people to the app. They’ve even removed r/all recently.
People started calling out who wanted the better for reddit “tantrums” so the good part of reddit left, and many of them are here on lemmy networks.
As results Reddit’s quality today is basically Facebook. no difference.
Three things happened:
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RedReader did get a free api key for being accessible for screen readers. All the other third party apps got left in the dust.
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The people who were seriously mad came here. Lemmy was still a bit of a ghost town before these protests, and it was around this time that it gained enough traction to be a viable platform imo.
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The people that didn’t leave got waited out by reddit and went back.
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The overall quality of Reddit has very definitely gone down the last couple years.
Obviously I don’t have access to their statistics, but just from looking at it I think most of the higher quality posters have either given up on it or been drowned out by bots.
I’m another user who left during this and came to Lemmy. As a non-tech person, though, it really wasn’t the easiest migration, and I do think you can see through Lemmy’s content sometimes (love for Linux, well-upvoted IT memes, programming humor, etc.) that it is a different crowd that was able to make the migration in general.
My city’s subreddit is incredibly active, very human, and still gets a ton of traffic. I usually check it once a week just to keep up with what’s happening locally, but I don’t log in and just scan the feed titles. That type of valuable local platform is unlikely to ever exist on Lemmy, which is sad.
As soon as reddit is fun stopped working I left reddit, the only reddit is good for now is weird porn.
It seems reddit has made it even worse now. I cannot se anything anymore without installing their clunky app and making a burner account.
The enshitification is real and the way to fight this is by collective action and escalation. When the mods took action collectively it shook Reddit and forced them to ban the offending users. If the userbase maintained the pressure with a boycott there is no way Reddit Inc could withstand the pressure. However, the asset owning class have configured our society to prevent collective organisation and protest. Power is being concentrated in fewer and fewer white mens hands. This Epstein-class of people tend to be psychopaths and narcissists because those are useful attributes for amassing power. We see the effects of this everywhere we look in the form of censorship, punitive legal statute, lobbying, corruption, inflation and the rise of fascism. Open source projects such as Lemmy, Wikipedia, Mastodon, Linux, Signal, etc, form the basis of an antidote.
RIF stopped working. Now I only end up on Reddit if the search results says something I am looking for is there, and if there’s somewhere else I try that source first.
Lemmy is okay, and I need to filter it, but that was the same on Reddit.
One the plus side I spend less time online 🎉
One thing that happened is that I left and have never returned!
Fuck you spez.
By the end of the day reddit is feudal property and the asshole can kick out anyone anytime, as he uses the data for, of course, AI mining.
The brain and the heart left reddit back then, the gut and the asshole remain there.
Now its mostly the asshole.
Yeah reddit today is unbearable, the peak on internet incels and toxicity, just a tad bit below 4chan
I came here! Not everyone followed because the didn’t understand the concept of lemmy, and in general fediverse.
I found lemmy very confusing at the start. Instead of signing up to one site and all sub reddits are there, you can sign up for one of multiple sites. But they all somehow show the same sub lemmys. But then again they may not.
Yes, it’s one way to think it. Other way is to say “It’s like emails, you singup on an instance/email, and then you can email/speak with others from other emails/instances, which are owned by individuals and not companies. You can access communities and have conversations with others, as well have personalized feed page.”.
I came here and havent been on reddit since the API stuff. RIP RIF.
Recently I’ve been struggling though. The number of posts that just worsen my mood has been increasing and I have began to associate Lemmy with upsetting content.
To be honest I still have hope for this platform but I’ve been looking around. I’m not planning to go back to reddit yet.
Everywhere online is getting this way for me. I realized that it’s intentional. The fascist take over of Twitter was a real tipping point. The fascist realized that anti-fascists congregated and connected online, so they started a full out assault on any place that has anything other than hardcore fascist ideology.
Also, the introduction of LLMs has enabled them to really slather on the insanity while making it more difficult to filter or ban.Block anything that’s not a net positive for you. Instances, communities, users, keywords, etc. You will start to enjoy the communities you do interact with more as they feel more relevant.
Been doing that but it’s like sitting in a hornet nest with a flyswatter. Trying my best though.
I unsubbed from most political communities. The technology communities are still fairly political but I can handle it. My feed is mostly memes now (thank you c/shitposting) and stuff related to Linux and self hosting
Same for the first thing, not so much the second. I curate my subscribed list and find that much healthier than all, and certainly healthier than the reddit front page which I hardly ever looked at.
Another Lemming (I just made that up, what’s the correct term?) mentioned how they blocked all the news communities and how it improved their experience. Until then I’d just been blocking individual accounts. I took their advice and blocked news, but also politics, communities about certain countries, and anything else where the default seemed to be activism/rage/hopelessness related. I actually agreed with the sentiments or causes of a lot of the communities I blocked, but I found that those actually hit me the hardest as I would get invested in them. All this blocking has helped a lot. Lemmy is a lot less heavy now. There’s more humor and animals and less horrors. It’s not that I don’t care abotu bad things happening in the world, it’s that I start to care too much while being powerless to do anything about it, and then I was no good to anyone, not even myself.
RIP RIF can’t believe it’s been three years
What happened with the 2019 Hong Kong protests? What happened with the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests?
The protocol for handling protesting is pretty much locked down: ignore it and it will fizzle out. Outrage fatigue is real and people have jobs.
Easier when you control the media as well. Simply stop reporting on it, and people forget it exists.
