I think many people were looking for a reason to leave but kind of felt stuck seeing all the alternatives being either dead or abrasive.

Lemmy seems to have captured the soul of what a significant portion of people have already been looking for.

I’ll be real: I don’t want to go back. I want a return to actual communities and comradery, and an exodus from “social” influencers, on ad-riddled and bloated soap boxes.

I’m done.

The subs I moderated have either gone dark, or are going dark in the next ciuple days.

And with that I let the mod teams I was a part of know that I am moving on. I hate what reddit did to the community, and my time feels better spent where it will be appreciated.

i kind of want reddit to die now. people talking to one another shouldn’t be monetized or debased through some spyware algorithm run by antisocial dickheads.

I haven’t left reddit, but I am sure I will be spending more time here in the fidiverse than sites like reddit and twitter.

if reddit becomes federated I’ll consider subscribing

At this point, it’s only going to get worse. It’s a very large Venture Capital backed company, on track to IPO.

Large VC/public companies goals will follow more of what we see with “mainstream” sites and social media. It’d be against their goals and their business to have less ads, less agorithms showing what their partners want to see and not what the user wants to see, less bloat on their front end. Even if the CEO wanted to go that way, he’d quickly be replaced.

It’s a self sustaining movement of capital now and users are annoyances that they have to deal to achieve their goals.

I’ll be honest, I started using redding decade ago because most forums were very niche, specific, with weird to follow rules, very low on users, and reddit seemed to always have a community for each topic I had an interest on. It still does, but the end is approaching fast, and I don’t want to search Discord servers, social media videos, or even ancient methods that are alternatives like IRC servers, mailing lists ; search results are useless in Google due to SEO and already affect other search engines

It all comes up to finding one or more sites that don’t look ancient or too mobile focused, and if enough people are going to use it and stick to it. Otherwise it’ll just be another corner of the web filled with a few crazy users

I dunno, the way they’ve (board members, ceo, admins involved in trying to spin things, etc) been acting, it’s pretty obvious they don’t want the engaged, active users back. They want to turn it into an ad server and user tracking hub like facebook.

Maybe if they can spez, build a new board of directors, and walk back everything they’ve done totally, I might be willing to use it passively but directly (as in reading things there via my app of choice, but not interacting) rather than only indirectly via search results when the only hits are there.

That ain’t gonna happen. If they don’t do that, my last act will be to find replacement mods for the places I’m responsible for, and then I’m gone totally. I’d have done it already, but I’d have to use reddit to recruit anyone at all, and I’m not willing to do that until the protest is over.

Hell, I’ve thought about just doing enough mod actions that admins would have to break their own rules to oust me, and leaving them locked. But I don’t like shitting on communities of people just because the site has gone to shit.

A week ago: Bring down the API costs. I’d have begrudgingly accepted paying a few extra bucks a year for Apollo Ultra.

Today: Nothing. Reddit admins acted like smug children in the face of the Apollo Dev’s good faith questions, then the CEO and admins pulled the stunt of trying to act like the dev threatened them. Then the CEO doubled down on that story in the sham AMA. I don’t want to feed that machine anymore.

I have edited and then deleted all my posts and comments except for a few final ones that will go soon. I will keep the account but only as a point of contact for some people until I get them all contacting my email instead.

Reddit was dead from the day Conde Nast bought it. Every day since then was a roll of the dice as to whether they’d attempt to seize more profits and ruin it, or not. This happens to essentially every public or aspiring public company eventually. The need for perpetual growth warps decisions and guts the original mission in the end.

We call it “autosarcophagy” or “self-cannibalism.”

As I understand it, Reddit also took on a lot of external capital investment, which only makes the pressure to perform financially even greater. I can’t fault them for making the decisions they have to make to keep their jobs, keep their executive salaries, and so on.

Long live the sustainable, community-driven, community-funded future! Nobody can screw this up for us if we are the ones footing the bill.

At this point, me run out of alternatives worth trying. Just signed up for a lemmy instance today, and liking what I’m seeing so far (even if communities are quite a lot smaller than I’m used to at the moment), but there are other sites that might scratch the reddit itch that I’ll try even if the fediverse stuff doesn’t take off. Reddit has shown that that they’re a) greedy, and b) incompetent at being greedy. And I’m not going to contribute to them again until I’m well and truly out of other options.

Removed by mod

Nothing.

Reddit and u/spez haven’t even offered an apology and/or reversed their position. But let’s be real, here - apologies don’t necessarily make things right, and they don’t necessarily erase what’s been done. At best, we can forgive. But people don’t forget. Whatever trust there may have been, it’s gone now. I’ve grown tired of the half-assed apologies made by organizations and famous individuals that are supposed to make everything ok and compel us to forget what was done. I don’t think I’d care if Reddit and/or u/spec tried to make amends. They would not be genuine - your true colors are visible for all to see. Welcome to the real world where hollow apologetic half-measures don’t fool anyone.

If I spat on your lunch because I was having a bad day, I don’t think there would be much I could say to defend my actions. Actions speak louder than words, and sometimes when you screw up there’s no going back. You’re just done.

One thing that irritates me about Reddit is how it’s converged with the rest of twitter, instagram and tiktok to be just endless scrolling through memes, gifs and videos. Reddit is so far from it’s roots and killing third party apps really does remove that old avenue. I do feel like commenting is going to reduce as people just mindlessly scroll through content without really engaging it anymore.

Hard to say… the resignation of Spez and withdrawal of plans for an IPO would be great, as a start. Commitment by leadership to focus on users and mods instead of chasing $ is also on the list.