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Reddit is the perfect metaphor for America. What was once a beautiful and accessible tapestry of independent contributions, has been gated and monetized. Now it is a place for slop, misinformation, and vitriol.
That it receives support in this form speaks to the mental health of its participants.
What was once a beautiful and accessible tapestry of independent contributions
Reddit has been flooded with bots for decades. Bot engagement was a strategy the firm used to outcompetes Digg, as admins discovered any kind of engagement in comments juiced human participation.
The site’s had quality contributions in the past. I’d argue it still does, in the more neglected and low pop corners of the site. But it’s central thesis of stack-ranked engagement and search optimized meta-tagging fueled the worst kind of online participation straight back to the early days.
Reddit’s last ten years of decline has more to do with the overall decline of the Internet as a service than anything the admins have done directly. Humans have been crowded out by automated promotion tools and AI Slop everywhere. Reddit’s just a big popular spot that got hit hardest.
It was never a good site.
i did make my script that cross posts from redddit yesterday so that might have something to do with it
Checks the P/E
106
Still absurdly overvalued. Let me know when it gets under 20
deleted by creator
Diggnation on revision 3 before YouTube existed
digg… A blast from the past!
For context, one year:
And that’s without the full vertical axis. There’s like $100 of empty space beneath what’s showing.
Not to mention it already bounced back…
The image shows a line that goes up and down, ending about the same value as it started
Who needs AI when you can answer your own prompts!
That same post on Reddit was what encouraged me to look for alternatives. So here I am…
Well welcome aboard! Lemmy is a great substitution once you learn to cope with the fact that there is less content generally, but it is a much better community. Of course that depends on the instance you choose but you can always just silence the ones you don’t want. I came here back during the api fiasco and I’ve never looked back. I can’t even imagine using Reddit now. My wife still scrolls on it and it’s so cringe, all bots and the same tired inside jokes. I like it here much better. We still get dumb jokes but it isn’t nearly as bad as Reddit.
Welcome to Lemmy🎉
Totally forgot about digg, did not even know it was making a comeback. It even has the old logo on it, holy nostalgia
it’s not down because of digg, literally no investor cares about digg. It’s down because ad spending is down. Ad networks are spending steady on places like google and meta but they’re spending less on reddit.
Apparently this is because reddit sucks at the targeted ad game part and the advertisers feel they get a better return by just building a presence on the platform (eg bots that go “oh that’s cool. By the way have you tried the new Taco Bell™ PepsiCo™ Shitbowl®, now with 10% less petroleum byproducts?”).
This likely means they will become more aggressive about data collection and backend analysis of that data to get conversions up but they’ve been doing this for ages already. Reddits staff ballooned up long before the API fiasco and most of the hires were related to analytics. It only works if they can shift the culture away from nerd haven (aka people with adblockers who despise being advertised to and won’t click through) to facebook grandmas and ig normies that apparently love clicking ads.
They’re at least somewhat successful: while I and most of the people on this platform have shifted away from reddit they aren’t bleeding users like you want to believe. They’re not seeing exponential growth either, but they are seeing shifts to some of those populations. Anecdotally I have several family members in their 40s and 50s who were known for facebook drama and they are adopting tiktok and reddit nowadays. They eat up the obviously fake shit on relationshipadvice and places like that bc they’re primed from spending all day scrolling ig and youtube shorts to just digest content without any questioning of veracity and they ultimately love the outrage cycle.
All you said is probably accurate, but this one little dip was probably unrelated. It’s already back up to where it was.
Has ICE been advertising on /r/donald ?
So it’s only up by about 400% instead of 410%.
As a reminder, that any social network can be captured, if it relies on central control.
But competition is good at least.
Unfortunately probably temporary. Digg is very unlikely to be a better reddit. They dont have the content or the users.
They’re very unlikely to be a better reddit because they’re just another walled garden and will end up the same way if they manage to be successful.
Excuse me ? How is that a reason ?
That’s pretty nonsensical logic.
By that logic, reddit never would have been a thing, because they didn’t have the content or the users, because they were all on digg.
No one migrated en masse to Lemmy because making an account here is too much work for someone to just hop on over and check out.
Reddit started in a VERY different online landscape, Lemmy got a huge boost from the APIpocolipse, and is still pretty small compared to reddit.
Reddit was nothing but an unused digg clone untill digg screwed themselves so everyone just moved over.
Lol wut. There has been massive migration to lemmy.
And the content quality dropped after.
The user base on Lemmy is 40k to 60k. It’s held there for the past year. Lemmy did get a big increase compared to the sub 10k a few years ago, but a total of 50k users is still miniscule by comparison.
There has been massive migration to lemmy.
…for varying definitions of “massive.” I can basically guarantee that reddit didn’t even notice.
No one migrated en masse to Lemmy because making an account here is too much work for someone to just hop on over and check out.
On the plus side, Lemmy doesn’t force you to make an account in order to view it. That’s becoming increasingly rare these days. It used to be normal to lurk for a while and get a feel for a site before taking the jump to making an account, but so many places won’t let you view a damn thing unless you sign up (and then when you have an account, they try to force their app onto you. Because of course.)
At least with Lemmy, newcomers can browse around and decide if making the account is worth it. The choices involved in picking an instance might not draw in crowds, but hopefully it’ll draw in those who actually want to engage with the site. Quality over quantity.
You can browse digg and reddit without an account.
I agree with some quality over quantity, but we really need a bigger base than 50k to get more people on. With only 50k there’s pretty much no user base for any instances\topics that aren’t very popular.
For instance, there’s no user base for an instance about yo-yo’s here. But reddit is so big that \throwers has a subscriber count as large as the entire user base of Lemmy. We don’t need 50,000,000 people here, but having a couple million would make a world of difference.
Ok, let me add this to the logic: reddit is not bad enough for most users to move away from it.
Most people leave Reddit involuntarily, when they suddenly get permabanned for no reason, because a mod was in a bad mood that day.
If digg opened up api calls (no idea what they’re at on this right now) and has better implementation for keeping out bots with fewer ads; all the sheep will enjoy being a part of a mass exodus.
It was less bad on digg around 2010 or so when everyone bailed from there to reddit, than what reddit currently is right now.
It’s still stupid easy to make an account and create a sub. I’ve been on the internet since no one owned a cell phone and a modem gave you less than 3KB\s speeds. I’ve watched a lot of .coms that seemed unstoppable become worthless in a manner of a few months. If a few million people decide to head over to digg, the other 40 million will happily follow. It will be fun for them to do. It happening is anyone’s guess.
There was a time when aol owned the internet, dogpile was the greatest search engine, Yahoo was the defacto email provider, Craigslist was the only and best way to make local sales, and MySpace was where you put yourself up at on the internet.
BBS Prodigy CompuServe Slashdot Fark Kuro5hin Digg Reddit Lemmy Digg?
Say it ain’t so
Bring as many good Reddit users to Lemmy or Piefed and make it go down to zero.
good reddit users
You have a contradiction
Everyone who left before me is a pinko troll.
Everyone who left after me is a bad idiot.
diggs front page is more appealing than piefed or lemmys ever is (I prefer piefed/lemmy) But if I didn’t join these and just got banned off reddit, id be all over digg and not considering piefed or lemmy because of the perceived barrrier, might not even hear about them because of no advertising
