Reddit Migration

I’ve stayed off it since the blackout started, but I did visit a sub yesterday that I used to read regularly about a topic I haven’t seen covered here. I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say, but maybe I’ve forgotten just how much crap I used to scroll through before landing on something decent. Either way, I’m OK with not going back.

I think its more likely that the posts on reddit are the same, and we are simply starting to become accustomed to the posts\quality of comments on the fediverse.

Our eyes are finally starting to open.

The quality has been declining for years now. This last thing has only made it worse, but you're likely now noticing how bad it is because you spend less time on it.

The protest won't work. It's failed in crippling reddit. Reddit will keep going, but as a shadow of its former self, with increasingly shallow discussions and increasingly crappy/old/unoriginal comment.

Havnt checked so honestly wouldn’t know. Now that I think of it, it’s kind of crazy that Kbin replaced it so easily for me and I am on it far less (which is a good thing tbh).

It’s also testament to how good the experience here has been so far. And how crap reddits response as been.

We'd need an objective way to measure lameness and then review a large set of posts (on a particular sub?) from a couple of months ago vs now. Criteria have to be pre-determined to avoid the post hoc fallacy.

Average words or characters per comment? Number of insults directed at other commenters (measured by someone blinded to which group they came from)? Number of "controversial" comments judged by large numbers of up and downvoted?

I dunno. I'm not doing it. Not a social scientist. Just suggesting an interesting experiment.

A lot of small, shitty subs are popping up on r/all lately, I've noticed. I used to doomscroll and only notice I'd been too far when I started seeing stuff from subs I'd never seen before, like r/artefactporn, r/justguysbeingdudes, or that weird Talylor Swift circlejerk sub. That was usually around pages 7-9, somewhere in there. That was the sign that I'd been scrolling for too long, and probably ought to either touch grass, or at least refresh the page.

Right now, for me, all three of those subs are on the first page of r/all, along with other subs I've never seen (or rarely seen) before the bottom of the barrel, like r/newsofthestupid and r/rabbits. The one from r/rabbits is on the bottom of the front page with less than 1500 upvotes.

I’m dying with Apollo so I make sure to go upvote Christian appreciation posts and I do not look elsewhere

I ended up checking a few times via teddit and I noticed the exact same thing. It seems a lot of the non-mod quality contributors have already left.

Those who stayed are probably power users using 3rd party apps. So expect another big drop in quality on July 1st.

I want to focus on how I can contribute fediverse rather than worrying about Reddit.

I know this has always been an issue for the nearly 12 years I’ve used reddit, but I’ve seen a lot more of the smug redditor comments than normal that remind me of this guy’s skits. Usually I’d only see larger instances of smug know-it-alls when someone brings up religion (since some reddit atheists can’t help themselves), but I’ve personally been seeing more smartass remarks on the weirdest of things.

Has anyone else noticed that as well?

I think Reddit quality has been declining for some time.

There are two factors at work I believe. One, once something goes mainstream, you get a much broader set of the population on the platform, and much like real life, the idiots seem to be louder. More importantly though, updates to the platform deprioritized serious conversation in favor of mindless scrolling. Look at the new website, or at the official app. They are not conducive to in-depth conversation. They keep trying to distract you with posts from other communities that you don't even subscribe to, the goal is obviously to get you to keep clicking clicking clicking rather than spending a bunch of time on one page composing a well thought out reply.

And that shows. Really high quality in-depth conversations on issues of importance used to be far more common for me on Reddit. Today they are much less frequent, fewer people seem interested in real discussion or debate. And there's much more of the attitude of 'you disagree with me there for you're wrong fuck you'.

I think the recent protest and beginning of migration are going to make that even more prevalent. I think many of the smarter people who enjoy in-depth discussion and post quality comments are going to migrate to Lemmy or Kbin leaving Reddit full of idiots. I think that will actually be good for Reddit as a company, at least in the short-term, because idiots don't use ad blockers and they install the official app without thinking. It is of course killing their golden goose, but their actions suggest they have decided they prefer to do without that goose's continued services.

It sort of feels that way. I honestly can't tell whether I'm just filled with whatever the internet site equivelent is for "New Relationship Energy" or whether this place is better. It seems better.

I think part of it is the fediverse has so much potential to get better while reddit seems to have been gradually introducing more and more things I don't like.

I've found that the quality of Reddit comments has degraded over the past few years, with lame jokes and low-effort regurtitated talking points getting upvoted to the top of most threads. Which is fine. I'm full of lame jokes. But it's just not what I'm (mostly) interested in.

KBin, Lemmy, et al. seem to be better but also suffer from a lack of any commentary, interesting or otherwise. I expect that'll get better as more people engage over here.

On the other hand, I haven't been back to Reddit much since the great unleavening.

Don’t know don’t care, I haven’t been back since the bullshit started.

I came to Reddit in 2019, it felt nice then (avoided anything but tech discussions, though). Since 2020 it has been consistently getting worse, maybe before that too.

Anyway, centralization is bad. I'm not coming back.

I've been observing the creation, expansion, and slow heat death of Reddit for a long time now (had accounts there since it opened). I think that Reddit's decisions here accelerated a decline in content quantity and quality, but the trend had been happening for a while.

I think that the biggest issue behind this decline is infrastructure based. Reddit was designed around the basic concept that the desire to post and contribute to the discussion would be reward enough to drive participation. Karma is the point system for this participation, a number that only speaks to popularity, not the quality of a post or a contributor. When the community was small, this non-specific variable served the purpose of identifying content trends, but karma is very poor at describing WHY a post or comment is popular. Eventually, instead of karma being an indicator that someone had contributed to conversation, it's only meaningful metric became one of popularity or notoriety.

This meant that where once Reddit had been a haven for enabling discussion on any topic, it became a shouting match between who could get the most upvotes. This cultural shift became very apparent after the Digg exodus, and the trend accelerated as other social media copied Reddit's voting and karma system. Of course, Reddit began feeding off of their content, which was also popularity driven, and once the content algorithms started coming into play in the mid-2010s, it created a feedback loop of popularity driven schlock that drove most real discussion to fringes of the site.

We've recently seen this dynamic start to even affect Google, whose search results are getting hammered due to Reddit's blackouts, and whose search results have been significantly dropping in quality over the last few years.

As for myself, I still browse certain reddits that I haven't found equivalents for in the Fediverse, but it's pretty clear to me that Reddit's not really a positive place for contributors - whether they be moderators or posters. To some extent, I'll miss the reach of Reddit's audience, but lets face it, most of that audience is just shitposters and bots.

Will the same trend happen in the Fediverse? Possibly, but I think there's more potential here for positive change than there ever will be in a company led by the likes of Huffman, or for that matter any company or centralized authority. Besides, it took about 15 years for Reddit to condense from being a cool place full of new ideas to the condensed black hole of regurgitated shitposting it's become. I think the Fediverse has a bit more potential longevity than that.