Year-end recap from The Guardian.
I left Reddit forever because they were going out of their way to actively make the site worse for literally no other reason than corporate greed. Then they were unbelievably smug about it and insisted it was actually a good thing somehow. Then they tried to gloss over the whole thing by letting everyone play graffiti artist on a virtual wall for a few days, after which they pretended everything was normal again.
Fuck Reddit.
Went back recently and found that the “back” functionality was broken. Literally, going back out of a post didn’t take me to the main feed, it brought me back to the new tab screen.
How does a site as big as reddit screw up basic navigation?
In response to such critiques [concerning the decline of quality], Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.
My sides went into orbit. It’s a Reddit spokesperson acting like the worst of the Reddit userbase: being passive aggressive and using appeal to ignorance, at the same time.
I haven’t been back to Reddit since June. Am I missing anything?
Yeah. You’re missing bots regurgitating old posts into new ones, and ai bots responding to that. You’re missing the thousands of samesies “What [movie/video game/song] do you like but everyone hates” You’re missing obvious troll posts like “AITA for defending my 6yo from nearly being a rape victim?”
I have been back occasionally when searching for some specific thing, and sometimes I checked r/all and my former favorite subs. My overall observation:
- Top subs already sucked before the API changes, still looking bad. I don’t have too much comparison, as I wasn’t following them anyway, but I would be surprised if they improved
- My former favorite niche subs went downhill, with lower frequency and quality of content. I assume this is due to some mods and powerusers leaving
Overall, reddit is still useful as an occasional information source for checking public opinion/sentiment on specific things, but for me, it’s appeal as a general “time-waster” social media, where I keep scrolling for an hour and leave comments is gone.
Reposts, outrage bait, horny bait (98% of OldSchoolCool) and whOleSomE bait
Fuck no
I still use a modded client to lurk on niche subs, but I completely avoid “all”
Nope.
No.
Lots of bots. Lots of reposts. Subs still on lockdown…
I feel like it’s unfortunate they didn’t highlight the open source options where the customer is not the product as their article closer, but rather of a quote about how Reddit could be such a better place. Seems to entirely miss the point.
They did do a beginner’s guide to Mastodon after Musk infested Twitter, but it does seem like they don’t consider Lemmy or Mastodon to be “serious”
Lemmy’s still at the “ignore it to death until we can’t anymore” stage.
