Why is this subreddit now just askreddit for movies?
Some time in the last few months, r/movies has been entirely consumed by askreddit-style questions like “What’s your favorite hidden gem??” or “What actor fell off the map??”
[…]
What is now causing all these unique, seemingly-non-bot posters to suddenly start flooding this particular subreddit with their discussion posts, instead of going to askreddit? Did the whole reddit protest shit change the moderation rules? Has the subreddit been infiltrated by a secret Buzzfeed content farming cabal? I unsubscribed from r/askreddit because I got sick of this shit, but now it’s back on r/movies!
What is going on??
I think the comments are most interesting though
Because the audience for reddit has dwindled since July. Reddits offial site and app push controversial posts over just well yovkted ones. Most controversial posts asks inane questions. Then there’s bots reposting those questions for karma and then websites juicing social media for content to get crammed down your throat via SEO.
They should make a second internet just for people
This all started with the boycott.
[…]
I’d assumed things would go back to “normal” after the boycott, but it looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?) Maybe reddit will regret removing the 3rd party apps, after all? Maybe we’ll just accept a future where niche subs become little more than BuzzFeed polls, but we get paid if our poll does well, so users won’t care?
It’s because Reddit is trying to drive engagement. I don’t know if you noticed, but since the purge of third-party apps, the comment sections have been kind of meager, and things don’t get as many upvotes as they used to. Heck, half the comments act like bots anyway. It seems like reddit has been distilled down to those most addicted to it and has taken a hard lean into all the most extreme views.
When Reddit killed third party apps, the quality fell off all over the place. It took me about a month to realize the timing and why r/all had so much AITA rage bait stories and celebrity gossip and stuff now. I think a lot of the quality posters and people who liked more high brow discussions just left Reddit.
This makes me sad. Not just because of what happened with reddit, but because I’m still missing that high-brow discussion. Most of my reddit comments were replies to other people, rather than top-level comments, and I spent more time reading comment sections than I did looking at the content they were discussing.
I like it here, but I don’t feel like I come across the depth of content I did on reddit. I don’t mind the lower quantity - that’s expected on a small platform - but I’m definitely not enjoying the lower quality. Most of the activity seems to be around memes and American politics, neither of which particularly interest me, and most of the comments across most posts feel fairly unsubstantial. It’s so much rarer for me to find something I want to reply to on here than it was on reddit.
I don’t mind the lower quantity - that’s expected on a small platform - but I’m definitely not enjoying the lower quality.
I think the issue here is that there’s a sweet spot where quantity and quality are in equilibrium. You NEED a certain quantity before you have a high chance of finding insightful comments on a given topic – to simplify things, if there’s a 1% chance a given comment is going to be from an expert with great insight, you have a ~9.6% chance of finding that on a post with 10 comments and a ~63% chance of finding that on a post with 100 comments. The threadiverse just hasn’t hit that threshold yet.
Of course, there’s a tipping point which reddit is long past, where higher and higher quantities start to drown out the insightful posts with memes and quips, or downvote and mock them with a confidently wrong counter-opinion the mob wants to hear more.
I hope the barriers to entry with decentralized services that the masses find “confusing” are such that we eventually manage to reach equilibirum and not tip too terribly far past it.
Oh I agree completely (and thought about going off on a tangent about “critical mass” myself but decided against it). It’s a rough path towards reaching that point, though, if we can’t have enough discussions to draw those kinds of people in and keep them around in the first place. I agree, also, about the “signal-to-noise ratio” on reddit being too low in general nowadays - especially post-third-party apps controversy - although I think that’s preferable to there simply not being enough quality content in the first place; good moderation (not that reddit has much of that nowadays…) can deal with the noise, whereas it can’t make up for lack of substantial comments.
I’m not sure what the best way to address the barriers to entry to the fediverse might be, but I’ve thought that the various apps either hosting their own instances or partnering with other instances to funnel users towards them and streamline the signup process would probably be a good first step. I think having some barrier to entry is a good thing, though - so we don’t tip too far past that equilibrium.
I’d like to see more outreach initiatives in posting Lemmy content to Reddit. Nobody not specifically looking for Lemmy is going to even be aware that it exists. Think about how many times the same posts hits #1 on /r/all. The API protest was massive and I would still guess that less than one percent of Redditors have even considered alternatives like kbin/lemmy exist.
I’m personally not worried about growing too much because instances can only get so big and still afford to be online. There’s no incentive to grow an instance beyond sustainability.
I thought I might leave Reddit entirely, but then I realized this as well. So I have taken to posting some things exclusively here, some very few things also there, and when I do post there I post here first then just share the link.
On the other hand, keeping in mind that my “here” is Kbin not Lemmy, I’ve more or less ceased most of my encouragement to try to get people to join b/c of all the bugs that have been present - some of which seem fixed now but overall the set of features present in Kbin is very much behind Lemmy, which is itself enormously behind Reddit still. It makes sense: people were “hopeful” about Kbin/Lemmy, but to actually realize that hope has been slow going. And that too makes sense: Ernst has had family issues that MUST take priority, although it has greatly slowed down integrations of fixes that others have offered into the main code, for a time. And too there is the fact that Kbin, like many Lemmy instances, has been under DDOS attack. These things take time to develop even under the most ideal circumstances, and all the more so in the face of such challenges. Overall, Kbin is still alpha version software at this point.
And even Lemmy is still just a beta version. e.g. just to name one example: you still cannot migrate from one instance to another across the Fediverse, so whatever instance you choose to join is basically a permanent decision - like if you ask all your friends to come with you from Reddit and then jump ship yet again, you risk alienating them by leaving them behind as you hop around looking for the greenest grass. Joining instances here is nothing at all like casually joining subs on Reddit - they will need to learn all about that, and what it means, and how to curate their experiences here, etc.
In comparison, for now at least old-reddit or even new-reddit on a mobile browser with ad-blocking meets many people’s needs, especially with “everyone” more or less remaining behind on Reddit, and it is a tough sell to try to tell them to give all that up for an objectively worse UI/UX experience (the cost-to-benefit tradeoff is worthwhile to us, but is it to them?). At this point, those with the “early adopter” mindset are already here, and more importantly the content creators have already made their choices too. (Though if Reddit kills off old-reddit, that could change things in a BIG way)
I am not saying that there would be no value in such outreach initiatives, just that they have already happened and yet here we are. At this point it may be worth looking into the reasons why people who already know about Lemmy/Kbin have not chosen to come here. And on some level we just need to be okay with the fact that we are likely going to be small for a long time, especially as the code continues to be developed to help it catch up.
Unless Threads causes things to change much more quickly… which it very well could.
(edit: added UI/UX)
I don’t know. I get the same raw energy here as I did when I first joined that other site. I get a rush of joy when I discover a new, cool community. The truth is, Lemmy is literally what you make it, not shoved down our throats by someone looking for their first billion.
Lemmy is what we make it. I can’t keep a community alive on my own, but sadly that is the reality for a lot of subjects right now.
This is it. I can (and do) filter out the communities I don’t want to see, but I can’t generate the activity required from other people to make for interesting discussions. And as much as I want interesting discussions, I’m not interested in trying to carry every conversation myself. I want other people to bounce off and interact with, not just to feel like I’m typing into the void!
We’ll get there. It turns out that it’s more difficult than many of us realized to build a new social media site from scratch without any VC funding. It’s going to be a long and arduous journey, but I think we have already navigated the most dangerous leg and built a strong foundation.
Large scale movements of people take a very long time. We are on the vanguard, which can be a bit lonely but will ultimately turn out to be an extremely rewarding experience if Lemmy eventually does grow much larger.
It’s also far too confrontational for such a small community. People’s posts asking for help get downvoted, comment replies get voted down just because of tribalism (shit on Windows, much?), and replies devolve to insults far faster. There’s really no place for any kind of nuanced discussion.
I hate to say it, but I think that’s just an issue with online culture in general nowadays. I’ve been saying for years at this point that “the internet is where nuance goes to die”. But I agree; I wish it wasn’t the case here, and I wish it was something that got called out more. Calling out people for their extreme and distasteful political opinions is fine, but piling on people because they’re fine with using Windows or whatever is just ridiculous.
Calling out people for an extremist, strawman version of a popular opinion is not accepted. Because people eliminate all nuance, and you’re either for it or against it.
I’d give examples, but they’d get downvoted. I’m generally in favor of the government staying out of personal issues that don’t affect larger society. When it comes to a woman’s right to choose, that’s popular. When it comes to certain religious practices, it’s unpopular.
I’ll bite. Go ahead and give an example. I feel like most people are ok with people’s beliefs and opinions as long as they follow the whole “your rights end at your nose” premise. Popularity of issues pretty much falls in line with that every time.
Most people yes, but those who feel like their rights extend well up into your nose make a disproportionate amount of noise far out of proportion to hundreds of others who are more neutral, and b/c of how human psychology works, maybe also more than ten or so people who are weakly positive.
I guess I am saying: do not underestimate the human need to create an echo chamber for emotional validation:-D.
I was asking for an example of an extremist, straw man argument of a popular opinion.
And I hope the person you asked responds with such - I was definitely going off on a whole other tangent here.:-)
I’m generally in favor of parents being able to make decisions for their children (particularly infants) with little involvement from the government.
I don’t think you should pierce a baby’s ears. However unless the government can show significant harm, they should stay out of it.
You can speculate on the more controversial version of this.
I made this comment because I relize that I can be extreme when (even unrelatedly) angry despite fighting against extremeism otherwise.
Abortion debates are designed to be insane. Amarica uses it to divide and control its voters. For those that genuinely want a discission, im sorry. Here or reddit is probably the sanest place to discuss it online.
piling on people because they’re fine with using Windows
Ive personally attacked that toxic mindset before and found myself slipping into it. Windows is “bad”. I find by attacking windows on instict, I indirectly attack its users. Most (I too) struggle to imagine a diffrent and hopefully better world. So the current one becomes immitable and “natural”. By attacking their OS without showing somthing practical but better, you might as well the saying the flowers secretly spit asid too.
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That’s what happens when you openly express contempt for your userbase after doing nothing about spam or influence operations for 8+ years.
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Oh, yeah, Lemmy is tiny by comparison. We have to post content instead of just consuming it.
The general social media culture effects us, reddit culture is partially still in our blood. He may be right in that reguard.
About movies, !moviesandtv@lemmy.film has discussion threads for every new movie being released
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Can you even sign up for tildes yet?
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Send them an email
I have invite codes from when I tried it out in 2018 if anyone’s interested.
I would be interested
I honestly completely forgot about Tildes.
I find tildes.net fills the role of in-depth discussions pretty well, they don’t tolerate memes and other fluff which I do still find entertaining but lemmy has plenty of that. Only thing neither do very well is lots of content for niche hobbies or topics that just require a lot more users to work well.
Yeah I like tildes for the slower pace in depth discussions and thoughtful comment section, and Lemmy for the scrolling and occasional laughs. Throw in Hackernews for very in depth technical discussions and I don’t miss Reddit much at all. Spending a lot more time reading books or learning new things instead of doom scrolling on Reddit.
I agree with much of this. Though, I’ve been here for a couple months now (only just made an account) and I’ve noticed as the posts have become a bit more diverse. The commie stuff is a little wack/comical but eh - I like my commies out in the open and proud of who they are.
I want Lemmy to grow, but nobody I recommend it to is particularly interested. My husband thinks it’s really no better than 4chan or reddit. He’s never been a fan of either. He feels that the people here are too high handed and snobby and considering that 4chan has a better time dealing with trolls and (tankies) problem users because it’s hard to stalk someone on a completely anonymous web site he just feels like we’ll end up going up like a flash in a pan. Here one day gone the next. I hope he isn’t right but I also do see my fair share of what he’s talking about. We aren’t nearly as welcoming as we make ourselves out to be.
Quality is subjective. But there’s always gonna be some slag in the smelting pot. Pretending we can make a community that’s free of all of Reddit’s problems is kind of foolish.
On the other hand communities don’t just spring up over night. The kind of quality the majority of people say they want happens organically and I don’t think we can rush that. I do think that people with message boards or discords could migrate here and start their own instance or subs. That would be a good way to grow the community.
Agreed, I had largely the same usage behavior as you. Blocking dozens of meme communities managed to filter out most of the junk but substantive topics and discussions are still rare. While things seem to be decelerating lately, I’ll be sticking around in the hope that over time the sort of thing we’re looking for grows.
Same here. I miss having actual discussions in comment threads once in a while.
I’m more grateful for paywalled Web 1.0 platforms from two decades ago than I have been in a long time. Metafilter’s FanFare section is low-volume but particularly satisfying for thoughtful movie chatter. It’s fun when bursts of comments in an old thread are years apart between a title’s theatrical release and arrival on streaming.
I feel the same and that’s why I’m posting here And trying to do my part to grow the community. I loved the fact that I could be having a bad day and go to any comment thread and be laughing within seconds.
Many of us are still piecing together where our new homes will be on Lemmy. Several of the popular subreddits were re-created here but the content is largely bots cross posting reddit content that sucks. It’s taking longer than I expected to find content I enjoy interacting with too, but I suspect that’s a problem that can only be solved by continuing to interact with those posts as you find them.
While I don’t think Reddit is going to collapse anytime soon or anything, any moderators that chose to stay after seeing how little Reddit cares about them, are not going to be the sorts of people with a bold vision on what they want to see in a community. What remains of the culture is just going to get more and more generic as evidenced here.
Digg didn’t collapse overnight. Neither did MySpace. Or Fark. It was little by little then all at once.
And even then, all of those websites still technically exist, in some form at least. They died, but they’re not dead.
A lot of people seemed to expect reddits crash and burn to eventually shutter the service entirely, but even if every single major content creator left the bots would keep things running semi-smoothly for the less engaged users for probably years to come.
Brain drain.
It’s not going to collapse its just going to turn into Facebook.
Right wing memes and every post is gonna be the “did you know there aren’t any words in the English language with two o’s next to each” level posts where dozens of people leave the same comment to prove how clever and unique they are.
Basically it’ll be full of people with nothing better to do because everybody else went to a site that wasn’t a charicturature of a robber barron wringing pennies out of people.
I think the main community that I was in wouldn’t mind jumping ship, but there’s no where for them to jump to yet.
Lemmy’s mod tools don’t seem to be rolled out yet and I haven’t found anywhere on Lemmy that has a wiki built into their community yet.
I agree mod tools are the largest hurdle right now. Startrek.website has a wiki but I understand it’s not built into Lemmy.
!Piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com has a wiki of sorts, too.
looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?)
Nah we’re doing the same shit just on Lemmy now
Are they not allowed to mention lemmy or do they not know?
If people don’t know, how can they be reached?
You get shadowbanned for mentioning lemmy. The post likely wont even be visible either.
Yep, it’s been removed.
I thought there would be a lot more discussion on reddit about the new privacy changes and migrating to Lemmy. Either people genuinely don’t care or Reddit is actively suppressing discussion about this to keep their user base.
Suppression
Or both:-)
Make a reddit account and tell them
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There’s more normal people on Lemmy than you think. I posted the other day that this place really needs to try to be less of an echo chamber if we want to grow it at all.
I agree. I feel like Lemmy is the place I go to when I want to be angry. All the most active submissions are about some injustice that’s happening in the world - not that they aren’t legit issues, but it’s very tiring. Now I’m sure someone will tell me I should be raging all the time about all of these injustices, possibly by calling me a lib or whatever.
What’s missing are the more niche subs. Risa’s memes have definitely been a lot of fun, but beyond that, the hobby subs are extremely slow and there’s just not enough content in them to keep it interesting.
I really hate it when a tool makes me angry
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You are not wrong! I guess that we just have to accept that Social Media is as perverse as it is. Never in the history of my life I thought, oh hey you know what? I want to know all of the political views of all of my friends and associates. I think that actual pornography is less terrible for you than social media in most forms.
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I’m going to keep repeating that until it’s popular. I think we need to start to view social media like it’s a porn addiction
it is insane how social media is worse than porn
It’s sort of like how texting while driving is more dangerous than drinking and driving. It’s not the intuitive answer but after thinking it over it makes sense: at least the drunk is looking at the road.
Maybe it’s worth trying to start a No Social September event for next year and get people to drop social media for a month. Make them see how much better it feels to limit consumption of this crap.
English speaking countries?
248 Million English Speaking Indians are under represented though.
ooooooo…edgy!
Every girl loves singleminded political personality!
They will prefer becoming slaves to touching “open source communist” software.
That’s likely got nothing to do with it for most of them. Reddit still has people, and people go where people already are. Most people do not want to be a pioneer building a new community, they just want to go read shit and maybe throw a comment on it.
Where are the good movie communities on Lemmy? I searched a couple of times but couldn’t find one that matched the old Reddit one.
!moviesandtv@lemmy.film is fairly active.
Thank you!
My pleasure
This comment showcases a major problem I have with Lemmy. The latter loads correctly in the Instance I subscribe too. But there’s no way for me to view the former the same way is there?
Browsing another instance’s local feed? No, that’s not presently part of the official lemmy front end. But many apps have added it on top.
They might not exist yet. You can create one if you wish.
That’s the home they talk about, no?
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Yup. Fluff principle - TL;DR barely passable content will flood any vote-based community, unless you take measures against it.
I got tired of holding the line against that long before the protests - that is why I believe what I heard said about the fact that most mods that cared about their communities only lasted a year, maybe two. I gave up modding one game community, and then along with the protests a second one, and each time I can barely stand to go back and read the posts there, bc they always trend more towards this, as you say bc it takes continual efforts to stop them!
And like, on the one hand, if that is what the people there want…then power to them? Except even they complain about it too, bitterly - both “why can’t I say whatever I want, when/however I want?” while also at the same time “why are others free to say what they want too, can’t they be removed somehow?” (ignoring the obvious answer that yes they can be blocked, though that takes all of two whole clicks!:-P). Also, they seem pissed whenever they ask a question on the sub’s main feed (ignoring the rules & things like a prominent Questions megathread pinned for precisely that purpose, or in some cases a “Questions” flair, instead putting something like a “Guide” flair, representing the exact opposite purpose of what that was designed to mean) but then nobody remains who wants to answer it. Like: “What phone should I purchase?” (ignoring the fact that the previous 10 posts all had an identical title, nor are there any details about what the person is looking for, plus again a megathread for precisely that)
I would say that it’s literal children taking over the internet, except some of the people complaining say they are retirees, others middle-age with kids, others in college, etc., so it is not a matter of mere physical age. Still, it is a childish mindset of wanting others to take care of them, while not being restricted from doing any of the things that they want to do. Nor is it selfishness, I believe, not precisely; although it may be more akin to self-centeredness. In this way then, it is like a public park or playground where people choosing not to abide by the rules destroy the experience for everyone, ironically also including themselves (when they come in wanting to play, and then everyone leaves rather than play with them, under those circumstances).
And like, on the one hand, if that is what the people there want…then power to them?
Two important details on the fluff principle: it isn’t exclusive to Reddit (it was first noticed on Hacker News, and it’s probably here too) and it’s a bit independent on what users want. It’s mostly the result of good content being often hard to judge, so people often skip it while upvoting barely passable content.
As you probably know, mods usually handle this by discouraging the barely passable content, either directly (“don’t post memes here”) or indirectly (random/small post requirements to cull out effortless posts). Or at least they did in Reddit.
I would say that it’s literal children […] although it may be more akin to self-centeredness.
I know which type of behaviour you’re talking about. I wouldn’t call it childishness, self-centredness, or even selfishness; it’s simply lack of reasoning and insight, as those users ruin the very subreddits that themselves would use, so I call it “stupidity”. And Reddit in special has an endemic stupidity problem. It’s a bunch of vicious cycles:
- users ignore why rules exist →users post shit → mods take action → users whine → mods give up reasoning with users → nobody explains the rules → users ignore why rules exist
- users post shit → mods create new rules → users rule-lawyer their way out → users post shit
- users demand spoonfeeding → users are spoonfed → higher noise/info ratio → users give up looking for info due to high noise → users demand spoonfeeding
- users assume words onto each others’ mouths → finger-pointing goes rampant → users feel the need to state things to avoid finger-pointing → assumptions get reinforced → users assume words onto each others’ mouths
- etc.
I’m saying this because this “endemicity” of stupidity in Reddit is one of the reasons why moderation there is so fucking shitty and laborious, even with comparatively better tools (even now!) than Lemmy.
Okay I hear you - so self-centeredness may still be present, as is selfishness, purely short-term thinking, loads and loads and loads of toxicity, etc., but it is not only each one of those, but all of them combined that leads to that enshittification effect.
I once had a guy beg me to block him. I was trying to train new mods and felt the need to literally screenshot his request (sent via DM) b/c it was barely believable otherwise - he simply could not stop himself from being toxic to others on the sub. Ofc such people exist in the world, but at some point, it becomes the fault of the systems themselves if they both allow all-comers yet cause the absolute best stuff to become buried amidst a flood of posts sorted by New, plus even Hot has such a heavy newness component, etc. i.e., requiring moderation in the first place + doing everything possible to “increase engagement” (for the sake of
enshittificationadvertising profits, e.g. you get the privilege of watching moar ads by clicking on or scrolling through posts, not writing out meaningful responses), while also limiting pinned posts to strictly 2 slots, plus making megathreads super-complicated to try to set up in the first place without access to a 3rd party bot written for that purpose (then charging communities who already donated their programming time to make that + computing time & access to run that for the privilege of being able to use it) e.g. the latest megathread cannot simply include a link to the previous megathread that it replaces, + other things too like virtually hiding the sidebar/About section (on the official Android mobile app anyway) with tiny fonts and making it disappear as you scroll. => Everything basically feeds forward to reinforce the doomscrolling effect and toxic commenting - to turn Reddit into the next 4chan/Discord? - while taking Reddit away from its forum board origins.And all b/c the guy in charge worships at the feet of Elon, not even realizing that what at best would have worked for those circumstances (e.g. a public company transitioning into private, rather than a private one wanting to get an IPO to become public; and yes, highly debatable that Musk’s efforts may work even for that other company:-D) will not necessarily work for Reddit.
Though as you said, a lot of this is independent of the specific company & product itself, and relates more to trends that occur purely b/c of human nature. It reminds me of computers trying to fend off viruses: you can’t just exist in a soup of code that you feel absolutely safe running without any protections, b/c it is too vulnerable to selfish, self-centered, short-sighted counter-purposes that can destroy you. And biological cells are an even better and more complex example, as they also fight off cancerous states of being - ones own cells that have been perverted, twisting the purpose to now grow in a selfish, self-centered, purely short-sighted manner rather than working for the health of the overall body. Our immune systems protect us from all of that and more, including literal dirt that we don’t want floating in our bloodstreams, and that reinforces your point: fluff spreads unless you have a system in place to counteract it. It seems like that is literally a physical rule of the universe, that also applies in virtual as well.
So I guess in this analogy, Huffman is like HIV then (!?:-P), in that greatly diminishing the capabilities of the “immune system” (moderation) - not just recently here with the protests but for the past several years worth of changes to Reddit that continually pushed towards “engagement” but at the expense of thinking/reading before speaking - has lead to the result of modern-day Reddit as it is now compared to what it used to be. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step after all, and it should be no surprise that after taking a bunch of steps towards a particular goal, that
wethey have now reached it.
How much of that style of posts is bots?
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the real cycling community hung out at the circlejerk sub because the regular sub was full of the most boring, trite, entry level shit imaginable.
The cycling circle jerk sub seemed to be embraced and accepted by the main community far more than any other circle jerk sub.
Far more so than, for example, fuckcarscirclejerk
Just like guitar lol.
The other day I found myself thinking that reddit was transforming itself into a Yahoo Answers, specially r/brasil
Every subreddit without sufficient moderation becomes /r/Funny with different CSS.
Three brazilian subreddits? Thats a lot.
When you monetize karma, this is the result. Reddit will be Buzzfeed / WatchMojo / Snapchat Top 10 lists in a couple months. But number 1 will shock you!
Well, what is it? And is it the hit 1996 film Kazzam starring Shaquille O’Neil?
Let’s get back to talking about Rampart.
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Glad to see the migration actually made an impact to some degree.
Reddit nowadays feels like quora + socmed with stagnant contents
Reddit has been dying for a decade or longer, it’s just now the people who saw it through all the previous crap, and tried to make it have some semblance of the site it once was, have up and left, leaving it to the brainless hordes.
If I had to name a year when Reddit turned sharply for the worse, it would be 2015 when Gamergate-style ““discussion”” tactics took over everything. It’s not entirely Reddit Inc’s fault, but they also did nothing to stop it or slow it from devouring the platform. Good moderatrors who didn’t tolerate fools could only do so much to preserve their communities when the Admins openly embraced engagement at the cost of everything else.
Oh, was it gamergate that started the trend of calling each other a bot/paid shill?
Idk if it was gamergate that started that, but it was around that time when the 2016 election was happening.
tbf that election brought a lot of awareness to mis/disinformation, propaganda, and secretive advertising. It could have been going on long before to a lesser degree.
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I think that goes back to the start of the internet. Maybe has become more common over time
Start of the internet? Is this hyperbole?
IRC bots were common, but they were seen as admin tools, not drivers of participation.
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I’d been a lurker for almost a decade, and had noticed the quiet variation in post/community “quality” over that time… I’d kinda wondered where everyone else went too.
I don’t understand. I was told in no uncertain terms from many news outlets that “Reddit won.”
Reddit’s bottom line in the short term is unimpaired that is how they won.
But in the long term- they are dead. I mused on this before.
Social network need monopoly - otherwise the business model struggles. One Facebook. One Reddit, one Instagram. Facebook, Insta, Snap, and TikTok however are struggling because they are now the same thing in different packages.
Not so Reddit. Reddit was a true monopoly. Nothing else compared. Well no longer. All their hiking have spawned a true credible alternative in Lemmy/Kbin. This will kill them. No matter of it’s Fediverse or something else - now there use than one place for Reddit. That means a third, fourth and fifth place is in the realm of possibility. And they WILL emerge. Others will try to enter the Reddit space.
Reddit had a niche and it was so dominant. No one truly tried to enter my ya niche. But that was not good enough. The enshittified it over and over again. And now the. Have competition. As they will never have a monopoly again. They will struggle to get their ads money. They will struggle with the margins. They will struggle. Yahoo will buy them in 10 years and do the mercy blow.
There’s also Tildes, Lobste.rs and Hacker News. Reddit has really shit the bed with their decisions.
There’s also Tildes, Lobste.rs and Hacker News. Reddit has really shit the bed with their decisions.
Can those and similar sites federate with us? Seems like the more that happens, the deader Reddit becomes.
if Hacker News is allowed to federate with Lemmy at large we have failed
How do you figure, bot?
My thinking is that: 1) individual instances can still block them as appropriate, 2) any or all of their communities can be blocked at the user level, and 3) their content won’t show up in one’s subscribed list, anyway. Unless of course one chooses that.
- there already at least 2 hackernews repost bots posting constantly and getting zero comments
If they’re posting in appropriate places, what’s the problem?
And-- if a user doesn’t like them then they can be blocked just like a community, n’est-ce pas?
Part of the appeal if Tildes has been the right-knit, invite-only community. So no, they probably wouldn’t federate with Lemmy(and shouldn’t).
I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?
Way too much Lemmy…
It never was about the quantity of users leaving reddit, but the quality. Those that didn’t care about the changes were not those who were posting the most. They weren’t the moderators, the power users, people making original shit. Those all cared about the site and about the changes.
And they all left.
I definitely noticed in the immediate aftermath of the Great Enshittening, how the quality of the discourse on subs fell through the floor. The people who left seemed to be the ones that had some level of empathy, leaving shithouses behind to snipe and gripe everywhere.
Empathy would make sense, given the tendency of empathic people willing to actually protest instead of being indifferent
Where did they go? They sure as hell aren’t here.
/r/movies has always had tons of those generic hidden/underrated gem/actor threads about huge blockbuster films that everyone has seen. It’s in no way a new phenomenon. The /r/moviescirclejerk subreddit has existed for years, and lives off those posts.
I’ve seen it happen in a lot of smaller communities since July. /r/Subnautica, for example, used to be primarily memes and gameplay questions and was fairly low-traffic. Since July it’s been a steady stream of polls and “what’s your favorite” questions - low-effort posts that drive easy engagement.
Reddit has long paid mods to be “Community Builders”. Ostensibly they’re there to help other mods build their subreddits, but actually what seems to happen is they spam low effort posts like the ones described (the “question style” post is very popular) in lots of subreddits.
I’ve posted this before but here’s more info:
Have a look at this user’s posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/ Lots and lots of low-effort posts in various UK subreddits.
And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/
This link confirms that Community Builders are “vetted and paid by Reddit for their time”: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-
Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don’t seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
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Discussion quality in the whole platform went down. It isn’t just r/movies, or large subs - it’s everywhere. Specially jarring if you stopped going to reddit since the revolts, and then checked it “randomly”.
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Gaming subs were similar.
Starfield, despite having potential, feels very unfinished. Which is kinda expected for Bethesda, but the games also just boring and underwhelming in addition to the bugs. Yet, I’ve seen across reddit as there seems to be an open campaign to try and make the game not seems as bad as it is.
I don’t know maybe I’m spoiled - I came off the incredible high of baldurs gate 3 into the slop that was starfield.
MS seems to have the infrastructure to manage public opinion. How do they manage it without anybody spilling the beans? Is it already entirely AI generated?
I’ll offer a real and genuine human opinion. I think Starfield I great. I also just generally love the Bethesda gameplay loop, so I guess I’m a bit biased.
It has its boring moments and I think it doesn’t respect your time with so much artificial time wasting (long walks to objectives, slow menus). It definitely isn’t the most polished game, but I have really enjoyed my time with it and I’m hoping the modding scene can clean up a lot of the issues people have with the game.
Well, some people actually do like the game.