It doesn’t need to have a use case. Use cases are for users and our priorities don’t really rank near the top anymore. It’s mostly cargo cult follow-the-leader product management at this point, so it needs to have the latest buzzwords tagged on like blockchain or machine learning or something-as-a-service so investors will get hyped for it and maybe generate some buzz in the tech industry.
This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.
So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.
The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.
So yeah, they’ve managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been:
I’m just grateful to see that just when folks were beginning to doubt if Lemmy could actually serve as a Reddit alternative, we’ve been able to prove that we’re equally if not more adept at insular slapfighting over petty bullshit and assuming the worst about others’ intentions.
I see we’ve unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I’m disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:
It’s reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they’re cowardly acquiescing when it’s not our neck in the noose.
That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:
I mean I do analytics on site engagement metrics professionally, like as my job that pays me money, and based on that and past instances of r/place, I can make an educated guess that:
They were desperate to improve July usage numbers because projections were looking shitty after the events of the past month.
r/place has traditionally been a good way to juice engagement numbers
They pulled a lever they knew would generate the results they needed
Is it temporary? Sure. But this buys them some time and August’s numbers are August’s problem.
Here’s are the stats from a previous instance of r/place:
Social platform Reddit re-introduced its collaborative social experiment r/Place on April 1, leading to the highest daily active users (DAUs) its mobile app has ever seen
So yeah, they’ll get the juice they need, probably, but the fact that they were compelled to even need to pull that lever says a lot, imo.
I don’t think there’s going to be a good way to know. Semrush is showing a relatively steady decline since January 2023, but I don’t trust third-party tools for that. And I doubt that Reddit would make its first-party analytic data public if it looks bad, so in that case the default move is to either cherrypick or create a metric that appears favorable, a la Elon Musk’s brand new Twitter metric of median picoseconds of verified user screen time per albatross fart or whatever.
From a qualitative standpoint, both the content and general vibe seem markedly worse than a month or two ago. It’s made it easy to stop using it as my default online platform.
But in any case, I don’t think it’s worth it to get too invested in either its success or failure.
This is one of the things that I’m struggling with right now as well. My reddit experience was heavily curated in favor of smaller subreddits, to the almost complete exclusion of top subreddits. The thing is, since Lemmy is so new, it hasn’t had the opportunity to build up a diverse array of specialized communities the same way. So basically right now all we have are mainly versions of the “big” Reddit communities, along with ones that decided to emigrate here from Reddit.
But it turns out, content from “big” communities is often the same low-effort, lowest-common denominator stuff regardless which platform is hosting it. Memes, clickbait, and ragebait permeate the top results, because well shucks, that’s what people want to see and engage with, apparently.
I’m hopeful that if/when Lemmy continues to grow, that it’ll become home to more active specialized communities. In the meanwhile, I’ve been trying to improve the experience as much as possible by A) trying to subscribe to more communities and B) slamming that block community button like I’m playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.
I can’t see how the combination of:
Can lead to anything other than Reddit becoming increasingly flooded with botted content. Like you mentioned, it won’t happen overnight, but it does seem inevitable.
I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:
What I’ve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.
You can block communities and magazines that focus on it, which should get rid of the lion’s share of Reddit-related content. It’s been a bit disappointing to see so much low-effort, choir-preaching memes and content flood in. Hopefully the Fediverse can progress to a place where the primary activities extend beyond discussing the Fediverse & Reddit.
I suspect part of it may be due to the type of content we’re seeing. It feels like low-effort meme and shitpost communities are dominating the feeds, and that’s going to attract a certain low-effort audience. I’ve been blocking them liberally but they just keep coming.
I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.
This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.
All good. The main negative has been international travel, but generally I prefer to switch to a local SIM card when travelling anyhoots.
Since a lot of the exodus was prompted by conflict, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a higher proportion of folks here who speak conflict as a first language, at least for a while.
I kind of feel like without purposeful and diligent pruning, all online communities sink down to the lowest common denominator. That’s hard to manage since a community is as much a vibe as it is conforming to a set of explicit rules. Personally I like the tildes.net code of conduct, since that’s basically a similar philosophy.
OP may come across a little alarmist, but it’s really easy for online communities to become Nazi bars if the admins aren’t carefully weeding out the ne’er-do-wells. Especially in places with open signups. Taking a hands-off approach and simply hoping that everyone is going to be a mature adult and behave themselves is effectively voting to surrender the site to assholes.
And yeah, they follow “the rules”, and free speech and all that, until they don’t. The thing to keep in mind is that these are not folks who, as a community, are interested in engaging in good-faith discussion. They are looking for a platform to spread disinformation and troll the libz, and any platform that facilitates it is also complicit.
Reddit will continue to highlight Weekly/Monthly Average Users to the press and advertisers, since those metrics won’t take much of a hit. You visit the site once to vote in a poll in favor of continuing the blackouts, you’ll get counted in those.
Those more granular metrics like session length and especially Total Posts Viewed are what really matter when you’re trying to run ads, and it’s hard to imagine a world in which those did not take a huge hit when most of the major subreddits are either blacked out, or (even better) flooding the front page with repetitive pictures of John Oliver.
I’m not entirely sure that Steve Huffman understands how protests work. The whole point is you don’t have control over them, friendo.
You can’t just say but we made a business decision and expect people to just say welp guess we should give up, there’s no overcoming business decisions.
That he’s becoming increasingly more catty and loose with the truth by the day speaks to the protest’s effectiveness. Aside from the dropping engagement numbers, the daily deluge of negative press from major media outlets isn’t doing their valuation any favors, and as the person responsible for this decision, he’s feeling the heat more than anyone.
Also, if they weren’t having any effect, he’d simply maintain the previous party line from before the protests about how the community is free to express itself and protest in any way it sees fit.
I think the fundamental thing for alternatives to succeed is that they can’t primarily exist as outlets for us to complain about reddit. Certainly there’s going to be a lot of that given that reddit’s actions sparked a partially-reluctant exodus, but the best revenge is living well and all that.
I dipped out of r/politics on Reddit because over the past few years the general trend there has been:
Reliable news outlet posts article > Partisan clickbait site posts their incendiary “take” on the article > Redditors post their hot takes based on misleading clickbait title without reading either article
There’s just no value to reading hot takes from uninformed teenagers seeking only to validate and amplify their worldviews based on clickbait titles alone. It’s important to stay informed, but there’s such a diminishing return for getting news from a subreddit vs. a legitimate news outlet, and it’s definitely not worth the mental health hit. And I don’t think it’s a Reddit-exclusive thing. Personally I’d rather stick to reading news from the sources, and keep my social media focused on other things.