Ask Lemmy

The content on Reddit has gotten noticeably worse - but less as a result of Lemmy's existence and more of a reaction to killing 3rd Party Apps.

Unfortunately for me, some of my favorite communities haven't migrated over to Lemmy. So I'm still using Old Reddit Desktop to access them.

I don't know if I'd call it a mass exodus, and I don't know that it directly has anything to do with Lemmy, but there's been a noticeable dip in quality. Fewer posts across many of the front page subreddits, fewer votes, more bot posts, more low effort posts, less discussion in comment sections, lots of deleted comments and accounts... overall there just seems to be a dip in quality.

I was going to delete, but decided to stick around for a while first, to see how things pan out, and I've got to say the mobile site is even worse than expected. I get constant pop ups trying to direct me to download the app, then when I say no the website will auto reload, often sending me back to the top of the page. It's difficult to find and respond to anyone who replies to your comments, and sometimes if you sort by top: today it won't even show any posts. Just... blank. Clicking on a post opens it as a tab that is more like a popup, and closing it resets where you were on the page.

I could keep going but I think that pretty much summarizes what I've noticed. Don't know that it's directly related to a Lemmy "exodus," and I'm still finding my way around here so I can't really say, but reddit as we knew it seems pretty dead.

This didn't happen quickly with Digg either. This won't be as substantially decimating to the platform as the Digg exodus was, because reddit is WAY bigger than Digg was.

I'd say it took me about 3-4 years to fully migrate away from Digg to reddit, and that process was very similar to today, where there were a ton of platforms gaining steam (even while it was pretty clear that reddit was where the party went).

I think reddit's quality of content will deteriorate over time, and the moderation will suffer. It is going to die a death of 1000 paper cuts. The API change was just reddit saying "Hey, come stab is with your paper knives!"

idk. Reddit in 15 years will probably look a lot like newspapers do today. Kind of a joke, but somehow still standing.

A mass exodus doesn't really happen in the traditional sense unless shit really hits the fan. For that to happen a large majority or even everyone has to be displaced at once and there can be no way to salvage the situation. In this case, there were a lot of short term ways out here for users not directly affected.

But, the whole situation is more akin to a war of attrition. The ones not convinced by the big things, will be convinced by the smaller things that accumulate over time. Goodwill for reddit is at an all time low, which hampers their ability to grow since word of mouth is effectively dead. People that provided effective labour for reddit in the form of moderation or content aggregation lost their morale to continue. Not all of them for sure, but it might very well be a critical mass (even if they didn't move to lemmy).

It's like a line of dominos increasing in size, if the ones that fell now were big enough to topple the next, eventually there will be a ripple effect. Eventually the quality of content goes down, the discourse turns stale and antagonistic, and communities fall apart. Only once the users who took the easy way out now realize that will they finally start the process of moving. And if reddit was doing so bad they had to make this move, I can only assume their future will be very grim indeed. The seed of destruction has been planted. (And if you want an example of that future, look at Twitter)

Whether or not that all actually happens, I'm not sure. I'd like to believe it will, but some people revel in their unreasonableness, and they're often the easiest to exploit for financial gain. I think the best thing is to stop looking back, and focus on what we have here and now. I think what lemmy has achieved so far is already more valuable than reddit had.

Some of the larger subreddits shut down or turned into a John Oliver meme, one niche one I enjoyed is gone, the rest seem to be back to business as usual. At the moment? I'd say not much has changed.

Who cares, though? This isn't reddit, let's stop focusing on that and focus on Lemmy.

I suspect their July user metrics will see a hit, but even if all Lemmy activity came directly out of Reddits numbers they would still be a top 10 website in the US by traffic.

You can't have "the downfall of reddit" as a goal, you can only hope for the proliferation of a better experience, hopefully here. Lemmy not dying is preferred over reddit dying.

Reddit front page, not logged in:

I found a large amount of the developer / programming reddits died, so I noticed a large difference but a lot of other subs there has been no change so it depends on what you are in.

We came to Lemmy for our own benefit, not just to fuck with reddit. Who cares if it hurt them or not? We're better off without reddit, and that is all that matters.

Realistically, no. It would also be quite a stretch to assume everyone who created accounts here no longer checks reddit and stopped using it. I know I personally still use both.

I believe that most of the people, including myself, are still waiting for proper 3rd party apps. I still use Boost for Reddit untill the developer releases Boost for Lemmy, then I switch completely. The app I'm used to is more important to me than the platform I'm using. But.. Needs to be said that Reddit's behaviour is horrendous and therefore I don't want to be using it. The future is decentralised..

I deleted my account. That probably showed 'em.

I don't think any platform collapses overnight. What you have to do is do is make something "better" and engage in a campaign of attrition to get people to move over. Produce content that other visitors see and like. Submit links to that content to aggregators (e.g. Slashdot / Fark etc.). Even start submitting links on Reddit that lead over to Lemmy and so on.

Make Lemmy feel as normal as Reddit. People will get used to the interface, the quirks and perhaps stay. Every person who stays is one less for Reddit. Now "better" is doing some heavy lifting since Lemmy has some advantages (ad free, federated) and some disadvantages (inline media & limits, sign up confusion, app). The disadvantages need to be addressed and the advantages need to be made stronger.

Steve Huffman has helped me cut down on my time on social media, and even screentime in general. Because I left the platform that I used so much because of one stupid decision he made.

I can now start my sand grain collection thanks to him.

Yes, because it has lost some of its most passionate users. The only effect will be a subtle drop in quality to the site, though, which will be completely unnoticeable to the average user.

For sure the quantity of posts is the same, but the quality has gone down.

You can just feel it all over. My frontpage has little to no good topics anymore. I used to peruse for at least 30 mins easily losing myself. I barely get 5 now before getting irritated with the low effort material.

I doubt there's been enough people moving to create an impact. I used to visit Reddit multiple times a day but now it's once a week if at all. When I have looked all my old subs look no different really.

No, and I (honestly) don't care either. A nice sum of users is better than a bunch of users that are (at most) "rotten apples" willing to denigrate everything and everyone.

Long ago I posted on Reddit that publicly traded companies are the plague for our society as they are pushing to the eternal growth at the expense of their users.

I do agree that privately held companies are also looking for profit but the difference is that they are not subject to the immense pressure to exponentially grow.

And now the Reddit IPO comes to prove just that. I am fairly confident that if not for this IPO Reddit wouldn't try so hard to push those changes and would still thrive.

But at the end of the day, I am happy that it helped me to discover Lemmy and this debacle is why I am here and not there.

Personally I could have lived with the ads but the quality of the subs I followed dipped massively after the mods left or were forced out. The people who left may have been fewer than expected they were the ones creating the decent content and most importantly keeping the worst of the bots at bay.

People don't like change, and most have extremely short memories. I doubt Reddit will see any major loss and will back to business as usual very soon if they are not already.

The subreddits I watched seem to be as busy as they always were, and the corresponding communities on Lemmy are mostly devoid of activity. Frustratingly, I'm still getting reddit links from my friend, which I leave unopened. Maybe Reddit took a hit in terms of users and post quality, but I'm growing increasingly skeptical that a mass migration is going to happen.

Maybe some are waiting for Boost or other 3rd party apps but there will likely not be a super big number coming over. Apparently doom scrolling is preferred for a large swath of Gen Zers

Need to focus on improving these communities and being active/creative especially in building niche communities on Lemmy.

I see so many communities created with just a link or two posted weekly by community creator. That kind of activity gives Lemmy a bad look.