I’ve been wanting to boycott Reddit for a long time, and the list of problems I had with it was very long. It took this API issue to finally get some community action.

But in short, Reddit is moving away from genuine community, and more towards fake astroturfed corporate content with manipulated comments and unabashed bot activity.

I’m seeing a lot of worrying trends.

The whole idea of Reddit is changing. It used to be the front page of the internet and that encompassed basically everything. Now it seems like there’s a lot of focus on making it advertiser friendly

Then we see Spez basically spitting in the face of the community. Mocking them, calling the unpaid mods “entitled” and just showcasing that he actively seems to despise the users.

Now we’re seeing Reddit do shady stuff like undelete comments. Destroying any trust the community may have had in the website.

The 3rd party app issue was just the kindling that ignited all the other issues

Yes and no.

Broadly, at this point, I couldn’t care less what Reddit does. This is my new home.

In the weeks leading up to my move here though, it wasn’t so much that I was concerned about the third party apps specifically. I did use one - RIF - and the official app is complete garbage, so it would’ve impacted me negatively, but it was more than that. And yes - the certain increase in censorship was another issue, but still, it’s deeper than that.

Both of those things, and much more, are really just aspects of the process that Cory Doctorow has called enshittification, and that’s the thing that drove me away. And if I was still on Reddit, that would be the thing I’d be concerned about.

So it is the case for me that it’s not just about the third party apps, and that censorship is also a concern, but really those things, in my estimation, are just signs of a deeper, underlying issue.

Which I no longer have to care about.

Guy is acting more and more musk-like, that’s enough for me to bolt. But I did exclusively use RIF app for last ~13 yrs. Whenever a Google search took me to native page I was shocked at how unusable it was on mobile

Yes! Very much so. They’ve become increasingly authoritarian over the years. These days just saying the word “trans” can get one banned from dozens of subreddits and even from the entire website. So far kbin.social has been pretty good, but there are a lot of users who want a safe space and don’t like opposing political views. Let’s hope either the owner believes in free speech, or I find an instance which does :)

The thing is, when reddit does it there are millions of users ready to make noise about it and investigate what is happening, as we’re seeing right now. Even some large media outlets are getting in on the story.

If an adminstrator of some small instance starts abusing his power, like… what are you gonna do but take it or leave? Nobody else is going to care.

So I dunno, I’m conflicted. I feel despite everything it’s harder to abuse power that much on reddit because it is kinda obvious with so many eyes on you, but then again - I prefer that power being split around so you can just leave elsewhere if you don’t like it.

I am and always have been against walled garden internets, and against corporations owning and controlling what essentially becomes a part of people’s culture. I let myself get sucked into Reddit despite that without thinking about it, largely because a 3rd party app shielded need from the shittier consequences of that (like ads).

Watching spez display his true colors has just served as a reminder of why it’s not okay to build your communities somewhere that is at the mercy of a corporation. There’s just no way I’m going to support something controlled by someone like that. It’s a matter of principle now.

It’s disappointing to me how many people don’t seem to see it as a matter of principle, or else don’t see a principle as being worth any inconvenience, or being willing to give up anything they have gotten used to at Reddit.

One of my biggest fear is one day the reddit admins will get rid of downvote buttons in all of the subreddits. Just like how youtube get rid of the downvote button.

My concern about Reddit – and my reason for being here – is primarily around the distorting effect of profit motivation. That distortion comes as changes to sorting algorithms, changes to search, and the hiding of communities critical to Reddit or the endeavour of profiting off of other peoples’ opinions, creative works, and labour. So yes, I have some concerns around censorship.

It’s worth noting that I don’t have the same concerns around censorship here, though. Centralization and corporate control is my concern, not specifically that certain people feel entitled to an audience that doesn’t want to listen to them. People are free to find their tribe here, and the rest of us are free to not pay any attention to them.

I think they’re all part of the same issue - Reddit only cares about it’s IPO and financial status, not it’s users or communities. This will get worse when they IPO as Reddit will then care about the share price and nothing else.

We saw this with other Social media - look at Tumblr; it imploded as it started banning NSFW content because of bizarre moralising by Verizon when it took over Yahoo (and Yahoo already had been restricting content since it bought Tumblr). Twitter is imploding since it came under the whims of a billionaire egomaniac owner. Facebook has been in a long slow decline as it focuses on advertising above all else.

Reddit is going the same way. It has already started censorship - it closed lots of communities already in the past few years. This wasn’t too controversial as it generally went for the obviously “extreme” communities or communities without any moderation which were therefore high risk. But it’ll get more controversial as it moves towards its IPO - it’ll do whatever maximises it’s share price, and in the US in particular that also comes with a lot of reactivity to the general media. It’ll just need one controversy for it to start banning other communities, and the NSFW communiteis are the obvious first targets. But also targetting communities based on being “hateful” or “trolling” - the problem is the how “bad” something is is largely in the eye of the beholder. Once you go down the road of banning anything you don’t agree with you end up in censorship hell.

For most users issues around censorship, 3rd party access to APIs, and even privacy mean little as they don’t feel the impact. But Reddit is on an inexorable path of decline and users will start moving as community quality falls (moderators working for free for their love of the community only is a huge asset; users will leave communities when they become filled with rubbish or trolling users), and faster when content they want gets banned.

Social media is littered with failed sites that either failed to move with the times or went off the rails ignoring users: MySpace, Tumblr, Digg, Twitter. Reddit is next up.

It is both. And I don’t think Lemmy/kbin can ever be truly successful without a large and diverse 3rd party app support. Everyone isn’t looking for the same type of interface. It is why an “official” reddit app will never truly be successful. I was always more into subreddits that were text content. Having the interface with giant pictures isn’t going to work for me. However, that is what my wife wanted.

As for censorship, that was always an issue with Reddit. But that doesn’t change on lemmy/fediverse. You can easily be banned by different instances. For instance, lemmy.ml doesn’t tolerate any criticism of the Chinese gov’t at all. When you decide to be on that server, you are agreeing to deal with that type of censorship.

I think reddit has just continued making more and more moves down their path towards the IPO, and all of those moves together have shown a lot of us that we’re not interested in staying on for the rest of the ride. Complicity towards corrupt or powerhungry mods of massive communities with tangible effects on the world (e.g. r/politics), censorship, revenue-focused anti-user actions, ignoring the community, downplaying the value of volunteer mods and threatening to replace them… Yeah, thanks, no. I’m good over here in the fediverse now.

There’s always been a tonne of censorship on Reddit, tho? Admin and to a lesser extent Mods have unchecked power to delete and even edit whatever they so please. user and subreddits get banned, shadowbanned.

My problem is different from everybody else’s here. I’m not bitter towards Reddit, I can watch it thrive in different hands from the sidelines, I don’t need it to crash and burn. But it’s a repository of information that’s almost second-to-none and my fear is embittered redditors scorching the earth before they bail.

Anecdotally, this evening I had an issue with my Plex server (HEVC main 10 videos maxing out CPU usage for transcodes, I digress) and searched my problem. Lo and behold 95% of qwant searches returned reddit threads, and the plex subreddit is still set to private.

I defend people’s rights to do what they want with their data and delete their histories on their way out—but damn if it isn’t going to hurt a little in the short term. reddit has helped me problem solve a million things, I’d hate to think that someone after me searching the same problem couldn’t find a solution.