Been thinking of making a post like this for some time, apologies if some of this is not completely relevant: this community seems more like it's about Reddit the platform/product than Reddit the social "thing", but I'm sure a lot of people have similar experiences to mine. Maybe on some instances more than others.

Here's the one of the last comments I wrote as a regular Reddit user, on the eve of the blackout (almost a year ago to the day), under a post titled "Will your participation in Reddit change":

Reading through this is a bit funny, in retrospect, seeing how Reddit-centric my understanding of the internet had become at the time. I am happy to report that I have checked the home page maybe a half dozen times since the blackout, instead of once or twice a week like I expected. I suppose the disgusting state of the heavily astroturfed worldnews sub was a big part of it as well: for me Reddit was the one big online platform where the average visible user didn't seem to be very misinformed about Palestine (at least not by default), and it was frankly very sad to see where it got in the past few months.

I do miss Reddit, I haven't been able to replace it outright. I'm from Lebanon, and Lebanese Twitter is (if you can imagine it) even more of a toxic cesspool than regular Twitter. I'm not on Facebook (also cesspool here), I'm not on Instagram - my point is I don't get anything about my country on ostensibly user-curated social media. /r/Lebanon was very far from perfect, but it was nice to get a trickle of local news with users who were more in line with my own politics. The local news outlets focus on a lot of irrelevant crap, the sub's news feed was a bit more interesting.

One thing I loved about that subreddit was that users with more mainstream views in my country (eg. transphobia-as-default) were allowed to spout their bullshit in the subreddit with little mod pushback (if it's just JAQing off etc, not harrassing people obviously). Then the regulars would dogpile on that user's post - very refreshing! And very validating I would imagine for anyone who is used to hearing this shit everyday.

I was applying to be a mod to help keep the sub moving, at one point, but hey. Maybe that headache was never worth it. Still, I felt like I lost one of my online homes.

More generally, I have enjoyed my first year on Lemmy, although the experience has been lacking in many ways. For one, while Reddit has a reputation as a meme cemetery, the memes here are generally a bit moldier. But that's okay. The fact that there's fewer posts I think isn't necessarily a bad thing either, I think we all preferred Reddit's slightly slower homepage in 2013 than the one we left in 2023, that would regurgitate more and more from the bottom of the barrel if you were willing to keep scrolling.

I've toyed with opening a Lebanon community here on dbzer0, having opened one on FMHY that nobody used. But it wouldn't be the same, and I wouldn't know how to populate it. I posted maybe 2 non-question posts on Reddit in my decade+ of being a regular user, but I wrote tons of comments. It also helped keep my English sharper, I think.

I've reactivated my old Instagram account and it's pretty ass out there. The ad/post ratio is just egregious, and they'll just serve you random posts from random pages. I want to see my friends goddamn it, isn't this what your platform is supposed to be for? For those of you who don't know, the app will also send you a notification once or twice a day suggesting you look at "today's top reels". I have never watched a reel of my own will, fuck off.

Point being, the main platforms people use online haven't been up my alley. I can only hope the zoomer dumbphone pushback keeps expanding, and that social media starts being seen as something for older generations. Wishful thinking?

This is just a post about enshittification, everyone's favorite word, but every time I think about it for more than 2 minutes I can't help but miss a simpler internet. Some part of me was hoping it would kickstart me "growing out" of spending this much time online per day (not everyone spends a ton of time online), but it hasn't.

Also every time I ask something longer than 20 words on Discord some middle schooler will reply "yap", even in the channels designated for questions. Discord has had its uses (yes I know there's privacy concerns), but it's hardly a replacement for Reddit, or forums. Both of which are/were searchable. But enough yapping from me.

Thoughts? How has the exodus been for you? Is this how Digg users felt?

Btw for those who don't know, this app is called Blind. It's where tech workers go to anonymously post. Also 700k TC is basically their yearly take-home pay, and it's a real number (see levels.fyi)

These people are disgusting, contributing nothing to society, not realizing how privileged they are, while the Lemmy devs live in poverty

I've been using Boost(s) since the APIcalypse since I mod a dead subreddit. A few hours ago the app stopped showing content and started showing errors. Is it just a me thing or is this more general?

The post in the screenshot was from January; the original poster has since been suspended for a reason I could not find, even with reveddit. Since then, the same 6 accounts mentioned above seem to be in some sort of limbo, as most of them have been suspended, but still post the same topics regularly.

If you look at the comments of the most repeated posts, there is some acknowledgement of the constant reposting ("Mom said it was my turn to post this, blahblahblah") before being derailed back into the slop in question, but oddly enough, I have not seen any comments directly calling out the sub for botting. I did find one post on the sub itself that got little traction before it was deleted by an automod.

Looking at other subs on the subject, it seems that several people have been quietly banned from the sub for making the same observations. My guess is that joking about people rehashing topics is preferable to people coming to find that your entire subreddit is some sort of psyop.

someone on a subreddit said they had brain bleeding. i asked how it happened. a mod immediately removed it and said that it was an intrusive comment or some nonsense..i messaged them asking them to explain how, and i explained how i thought it would actually be beneficial for the readers if they decided to answer and that they didnt. they responded with some authoritarian nonsense which they actually later deleted. today i get this from them:

Yesterday, I told you:

please tell me that you are willing to back down, to follow our rules, and to take moderator direction in the future without endless and exhausting debate -- or indeed without any debate at all. Otherwise, you will no longer be welcome at r/(removed)

Since you have not confirmed and are instead ignoring me, may I take this to mean that you no longer want to be part of r/(removed)?

i was tempted to reply "yes mistress"

this is sadly almost a step in the right direction cuz now they will ban you solely if they dont like your posts or other communities youre a part of.

they want you to go belly up and comply like they get off on it 😂.

i hope reddit crashes and burns hard lmao

So ban me over my pro-Palestine stance and well the rule I broke was basically depicting child abuse/neglect. But that as well has me going cause it's like when it comes to the war how can it really be define as child abuse to show how the children of Palestine are suffering. Anyway I hate reddit so much right now and have even tried created other accounts which yeah reddit is able to find out even the account I sign up with my phone number. I for real will miss reddit but I don't think there's anyway to get my account back unless I move to another home or whatever. Either way now I've run out of ways to actually create another account sadly. So this is my first post on this site and yeah I think I do like reddit better.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/22092764

Just a few years ago, you would never see such a disparity in votes vs comments. But these days, this is pretty much the norm. I've seen posts with 10K+ upvotes and no more than 80 comments.

I'd say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic "real users" using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool. Not sure how that's legal as I thought ads needed to be marked or differentiated from regular content, but here we are.

The future looks bleak and AI even bleaker. Because it's going to be used against us to make the rich richer and not to make our lives better.

Used to love the gaming and gaming related sub-reddits. Its sad what its become. While /c/gaming (and other related lemmy instances) may not be as active, it feels like it has much more human reactions than reddit at this point.

The text in the link: "So many esoteric questions that seem to only aim to answer the most niche, weird edge cases and obscure topics. Has everything else already been covered and these sorts of questions are all that’s left? Or is someone using the commenters of this sub to train an AI?"

Google artificial "intelligence" suggested to add glue to let cheese stick to the pizza, because a decade ago user fucksmith on reddit said so

Browsing Reddit at work like I've literally done every work day for the last six years, suddenly Reddit won't let me vote. Says my account has been suspended, but all I have to do is reset my password, using the email address I have on file. I don't have one. Can't get the email to reset the password, can't add an email now. I can be logged in but can't vote or comment or post. A 12 year old Reddit account down the drain. The password was unique, 20 characters with upper and lowercase letters, numbers, symbols. Generated by my password manager. No way someone compromised my account. Thanks, Reddit.

-modified the original reddit link to point to a privacy frontend-

Now that the change is in place, there is no more login on old. reddit. com

Reddit is getting worse

It tells me I have to register to view posts! It has blocked all my VPS IPs. From random places:

• Turkey
• India
• Germany
• That Asian country that is very 'western', I have forgotten its name

So what's the reason? Is this because of scraping? Seems random. If the IP is from India, we could say, well, they don't want scammers. Turkey, not sure. But Germany?

I know datacenters have an IP range, and they could ban all IPs from all datacenters. But why?

And the issue is, when you register, and post, you suddenly find yourself shadow-banned! I did not even made a bad post or anything.

Where do I get a quality IP that Reddit has not blocked?

Hi everyone,

As part of a school course, I am currently conducting a survey for our product "Color Sense." This project is specially designed to help blind or visually impaired individuals choose their clothes independently using tags that integrate braille and a QR code.

Your participation in this survey would be extremely valuable in helping us improve our product and better meet your needs. Link to the survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd-ShxAK5tcA4lYLcq9AyD5EHNvY1zNvGvM-VELhZoG0n3K7A/viewform?usp=sf_link

If you have difficulty answering the survey yourself, please feel free to ask someone to help you complete it.

Thank you in advance for your participation and valuable assistance!

Just in case Reddit needed to make it more obvious where their priorities lie.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15479755

OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts

New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what's everyone's experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?

I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 "controversial" comment and I got perma-banned... this sucks. I mostly followed music pages like r/TheBeatles and loved to just rant about Beatles albums, Paul McCartney's latest tour, discuss new releases from other artists and also movies/TV shows. I can't think of any other website that offers that kind of forum-like discussion other than Lemmy?

I really did always hate that Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber. The way the system works with upvotes and downvotes, if I said anything people don't agree with, I'd get massively downvoted. I once got temporary ban for saying I preferred Zelda Breath of the Wild over Tears of the Kingdom... it really felt like I was treading on egg shells. My perma-ban happened in a discussion within the r/EveryoneKnowsThat search for a lost wave song. Really petty.

I've always hoped somebody would create basically a clone of Reddit, but without the politics and without being overly-policed. Where people aren't pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?