[sunshine_reggae]

Yes, same here.

Let's just QUIT using Reddit. Enough is enough. If we tolerate corrupt behavior, we support corrupt behavior.

And quite honestly, it's become such a pile of trash, anyway. Also, it's become so obvious that submissions and comments are being manipulated and pushed by tons of bots and industry interests, it's just a bad joke at this point.

[doodlebugging]

>it's become such a pile of trash, anyway. Also, it's become so obvious that submissions and comments are being manipulated and pushed by tons of bots and industry interests, it's just a bad joke at this point.

Very true. Over the last few months as more bots and reposters come online you have seen the subreddits bleed back into related subreddits. Most of the posts on /r/popular (landing point for navigating to old.reddit.com when not logged in) come from subs that never appeared before last summer's mod rebellion about 3rd party apps. Subs like /r/AITAH, /r/SipsTea, /r/TikTokCringe, and several others hit /r/popular regularly.

/r/news will see stories that are functionally dead with no comment activity hang around for multiple days. The sad fact that the mods for the sub require you to have an email associated with your account keeps me from adding any content there since I don't give that out.

A lot of content that rightfully belongs in one sub is cross-posted to related subs for additional karma. /r/pics is one targeted sub that catches a lot of content that normally one would only find on /r/oldschoolcool.

It's almost like reddit is returning to the pre-subreddit days where there were no boundaries on the content that one would see on the main, and only, page as it updated. Memes, rick-rolls, news, questions, etc all just fell into line and as the site grew, faded quickly into the mist.

With all this in mind I have been cutting way back on my engagement. I have walked back through my post history and edited a bunch of them, using Yossarian's censoring rules - death to all adverbs, nouns, verbs, adjectives - or just replacing the posts with meme text or song lyrics to stupid songs.

If the post involved answering a question commonly encountered on the sub, one that would be easily discovered if reddit had a high-functioning search functionality, then for the most part, I leave it in place. Most subs I interact with are DIY type subs for automobiles, home projects, etc. and there are problems common to some models of car, truck, etc that people always ask about so removing that content seems wrong.

It is sad to see a tool like reddit become such an enormous pile of suck but I think it was inevitable.

[Y_Y]

> Yossarian's censoring rules

> Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. (Heller, '61)

[doodlebugging]

Yes. An excellent character in an excellent book. Thanks for this.

[asdff]

Kind of a waste of your own effort going through your post history when everything is crawled already

[doodlebugging]

I totally agree. Seems dumb and probably is dumb. That's okay. Totally my choice.

[scarface_74]

> been cutting way back on my engagement. I have walked back through my post history and edited a bunch of them, using Yossarian's censoring rules - death to all adverbs, nouns, verbs, adjectives - or just replacing the posts with meme text or song lyrics to stupid songs.

So you don’t see that you are being part of the problem?

[add-sub-mul-div]

The site is systemically bad now. Shitting up or deleting the content is part of the solution, to accelerate the timeline of typical users finding it worthless so that it can die and give rise to something better.

[scarface_74]

So if you don’t like a place in the real world, do you vandalize it or just not go there?

[add-sub-mul-div]

It's silly to act like every online context has a real world analogue. But no, I don't vandalize it. Whatever you consider the real world equivalent of deleting my comments after the place has enshittified itself, that's what I do.

[scarface_74]

There is a difference between deleting a comment and purposefully posting meaningless junk.

[doodlebugging]

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that from day one a user had the right to edit by adding to or subtracting any part of their content or to delete the entire comment? How is this vandalization? This is user control, the same level of control granted on a site that was built for users to post on and discuss any subject - free speech was a keystone principle until some bad actors couldn't stop posting trash and ended up rightly banned.

Millions, maybe billions of comments are digital dust at this point. Like thoughts lost just before they made it past the tip of your tongue. This is normal and expected behavior. Conversations get lost in the fog.

Reddit isn't a Banksy. Today, it's more like the monkey area of the zoo in spots with each monkey's hand ready to sling the shit. When you consider the huge number of bots on the site it is likely worse than that.

Originally /u/spez and /u/n0thing set a standard where a poster who dropped a reply containing information that didn't fit the established narrative and tried framing it as an accurate answer was asked to post the references that supported their conclusion. It was "tits or get the fuck out" days. That by itself promoted healthy discussions and worked to disseminate accurate information on important topics. It helped establish a cadre of users who are outstanding in their fields and who enjoy sharing their expertise with others.

In time, especially after Digg imploded themselves, the expansion of subreddits made it untenable for proper moderation so a lot of boogers were allowed out of the nostrils and while the quality of discussions in general on the site was still good, many subreddits were established where people could say anything with no one calling them out. It sideloaded all the horseshit that used to hit the front (and only) page of reddit to the subs - stuff like goatse, nsfw content, etc. In the earliest incarnation reddit's front page was a minefield of stuff you really needed to avoid if you wanted to surf online and still keep your job. Early users learned fast to read the comments before opening the post.

I'm having a hard time understanding how a feature - user control of content they post - is mislabeled in your reply as vandalism when the user elects to employ that feature in managing their content.

[scarface_74]

He said he was modifying the content to add useless messages and song lyrics. How is that not trolling and just plain juvenile behavior?

[water-data-dude]

The reason they commented originally was because they wanted to provide value to a community that had provided value to them. Reddit was simply the platform that hosted that community. Their loyalty was never to the platform, it was to the community. When Reddit decided to screw over that community so the execs could get a big payday from the IPO, it sort of broke a social contract.

Letting them keep extracting value out of you is kind of like if you worked at a grocery store, and then they unjustly fired you or a couple of your friends. Now they’re not doing so well, but are you “part of the problem” if you don’t keep shopping there?

No. Screw them.

[doodlebugging]

This is a great way to explain it. Loyalty to the community. You spend enough time on a sub and you begin to recognize a lot of posters even though you will likely never meet them.

[doodlebugging]

Not at all.

I have contributed a lot of content since 2005 under several different user names. A lot of that content required significant time for me to locate links, photos, etc to be able to provide accurate answers to a question or, as many of my posts attempt, to correct an inaccurate answer that seems to be getting a lot of traction in the post.

The content that I post is mine, the aggregation platform is theirs. I post with the understanding that it becomes as public as the sub allows and that I have the ability to edit as I feel appropriate.

Reddit is a platform for aggregating news and information on a huge variety of subjects but the content belongs to the users. Reddit felt like they needed to monetize things and the only thing they have that has any value is the user content and user ID info. I have never provided any ID info so they are stuck with an IP address for me. I'm okay with that.

They have had ample opportunity to crawl all of my posts over the years, archive them as they see fit, and repost them later as long as I get acknowledged as the OP. They have backups. Many others have used publicly available tools to crawl the site and index user content. It is safe to say that nothing that I have ever posted has disappeared. It is available in someone's archive somewhere. I'm okay with that because I can't change that now.

When I post today, I monitor the thread activity and when it dies I edit my post unless it fits the criteria that I honor - the post references a situation where someone needed information about a common issue with a vehicle or other product that I have a lot of experience with. For example if someone just bought a 15 year old vehicle and suddenly they encounter an issue that is well-known to everyone else who has ever owned that model then I post a clear answer with photos if needed to help them solve the problem. People like this tend to be unable to afford newer vehicles and problems like this can be expensive to fix if they go to a shop when they are really simple to fix with ordinary tools. I give a description of the process to repair it so they can get on their way and not have their "new-to-me" car break down and cost them a job. Most of my posts are reposts of content posted several times over the years such that I just grab the text from my local folder and the associated photos and let if fly again.

This is necessary on reddit because their search function is intentionally broken so that old useful posts can be hard to find. This encourages people to make new posts solving old problems and drives traffic to reddit. It's a dick move on reddit's part but I accepted that years ago.

The absence of permalinks on many subs also fuels this repost bullshit. Few subs have permalinks to popular questions or FAQs on the sub, therefore you see a lot of repetition in subject matter of the posts. Reddit subs are less of an information site than they are an activity site. Reddit needs a certain amount of traffic on a sub for it to be a useful place to post so search is crippled, permalinks are largely absent, etc.

The content I post on reddit is mine. I will do with it as I please. If you wanna see everything I have ever posted in its original form you need to use one of those crawler tools before I edit.

[scarface_74]

No matter what excuse you make, you’re still being part of the problem.

If you could do the same on HN would you? How is your action not petty and trolling?

And exactly how was Reddit suppose to be an ongoing concern without monetization? Were you going to donate to them? Provide free labor?

[doodlebugging]

I have been part of their free labor since late 2005. Now they want to farm out my content with no compensation to me. They would have nothing of value without the content that users like myself freely provided.

I donated my content without which they would never have gained any traction online.

>If you could do the same on HN would you? How is your action not petty and trolling?

I also edit comments on HN if the edit is appropriate and I remove comments if the thread is dead when I comment so that the comment adds nothing to the discussion.

>No matter what excuse you make, you’re still being part of the problem.

These words that I spent my time to type should never be construed as an excuse. They are an explanation. There's a difference. As to whether I am part of the problem or part of the solution or just a small part of something else, that is always open to an individual's interpretation based on and biased by their own personal experiences.

>And exactly how was Reddit suppose to be an ongoing concern without monetization?

This has never been my problem. It is a problem that they should have had the foresight to solve before they launched.

[scarface_74]

So exactly what do you propose? Should they pay everyone who makes a post or comment on Reddit?

Do you feel the same way about HN? You are posting here for free and providing value.

> This has never been my problem. It is a problem that they should have had the foresight to solve before they launched.

Do you feel the same way about all of the companies that YC funds?

If so, why are you commenting here “adding value”?

[mplewis]

Everyone who used the site and moderated it was providing free labor. Do you not remember the moderation protests against the administration of the site?

Now that those mods have left, the value of Reddit has too.

[scarface_74]

If you didn’t get any value from Reddit why did you comment and provide content? Why are you commenting here?

[goplayoutside]

If Lemmy had an automod I'd happily try to move the niche communities I help mod over, but without even the basics (regex rules + mod queue) attempting to mod any sizeable community is ime an exercise in frustration, making Lemmy essentially useless for us.

That's a real shame, because otherwise it looks like great software. I've got an offline instance sitting on AWS since last summer just waiting for any bit of progress, but gave up hope some time ago.

[culopatin]

Maybe if I was a teenager again I would spend the time to figure out how to use Lemmy, but at this age: I go in, curiosity takes me to “instances”, I see a million. Click a few, many are dead and I start wondering “wait, I have to navigate through this sea of non descriptive URLs that tell me nothing about the instance to get to the data?”

And even if that’s not true, that’s about where I drop it, because it seems like a big climb for something I already know won’t work as a Reddit replacement because there is no way my friends will be convinced to put this kind of effort, and because it’s hard to discover.

[dhalucario]

https://github.com/hjalp/automod

It seems like someone has made an autoposter. Maybe someone could have a look to extend it.

[rglullis]

Please tell me which communities you mod, and if it's not anything 18+ I can help you with moderation and use it to guide the development of the moderation dashboard I started working on.

[danslaboudoir]

The day Apollo ceased connecting is the day I deleted my account. I wish Steve and the crew my very worst.

[marcrosoft]

I thought we all quit when they disabled API access and ruined Apollo. People are still using Reddit?

[EasyMark]

tens of millions a day, I sometimes wonder why people take on these false "people are still using __________?" when they know that people are still using twitter and reddit and facebook. Do you have any explanation as to why one would act pseudo-shocked? Is there a point?

[rpgwaiter]

(Not OP) I legitimately thought reddit the site had died and gone full ghost town. My use of reddit has almost always been as a knowledge resource, and that had been totally destroyed with these API changes.

Like, very often I have a technical question, search it+reddit and find a seemingly helpful thread with most of the comments deleted. It's logical to assume that most people who also engaged with reddit like this have slowed their use considerably.

Hell, lately I'm more likely to slap "hacker news" onto my search query

[EasyMark]

reddit is more popular than ever to be honest. Sure they lost some people over the "no more free clients" massacre, but it was a miniscule amount.

[bluish29]

Apollo can still be used with sideloading a patch that allows you to enter new API key. As a single user it is hard to get to the limit.

[_8j50]

What is the alternative? lemmy and mastodon are protocols, what specific site with high engagement and good (not over zealous) moderation is worth checking out?

HN is nice to lurk but you really gotta be a conformist. It all just feels like tribal bubbles. It really is making me appreciate free speech, I prefer the days when horrible people were allowed platform/reach. The state of society right now (not just on the internet) is not compatible with liberty and free thinker idealisms.

[smokel]

The alternative is to simply not use it. Read books, hang out with friends, do some tinkering.

Free thinking is perfectly well possible without Reddit, in our very society. Unless you have some really weird thoughts? Rubbing these thoughts in other peoples faces may not be viable, but it has never been, as far as I recall. And I'm glad for it.

[_8j50]

Most communication happens on the internet these days. But also, my whole point is the "friends" bubble is increasingly getting smaller and tribal. We don't interact with strangers because our communication platforms optimize and moderate them away. How can democracy work if you can't talk to and convince fellow citizens on various controversial topics?

Even on HN, I was doing fine until I started commenting on political posts. My account started getting restricted when I stated the idea that Tor and similar software being used to undermine foreign governments and the works of many tech companies in this area is wrong, that democracy works for us but the "manifest destiny" approach of forcing democracy on others amounted to neo-colonialism.

If my views are wrong and unpopular, the downvote/karma system takes care of that. What's wrong today is, moderators and algorithms are herding us into tribal camps. People have forgotten how to passionately disagree with others without hating them or excommunicating them. We are being excommunicated from each other for the crime of thinking for ourselves.

[smokel]

A lot of communication happens online, but that doesn't make it great. Most communication online is unidirectional, dishonest, or plain wrong.

Before the internet, there was television (the drug of a nation...). I fail to see how social media actually improves communication. By all means it seems to spread disinformation faster, but it does not seem to lead to constructive thought. Even here on Hacker News, discussions can last only up to a day typically.

I personally don't care for all this to go away. We didn't win much by it, we won't lose much.

You wouldn't have had a big "friends bubble" in the 1990s, you may have had the illusion of having a big one in the early 2020s. Democracy is not built on that illusion.

[toofy]

i’m not trying to be dismissive of your concerns, so if this post comes across that way, i apologize in advance. im aware this will be wordy, i can't really sum this up in a more succinct way--im with the family doing easter dinner so i dont have the mental bandwidth to eloquently sum this up. i think the subjects surrounding this are super important for the future of the internet so its impossible to put the nuance it deserves into a tweet size paragraph.

also, in advance, while im gonna disagree with some of your points, i strongly agree with you regarding algorithms. im confident in saying they have played one the largest parts in the downward trend of online social. i’ll expand on it a little more below.

anyway. the reality is, the internet has pretty much always had moderation. if anyone attempts to convince you otherwise, they're wrong. irc ops banned indiscriminately, they did this so often it would make modern day internet hogs cry. bulletin boards always had various types of rules and they too would absolutely regularly ban people. forums have always banned people. etc... banning is definitely not some new internet thing.

there were/are of course places that have no moderation but they’re ghost towns entirely overrun with spam, or worse. they're absolutely not places that will ever attract a significant number of users.

this idea that we can build a large online community with no moderation, or somehow only moderate illegal content is just not based in anything resembling coherent reality. we have proven this time and time and time again. there are thousands, maybe millions of sites with little moderation that are empty other than loads of spam, nazi shit, child porn, noise spewing bots, dead internetting back and forth...

i bartended through college. a pretty good real world comparison to mods would be a bartender. for a huge number of bartenders, a much more important skill than even making drinks is to know when to remove a person from the bar. this skill is absolutely more important than mixing up a cocktail. knowing when to save someone from an uncomfortable interaction is paramount. recognizing early when a person or group is making the experience miserable for the rest of the people is so important. we don’t expect a bar or restaurant to have a written list of Every Single thing that could get someone bounced out because 1) this list would be impossible to make, and 2) people generally know how to behave socially in the real world. yet somehow we've been convinced the same etiquette doesn’t apply online. which, to be a bit terse, is kinda stupid. as the internet ages, ultimately we’ll see online users are people. people still find the same behaviors creepy. the same things weird. even tho it’s online we still think it’s weird if a random person interrupts our conversation and starts screaming weird stuff at us. while bartending, i had to remove people from the bar regularly for all kinds of weird shit, not once did i ever hear someone cry “but i have free speech” while being dragged out of the bar. not once. if someone had yelled this, the crowds would laugh at them. common sense and etiquette rules over free speech in social atmospheres. and until we realize this extremely basic thing (so basic that toddlers understand it) we’re still going to see people being metaphorically dragged out of forums, even while they're screaming “i have the free speech to unprovoked call that random stranger a fat pig! free speech!” its hilarious that people don't understand this extremely basic human issue. yes, they have the free speech to be a dickbag but somehow forget the bartender has the freedom to snap their fingers, point at the person and have the bouncers drag them out? common sense and etiquette rules in social atmospheres.

you mention “how can we talk to and convince people on controversial topics?” (again, i want to stress that i hope i don't come across as dismissive of your concerns, but…) you don’t need to convince random strangers to believe controversial topics. you don’t need to. and we need to understand, when people do this, they come across as zealots. take the real world again as an example: if random strangers approach you and start chirping controversial x, y, or z subjects, thats weird... people will treat that as weird. they will cross the street to get away from zealots who do this. if you’re on a site and it seems like people are metaphorically crossing the street to get away from you, ask yourself how you might appear if you approach a random stranger in the real world and strongly start talking about weird controversial shit? would they look at you sideways and slowly back away? would they maybe come up with excuses to leave the conversation? common sense and etiquette rules. be normal. you don’t need to “convince” random strangers to save democracy. most people find randoms bringing up controversial topics to be creepy and weird.

we’re people, we’re not random usernames you need to “save” or “convince” of anything. especially controversial shit. just like in the real world, remember, sometimes people are open to a conversation--i want to stress a conversation, not a debate--sometimes they're open to one, but more often people just aren't interested. there are so many very good reasons people may not want to have conversations at any given time. and beyond that, it’s even more rare for people to want random strangers who are trying to save or "convince" them through some weird internetDebate. that’s not normal. rarely does anyone want to be preached to (and yes, im fully aware that i am saying this as i’m preaching to you lol, sorry) if someone isn’t specifically looking for a debate, it’s absolutely offputting and creepy when people do this. sure, there are tiny little niche communities where people enjoy what these communities call "debates", but those are a tiny fraction of people compared to the massive world of normal people who find that weird.

im sure we’ve all had the “have ya heard the good news about jesus” people knock on your door? a lot of times that’s pretty annoying. imagine how much more obnoxious it is if a random were to approach you and your friends on the street: “did you know jews and gays are ruining the world?” when this happens in the real world we’re like, 'get away from me dude, wtf…' the creepy weirdo factor doesn't change just because it’s online. and it doesn't have to be that controversial... its just odd when people try to jam controversial shit onto random strangers. its just creepy.

as for algorithms, i totally agree with you, they’ve done far more to destroy social than anything. in the big picture i dont think we need to be stressed about it though. im confident we’re gonna ultimately see a rejection of algorithmic curation. i mean, algorithms are just so bad. everything from shopping algorithms to music recommendations to the conversations the algorithms choose to show us. its just bad. a fail all around.

i suspect online will go back to something closer to offline reality. in reality we are never all jammed into the same room with an algorithm strongly implying "now scream at him! now tell her shes fat! now tell him why his doctor is wrong! now yell at that group!" in the real world we have never in the past (and still don’t) need or even want to talk to random strangers in the real world. we don't scream our ideas at each other. we don't think we need to interject our personal ideas into other peoples conversations.

frankly it’s bizarre that the same group of investors keep trying to convince us to do this. trying to convince all of us to simultaneously go to the same place and listen to their curated algorithms. its super odd. the same group of investors are repeatedly trying, over and over again they've been doing this on multiple different failed social sites. "everyone listen to our algorithm! it failed on that other site we own. but you *all* need to listen to this one! no, dont go elsewhere, listen to ours, all of you! you'll hate this one idea from him, yell at him!" its super creepy.

also, this thing where a few people keep loudly trying to jam and force everyone around them into a “debate” is another piece of this thing thats got to go. more of us need to read the room. sometimes people will be interested in an actual conversation but they're rarely interested in what these guys laughable call a “debate”. we need to be normal. if a person indicates they want to have a conversation with a random strange, sure, jump on in, have that conversation. however, if they’re already in a conversation with their friends, are they open to a random chirping in? if they’re not interested, yet someone forces their way in, its not at all surprising when that group of friends metaphorically crosses the street.

anyway, go easier on yourself. you don’t need to save democracy. don’t imagine you're “making democracy work” by forcing controversial opinions on normal everyday people. especially those who aren’t interested in your controversial opinions. we’re just randoms on the internet. none of us are saving anything with our internet posts on random social sites. there are much bigger things pulling those levers. pursue interests. have fun. be normal.

[smokel]

A bit lengthy, but I for one tend to agree.

Basically, most of us haven't figured out how to meaningfully make the switch from real-life communication to online.

[al_borland]

X/Twitter is supposed to be the free speech platform.

A course I’m taking told students to post daily updates there for some accountability and community. I signed up to do that. I followed some normal stuff as part of the onboarding (some tech people, some local news, a couple podcasters… only 17 people) and the “for you” feed it gave me is nightmare fuel. To be fair, I turned off the content filters, as I do on every site, but it’s usually not that bad. I’m thinking of turning the filters back on to see what that looks like. So far it hasn’t really been a community I want to get invested in. Not to mention the comments on posts are littered with completely unrelated posts. A 3rd party app would go a long way, but like Reddit, Twitter killed that off.

[rrr_oh_man]

I love /r/askhistorians, though. Excellent posts.

[blakblakarak]

This (and r/stopdrinking and r/peloton for race feeds) are my only reasons to visit nowadays.

[ktosobcy]

Unfortunatelly it won't work/happen... even after huge protest and backlash reddit is still strong and go-to-place :-(

[gamepsys]

I hear a lot of people talk like this, and I understand that reddit has huge traffic numbers. However, for me Reddit peaked in interesting content around 2013, and I stopped daily browsing in 2015. Sometimes some subreddits have interesting posts, but interesting content is far from the norm. Now each subreddit feels like it is having the same discussion again and again, and the median post is a meme or some chat-gpt generated text dump. As Reddit became more and more popular the most upvoted posts became more and more mass-appeal and easily digested content.

Other platforms have taken it's place as where the truly interesting discussions are happening. Twitter and Discord being the biggest two.

[asdff]

But thats not what the reddit owners care about. They are happy people like you leave, you are hard to monetize and block ads. The people who look at the front page today and say this is great? They don't block ads. They don't use old reddit. They don't realize when they are engaging with a shill post. Reddit wants proportionally more of them and less of you, and they are winning.

[kbenson]

That only works to a point I think. If your forum devolves to only having the easily duped people, it becomes a lot less interesting overall (since the content is from the people) and even those people leave.

[asdff]

Its about making as much money as soon as possible so you can cash out and diversify. Its not about making a long term sustainable forum model.

[omoikane]

I have observed a recurring pattern of "this popular place is doing something I don't like! Let's all move to a less popular place, that will show them!" Time and time again, the people who made the move learned that they were the minority in what they didn't like. Also, while the old place might have a greater variety of people (good and bad), the new place is often filled with many people who were angry about the old place (maybe mostly "good", but makes a lot of angry posts).

So now, people who are at this newer, possibly better, but quieter and angrier place, they have to wonder if they made a good move. Sometimes, with enough patience, the new place do eventually turned out to be just as great. But usually my observation is that people just give up and leave, possibly returning to the old (still popular) place.

[dotnet00]

Yep, I've seen the same phenomenon.

Another example being of X to the fediverse. So many people switched over, made not being on X their entire identity, freaked out when the place wasn't as sanitized as X and eventually just went back.

[Tijdreiziger]

Ain’t that the truth.

I tried moving to Lemmy, but turns out that the only people there are other techies who are mostly interested in techie topics (and I already have HN for that).

If you want a broader perspective or you want to discuss non-techie topics, Reddit is still the place to be, for better or worse.

[Dwedit]

The protest was done in the worst possible way.

You don't PRIVATE the subreddits. You keep them visible, lock out new posts, and direct visitors to a successor website to continue the discussion.

[swed420]

Some communities did exactly that. Jellyfin is one example.

[bwanab]

All true, but I haven't found any forum that works for very localized (geographically or otherwise) interests than reddit. I've long ago stopped looking at or participating in any non-localized subreddit.

[redox99]

Around 2 years ago I got incorrectly banned site wide for 3 days for "ban evasion". Haven't used it ever since (except through google searches). There's no downside to leaving reddit really.

[EasyMark]

probably the cabal of mods that run the more popular subreddits. I deleted an account because of that; I had posted in one of the antivax subs about how stupid people in there were being and the popular reddit mod cabal sentenced anyone who posted ever in a slew of those antivax subs to "bans" and if you used a different account you were "ban evading". It's a petty power play by very small minded people to hurt those even though reddit possesses no mechanism to know you are "banned" in a sub other than a one time message. It just shows how pathetic and small their lives must be to try and reach out and cause other folks trouble

[silisili]

I'm not sure that one who purposely goes into subreddits of topics one disagrees with to throw insults and start arguments is exactly a model user, in fairness.

[EasyMark]

Those were subreddits of conspiracy theorists and propaganda bots, I didn't really care all that much about their feelings. I wasn't banned for speaking out against it, I was banned because I commented at all in those subs and the moderators HATED said subs because they were anti-vax cesspools and assume anyone who would go there opposed their world views. You deserved punishment even if you had never even so much as read their "popular" forum. It was a power play and ego boost for them, maybe to make up for holes in their own lives so they could feel powerful at least somewhere.

[butz]

There still is a lot of useful information posted on Reddit. Was it scraped somewhere for preservation purposes?

[rglullis]

https://lemmit.online and https://zerobytes.monster mirror the posts into their own instances

https://alien.top mirrors the posts and comments from some communities into a set of topic-specific instances and is my project to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy. Visit https://portal.alien.top to get started.

[no_time]

Actually yes, the entire thing: https://academictorrents.com/details/9c263fc85366c1ef8f5bb9d...

Nobody is actively hosting it with a frontend though.

[tootie]

Losing the VPN crowd will cost them next to nothing.

[hipadev23]

A vast amount of reddit “users” are persona bots behind proxy and vpn networks.

[lxgr]

Only because they've already lost most of what is actually valuable (to most early users; maybe not to advertisers).

[andsoitis]

> Only because they've already lost most of what is actually valuable (to most early users; maybe not to advertisers).

There are many many users who were not early users who find Reddit very useful and a positive in their daily lives.

[lxgr]

Is that despite or because of the changes they've made in the past years?

[someonehere]

I gave up over a year ago. Best decision ever. It’s just garbage now that gets posted.

[kilroy123]

I did several years ago and it's been great.

I'm still a bit hooked on HN. But not nearly as bad. ;)

My strategy was to slowly unsub from everything until it got so boring I just stopped visiting all together.

[itsoktocry]

That's why reddit, as an investment, is so strange.

Running forums as a business is antithetical to the needs of the community. Fortunately, there's always "another forum". Quitting is really easy. I know because I've been doing this for almost 30 years.

[smokel]

> Let's just QUIT using Reddit.

This suggests that you need others to join you in quitting. Why not simply quit yourself?

[mitthrowaway2]

People want to talk in the place where other people will listen. People want to listen in the place where other people are talking. If you walk out by yourself and end up standing in an empty room, you'll just end up turning back.

[smolder]

More people leaving means less FOMO. Or perhaps they want to harm reddit in some karmic justice way.

[racked]

If not site:reddit.com, what am I going to type into Google to get any kind of reasonable search result?

[swed420]

Agreed. The manipulation became obvious with the capital fueled shareblue / "correct the record" campaign from Dems years ago and has only gotten worse since.

The stated purpose of CTR was to defend against Trump, but it was of course also abused to help sabotage Sanders. A tool like this will always be abused to perpetually elevate capital interests over human interests.

Whatever solution everybody jumps to, it needs to somehow prevent this behavior because it's not going to stop on its own.

[tomrod]

Is this "CTR" from the world of alternative facts, or a real thing?

[sircastor]

I can’t speak to what the GP is talking about here, but Correct The Record was a SuperPAC whose purpose was to “…fight online harassment aimed at Clinton and her supporters by staying positive.”

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct...

[tomrod]

Appreciate it. So it's a "nothingburger" to borrow parlance!

[swed420]

Looks like you got to the bottom of it. Good luck with your "democracy."

[tomrod]

Hey, thanks! She's got some leaks and is showing her age, but we genuinely do love this old ship.

[swed420]

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/04/if-you-want-solid-evi...

Not the "nothingburger" establishment Dems like to claim.

[weregiraffe]

>Let's just QUIT using Reddit. Enough is enough. If we tolerate corrupt behavior, we support corrupt behavior.

Might as well quit using Internet.