Fedibridge

It's not dead, it just lived long enough to see itself become the villain. Reddit used to be about communities and people. Now it's about bots and defending pedophiles. And falsely accusing devs of blackmail and shuttering the API when said dev brings the receipts. That, too.

Of course, said dev's app got open sourced and ported to Android for Lemmy users, so there's that. I don't know much about coding and source, but both Voyager and Mlem look like they got the best parts of Apollo. And that's a good thing.

It’s complaining about bots on Reddit. I honestly don’t think Lemmy would stand a chance if bots decided to come here instead.

Claims Reddit is dead, then proceeds to say Reddit is not actually dead, and admits they are just looking for attention. That's so Reddit!

The Reddit of a decade ago is long dead. As is the Reddit of 5 years ago. As is the Reddit of a couple years ago.

Reddit has always been ever changing. The users change. The popular topics change. The drama changes. The rules change. The inside jokes change. The discourse changes. The site itself changes.

If I were throwing out random poorly supported theories that make sense to me (and maybe only me): I bet the site is doing fine, even by real metrics. It's just that the demographics have shifted, leaving "older" accounts feeling a bit out of place.

While I'm confident that bots and AI are pumping the numbers, my assumption is that Reddit is now focusing on new/different markets with potential for lots of growth, like users in regions outside of "The Western World". For example, the past few times I've gone over and looked, the front page is full of posts from subs catering to people in India. Even in less regional subs, if you look at comments and submissions, it's clear that more and more users are from places like Southeast Asia, China, India, etc.

So, when the topics and humor and discourse and design and everything else start veering towards a new demographic, and particularly when it's a demographic that you're not part of and have limited familiarity with, I totally understand why it feels like the place is dying to someone especially if they are from USA, Canada, and places like that.

It wasn't just rage comics and advice animals; it was new atheism, tech bro libertarianism, I Fucking Love Science rationality and skepticism and grammar nazis to boot. Celebrities like Adam Savage were all but worshiped, and Ron Paul was bigger than Jesus if all you went by was the default subs (which are no longer a thing).

Holy fuck don’t mention Lemmy; please don’t mention lemmy to these peasant-brained annoyers (Adam Savage is okay I guess)

It’s not dead…but it’s certainly an enshitified: husk of itself.

The way I described Reddits’ current state to somebody who asked was: “A bunch of bulletin board/chat rooms moderated by wanna be despots…all of whom rely on an overarching AI moderator that’s constantly sniping users and handing out bans for benign content. In between Ads and bots trying to instigate you or farm your clicks.”

it’s basically turned into a weird Orwellian advertisement delivery service. All the mods who turned their pages black should have just left.

Half my feed is AI generated engagement bait or marketing disguised as content. It’s a bit of a wasteland compared to what it was

Someone should mention nostr. Wonder if anyone has. It doesn't have a reddit clone app available right now, but it inevitably will, and it's the only social media thing I know of right now where you're really pretty much immune to bans