Technology

Agreed. And this has taught us some things about communication. About how it works when it's hooked up with capitalism, government and/or the general population.

I personally think it works better without that stuff.

There's no point in taking moderation seriously. It's a volunteer position and the tools to handle slop aren't there.

I hear they're bringing back digg.

I also hear it's a former Reddit C-suite that's bringing it back, so it'll probably be more of the same.

They'll just make new ones

I beg to differ: spez has ruined reddit for everyone.

i loved reddit. I was on it since nearly the beginning. It's a sad day where reddit has ended up. Aaron Swartz would be rolling in his grave if he could see where reddit ended up.

The engagement bots constantly peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction is what drove me to Lemmy. I was there early on, and it was awesome. As its popularity grew, it became less nice, but I still enjoyed going there. In the end, I didn't feel like commenting because I knew that I'd just get hit with stupid responses calculated to draw a response. It just felt harassing.

I mean, yeah, I left during the first wave of API changes and before the company went public, but the AI has definitely made it completely unusable.

This is key. 

If there weren’t bots…Reddit would make its own bots. Reddit dances a fine line of allowing the population to be a certain proportion of bots because they increase real engagement by picking fights with its real users, as well as creating never-ending “content” for people to read and vote on. They only ban bots when real users notice they are bots - which is less and less frequently - even though Reddit has the tools and information to ban them long before that point.

Reddit could easy eliminate almost all of them, but that would be expensive and they’d lose real users as a result.

Niche communities that simply don't exist on Lemmy. If your only hobbies are tech, lemmy probably covers all of your bases, but there are nearly no niche non-tech communities here.

We can absolutely blame AI for everything. The reason AI took over Reddit is because Reddit fired their human moderators in favour of AI moderation. It’s basically a vicious circle of bots learning how to avoid being banned, and auto moderation learning how they’re avoiding being banned…repeat.

…the obvious problem being that bots are valuable to Reddit because they increase real engagement…if there weren’t bots, Reddit would make its own bots to do basically the same thing. Reddit only wants to restrict bots to a certain proportion of the population, rather than eliminate them.

The AI slop is just extra piss in a lake full of piss.

Yeah AI had nothing to do with it. Ruined waaay before AI took hold. That's why I left.

The UI was becoming unusable, the policies were unreasonable, the greed got to them, etc, etc.

Yep. It was headed downhill with the bots, reposts, karma farmers, hive-mind, troll farms, and of course the reddit c-suite "purging" the site of things like WPD, morbid reality, spacedicks (yeah, not subs for everyone, but noetheless...not hurting anyone), getting rid of Victoria, getting rid of mods and leaving petty power mongers and sycophants in place, and allowing shit like The_Donald and similar subs to run unchecked. The forced commercialization, crushing of protest and reddit app was the final straw.