this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.

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SNOOcalypse is closing down. If you wish to talk about Reddit, check out [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].


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The outcome was predicted by plenty users in this community, but now the news are noticing it.

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[–] Ubermeisters 93 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Regretfully the good content doesn't seem to have migrated here either

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’d disagree but it does depend on your instance and how you curate the content you want to view.

[–] Ubermeisters 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I can tell you that my community block list is about 5,000 times longer than it was on Reddit because of all the weirdo shit here.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Such is the beauty of the fediverse, block/mute/filter freely and openly. I'd block and filter more if I weren't an admin. Curating your content is the purpose of the fediverse, you make the algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

It's more that since Lemmy is smaller, the smaller subs show up on all.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sadly a lot of the good content will be lost, regardless of migration or encouraging users to take it off the site. Eventually someone in Reddit Inc. will have the "bright" idea to wipe everything out, to reduce spendings on data storage.

[–] Ubermeisters 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A very very very heartily disagree. Their entire business model now is selling that information, they aren't going to get rid of it EVER.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In the short term it goes as you say, they're selling API access to the LLM bubble. (And they're likely selling your data too, against your consent.)

However in the long term the LLM bubble will explode, and users will disengage with the site, causing a downwards spiral. At some point of that spiral they'll delete the data, after it's unprofitable. I think.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit hosts hardly any content. It's a link aggregator.

All the text content, all votes, posts, comments, etc. probably only fill a few TB. The video and image hosting part is a bit later, but arguably not huge either. Given the salaries in the valley, just having a meeting with 10 people about deletion is probably more expensive than storage for the next 5 years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You know what, you guys are right. Nevermind on that point then.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

X gonna give it to ya

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

It’s still early days. I’ve been enjoying myself more here than I had been there so far. Still holds promise.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I think quality hobby communities like the ones that used to exist on Reddit require both smart people and a larger population to create a sense of social investment. This kind of information used to be distributed across forums with fewer than 1k people each, which isn't so bad, but does prevent it from propagating easily.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

People have to post content, but most users lurk. It's a chicken/egg scenario.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think social media is inherently incapable of fostering good content. By nature it is social as in interpersonal drama slanted. That's not considering shareholder factor yet. Early years reddit was an oddity at the unique intersection between message boards and the social media era. In the beginning they were in the money burning phase. Not concerned with making profit. So maximizing engagement at the cost of content quality wasn't on the table yet.

Quite frankly old reddits reputation became something larger than life sized. The expertise on reddit was never really that great. There was a lot of bad info but try telling a big headed neckbeard that.

Better content is to be found on the internet outside of social media. Find that person who hosts a site to share their content from a technical basis. The people who will not suffer fools. They want to talk about inner working of their widgets. They don't care about likes and subscriptions. They don't have shareholders to answer to.

Lemmy seems to be taking the route in attempt to rapid expansion by stuffing it with low content memes. A flaw is in trying to mimic social media when most people want message boards of yesteryear.

[–] Ubermeisters 0 points 1 year ago

will not suffer fools

Yep, you definitely came from reddit haha

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Don't know if it's good content but I really like posting here. 😎

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Popular is dominated by posts about relationship drama, freakout videos, and things like amiugly. Rarely do you see any major stories on popular now. Aliens could be invading and destroying half the world and the top posts would probably be about whether someone was the bad one for breaking up with their partner due to not washing the dishes.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh gee, if it isn't the consequences of Huffman and his board's actions

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Just wait until Greedy Pigboy says something that boils down to "leopards ate my face". It'll be fun.

And frankly I'm glad that we're seeing the consequences of that now, instead of later. Call it pettiness but I want to see the IPO failing hard.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Who would’ve thought getting rid of all the mods that were the SMEs would later become an issue?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

None of the forcibly removed mods I spoke with have worked with or plan to work with replacement mods to pass on knowledge gained through years of experience.

Not to mention the people who have removed their previously posted content.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol can’t even view your link without the app any more.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It does open on my side, i just can't scroll lmao

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm convinced that Reddit is delaying banning anything that will leak more users to Lemmy. For instance, i would be 100% done with Reddit if they banned the Infinity client, but they haven't. I'm sure I'm not alone too, as there is probably a huge overlap in infinity client uses and those who would move to Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Perhaps, but the administration showed already that it doesn't really know what would piss off users and encourage them to leave, so there's a good chance that they'll still do it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm only on reddit because the Godot community here is so small and I don't want to push for more fracturing of an already small community

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Perhaps you could help usher people over with help on how to get Lemmy set up and add the community, and seed it with content. And maybe it's ok to fracture the community temporarily. If Godot has staying power a community will eventually recongeal.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Who else had "people start trying to can already-canned tomatoes" on their Reddit Enshittification Bingo card?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have seen this exact question so many times in my decade on r/canning before mods could nuke them. It’s kind of astounding how ignorant to food safety some of those posts can be and that was before the great mod purge. I really hope the rest of the community has stepped in to warn others if the mods aren’t doing their job to combat misinformation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I did not know that this was a dangerous thing to do!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly why it’s so important to have knowledgeable mods that can fight disinformation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wouldn't a sticky do that too?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You think people read those?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I wasn't expecting to leave the article having gained so much knowledge about canning

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There was a reddit mod that went on a ban rampage because someone dared to use the word "female" instead of "woman" and their justification for it was, it could have been from an incel. Fucking hell, shit like that makes me glad I'm not on there anymore.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've seen worse. Have you heard about the chicken sandwich drama?

  • user1 calls a chicken sandwich a "chicken sandwich", in a food subreddit.
  • user2 (an assumer unmoderating the sub) assumes that user1 is trying to "public shame" the OP, otherwise user1 would've called it a "chicken burger".
  • user1 and user2 start discussing through modmail, while user2 is clearly harassing user1
  • the discussion goes public
  • people start mocking user2 with the words "chicken sandwich" in all subreddits that user2 unmoderates

Bonus points: user2 also moderates a subreddit known for its propensity to brigade and try to... public shame people based on their cooking opinions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

...I might have been banned from that subreddit about shaming people. I got banned from some small cooking sub like that for "spamming" with like two comments in the whole sub. Turns out one was a reply to the moderator, and I guess they didn't like that.

Oooh, I couldn't remember the name but it just hit me. Was it r/iamveryculinary? I don't recall any brigading but I wasn't there for long.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yup, the brigading sub was r/iamveryculinary. The "chicken sandwich drama" was in r/food.

If you don't remember brigading you probably went to IAVC in its earlier times. Back then the sub just picked on content where users were bossing each other around on food opinions. That was fine, but in Reddit it is not sustainable in the long term.

Eventually the sub got filled with oversensitive and assumptive morons with the reading skills of a potato, always assuming that any food opinion was someone trying to boss them around, and reinforcing each others' assumptions. Nationalism also became a commonplace there, since the users there were too stupid to not generalise. With the unmoderator in question (TheLadyEve) disingenuously pretending that the admins, in one of their few instances of sanity, were persecuting the subreddit to curb down its brigading tendencies, even if she knew that the only way to prevent the brigades would be to close down the derailed subreddit, but I guess that an assumer like TLE wouldn't be able to do it.

It reached a point where, if you found some comment being downvoted into oblivion in r/food, r/cooking or r/askculinary, with random insults, you could pretty much guess "this was linked in r/iamveryculinary".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh, wow. Yeah, TheLadyEve was the moderator I replied to, and the one that banned me. Good to have confirmation I did nothing wrong and they were just a terrible mod.

Thanks for the Reddit history tour lol.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As someone who left Reddit shortly after they instituted the API changes and then stopped following the fall out, can someone provide a TL;DR of what happened?

I know that reddit pushed back on the protesting subs by saying "revert to what you were or we'll do it for you" and then started asking lower ranked mods to scab.

But beyond that, I don't know if reddit actually reverted the changes, dismissed the mods, or anything else.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

can someone provide a TL;DR of what happened

API changes happened. Mods protested against those API changes by privating their subs (blackout). Initially the blackout was expected to last two days, but plenty mods kept going indefinitely, because Reddit refused to undo the changes, and because plenty users were also pissed against Huffman smearing a third party app developer. Then Reddit resurrected the u/ModCodeOfConduct account to threaten the mods to go back, while pretending "I dun unrurrstand, u dun liek to mod than u leave lol" (in other words but in the same spirit). Plenty mods refused, so they were removed as mods. Then the same u/ModCodeOfConduct account started recruiting bozos and vultures to moderate the subs where the mods were kicked out.

TL;DR: of the TL;DR: Reddit didn't revert changes. Mods were kicked out. Dumbarses in their place.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That last step is......crazy.

So, in theory, I could have made a brand new account, say I will scab, and turn the sub into a burning dumpster fire.

I mean, if we really wanted to tank reddit, we should have been done on it purpose.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yup. And the karma restriction seems extremely low (probably because no sane person would still be willing to mod Reddit?). It's that sort of thing that you get in a single day, by simply answering stupid r/AskReddit questions with equally stupid jokes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Changes not reverted. Many mods dismissed. Many subs forcefully taken over, with very young accounts appointed to lead them.

Granted, I haven’t been back in many weeks now, but that was the state of affairs last time I was paying close attention.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is a cool article and all but there is no reason, to me, to believe in a mechanism that would make those new mods somehow worse on average than the old mods. Mods order was just seniority mixed with interpersonal drama with whoever was there before them, up to the guy who happened to be there in 2009.

Moderation was a sad fiefdom that was never good, these few in the article maybe just happened to have been good ones

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Mod order is still just seniority mixed with interpersonal drama, in a fiefdom structure. That doesn't change, even if the "senior" in question was recruited 5min ago.

What does change however is: emotional attachment to the platform, the subreddit, and the topic; personal and inherited (from older mods) experience; willingness to moderate a small community and make it grow.

It's also worth noting that a lot of those powermods who are eager to create interpersonal drama and abuse seniority are still there. The APIcalypse only gave them more room for expansion. Cue to Bardfinn defending Spez and trying to gaslight users with "ackshyually, spez defeated a fusker scheme".

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