this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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Looking at what reddit was and what Reddit is now, I genuinely can't imagine why anybody goes there anymore. The odd time I do some nice doomscrolling, I find that >99% of the content is re-heated and re-served. Nothing there informs me anymore. Nothing there inspires me. Nothing makes me think in a new way.
Every day the same thing ad nausea. Fascism bad. Sexism bad. Phobia bad. Musk bad. Orange man bad. Inflation bad. Boomers bad. Cats good. Name my rescue dog. Celebrity good. Celebrity dead.
That site should be renamed Reggurgitatit.
That's not just Reddit. That's the entire Internet right now. Reddit or Lemmy, X or Mastodon, Facebook or anything else on the Fediverse. It's all the same. We are living in a time of mass fear because of several different reasons. War, climate, economy, personal rights... pick whatever topic you want. There's a reason to be angry about it.
We need to go back to the days of happy people sharing their passions, rather than angry people attacking each other. But that won't happen anytime soon.
The big problem is algorithmically driven content feeds. They don't feed you content that makes you happy, they feed you content that makes you mad. I think Lemmy is different in that your feeds are based on what is popular in the communities that you've subscribed to. Reddit used to work like that, but now it's all algorithmic content too.
It's still insanely popular.
I don't know about "insanely".
It's not in the top 10 globally. It gets less traffic than Yahoo or Yandex.
https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
Compared to other social media it's below Facebook, Instagram and even the dying Twitter. It might get more traffic than TikTok (which seems off to me) but unlike Reddit and Twitter, TikTok knows how to make money. Reddit has never made money, but the pitch to investors is apparently "as soon as we go public, we'll be in the black, trust me bro".
Yandex is not that popular in the United States, their data collection seems wrong. Semrush ranks reddit #3 in the US.
More traffic than Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Amazon, etc? That seems unlikely. Maybe they're not counting any traffic from apps? If so, that isn't all that useful.
These statistics are only as good as their method of data collection.
I recently started using it because it's actually a search engine like Google used to be. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it's gaining traction. Google.com is just a website. I don't think they realize just how quickly we can switch to other providers.
Yes, but why?
There are still a lot of smaller subreddits of rather niche communities that you just don't have here on Lemmy for example
That whole "niche communities" thing never rang true for me. I mean sure, if you like cast iron you can go to the cast iron community. And see 9000 pictures of cast iron pans and people freaking out about cast iron. Or cooking... and you have to listen to THOUSANDS of recommendations for air fryers but not cooking.
The "communities" system never worked from the word go. The site content should have been organized with weighted tags. As I find few things more nauseating than "collective intelligence" which is mostly wrong, ill-conceived, closed-minded and half-baked at best.
Disagree, there were, possibly still are, good ones. A handful around mushrooms cultivation, food preserving, food fermentation and personal finance specific to my country come to mind, lots of high quality content.
But I know what you mean. I think it mainly happens once specific subreddits started going mainstream, often with an influxnl from facebook people. Out of all the fermented stuff, the kombucha one made my eyes bleed due to its popularity. Half the posts where new people asking if they had a mold problem, the other half was existing members posting "read this before posting, this is what mold looks like", but they were obviously ignored lol
I mean at least for video games especially ones that are live service games having a place to go to talk about the game and new changes is really nice and still a thing I miss a lot about Reddit.
In principle, I agree with you. But you are judging Reddit's value by the looking at the home page and taking a snapshot. Instead of looking at it as a lake of mostly crap, think of it as Instead of a river that filters things out and holds the not-crap that come from the flood.
For the same reasons that fast food is popular. It's basically dumbed down mindless consumption. I used to be on reddit because I could talk to like-minded people about interesting topics, but the vast majority of people on the internet just want to be entertained and with the support of the admins, they ended up taking over the site. Sure, there are some niche communities where you can have valuable discussions but their time is limited. It's essentially an artificially accelerated Eternal September.
I'm on board with your main point. I supposed I'm still left wondering why people go to a place that gives them the exact same thing every day without variation. Wait... yeah... that's actually the appeal. It is just like fast food: sweet, salty, fatty, devoid of nutrition, and always predictable.
I go there still when I want product recommendations that aren't full of marketing/ads. If I use a search engine to search for example, "dashcam recommendations," I get a million results that are sponsored, SEO-optimized, or otherwise garbage. If I go on Reddit, I'll find an entire community devoted to the topic with seemingly real people discussing the pros/cons of all different models.
I've tried searching with Lemmy but most of the time I can't find the answers I'm looking for so end up crawling back to Reddit.
I absolutely don't go there to doomscroll like I used to, I've thankfully moved on from that life.
I need you to understand that Reddit Astroturfing is a gigantic market. You're no more getting authentic experiences than you are with random (I got it for free with a check for $5000) YouTube review.
Your experience is very different from mine. Yoy make it sound rosy over there. In my experience all but a few subs have slipped to the right. I've seen blatantly racist top comments on racist-bait posts on multiple mainstream subs.
I've never seen the view of an IPO so heavily affected by bias. Superusers hate Reddit but so what - what matters is whether soccer moms are scrolling and being shown ads. No one cares that the most costly users are unsatisfied. You and me both are nothing to investors.
Is there some objective analysis of this IPO? All I'm seeing is "I'm a superuser who spent a lot of time on Reddit in 2007 and it was far superior back then. The stock will tank."
Yeah, reddit is astroturfed to hell and back. unless its something programming, the idiots on reddit are usually wrong.
Honestly not much different on largerv lemmy communities either.
This is more of a symptom of our society than of a specific platform.
It's because LLMs don't have imagination
r/sffpc is still good tho.
Boo hoo cry some more 🤌🎻