this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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It won't. Some people will scream bloody murder, most people will ignore it.
SO was in decline anyway. Most answers you'll find are several years old and outdated, because some idiot thought the new ones are duplicates.
So now a few people will leave, the spamming idiots will keep spamming the platform with low effort nonsensical answers and its relevance will dwindle just a bit faster.
Look at Reddit. Last year there was a huge outrage and today it's pretty much the same as before.
Most people don't care. Most people feel so powerless, that they'll accept every privacy scandal, every exploitive business strategy, every sellout of their platform.
Is Reddit pretty much the same? From my limited perspective, a lot of the genuine contributors left, quietly or otherwise. I've found it much more difficult to have an interesting discussion on there since the API debacle. Most of Reddit was already lurkers and bots, so all it took was a significant proportion of the tiny minority of quality contributors to take their time elsewhere for reddit to become a complete dumpster fire.
Anecdotally, pretty much every time I'm searching for information on reddit a number of comments are redacted or even the op is deleted. The only reason I didn't purge my comments is in case someone might find them helpful.
I have all my deleted comments in a csv (with context links), which I plan on fine-tuning an LLM with just for fun. I guess if there's a platform that'll accept it, I'd be happy to upload it. Mostly I wanted to make sure the info remains free for everyone, including AI researchers.
Hugging Face is the usual platform for sharing datasets and models.
Subs that I go on that used to get hundreds or thousands of comments now are lucky to reach 50 or so.
Reddit is still pretty useful, but it will become less and less relevant as contributors leave, just like StackOverflow did. Side note: are contributors actually leaving Reddit? People keep saying that's happening, but I don't really see it...maybe it's very slow? Might depend heavily on the subreddit too.
I don't have numbers, but I did. Took Redact 9 hours to overwrite & delete the 17,000 comments on my 17-year-old account. But watching them scroll by, most weren't really worth keeping. I saw several 15+ year-old active accounts do the same before I left.
Wait, how can it find all your past comments? I thought Reddit only have you a list of the most recent 1000 or something like that?
Through the API - well, it was through the API before they changed it. No idea if that's possible now.
This is something I have tried to convey since I came here when people are fantasising about the death of Reddit, I just couldn’t put it as eloquent as yourself.
I take the approach that me not using Reddit, or Amazon or whatever else is a choice I make so I can live with myself, and not that I believe it will have an impact.
I have alluded to this in previous comments in the past, that many of the choices I make actually negatively impact me more than the company I’m avoiding. Example: Not using WhatsApp means I can’t join group chats with friends as they won’t use signal as the things I care about, are meaningless to them. Or that I can’t find some items to buy except from on Amazon so I just won’t buy them etc.
All we can do is stick to our own morals and let others do as they will as it’s futile to make people care about the things we think they should.
I feel this. I'm well aware that if my partner wasn't on Facebook, we wouldn't have a social life. I HATE that fact, but that, sadly, is where people put their events. I don't think I'd join if she left, but I can't deny that I benefit from her being on the platform.
She won't leave until everybody else does, and they won't leave until everybody else does, and so nobody leaves. It's dystopian.
There's been a new thing (for the past two years anyways) where some power tripping user would edit the highest rated answer, causing new users to fail to get recognition.
So a new user answers a old question with the latest way to do something based on new language specs... And they'd get 1-2 votes.
Why even contribute then?
To help others? That's why I did it. Someone editing that into the highest upvoted answer is good because more people will see it.
Unless you care about karma, how is this bad?