reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
Bad is such an imprecise term it’s kind of meaningless. Reddit has a radioactive community, an enshitified user experience, and employs many hostile anti-user policies that make engaging and using the product difficult and unpleasant. There is no one cause for any of that.
The toxicity of the community is due to the free speech absolutist nonsense that spez preached in the 2010’s that allowed /r/redpill and /thedonald to fester and spread across the platform stoking hostilities and prejudices. The “hivemind” is a direct result of the karma system and making the number go up that lead to precanned tropes, memes, and opinions that act as nostalgia inducer and thought terminating cliche.
The ux/ui has remained largely stagnant in terms of improvements from the “new” reddit facelift while pressure from VC’s to monetize the platform have resulted in a series of business decisions that spurred on rapid enshitificaiton in the hopes of turning the company profitable to pay back investors.
Reddit HQ does little to vet mods, even on major subreddits, which leads not only to some very questionable moderation decisions but also the manipulation of content with an agenda. Unpaid mods are over-relied on for content moderation on a commercial platform and are not given sufficient resources to control spam, trolls, and bots. These problems have lead to extremely hostile community rules for the majority of subreddits that require users to have generated a sufficient amount of karma to even leave comments, making the new user experience abysmal.
There are so many more things that factor into why reddit is an unpleasant platform to use, but monetization isn’t even in the top 3. Look at how well facebook, insta, X, threads and even reddit are doing. No one likes ads and user tracking, but it doesn’t bother most people enough to abandon a platform that still has a strong network effect in play.
I’ve been a relatively active Lemmy user for two and a half years and I can’t give you specific numbers on how much it’s grown in that time, but anecdotally Lemmy’s community is not as friendly, nuanced, or intelligent as it used to be. In fact it’s taken on a lot of traits reddit’s community has that make it unpleasant, such as black and white thinking, grievance-based worldviews, and unflinching ideological zealots.
It’s the lifecycle of social media, Lemmy is out of it’s early adopter driven infancy and has now moved into it’s chronically online driven adolescence. How Lemmy will change as time goes on will in large part be driven by the demographics of the users.
The API fees was not what made reddit bad, it was just the final straw for many of us. The platform had been enshittifying for years prior to that.
It’s both. The more people on a platform viewing it’s posts, the more likely it is to be exploited for advertisements and mis/disinformation/propaganda and just general attention-whoring. The thing is, Reddit pushes that shit on you. The fediverse has no incentive to do such things.
I would never say “don’t make lemmy grow” (partly because I don’t use Lemmy), but there are valid reasons not to want it to.
Hmmm… I feel like this is only half the picture.
Lemmy, as mentioned, don’t have an incentive for such things. But also very importantly, no single instance would get away with spam/ad accounts. If one instance becomes a neucianse (to tired, can’t spell), other users/instances will block it outright.
This already happens to instances with high concentrations of stuff people don’t want to interact with. I don’t see how it wouldn’t happen to a commercialised instance as well?
While thinking about it, this is exactly what happened to Facebooks “Threads”. The whole point is decentralisation, so no one wants to federate with big company instances.
And commercialisation in the software for Lemmy is, while not impossible, very much neutered. If someone were to push features for ads or something else shittifying into the code, about 100 devs would immediately fork the codebase right before that change and carry on the work for an ad free decentralised platform.
Not saying Lemmy is perfect, but it has self-correcting properties in many layers that prohibit a general enshittification of Lemmy as a whole.
the issue with the “just block the instance” solution is if that instance has enough content defederating from it would be unpopular
no single instance would get away with spam/ad accounts. If one instance becomes a neucianse (to tired, can’t spell), other users/instances will block it outright.
In a world where there are hundreds of millions of Fediverse users, that would be an impossible task. New instances and accounts would pop up faster than you could ever hope to ban them.
While thinking about it, this is exactly what happened to Facebooks “Threads”
That’s not what happened at all. Many of them defederated. Many also did not. Some of the largest ones did not. Fortunately Meta put almost zero effort into it and it wasn’t really a problem anyway.
Sorry, I’ve seen this opinion way too often to call it unpopular.
okay then, i guess it’s an unpopular opinion that this post is an unpopular opinion.
Nice!
The mods destroyed reddit.
The admins intentionally made mods harder to organize and be run by their subreddit users as a way to disempower everyone else.
They did t have a sense of humor and banned quickly. Then got me permanently banned
I think we can agree that there are multiple failure points. Aggressive mods did not help!
Reddit was bad before the API stuff for a number of reasons. Jailbait and other underaged subs and numerous other very questionable things that were only removed with outside pressure. Also very uneven application of the rules.
I agree with the point that size was not in itself the problem.
What if Lemmy grows and donations don’t scale
what if lemmy grows and costs don’t scale?
(it’s more expensive per user to run a platform for 10 users than for 10k users)
How is this an unpopular opinion?
just check out the whole lot of users who keep saying “nooooo we can’t have more users or we will enter eternal september on lemmy too”.
see for an example a lot of comments under this post: https://feddit.org/post/37840829
I agree with you completely, though would like to emphasize corporatizations always leads to this. Social spaces should be socially run as lemma is. Size will have it’s issues though so I understand the want. A smaller community allows you to see people you would only see once in the flood of millions. I do hope to see it grow but people will need to leave if they want the small community vibe. Sad, absolutely, but it’s worth it for a socially ran socially media. It’s a scourge that causes many of our issues. I hope another place opens for those who leave.
You’re not wrong, the API was the reason I got here too… But, the problem with “don’t make lemmy grow…” is not the size itself that would kill it, but the attention that results from it.
More people => (even) more interest in bots for marketing and/or propaganda. Or some billionaire who wants to “own” lemmy and just makes the biggest, shiniest instance, which even pays users until 99% of lemmy is this instance. Or just buys every instance-owner until no free ones are left. Or whatever else wicked ideas one would come up with.
Though in some places in reddit it was not for participation anymore, just for consumption. A post appears, it instantly had 5.4 gazillion comments every minute (slightly exaggerated). A real talk rarely was possible. That aspect though matters with growing size.
