It’s been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.
Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren’t joking when they say it sucks. I thought it’d just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.
The official app doesn’t respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The “hot” etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.
Guess I’m here to stay on the fediverse now.
What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.
Hell, I’ve read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.
It’s horrifying!!
From an advertiser perspective it makes sense to sell to addicted people. Mission accomplished?
Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let’s see if Lemmy can work.
What do we do if it doesn’t? Just crawl back and apologize?
Consider exploring other Fediverse platforms before heading back to Reddit.
I’ve been using Mastodon for some time now so the Fediverse won’t lose me, the question is if my redditing can be migrated.
Nah. If Lemmy/Fediverse doesn’t work out, there will be others. This has all happened before…
If the fediverse idea doesn’t work out and it’s yet another company the cycle is bound to continue.
A big chance is in front of us to break the cycle!
My only problem is that we are in 2023 and we still need to read a bunch of text. Why can’t we have holograms and a sexy AI whispering us the comments?
“As an AI language model, I can’t use a hologram to whisper comments, but…”
The one true constant for me is 4chan 😅
I kinda grew out of it. It was funny when I was an edgy teenager but it got progressively more cringeworthy as time progressed for me, even though the content may not have changed much.
I stopped engaging with Reddit when meme-ification happened.Wheb it became all about the lolz abd short pithy responses, I started using it to find more interesting articles. Gone are the days wheb the average Redditor would read and make thoughtful contributions.
That is in part because the reddit algorithm doesn’t like thoughtful contributions. These take time and understanding of the discussed matter. When your metric is positive (upvote) interaction per timeframe you need easily digestable content that people immediately react to. If I have to carefully read and think about the content my vote/comment is far too late to be “hot” on reddit.
It’s funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:
In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:
“You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”
https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>
Sadly, this is the only logical conclusion of things that are run for profit. Here’s hoping the federated model proves more resistant in the long run.
In the medium run federated instances will have to be financed somehow as well. We’ll see how that goes.