OpenStars

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)

I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.

One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).

Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.

Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.

The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.

TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?

(though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)

Spez is unlikely to ever do anything unless the Musk has already said that he wanted to do it.

At which point you might start to worry that both X and Reddit may join us at some point? But consider this: if Spez ever did tell people that he wanted to do that, it would take their programmers 20 years to write the code to make it happen, and by then we’ll all have moved on to direct thought sharing over the Web10.0 anyway. :-P Whereas if he simply bought the code off of somebody else who already made a fully-functional copy, then like Alien Blue - the forerunner to Reddit’s official app - it would still self-destruct in his hands, converting itself into a pile of dung. At which point we simply defederate from it, no worries.

Here we are free.

There have always been such (it is human nature) - but right now they feel bold enough to speak and act, whereas previously they had been too afraid and embarrassed to do so publicly.

In South Carolina, various KKK-like groups said in advance that they wanted to kill people, wrapped barbed wire around baseball bats (in order to better kill people with), showed up to kill people, then actually killed people, then bragged about having killed people… Oh right, but the other side was not successful in securing a permit for their peaceful protest, so you know, there are “many sides” to every issue I guess.

Misinformation/brainwashing techniques are powerful. Like if you believed that a particular type of human was the root of all evil in this world, then you SHOULD want them dead, under those circumstances… right? You do not bc you know better, not just about that one group but more fundamentally that it is ideas that bring about evil, not people. But the people killing people do not know that, and it is to the advantage of others who seek power, and want to use the army of sheeple to advance their own agenda, for those sheeple to not know that either.

Think of it from the LLM’s perspective - in the general pool you have common English, you have less common variations such as this, and then you have whatever the heck people like Kid Rock are doing…

Bawitdaba, da bang, da dang diggy diggy
Diggy, said the boogie, said up jump the boogie

People have covered most of the bases here. The hardest part is that if you don’t go back soon, you will find that door is closed to you - at least to finish what you started, without having to start mostly over again. College can definitely be worthwhile, but whether it is worthwhile TO YOU is the issue. Also, once you get used to receiving a paycheck and not living on like Ramen… it is next to impossible to go back to being poor and spending every waking moment (and beyond) studying, especially for some undefinable end goal. But on the other hand, I’ve seen it done with like 15-year gaps in-between dropping out, joining the army/navy/whatever and then going back to finish up. Definitely think through all the angles here, b/c you don’t want to do anything that you will regret later - including wasting more time chasing something that you don’t really want to begin with.

Why does this sound so familiar? It’s deja vu all over again…

Yes, it is sad, but we do what we must. :-P

:wq will save and then exit, while :x will save only if the file has been modified and then exit, and then there’s ZZ that does the same as :x, plus there are probably others:-)

Me too:-)

Edit: well, okay so not 3-8 hours every day, but it still was better to cut back.:-)

Believe it or not, that GIGANTIC, absolutely un-missable disclaimer was not there yesterday… or at least it did not show for me for whatever reason, definitely on mobile Firefox and I thought I had also looked on desktop but now could not swear to it. I cannot offer definitive proof but here’s a snapshot from Sept. 28 - not quite yesterday but long after July 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20230928153646/https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit but still is missing that disclaimer. In any case, thank you for the note of caution: possibly results might be comparable across subs but perhaps not pre- vs. post-API changes.

a) a lot of accounts are bots, and depending on how they are implemented, a LOT of these have remained (or even were created) after the API changes - remember, it’s easy to spin up 1000s of these to each provide small traffic so as to not run up against the API limits. Overall, I suspect a ton more bots are there now, b/c the bot defense effort was suspended, b/c unlike a single bot, that one needs to look at ALL traffic (I suppose it could be re-written from scratch in a decentralized manner but… the developers did not choose to do that).

b) a lot of people who remain on Reddit, including myself, offer it WAY less traffic than before. I used to be a mod of a small sub, which I quit, so I went from checking it almost literally hourly, so at most once a day, and most days I do not even comment at all. Also, I used to browse r/all (actually, “popular”), but now I never do, instead preferring Lemmy/Kbin for that. My personal traffic dropped off a cliff just like this image shows, in fact probably a lot more so. Although I still do visit that small gaming sub, b/c while there is a version of it here, instead of like 5 posts a day we get at most 1 per week, which less than a handful interact with. So that is not an “exodus of users” so much as a (vast) reduction of interaction, which still impacts their advertising revenue and thus the continuity of Reddit as a corporate entity.

c) as people are saying, not everyone came to Lemmy/Kbin. Some went to Mastodon, others just stopped going online as much, and like myself I comment now a lot less than I used to, though I read just as much (here, not there). So just b/c the traffic did not come “here”, does not mean that it did not leave “there”. i.e., think of the shock of the event as making people regress more to lurking and not feel as comfortable interacting, especially given the lack of ability of smaller magazines (what are those called on Lemmy again?) here. Thus, even if they did not “go outside”, they still may not be interacting on Reddit.

Asking the right questions here!

I have had it with all these doucheshit snakes on this twatboy plane!

(from another comment) just doesn’t work…

I find it very interesting that this is reportedly one of the top subs on all of Reddit: “Comments Per Day” ranks it #1, by Subscribers or Posts Per Day it is #2, Growth (Day) and Growth (Month) are both #5, Growth (Month) and Growth (Year) are both #4, etc.

Not only that, it is by far the top sub by this “Comments Per Day” metric: it shows 15828 Comments reported in a recent 24-hr period of time, whereas the next highest sub is r/worldnews with a mere 5153 Comments Per Day, then r/AmItheAsshole and r/nfl also ~5k, then others rapidly falling further like r/NoStupidQuestions and r/AITAH each ~3k, etc.

To reiterate: this is the #1 sub over all of Reddit, with >3x more comments per day than any other sub, and like more comments than the next 3 subs all combined… and it still has fallen off a cliff, even by this same exact metric.

I do not know how reliable subredditstats.com is overall, but even if it were not so good lately, so long as all the stats are more or less evenly biased across all the subs, we should still be able to learn something from these comparisons? (please add a correction if you know of some evidence that this is not true) One caveat is that it might be harder to compare now vs. pre-API changes? But if it can be believed, the numbers fell from a peak of >100k in June 2023, to a more average ~75k, then dropped like a rock in July to ~15k and has remained hovering around that area ever since…

I do not visit popular subs on Reddit anymore, just one that has refused to migrate to Lemmy/Kbin, but this sounds entirely believable to me. If you click the links to the top posts, the very title titles of the posts and top comments to them also showcase the change: like the #2 top post to that sub is “Now that Reddit are killing 3rd party apps on July 1st what are great alternatives to Reddit?” w/ 78.1k upvotes, and has the top comment w/ 5.2k upvotes of “I might get back into reading books after over a decade.” (and other comments likewise, pointing to Reddit alternatives, and angry exclamations about the 3rd party apps going away)

In short, THIS seems to be the evidence that we have been waiting for all this time, about just how far Reddit has fallen / died off?

Although comments on Lemmy/Kbin I do not think have risen by +~50k or so per day, so I wonder where all that Reddit traffic went? Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.

Edit: I nominated this post to m/BestOf.

“Alpha” males - ftfy:-P

Hence why a certain someone would really rather that not to happen:-D.

And I hope the person you asked responds with such - I was definitely going off on a whole other tangent here.:-)

Or both:-)

Most people yes, but those who feel like their rights extend well up into your nose make a disproportionate amount of noise far out of proportion to hundreds of others who are more neutral, and b/c of how human psychology works, maybe also more than ten or so people who are weakly positive.

I guess I am saying: do not underestimate the human need to create an echo chamber for emotional validation:-D.

I thought I might leave Reddit entirely, but then I realized this as well. So I have taken to posting some things exclusively here, some very few things also there, and when I do post there I post here first then just share the link.

On the other hand, keeping in mind that my “here” is Kbin not Lemmy, I’ve more or less ceased most of my encouragement to try to get people to join b/c of all the bugs that have been present - some of which seem fixed now but overall the set of features present in Kbin is very much behind Lemmy, which is itself enormously behind Reddit still. It makes sense: people were “hopeful” about Kbin/Lemmy, but to actually realize that hope has been slow going. And that too makes sense: Ernst has had family issues that MUST take priority, although it has greatly slowed down integrations of fixes that others have offered into the main code, for a time. And too there is the fact that Kbin, like many Lemmy instances, has been under DDOS attack. These things take time to develop even under the most ideal circumstances, and all the more so in the face of such challenges. Overall, Kbin is still alpha version software at this point.

And even Lemmy is still just a beta version. e.g. just to name one example: you still cannot migrate from one instance to another across the Fediverse, so whatever instance you choose to join is basically a permanent decision - like if you ask all your friends to come with you from Reddit and then jump ship yet again, you risk alienating them by leaving them behind as you hop around looking for the greenest grass. Joining instances here is nothing at all like casually joining subs on Reddit - they will need to learn all about that, and what it means, and how to curate their experiences here, etc.

In comparison, for now at least old-reddit or even new-reddit on a mobile browser with ad-blocking meets many people’s needs, especially with “everyone” more or less remaining behind on Reddit, and it is a tough sell to try to tell them to give all that up for an objectively worse UI/UX experience (the cost-to-benefit tradeoff is worthwhile to us, but is it to them?). At this point, those with the “early adopter” mindset are already here, and more importantly the content creators have already made their choices too. (Though if Reddit kills off old-reddit, that could change things in a BIG way)

I am not saying that there would be no value in such outreach initiatives, just that they have already happened and yet here we are. At this point it may be worth looking into the reasons why people who already know about Lemmy/Kbin have not chosen to come here. And on some level we just need to be okay with the fact that we are likely going to be small for a long time, especially as the code continues to be developed to help it catch up.

Unless Threads causes things to change much more quickly… which it very well could.

(edit: added UI/UX)