I guess I kind of understand why companies want you to be logged in to engage with their platform, as the user metrics are the main selling point to advertisers, but man do I really fucking hate it when a platform forces me to log in by preventing me from using their website. So much so, that I haven’t made an account on Instagram or X or Facebook or whatever dumb social media platform specifically because I can’t browse without signing up. Well, that, and also the greed, the lack of privacy, the tacit endorsement of fascism, et. cetera.
No, I don’t want to make an account.
No, I don’t want to download your app.
No, I don’t want to turn on notifications.
Gah, fuck off with all this horseshit. The internet used to be fun. Now everything is a chore and nobody does anything unless they feel like they can make a profit off of it.
lul
According to Huffman, Reddit has grown to the point where personalization is increasingly necessary to help users find relevant communities and discussions.
More lies from Spez.
The change could also benefit Reddit’s advertising business by allowing it to serve more personalized ads
The actual reason.
spez wants a bubble algorithim to feed their users propaganda slop like facebook
This is it right here. Whoever controls social media controls minds.
Probably not a coincidence with the midterm timing. He just wishes he had done this three weeks ago.
Yesterday I browsed “/r/all” for the first time in like 3 or more years (I stopped using reddit altogether a long time ago). Holy shit I felt like my brain would melt, there was so much ragebait and misinformation that asks for primal engagement. The links I opened that seemed interesting lead to nowhere and the comments were so fucking dumb. Despite all that I kept scrolling looking for that sweet hit, I must have spent at least an hour of my time that I threw away. Thank God I jumped ship when I saw the direction it was heading.
Same. I went to reddit yesterday and it of course served me racist trash.
There are two subs for Sweden, one with 300k subscribers for normal people, and one with like 60k subscribers for terminally online fascists. The latter gets 10x exposure on the frontpage.
Fuck reddit, spez and EA.
The only account left that I have there was porn subscriptions only. I scrolled through it recently: It tries to make me mad about some political bull shit in-between all the NSFW. Really strange 🧐
Feed it to the bots
The actual reasons are certainly numerous but also certainly zero of them are “helping users find relevant communities and discussions”.
pretty much code words for “we need more fresh humans to login , because we just have bots running the site now”
How will fresh humans even know whats in the website if they cant look?
The bots are already logged in. Reddit embraced bot traffic eons ago because it “increases engagement”.
It’s not entirely wrong, in that Reddit is so full of bots and junk that a sizeable chunk of the site is unusable. Any animal photo subreddit often has more bots than a farm.
It’s either personalise or have the deluge.
Coincidentally, Reddit has just announced plans to shutter their RSS feeds, so if you were using those to personalise your feed, good luck.
Just because a login is required will not help with bots.
It does not, but you can block/unsubscribe from communities that have too many of them on the main feed, or block particular users from showing up, which can help with the repeats. That otherwise takes more logic on RSS, and isn’t really possible on the website.
that will not stop botting at all, bots already can make accounts very easily because they dont care how much gets banned if they can create more, they can automate it. but normal users cant do that, because they will get banned very quickly. what spez saying is a lie anyways.
also reddits have shown to preference not to filter out most propaganda botting anyways.
most users are lurking because they dont want to have account ban.
All but a proper search function
more like AI companies not finding reddit useful anymore to scrap= forcing spez to make reddit a login site only.
Pushing people into echo chambers isn’t even needed because people do that themselves. If you’re gonna profile people, autosubscribe all the libs to r/guns and all the conservatives to r/gender theory. At best people will learn something; at worst we’ll get a show.
Also, fuck Spez and fuck surveillance capitalism.
At best people will learn something; at worst we’ll get a show.
You’ll just end up with r/anime_titties situation.
/r/marijuana_enthusiasts vs /r/trees
Drawn birds?
no one likes talking about reddit more than lemmy 🤣️🤣️🤣️
Reddit continues to be the biggest hurdle to Lemmy’s growth; the average person doesn’t care about how much private companies profit off of their personal data, so convincing them to leave the vastly bigger platform for Lemmy is a challenge.
Ignoring Reddit and its potential user migration opportunities completely would be dooming the Threadiverse to not gaining any new users from the most likely place those users would be.
I remain utterly discombobulated that 90% of redditors haven’t already migrated here. What exactly are they waiting for? Lemmy clearly is more than good enough already.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
it might as well have been already, if you use a VPN you’re surely accustomed to the Fedora Teletubby
It’s a shame because it’s genuinely a useful repository of information. I wish infinite humiliation and discomfort upon Reddit’s leadership.
Front page of the internet my ass
How funny, it’s been a logged out only experience for me for years now.
Good! Finally the last holdover users will reconsider open source alternatives
What we need now is for every modteam on Reddit who have an alternative on Lemmy, to actually advertise it. Now is the time to do so.
A pinned post should do great to point people in the right direction
Finally the last holdover users will reconsider open source alternatives
The holdover users already have accounts, so this change will not affect them.
True, made me log back on and see how it’s going
Not well. Scrolling Reddit sucks now.
Yeah even the porn. We need more self-porn on lemmy!!
It’s what made me finally check out lemmy.
Welcome!
Just remember Lemmy is only part of a larger network called the Fediverse. If you find you don’t really like it, there are other alternatives like Mbin and PieFed. They’re all pretty good I think, but Mbin is probably my personal favorite. There are also custom lemmy interfaces like old.lemmy.world, as well as lots of different mobile clients.
All the different instances and platforms can tall talk to each other, so you can subscribe to communities you like from any of them, as long as they are connected (aka federated). So somebody on https://kbin.earth/ (an Mbin instance) could subscribe to !micromobility@lemmy.world (a community on a Lemmy instance) and post there, browse, etc. even though they’re different websites.
You can sign up for any instance you want and if you hate them all, you can even make your very own.
This is a great breakdown.
I’ll share I pretty much only signed up for lemmy.world because I looked up which one had the most users (not that it seems to matter with all the crossover).
I wonder if there’s another instance I’d like more!
I made accounts on a few different ones to check them all out but I started in kbin.social while it was still a thing (the admin had some health issues I heard, hope he’s doing ok). Kbin was the predecessor to Mbin, which got picked up by some other devs thankfully.
Kbin.social was my first too, Ernest was a king and I hope he’s doing well and thriving in life.
Made a handful of alts when it became clear kbin was going away. Ended up using .zip as my main as I like their hands-off approach to moderating/defederation. We’re federated with everyone except malicious/criminal instances by default. If you don’t want to see things you need to block them yourself which I like a lot.
It’s likely the one most similar to Reddit, for better or worse.
worlds is the largest one, but its problematic if you dont block the politics communities ones, i made one on lemmytoday as my goto.
What would you say makes Mbin your favorite compared to Lemmy? What mobile app do you use for Mbin?
Welcome!
Sweet, welcome, I’m glad you could make it!
And self hosting, no less. Pretty sweet. Welcome!
Welcome!!
i came from a ban, at the time i remember lemmy was remember during the API crisis, then i just made account, on instance, when it got shut down i went to another instance.
I want to keep Reddit mods off of Lemmy
The advantage lemmy has is that unlike reddit, you can easily make a community of the same name, just on a different server in the case of mod disagreements.
Its MUCH harder to powertrip on lemmy, both because the mod tools are ass, and spinning a new community isnt hard.
Didn’t like tenforward have tHe Exodus drama with some mod?
Its MUCH harder to powertrip on lemmy, both because the mod tools are ass, and spinning a new community isnt hard.
Do Lemmy instances also have that “no brigading” rule of Reddit that only exists for mods?
Because I think that rule contributed a lot to make mods more heavyhanded on their communities, even if they didn’t intend to.
unfortunately they dont, but its easier to block the whole instance. at least 2 instances crossbanned me, even if barely interacted with those.
Not having that rule might be better.
The problem with that rule at Reddit, is that it only exists for the mods, not the users.
So the misbehaving user will pick fights in a sub A, get banned, whine about it in another sub B talking shit of sub A, get banned as well for brigading. Then they go to a 3rd sub C and now actually brigades against subs A and B because their mods invent bullshit rules such as “brigading”.
The unaware users look at this mess and get confused because they can’t recall “brigading” being something forbidden by the general Reddit rules. And while “brigading” is just mod slang for “you shouldn’t incite fights between subs or users” (and anyone can figure it out by searching the word at Google, instead of whining that the mods just like to invent words), there is no rule against this either. Instead there is only a rule for the mods that they have to shut down any user attheir subs who do this.
The consequence is that the unaware users sympathize with the misbehaving one and join their brigade, even if just to taunt the mods into banning them as well. I’ve seen this a lot of times there.
Much harder to powertrip you say? Have you looked in the modlogs and see how moderators ban users in multiple instances that is unrelated to the original instance? It’s very reddit like.
The fact you can look at the mod logs is already something you cant even compare to when using reddit. Youd be suprised how far reddit mods will go.
The ban is also not worth as much as like i mentioned, communities are spread. There isnt always one version of a community of the same name, whereas clones of subreddits on reddit have an insignificant fraction of the traffic compared to a main one.
When a moderator comes in and starts to affect a lot of people, it can cause a mass exodus to a sister community. That doesnt happen really on reddit, because the people left on reddit are slow to change their habits (the fact that most dont use alternatives shows so). The people who use lemmy have generally had the mindset that if you need to switch, then they will do so.
In your first paragraph you hint at shadowbanning.
You can’t even shadowban people at all on Lemmy (as far as I know), while it’s a go-to for unethical Reddit moderators; nothing can be done to stop them and most people don’t even know it exists.
I was shadowbanned from /r/tampa because I asked them to implement removal reasons (a feature that’s existed on Reddit and takes five or ten minutes to set up). That upset /u/md28usmc and he shadowbanned me for it. Asking why I was shadowbanned led to them perma-banning me.
I think you mean communities (subreddits), and that can appear that way with an instance (server) ban.
Hi, I’m part of the Community Team for Lemmy.World. We help with finding moderators, make sure communities are kept up, and make sure moderators follow the site rules.
To some extent mods are mods. There will always be people who disagree, vehemently, and some people who resent any rules or moderation at all.
I mention this because there are a couple things I’ve tried to do on our instance to address Reddit mistakes. First, I try to avoid having several large communities under the same mods. The mod who holds a grudge in !trees shouldn’t be able to ban you from !science. (Assuming those are both large communities).
This can be difficult, because you’d be surprised at how few extremely active people are willing to moderate even a tiny community. The other is that instead of putting out advertisements to recruit for mods, I try to draft mods. So our mods are not limited to those who seek out the position.
As a long time Reddit mod and new Lemmy.World mod, I do lament the lack of many helpful features I’m used to, but I’m glad for:
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The significantly reduced likelihood of a moderator going rogue (because a rival community can pop up in its place with the same name and do a better job and the admins here are much more responsive and transparent)
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Public-facing mod logs (see previous point)
One of the big reasons I’m even here is /r/tampa’s moderators went off the deep end, quietly shadowbanning people they didn’t like, banning anyone who talked about it, and lying about doing both.
If I were to do something similar with /c/tampa, I trust an admin would remove me and/or someone would start whatever.instance/c/tampa. On Reddit, running /r/FreeTampa (because you can’t just have another /r/tampa), I have to be very careful about talking about why the subreddit even exists or we get slapped for brigading; Reddit is staunchly against anyone constructively criticizing subreddits/moderators.
I have to be very careful about talking about why the subreddit even exists or we get slapped for brigading; Reddit is staunchly against anyone constructively criticizing subreddits/moderators.
And only you as a mod needs to be that careful. The users will keep going to r/tampa and antagonizing r/FreeTampa, or the opposite, as there is no rule that directly forbids regular users from doing it, only the one directed to moderators.
Big, if true.
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You got a point… What i meant to say is whoever is maintaining the migration of content to lemmy. Hope they put some effort into advertising Lemmy as a viable alternative.
the reddit mods of the large subs should not be one on here, because many of them are powermods(they have hordes large accounts under thier belt, plus i heard many of those are in cahoots with the admins of reddit.
what lemmy needs is the niche subs. also indian subs are pretty much taking over reddit, solely because of the sheer number of people in india, apparently they dont have a sole “social media” platform of thier own. and i heard this is drama with india subs, solely because of the BJP bots.
what lemmy needs is the niche subs
I see far more “someone else should make a community” than people making communities. I think that’s a bit silly and selfish.
Good! Finally the last holdover users will reconsider open source alternatives
LOOOOLOLOL brother, I want some of what you’re smoking because I want to exist in this reality where people are fleeing Reddit rather than flocking to it. This only affects logged-out visitors, not so much “users”. Most platforms have been this way for a long time and seen no such decline either. Pretty much the entire internet is already account-gated.
Pretty much the entire internet is already account-gated.
Already account-gated and increasingly human-verification-gated as well.
wait til you see ID-gated, and facial scan, thats what facebook does.
It mostly affects people who use Reddit to search people discussing stuff. Unfortunately I don’t think the Fediverse is indexed much, plus some niche communities/interests just doesn’t have the critical mass.
The problem with that is, every mod on reddit already has an account and likely will not notice anything based on this change.
They are going to end up burning the whole thing to the ground in a bid to make investors money on something that never had hard quantifiable monetary value to begin with in a way that you could easily turn up the dial on “line go up” enshitification like Google can with ad impressions.
Its a fancy web forum, a big popular one for sure, but there are God knows how many similar options out there already competing for users. There is a very low ceiling on just how profitable it could ever be as a business all on its own.
There is a reason a lot of these websites, like Gamespot for example, ended up consolidating into holding companies that own a bunch of them.
I just came here from there. Reddit is getting weird AF
oh well.
Reddit is killing itself on live
I wonder how advertisers on Reddit will respond to this? It will certainly result in less ad views.
Maybe Reddit will make up for it with all the traffic coming from bots.
Maybe ads have two messages in such a scenario. One advertisement for human viewing and another hidden function with prompt injection, prompt leaking or other function for AI bots. Ah, glorious dystopia…
That’s a fucking rad idea
you see here, bots/AI bots are less useful than you think, it actually detracts from the traffic. because bots dont produce useful traffic to the site at all( they dont post meaningful comments/posts) that AI can scrape.
thats why Open AI/and google stop referencing them in thier “AI slop generators” this forced reddit to make Old reddit inaccesible to lurkers, and now they are forcing log ins. the NEW UI is a horrid feature, even for people who “likes to use REDDIT”.
the sources of bots come from propaganda farms like russian troll farms israeli bot farms, apparently India has thier own bot farms targeted at indian Subs. I suspect the majority of the sub will probably cater to india eventually, because they have 1bn+people who likely wil uses reddit.
the other source is the lowest hanging fruit that reddit filters out, the single users with hundreds of account whos pam on the site.
The argument would be that they provide " higher quality, more targeted views" which is probably correct.
Most people will fold and get the account, what’s one more " sign in with Google" on top of the 1000 other accounts.
Most people will fold and get the account
Well, except for the (apparently) vast swathes of long-time users who get permabanned for bullshit reasons (or no given reason at all) and then can’t make a new account because of “ban evasion.” I guess they just aren’t allowed to experience Reddit at all, even lurking.
I got banned for ban evasion recently. I do have two old accounts, but neither were banned before so idk why lol.
Their website is so shit that I can’t even ask why. The auto mod sent me a DM and says if I want further info to reply to that message, but I have to accept the message request. Which I can’t do because I’m banned.
the reason is that, permban has caused many to just lurk on the site instead. even the ones that still have accts are afraid to login. they want people to login, but htier AI moderation/filters are still yay high. plus its not even stopping most bots / AI botting anyways, they can just create a single use account, post and move onto the next thing.
If people can’t see the content when Earth would they sign up?
This is a good point. You lose existing users through attrition. How do you attract new subscribers to a site they cannot see?
They could leave the front top 50 posts of the day available as an attractor. With a “sign up to see more” banner at the end of the scroll. Is current leadership smart enough to do that?
They went with the assumption that as Google buys their data and replaces their links in search queue with LLM gen answers, their organic traffic from searches would get reduced into nothingness, so they can push their login requirement with little drawbacks. They increase price of each ad via personalization in a short run, but without a drag of the likes of Instagram, Discord, Whatsapp etc there would hardly be new users to create content.
On the former, yes. Maybe we will luck into attrition being greater than the users they will attract.
For the latter–maybe?
At this point I think it is best for Reddit to quietly wind down and just go away. Eventually it is just going to be a right wing hellhole.
reddit already lost to attrition, which is why they want people login. first the purges came last year, reduced overall traffics and users, but not botters, then AI stop using reddit as a datamine, because its not useful if all your content is also AI generated.
I’m not certain that I follow the logic, but I’m also not certain that the logic would make sense if I was following it.
maybe they shouldnt do massive purges after the eleciton, and at musks request twice last year, that definitely had an effect users whos has been caught in the crossfire. not only the AI filters ban people on politics, but everyone else using the site, basically they only need a small inkling of “botting” to even ban you.
Sadly
Sad thing ad networks will perceive it to be better since they better tie tracking between networks and thus better impressions. Don’t matter to me though I just recently gone the next step of filtering Readit out of my search results and have never been happier.
Same! I use this
Ah cool I just use the one built in to the search engine I just dont show me results from this domain
Do you mean adding “-site:reddit.com” to all your queries? Or is there a setting that I am missing?
DDG, kagi, searxng, and likely many other engines allow you to hide the domain from results. I use DDG and there you have the ‘3 dots’ button to the right where you can block the site for good.
DDG only lets you do 5 and for me three of those are taken by fox news domains already.
Whaaaaat?! Thanks for the info. Even more reason to finally give a shot at setting up searxng which I assume won’t have a limit like that.
Surveillance capitalism follows the same rules as capitalism; do whatever is most profitable. The deception/manipulation/propaganda algos are 10-1000x more valuable when they’re able to target you as an individual; across all accounts, space, and time. The users hardest to swindle, who already gave a shit about privacy/anonymity, have already left.
Most advertising on reddit is guerrilla marketing, and reddit either runs their own bots or explicitly enables them to inflate activity and engagement.
Don’t worry, they have all the data on that, and I’m pretty sure they thought of it.
Fact is that most visits from search engines don’t go very deep anyway. They are allowing a brief glimpse at one page before they start prompting you to log in, and that is likely driving logins while barely shortening those SEO visits, which are not of great value in the first place.
It may come as a surprise but websites often have traffic they don’t want. I recall once my boss noticed there was a non-negligible amount of traffic from parts of the world none of our advertisers care about. He built an endless revolving door of promo offers and directed this traffic into it. It didn’t generate much money but it made the rest of our traffic look higher quality right away.
spez just wants to give it to AI companies to scrape for a fee, they already charge 60mil/year to let google have the data.
It hurt itself in its confusion.
