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/r/theoryofreddit post asking why reddit seems dead
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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As anything with Reddit, it depends on what you subscribe.
It's perfectly possible that this person sees the site completely dead. Personally, every time I go there it's full of interesting comics raised by some bots that keep reposting old things, and really really bad comments, but still plentiful.
They made some algorithm changes a bunch of years ago (2015?), and migrated away from the concept of "default subs". The front page drew from every sub with an algorithm.
TheDonald was very good at understanding and abusing that algorithm, resulting in it overrunning the front page for everyone. They had to tweak it a bunch as a result.
IMO, this resulted in a great homogenization of communities. People participate in communities without really understanding the communities. Why should they? The "community" is just "the Reddit front page".
As soon as any community gets popular enough to hit the front page, it becomes hive-minded, predictable, and bland.
Lemmy actually has this same structural problem... Evidenced by the fact that as I write this comment, I actually have no clue what community this post is in.
I think Lemmy just hasn't been overrun w/ bots (yet), isn't being as heavily invested in by bad faith foreign state actors (yet), and is mostly composed of people who moved from Reddit who want to actively participate in a way to keep it from having that same Reddit "flavour".
Just my take.
Omg a little anecdote to add on to your point. I made a post on a news article about how people blindly follow name brands. It was only after a few blindly ehh and some other comments along those lines I realized I was on a blind community thread. Real foot in mouth moment lol. It was taken well enough when I explained my mistake and apologized. Got some good info too about the community.
LMAO, thank you for sharing that story. Must have been painful, but the story gave me a good laugh!
I definitely felt like an ass, but everyone was a good sport about it. We all used it as good learning opportunity because the thought had never crossed my mind about a blind lemmy community/instance. They even invited and insisted I followed some communities. All in all it was a good experience from a dumb mistake.
Not against you specifically but this is why I don't tell people about communities anymore. The quality declines the more people participate.
I don't think the Donald was abusing the algorithm. It was literally the most popular sub, it was always on the front page because it's posts were getting massively and constantly upvoted. Changing the algorithm instead of waiting it out or just straight banning it ruined the site.
They tried to stand impartial (my most generous interpretation of reddits in-action towards the donald) and it really fucked them.
It's so weird how many platforms cater to harmful rhetoric in an effort to stay neutral only for them to later ban the community after the damage has been done.
If I were more conspiratorial I'd suggest the Donald survived for as long as it did on purpose and with the explicit support of the reddit admins/execs..
No shit. They didn't have the balls to ban a sub with that many members when they should have. The damage all really came from half assing a solution.
Or alternatively, they could have done nothing at all like the orginal mission statement entailed
Again, if they just hadn't tried to tiktokize their algorithm it never would have been a problem to begin with because it, like every other sub, would have been purely opt-in
I just went there, I also noticed that most of the posts on top of r/all are sub 10K upvotes, most sub 5K. However, when I sorted by Top/Today then I saw there were a lot of posts that were over 30K upvotes. Maybe it's change in algorithm and how they show posts.
BUT, i went to Top All Time, and all of the posts there were at the earliest from 3 years ago, a lot from 5-7years ago too so it rules out the pandemic effect. Looks like reddit may have indeed passed its prime.
Edit: actually it's weirder, i can't access Top This Year. It looks like they scrubbed all the top posts from 2 years ago, so I might be wrong about the activity. But that is still Hella sus.
Yup, top posts last 2 years definitely scrubbed or just excluded from top all time display. Probably to hide all of the protest posts from last year.
That's likely the case. r/theoryofreddit is mostly old users, who are emotionally attached enough to the platform to discuss it, and who often stick to smaller communities. It's practically "the" userbase that Reddit screwed the most with.
(I used to post fairly often there. I'd miss that sub if not for its moronic powerjanny godofatheism "randomly" banning people left and right because he's an illiterate.)