reposting one of the worst things i've ever heard someone say:

“There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

eat my ass spez

I dont have any direct experience with reddit any longer.

What I can say, is that I think a verrrrrrry significant portion of comments and commenters are actually reddit run bots. My source for this is my experience in the daily thread of a certain degenerate gambling forum. There were maybe like 12-30 posters who would reply, engage, etc... in the daily and day after threads. However, there was a yyyyyuuuuugggge number of accounts that would just comment with no real further engagement. Like you would respond to them, but they wouldnt respond back.

I truly believe that reddits internal business model is predicted on the use of reddit run bots to create synthetic engagement in certain audiences around marketing targets that a selective group of advertisers (read, not buying reddit ads) are given access to. The basics is that reddit astroturfs synthetic engagement until organic engagement takes over. I have no way of proving this and its pure speculation.

This is why I don't even worry about considering the user numbers on lemmy. Relying on my anectdotal experience, we've got about the usership/ engagement numbers from around the 2009-2011 time period, which is actually pretty amazing. Also, the overall lemmy experience is far superior, for example, just the ability to sort by a couple of different 'hot' options is a major improvement. I really think if the devs just keep vibing on their plan, lemmy will be more than strong enough to survive and continue for decades to come.

The fact is that reddit stole from us our faith in a 'good internet'. The users of reddit built reddit, not the company that owns it (they suck). The users of reddit paid for the server time and made the system work. That good faith was utterly exploited by the leadership of reddit and we should never forget how they stole from and exploited their community.

Oh oh... can we look forward to another wave of reddit leavers after inevitable changes to the site to please investors?

See, we made the holes in the d's look like little talking bubbles. We're not evil. We're cuuuuuute. Money please!

At least they didn't rename themselves to "Y" I guess... Though that would be mildly hilarious.

deleted

New look, same Reddit

I mean, yes and no. It's the same reddit from six months ago yeah, the vultures hungry for an IPO and who don't give a fuck about users.

The change in font actually speaks massively to a huge change in how reddit functions, and this has been a slow, gradual change.

Reddit was originally an all text site. The name fucking implies it.

"Oh did you see that link?"

"Yeah, I already read it."

The pivot to sound and video has been going on for a few years. The logo still referenced the text-heavy nature of the site by being stylized as text you might read on a website. Now it is clearly a logo that has dropped that pretense entirely, as they have said "fuck people who like to read," we're here for eyeballs on screens, and video is what makes that happen!

So yeah, it screams a huge change in direction that's been happening for years now. They're just updating the branding to match the site direction.

I looked at reddit today, it looks like ass. Not nice ass either.

Fuck spez I used that reddit for years. However you can only be fucked over so much.

Everyone here is on copium, not gonna lie.

Reddit isn't going to die. Honestly it has 1000x more content than lemmy.

Lemmy has a place and so does reddit.

Fuck spez

It looks like one of those soulless Apple animoji things.

Has he tried publicly spouting fringe fascist conspiracy theories yet? No? Give it time.....

Good riddance to reddit. Haven't been on it since the API pricing kicked in.

i still use reddit a lot of comunities havent left and my god the amout of bots now is insane entire threads are coppied with 1 year 6 month old acounts with zero history and what i think is ai spam from simualr acounts its a mess over there now what brainless idiot is letting this happen

"Edit: Obligatory 'Fuck Spez' for karma."

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it any more!"

Maybe they should have spent some of the money they used on this questionable design update on improving their app or working with third party app developers.