No Stupid Questions

We’re moving through the stages of grief. Many of us seem to be on “anger”.

That tends to happen when a site you frequent suddenly decides a portion of its users will have to visit with the worst experience possible or leave.

Additionally, false accusations and actions taking by Steve and Reddit admins only poked the wasp hive even more.

I think it also ties into a larger portion of people being fed up with corporate social media and corporations in general. All the ads, tracking, and shareholder profit driving decisions instead of what makes a product “good”.

I loved Reddit until I realized they were just going to do whatever they wanted and the community, apart from creating free content and work, didn't matter. But the lying about discussions with the app creator was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Suddenly they weren't just a bully, but they were a proven lying, dishonest bully. Everything that they say going forward will be suspect, so I decided to walk away. Who knows what they're doing with my data/content. I know what they're telling me. I don't know what's true.

I deleted most of my posts from my nearly 14-year history except for a handful that I think need to stay up and a couple of others that I'm testing something on. I log in every once in a while to leave any groups that might have unlocked since I was last there and delete those posts too.

I don't hate them. But they've lost my trust, and I don't see any way to regain it.

There could have been other, better solutions. The biggest problem right now is that the only tool in Steve Huffman's toolbox is a hammer.

I loved Reddit, but after the API shenanigans and the doubling down I went sour... and then I read the latest TOS...

You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

i.e. whatever you post WE own forever and we never have to credit you. It's so horrifyingly immoral.

I remember being introduced to reddit years ago. It was still new and unknown, there was in-jokes and cringey bacon narwhal shit I don't even quite remember. It was fun, it was cringe, it wasn't doomscrolling it was genuine engagement and I really enjoyed it.

Then the longer I spent on it the more hostile it became. Almost every comment thread is full of contrarians looking to argue with you just to get more upvotes and edit: omg thx 4 awards!!11! bullshit, bots "correcting" people's spelling and telling you how many consonants are in reverse alphabetical order in your username omg so cute! it just became regular, boring old social media.

Then the leadership bullshit kept just getting worse and worse and worse, every time you hear anything about what reddit (as a company) does it's just more and more hostile to users. The API/app changes and the way it was handled was the last straw. Users don't hate reddit, reddit hates it's users, the company has shown nothing but contempt for the users and unpaid moderators for years and I'm just sick of it and that long term animosity coupled with the last set of changes? Yeah, fuck reddit.

Mine mostly comes from how they treated Christian, the developer of the Apollo app. Ridiculous.

Reddit can't be divorced from the leadership. If you hate the direction leadership is taking Reddit, how can you still like Reddit itself? What is it apart from that?

This argument makes more sense to me with Lemmy. Yes, if you hate the direction one instance admin is taking their Lemmy instance, it doesn't make sense to hate Lemmy as a whole… but Reddit has only one "instance," so if you hate the "admin," you hate Reddit.

Pretty sure the only people still talking about Reddit are the really passionate people that hate or love it. I am neutral and therefore stopped talking about it.

Having been there since the pre-Digg days, I simply hate what they're doing with the place. It hurts to see something you've enjoyed and contributed to over the past 20 years become the antithesis of the free and open internet it once represented. Every change they made to the site since they tried to migrate off the old.reddit.com interface has been a negative one for the users. The sudden acceleration of those kind of changes has made the site both unreadable (content is beyond stale now) and worthless to participate in.

I think for me, this disappointment turned to real visceral antipathy when I saw this page - it looks like something the CCP would design for kindergartners. It's not a place I want to be a part of at all, and I don't want my past contributions to fuel it.

I hated it, I only just barely put up with the toxic community so I could still visit my favorite subs only (I used apollo so I could ignore the garbage that’d be recommended to us constantly). I used the app-pocalypse as an excuse to leave. Now I only lurk there for the ooh-la-la subs, but as more and more creators there have lately been moving to lemmynsfw I might not even need those subs for much longer.

We're still discussing Reddit? That's so 2.5 weeks old 😝 moved here because of spaz' rule, not because I hate Reddit. It was a fun time which will be remembered.

Hate is a strong word, but I don't like the power that comes with an extremely centralized internet. I also don't like the ad driven internet. So Reddit as a website is no good in my opinion.

Almost the same thing happened on Reddit when everyone migrated from Digg. It's so similar, in fact, that I wonder if maybe this isn't a normal thing.

It didn't help that the reddit admins banned a huge chunk of moderators who refused to comply with their decisions. That sort of thing doesn't sit well with creators.

You're seeing it more because Reddit has made a series of decisions, in rather rapid succession within the last few weeks, that were widely disliked by longtime users of the platform. API restrictions, the crackdown on NSFW content, major bugs with the official mobile app, mass deletion of DMs, removal of Reddit Gold and the rumored upcoming "creator program"...

All of this has come down the pipeline in a relatively short amount of time, and is pushing people to the point of vehemency.

It came from Reddit being stupid as fuck.

I'm indifferent about Reddit. I'm just here because I want to see open-source and the fediverse do well.

My experience with reddit is that users have always hated reddit, 13 years ago it was the same thing. We all bashed reddit constantly. My experience was that we only used reddit because there was nothing better.

For me personally, I joined Lemmy a couple days ago because Reddit shut Joey off with now notice amidst trying to negotiate payment for a paid API. Maybe the users you're noticing are in a similar situation. I personally have no issues with reddit but I was a lurker there.

The API changes were the trigger for the recent controversy and the fact that they may be forced to use the buggy official app instead of an unofficial but stable and well developed app pushed people too far. The API change is what caused the blackout and disgust for Reddit.

Love can quite easily turn to hate. Strong emotions still, just in another direction.

I do think there are waves of people moving from Reddit to Lemmy for one reason or another, each of them infuriated with Reddit and needing to express it. We had the wave of people that reacted to the news of the API changes, people that moved over after Reddit responded poorly to the protests, people that moved here after their Reddit app of choice stopped working, people after the latest set of third party apps stopped working, people after Reddit removed gold, people after the app icon was changed...

People are at different stages of dealing with Reddit, some of us who left sooner have moved on, some people are moving here currently outraged with Reddit, and some are in between.
I imagine we'll keep seeing these waves of people for a while, and that's ok, the best thing we can do is validate their feelings toward Reddit, welcome them, and keep the memes rolling.

API changes should have come into effect on July 1st, but they have been doing a prolonged rollout (a lot of the popular apps closed on June 30th) so that shattered some hopes for people that believed the blackouts would work.

And they also managed to make a lot stupid comments and other decisions between then and now. Combine that with people already being unhappy and some hostility towards the company is not out of the question.

Hating platform is unproductive, but emotional response is a very human thing. I'm just happy new alternative platforms came from Reddit greed and they are thriving. I stopped following all the Reddit-focused communities and I don't even keep up with what's happening there.

I always hated the UI, especially attempts to “improve” it, but that was mostly an inconvenience. And I don’t like being pushed toward an app, with increased tracking bullshit, just to view a web site

I don’t know what happened with the AMA person a while back but after she left, that was no longer worth subscribing to. It appears to be a sign of Reddit management killing their future

The reason I liked Reddit was the content, the discussions. However those are highly dependent on the mods and the super users, and Reddit seemed to start hating them, all of them. All of them at once. How are you alienating the very group of people who are volunteers responsible for making your site compelling? Who are responsible for your success?

I don’t hate Reddit but management made a change likely to degrade my reason for being there. I’m here to see if I can encourage development of a new alternative ….. but yeah I was actually hoping the boycott would make a difference

Hate? Nah. I don't care enough about it anymore to hate it. They are all welcome to enjoy it if they wish.

If you think about the chain of events, it makes sense. While there were people using lemmy pre-exodus, the giant leap in userbase is a direct result of the exodus of users from reddit.

So it stands to reason, as that core group of people interacts with each other, and is then exposed to further shitty behaviour from reddit CEO... considering they were unhappy enough with reddit to move in the first place, it's no surprise that exposure to more and more shitty behaviour leads to that feeling hardening.

I don’t hate it, but every time now that I get linked to a Reddit post, I look at the comments, and every time I get a little more shocked at the amount of low-value, hateful comments over there compared to here.

In other words, I don’t hate it, but I feel like it hates me.

I have disliked the direction of reddit ever since they made the new interface and removed css rules from subs. It was the first time, of many, that I saw reddit take something from the community and screw it up, all just to make the website more boring. It was especially annoying in that it removed text flairs from support and marketplace subs and forced people to come up with external systems.

They did it more often. Things like Reddit Gold were not first made by reddit, did you know? The whole API thing is just the concrete slab that pulverized the camel all the way to hell. Of all the things they took or took away, taking away the app I was using since years before they even made one was just too much. I can go from passively disliking them to actively hating them.

Plus, what ideas did they actually have that was original or good? "Hey guys, we stole Facebook's chat". "Hey guys, we added crypto". The community makes bots that mediate debates, convert video format or do reminders, meanwhile reddit busies itself by ruining the Relevant option on its already bad search and then fucks off while stating "eh, you fucking degenerate nerds use site:reddit.com anyways"

I feel a part of it is similar to anger of the natural process of grieving. Many of us spent years contributing to the platform and enjoyed just spending time with other like-minded members of subreddits. I personally loved reading the chains of comments. Reddit was a great source of pleasure; a place for sharing humor, frustrations, and other random cool things. Much of what made it enjoyable, including he third party apps, was taken away in a fashion that felt like the user base was betrayed, hence the utter vehement expression of some former users. It will pass in time.