Wow, out of a total revenue of $281 million $193 million goes to a single person? Holy shit. What a selfish asshole you have to be to disregard all of your employees and take such a huge cut for yourself.

It’s a sign. Spez will now milk the company and make himself billionaires for the next few years, then sell the company for tens of billions, and new owner will run it into the ground, milking whatever left of it. Then it will become the blandest, soulless socmed.

Basically paid that twat 200 mil to kill the site.

Imagine if they put 100 of that into developers and infrastructure and shit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cq1q2/help_reddit_turned_spanish_and_i_cannot_undo_it/

“Test Post, Please Ignore,” and that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera were high points for me.

Holy smokes. Beautiful

I remember Reddit helping to make a kid do his homework.

I got rickrolled by Firefox built in translation.

holy fucking shit that’s awesome

Let’s be honest, most of Reddit’s default subreddits (or whatever the fuck they’re called now) are basically just karma farms with no real moderation beyond removing extreme content. The real value of Reddit has always been in its smaller, niche subs. But as those grow in popularity, they end up having the same problems as bigger subs.

That subreddit always seemed so off-putting to me and now I know why. I don’t hate wholesome stuff, but there was just something off about that subreddit that I couldn’t put my finger on.

So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.

Well put

Wrote something similar 1 year ago 😁

https://dbzer0.com/blog/reddit-is-a-dead-site-running/

I can’t pinpoint when Reddit died in my eyes. But I can say the long road to where it is today started with Reddit Gold.

Reddit Gold was a minor change that didn’t do much of anything besides offer a way to collect money directly from the user base. But it was the start of monetizing the site and every decision by Reddit management after that point furthered that monetization at the expense of everything else.

Very well said, and it was the trust violation which finally pushed me off of Facebook and Reddit. Reddit as we know it is dead, it’s obvious to anyone who used to use it. But AI is here, and it’s going to continue pumping semi-believable posts and replies for years, making it look as if the site is still booming. But the posts are vapid, devoid of soul, and almost always written with an ulterior motive to sell something or some idea. The Dead Internet is here.

Yeah that’s my main problem with the article, it argues “as if” it was all but inevitable. As if something could be done. As soon as you have for profit motivation of social media, it’s all but inevitable that enshittification ensues. That obscures the real problem.

You want a website that is run non-profit for users and somewhat democratically. But they shy away from that conclusion.

I liked pics becoming nothing but sexy pictures of John Oliver, with the notice that all pictures of John Oliver are sexy pictures of John Oliver.

he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts

This is comedic gold. But the bad part? I envisioned it. Thanks a lot.

And he’s getting rich off of it too. I mean, that’s his whole gain, right? Money! He’s given his soul for money. The whole community hates him, but at least he’s gotten rich now. I’m sure reddit’s annual founders parties must be a hoot.

Spez has ultimately learned nothing

He’s learned he can do this shit and make money. It may not be a perpetual money machine. But he now has enough and will milk it for all that’s left. That’s what he’s learned.

What do you think he would learn? He got like $190 million dollars in compensation last year, broke the protest, and only lost a small fraction of users. He doesn’t view the site with the same love that we did. It’s just a business to him, and he’s just a soulless executive.

Oh the irony getting removed by a mod here. Although its probably in the mod logs somewhere with an actual reason :)

I’m not sure if there is any way you can promote links to my account, but feel free:

https://www.reddit.com/user/FlyingSquid/

Let’s hope more people will join the fediverse so we can all stop feeding our data to these greedy companies.

I’m very doubtful too. I look at “active users” stats, and for every sub at every time it never goes above a few hundreds.

The millions subs numbers are bs

One of the really popular subs - with hundreds of posts per day - cracked down on bots and nothing was posted for two days afterwards. Can’t recall which sub it was, It was WholesomeMemes. I caught wind of that a few days later and it was truly a ghost town. Even now they’ve only got something like 5% of their pre-bot-ban traffic back - about 4-6 posts a day.

People kept complaining about “karma farmers”

I remember the “Reddit is just you, me and /u/karmanaut” meme from 2008. He was the original “karma farmer”. It was a problem since the early days due to how they setup Reddit as a system. It just enforced his behaviour.

“Karma farmers” is a major reason Digg collapsed and Reddit took its place.

Thank you for all your posts here

Same. I used reddit since 2008. I’ve had accounts with multiple posts to /bestof, with over 100k karma get banned. The things I’ve been banned for have always been trivial “zero tolerance policy” violations that remind me of the zero tolerance, zero thought policies you used to (still do?) see in American high schools. At least when I was in school, my school had a zero-tolerance policy for violence. A bully could attack a victim and both of them would be suspended for fighting. The administrators didn’t want to bother figuring out who was at fault, so they just punished victim and perpetrator equally.

On different accounts, I was banned from some of the largest subreddits that I had years of history of posting very high quality and well-regarded comments in. The biggest account I ever had was under the username “isleepinahammock.” You can still find links to now-deleted bestof posts through google. The things I’ve been banned from the big subreddits for include:

1. On January 6th, as the capital was actively being breached, wondering aloud why this invasion wasn’t being responded to with soldiers and automatic weapons. (Historically how such mobs trying to overthrow governments are always dealt with. Later we learned that the reason those soldiers weren’t present was because Trump deliberately left the place unguarded.)

2. As SCOTUS was considering its ruling on presidential immunity, stating that if SCOTUS rules the president has complete immunity and effectively be a dictator, Biden should simply drone strike Supreme Court justices until the ruling is reversed. (Later news articles and opinion pieces proposing this exact kind of thing were openly promoted to the top of r/politics.)

3. Flippantly telling an overt bigot, commenting in one of the LGBT subreddits, to “go die in a fire.”

4. Making pro-Palestinian comments in r/worldnews.

Never did I ever threaten anyone. Never did I propose vigilante justice on anyone. Any mentions of violence were either obviously flippant remarks or suggestions of lawful and just use of government authority. But these comments violated the zero tolerance, zero thought policies of the major subreddits. I received bogus site site suspensions for these, which I ignored with alt accounts. Eventually I received a total IP ban for ban evasion.

I realize that reddit likes to claim to have a neutral hand. They say that moderators should be able to operate their subs as they please. But these major community subs aren’t some niche community. If you want to create r/rightwingworldnews, go ahead, but the main worldnews section for the biggest discussion site on the net should not be run by a bunch of radical Israeli supremacists. r/politics, the main political discussion forum, should not apply a harsher standard to their commenters than they do the standards they apply to the very stories they feature. And there should be a meaningful appeals process to actually get access restored to individual subreddits and the site as a whole.

If they actually cared about quality content, they would do this. But this takes care and thought. And if all you’re trying to do is juice ad revenue, your number one priority is to make the site as clean and sanitary as possible. If all you care about is maxing ad revenue, then having a zero-tolerance, zero-thought policy of “any mention of an act of violence in any context = ban,” makes sense. Even though in some cases, such a nation’s capital literally being stormed by an invading rebel army, violence IS the correct response.

I don’t know if you saw images of what the capital looked like a few weeks after January 6th on Biden’s actual inauguration day, but the capital was a damn fortress. If those fuckers had tried to storm the capital again on that day, it would have been a blood bath. And you know what? I would absolutely support the military opening up machine guns on any violent mob trying to overthrow our democracy. The moment you choose violence, you deserve to be responded to in turn with violence. You do that? Well you’ve made your choice. I have no sympathy for you. And zero-tolerance, zero-thought moderation policies prevent us from talking about these harsh realities. Sometimes violence IS the answer. Sometimes democracy DOES need to be defended with force. But we cannot discuss these harsh realities on the main political page of the biggest discussion site on the net, just to keep the place clean for advertisers.

Oh, and one more reason I was once banned from r/politics? Someone posted a doomer comment saying something to the effect of, “how can we possibly deal with MAGA terrorists? What if they lose the next election and just start an open rebellion? It’s hopeless! We might as well give up now.” I responded with the obvious and correct statement. Something to the effect of, “what do we do if armed revolutionaries enter open rebellion against the government? We shoot them. We send in the military and we shoot them. That is what you are SUPPOSED to do to people who take up arms against a just and legitimately elected government. It’s that whole ‘enemies foreign and domestic’ thing that soldiers swear to enforce.” I was literally banned for suggesting the very thing every US soldier swears an oath to do if necessary.

Hasn’t Twitter lost ~30 million active users, about 10%, since Musk bought it? Plus there’s probably going to be a couple million more gone from the Brazil ban.

i guess you dont remember digg https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/the-demise-of-digg-how-an-online-giant-lost-control-of-the-digital-crowd/

I keep seeing YouTubers who host their own subreddits still mentioning Reddit a lot in their videos. Yeah, some people probably don’t even care what happened.

That’s because there will alway be new 10-year-olds who are just discovering “new” parts of the Internet. They are growing up with the enshittification, so they don’t know that things were better before they were born.

Maybe the problem is that they’re all trying to be the same goddamned thing, like how there are 15 or more goddamned hamburger chains.

“We want to be like facebook! Also like Youtube and twitter and tiktok! And like Instagram!”

Maybe if they stuck to their speciality and strengths, pick a lane and stay in it, they would prosper. But no! God forbid!

It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.

It’s more like people aren’t geared to community, not the internet.

It’s such a mess. I mean spez is an ass, but some of those career mods were just as bad. Moderating hundreds of subs because they enjoy the power. And you can tell that was the case when they’d harass random people because they did some little thing that upset them.

Could moderation be handled democratically with votes and such? Create a system with central authority and you’ll just get people trying to be the central authority.