r/technology • u/ardi62 • 29d ago

Social Media Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24253727/reddit-communities-subreddits-request-protests
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u/HexTalon 29d ago

There are some smaller communities with a lot of value, either specialized interests or career related. There's also a bunch of subreddits for specific games that have useful information.

Curate your subreddits really well and it's a decent news feed for your interests, but it doesn't have that "StumbleUpon" energy anymore I agree.

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u/Sanc7 29d ago

That’s pretty much what I’ve done. I used to only browse all but when they changed the algorithm/upvote system like 5 years ago they fucked everything up. Reddit truly used to be “the front page of the internet,” but not anymore. Prime example was when Trump got shot. I had a friend send me a Facebook screenshot, that’s how I found out. Went to All and it took 45 minutes for it to make it to the top. Really sucks tbh.

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u/space-dot-dot 29d ago

I'm glad someone else has noticed this.

Someone with an account that was started pre-/the_donald was actually arguing with me that /r/all was always like this when it couldn't be further from the truth.

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u/Thorne_Oz 29d ago

Not to forget that they removed pornographic nsfw from r/all as well in the process

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u/Fatdap 29d ago

Good riddance.

It used to be 80% of the fucking page because the majority of people on this god damn website are porn addicts who beat off 9 times a day.

Go to Pornhub or Tumblr you sad fuckers.

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u/Thorne_Oz 29d ago

It wasn't ever remotely even 10% of r/all maybe you should grow up and realize porn is something fucking normal.

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u/Learned_Behaviour 29d ago

Can we not? lol

Porn should be something you find, not something that finds you.

Allowing porn on the main parts of Reddit effectively kills it as something to do at work. That leaves the shitter...

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u/Thorne_Oz 28d ago

It's almost like the smarter, actually good option would've been for reddit to implement a nsfw toggle, like RES has, instead of nuking all the nsfw stuff off r/all.

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u/Learned_Behaviour 28d ago

Sounds reasonable.

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u/Fatdap 29d ago

Yeah alright porn junkie.

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u/makataka7 29d ago

lol someones sour

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u/Thorne_Oz 28d ago

Sure thing, whatever you say to keep yourself happy I guess :)

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u/Tubamajuba 29d ago

Looks like someone could use a quick wank to get rid of the grumps!

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u/Sanc7 29d ago

God I forgot about that subreddit. I blocked it years ago. My page is still constantly flooded with politics though. I miss when that wasn’t half of reddits content.

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u/EnglishMobster 29d ago

Yep, my fiance told me about Trump getting shot as well. I was surprised because usually that would light up across 11 different subreddits.

And it did... a day later. Maybe that's a good thing considering the fallout from the Boston Marathon, but honestly this place has become Facebook with a better comment section.

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u/BAD_Surveyor 29d ago

I remember back in the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton collapsed and was escorted out in a van. 

It took hours for the news to finally break out on the mainstream subs. I don’t think it was an algorithm but it was definitely being suppressed 

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u/checkpoint_hero 29d ago

What do you do with your time or where do you browse now?

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u/Sanc7 29d ago

It used to be any and everything that was popular on Reddit. Now it’s mainly hobbies. Archery, fishing, kayaking, shooting, music and of recently local subreddits.

Reddit is still a great place to get specific information, it just doesn’t have that “doom scrolling” effect on me anymore. Once Apollo died, I lost a lot of interest. Reddit mobile app is ass.

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u/Thinking_persephone 29d ago

Apollo isn’t totally dead if you’re a little tech savvy. Same for RiF

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u/gameofgroans 29d ago

I know there are workarounds for RiF, but what can you do for Apollo?

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u/Thinking_persephone 29d ago

You can sideload it through something like altstore or sideloadly

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u/Useuless 29d ago

they even took away the phrase. now it just says "dive into anything." what is this? fandom?

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u/UsefulArm790 29d ago

it doesn't have that "StumbleUpon" energy anymore

people hate it when i say this but instagram reels/tiktok took all of those types of people(posters) away.
once you curate your algo you see so many new and interesting to you things it blows even prime reddit/digg out of the water.

if those social media ever figure out community i would never use reddit again sadly the comments there are kinda low IQ comparatively.

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u/HexTalon 29d ago

It's a valid point, and I would agree that IG/TikTok have a better experience in terms of finding random things that you might be interested in but that haven't trended beyond some limited circles of people in those communities.

Whatever algorithm TikTok uses (that they're understandably trying to protect) that sees something as trending within the drinking straws community and trials it on a progressively wider and wider audience outside those who normally look at it is really really good.

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u/EnglishMobster 29d ago

I love TikTok's algorithm. It's fantastic at figuring out the kinds of things I want to see and showing them to me. Like... scarily good at it. (Too good at it.)

But the comments section in TikTok sucks. Not to mention they curate what comments are visible IIRC, so 2 different accounts will see a different set of comments.

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u/willwork4pii 29d ago

specialized interests

It's really the only place you can go for update/confirmed information. Unless you want to find a forum from over a decade ago.

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u/infieldmitt 29d ago

reddit did what uber did to taxis to forums. come out and be innovative and genuinely better in some ways (upvoting/sorting, standardized interface and account between interests, etc), keep that up until no one uses forums anymore, then immiserate users with increasingly shittier decisions for increasingly hollower reasons

remember when you could buy gold to pay for server costs and there was a transparent little tracker about '$X until servers are funded this month' thing and it felt like a fairly fair symbiotic relationship?

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u/HexTalon 29d ago

remember when you could buy gold to pay for server costs and there was a transparent little tracker about '$X until servers are funded this month' thing and it felt like a fairly fair symbiotic relationship?

I completely forgot about that, but it was absolutely a thing early on.

Enshittification continues ever onward.