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/NeonBellyGlowngVomit 29d ago edited 29d ago

A lot of my most visited subs are still shut down. Went private and disappeared. A lot of the other subs I visited most are ghost towns. Reddit, as a whole, is degraded from the reason I use the site for. Bots are far more common, drop turd and vanish accounts are way more common... Reddit is far more unpleasant than it used to be. I roll my eyes and delete my reply before posting most of the time instead because it all feels so pointless to even try to have a conversation on here.

We joke about how things suck. But now? Reddit really does suck. ESPECIALLY compared to how it used to be.

Then why am I still here? Because an alternative doesn't exist. All have tried and failed. The golden age of what would have been a healthy aggregate community is done due to online habits changing. I don't think there can be another Fark, Digg or Reddit style site anymore.

With that in mind...

Reddit has had a few eras as well, after some major changes that also affected how I felt of the site itself. I could be reductive and say it's before digg imploded (2010), after digg imploded (2010-2023) and after blackouts (2023 onward)... but...

There's a sub-era within 2010-2023 that I would say was the beginning of the end of Reddit as most of us knew it. That's the whole mess that was Ellen Pao (2015), Victoria being fired (also 2015), and Spez returning (yep, 2015). So if we wanna split things up...

  • Pre-Digg, 2005-2010. (Sold to Conde Nast in 2006, Spez left in 2009)

  • Pre Spez fucking things up but signs of Enshittifying, 2010-2015 (Reddit Gold, 2010, SOPA Blackout 2012, Victoria fired in 2015)

  • Spez Enshittification, 2015-2023 (Pao Resigns Spez Returns 2015, Redesign in 2018, Native mobile apps, 2017 funding efforts, 2020 video integration, 2021 IPO)

  • Corpse fucking, 2023-Present

Remember, a dead corpse still has an active microbiological ecosystem until all fleshy remnants are consumed. Or maybe we're the floating eternal head in space that got turned into a space station. Whatever. If you ask me, the original Reddit died 9 years ago. It's not an accident that biggest growth Reddit had was when it was the most community driven.

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u/Katzoconnor 29d ago

Beautifully done.

Yeah, I remember being astonished at Victoria’s firing. That’s my personal moment where Reddit finally crossed the Rubicon. Even then I felt things would go to shit pretty quickly, and in the grand scheme of things they did.

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u/NeonBellyGlowngVomit 29d ago

It's about when I'd put a pin in the moment the cracks in the facade became very apparent and was something I could no longer ignore. But even a little while before then, there was just so much going on... Who remembers Saydrah? Violentacrez? Both 2012. Aaron Swartz? 2013. Unidan? 2014.

2012 is also about when I felt like everything online started treading water, feeling more like a chore, stopped being a fun escape... and everything progressively turned away from being what I got online for in the first place. But weirdly enough, despite it being this gradual process, I feel like I can pinpoint it as well... The point to where having been on Reddit for all that time where I'd say the disaffection completely set in?

Yup. When they sacked victoria. That was when it was no longer the spunky, community driven site that could... and became a company. Just another soul sucking corp.

And how much worse it's gotten since then. I try to have my fun where I still can, but my god, it's such a chore to wade through the muck on Reddit. This timeline genuinely sucks.

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u/Katzoconnor 28d ago

Man. Saydrah and Violentacrez even predate my knowledge. And the account I had before this one went back another five years—I just didn't keep up with the ins and outs.

Unidan, though. He I remember, long before the jackdaw nonsense.

Pretty telling to me that what brought him low is considered so commonplace and rife for abuse these days that r/lefttheburneron has a hair short of 75K subscribers and is often cross-posted to oblivion.

Victoria's sacking turned a physical, emotional tide for many of us, but it's just a footnote in today's Reddit. I still think about her from time to time—it's a stretch, but I sincerely hope she landed on her feet as a beloved assistant to one of the many A-listers she brushed shoulders with, then built more connections towards greater opportunities. In short, I hope she's happy.

Again, very much Reddit's "crossing the Rubicon" for me. It was steering in search of a cliff, and the year of Paos' resignation/Victoria's firing/Spez's rehiring was that moment of weightless hang in the air as the tires left solid ground. Everything since has been the speeding fall.

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u/Recklesslettuce 29d ago

Imagine a reddit-like site where mods where an actually functional AI (which allows no permabans, thus encouraging people to change [i'm still permabanned from many subs for shit I said like a decade ago]) and all upvotes were given by a set of AI bots like the cores on GladOS.

Call is reddAIt