this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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I've never been sentimental about a social media site but it's sad for me to see reddit so clearly killing itself. Pushshift is already banned and Apollo is soon to follow. Reddit will either pivot fully to a mainstream audience or die out. It's just sad for me to see it doing it to itself.

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[–] sprocket@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah for sure. I was on reddit for 13 years, there were users I recognised by name, people I was friendly with, people I'd have intense debates with, many, many, many subreddits I loved.

But nothing lasts forever, and this place seems nice so here's to new beginnings 🍻

[–] chrislenz@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same exact situation here. Been on reddit since digg v4 happened. Reddit was far from perfect, but for the most part I enjoyed my time there. If this is the end of reddit, then so be it. Lemmy/Beehaw looks like it can grow into a good replacement.

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[–] RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I mourn what it was, yes.

There was a recent comment I read about how it's become this incredible resource for the most obscure tech issues and they were reluctant to delete their posts and accounts because they'd receive random messages of thanks years after a tech resource post was made.

And it's true. Reddit has become an invaluable resource for these kinds of things. Not only that, but it's one of the few places that exists on the web where cohesive and coherent discussions even exist. It was always the community and discussion that made reddit great and they want to turn it into yet another swipebait infested serotonin sponge. I sincerely hope lemmy can take its place, but there are going to be some major growing pains if we get big influx of "redfugees."

It almost makes me think that when something becomes such an enormous and invaluable public resource, there should be a legal compulsion to archive it before doing anything that will compromise its accessibility.___

[–] belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm mourning the communities i found, but not reddit itself. Spez has been a turd forever. I saw him at a tech inclusion conf like 6-7 years ago and they knew then he was such a shit they didn't even allow questions from the audience. He said nothing useful and basically said "we keep the donald because both sides" and not so subtly that they keep everyone for add views.

He sucks ass and is only concerned about IPO and will likely just change the r/all to whatever is left and declare the IPO a victory as users bleed away.

Hoping to find more of my old communities around lemmy with hopefully less bigots.

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[–] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yea kinda. I think Reddit in general is quite amazing. People harp about toxic social media etc, but there's something truly great about being able to find people of common interests from all around the world.

In general... This is what internet was supposed to be, right.

Plus nobody forces you to deanonymyze yourself. With that comes some pretty cool culture.

Although admittedly I've noticed the mood on the whole site being more sour in the past months to a year... But maybe that's me more than anything.

It's a shame such a model is apparently not sustainable as a business. Maybe it's true that there should be public services fulfilling this purpose.

[–] Bewildebeest@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm slowly becoming convinced that actually useful social media is incompatible with being for-profit.

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[–] klemptor@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, yeah. Reddit has been part of my daily routine for 12 years now. Sure, a lot of the content is junk food for the brain, and reddit has changed a lot during that time, but I've also learned a lot of cool things and had a lot of interesting conversations there. Lemmy looks promising, but it's still very nascent. The userbase is small, it's missing a lot of the niche communities that you can find on reddit, and the tech is glitchy. Overall it feels a lot more like tinier than reddit (which duh, of course it does).

Reddit is also a bad habit that I've wanted to reduce for a while now, so maybe this is the shove I needed.

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[–] 1hitsong@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, I feel disappointment. What reddit was, or at least how I saw it, is not what was on display for the past few weeks.

But my excitement for new things is awesome! I miss the days of stumbling across new, exciting, and weird sites instead of 1 all powerful site. The feeling of starting something anew is fun, and I'm looking forward to learning how to use and defining what this site is with y'all.

[–] Nouveau_Burnswick@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was part of the Digg migration. I'm part of the Reddit migration. I'll be part of the next migration.

The impermanence of life.

[–] sprocket@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

It's migration all the way down!

[–] shufflerofrocks@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

Kinda. I've been a part of it so long, and it has exposed me to so much new stuff. Reddit got me through some tough times as a kid, and I definitely would've been a different person if I hadn't found reddit.

But the site has been dying for a while now. Hivemind is bigger than before, so many more teenagers, no one is following rediquette, and admins are actively trying to 9Gag-ify the place. I've been finding myself disliking the place more and more for a while, sinking time into it more out of habit than anything else.

The only things I'm gonna miss is the ease of access to expert opinions - I could just go on the trees or bugs or any other niche subreddits and get someone really knowledgeable to answer it.

That, and discussions about my city and country - not many folks joining sadly

[–] cark@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I feel like reddit dying could be a positive thing for me. For years now I have felt the negative influence that its toxic environment - fueled by impersonal, discordant interactions - had on me. Not to mention the complete destruction of my ability to concentrate caused by the micro dopamine hit targeting of social media UX. I'm hoping that moving to a smaller platform will help with some of that pervasive anger I feel as a result of constant reddit usage.

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[–] grizzzlay@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

There's definitely some stages of withdrawal going on for me. Having relied on that site for many years as a source of information, commentary, and just plain ol' entertainment scrolling on my lunch break, I definitely feel the sense of loss.

But that AMA yesterday with Spez really enforced that the site's not going to be at all what it used to be.

[–] Kuroneko@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

I’m definitely going to miss using Apollo, as well as the subreddits I frequented. What I won’t miss are the subs dedicated to misinformation and intolerance that have been allowed to fester for way too long. I have high hopes that Beehaw will do a good job at keeping that crap out.

[–] Skooshjones@vlemmy.net 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't mourn Reddit, but I am sad that it's another example of the commoditization and corporatization of the modern internet.

Hopefully federated networks, P2P protocols, and FOSS software/frameworks are able to provide a robust and healthy web going forward into the future. The era of the free general internet is over, has probably been for a long time honestly. Now if massive companies want to stay afloat in that space, they will need to make huge profits. Everything as you are seeing nowadays, is being monetized and centralized.

Maybe this truly is late stage Capitalism and the collapse of it all is on the horizon, idk. But as long as I have an internet connection and things I am interested in doing on there, I will be trying to resist the corpos as long as I can.

Long live the free and open internet!

(PS, power to the users, and I can and do contribute to the products and services I use from these wonderful people in our communities <3)

[–] Ultra980@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not really "mourning" it, but I had a weird feeling, like the end of a great book (series) or movie, like I wish it would have continued more.

Hiwever after switching to lemmy, the community here seems way more active and friendly, and even though there are less overall users, I get more interaction with my posts and comments, maybe also because they aren't drowned in a sea of other comments.

[–] FeralGibberling@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

I have the same feeling - I feel welcome here even though I spent years on Reddit lurking. I'm not mourning Reddit however as I've watched its slow decline over the years. Here's to many happy years on Lemmy!

[–] DiscoShrew@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 year ago

I think, at a fundamental level the Reddit I am mourning isn't Reddit as it exists now, but perhaps how I imagine it did ten or so years ago, the so called "Early Days". We're all here now because Reddit at is now is unsustainable and actively hostile against it's users. The contradiction between the need for monetization of the userbase and the userbases disgust at being monetized. This isn't a recent occurrence but sometimes we need to get a bit of a kick to realize how bad its been, in retrospect.

I do know, as many fellow tech people do, whenever I have to look into a problem I haven't encountered before, appending "Reddit" to the search often leads me closer to an answer. I will miss that, as it had become so well indexed. Lemmy isn't there yet in terms of being indexed.

[–] BobQuasit@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Reddit isn't so much killing itself as rather being killed for money.

This is why I hate capitalism. It ruins everything, including the planet and the future.

Pity we can't have a social media site that's a public service!

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[–] pridefulofbeing@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t mourn Reddit, I mourn the people and ideas I enjoyed engaging with through it. But, I’m glad people chose to find another way to engage (such as Lemmy) vs. staying in that toxic system. :)

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[–] GreenCrush@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I think what I'm most sad about is losing easily searchable information. Finding an obsscure thread about some weird question I had is great. Maybe that will be preserved somehow. Idk. That and the more unhinged reddit posts and copypastas throughout history.

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[–] luckless@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oddly enough I feel like I'm going to miss the UX from boost more than the subreddits themselves. Even the better ones have so much negativity in the comment sections that there's no point in participating in the conversations, even with the wealth of content compared to Lemmy currently.

Looking forward to the growth from Lemmy apps such as Jerboa and Mlem.

[–] howmanytacos@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Also a boost user. Also mourning the UX it delivered more than the subreddits.

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[–] Senseibull@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No I don’t mourn it, it became mainstream around 2014 and went downhill from there imv. The front page was full of rage politics and the comments became really toxic. Everyone got drowned out, spreading that audience across multiple sites might be a good thing in the end. End the hive mind

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[–] President_Pyrus@feddit.dk 7 points 1 year ago

I am beginning to mourn what reddit was. Not what it is or what it is going to turn into.

[–] jezebelley@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'll still be browsing it with Reeder 5. When they shut off RSS then I'll be completely gone.

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[–] Nullroad@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

In a way, I mourned for reddit a long time ago. I stumbled (literally, stumbleUpon'd) reddit way back before the great Digg migration, when it was still mostly a haven for techies. The site went through a great many changes. Some good, some bad, some just... different.

At some point it got a little much. I've known for a number of years that I was growing increasingly alienated from it. Part of it was the Nazis and Reddit's inability or unwillingness to deal with any of the hate and bots. Part of it was the pervasive meme / low effort image culture. Those things were always there, but there was a time it'd get you the stink eye and an annoyed upvote.

Besides Hackernews (which has always been full of a certain Silicon Valley type), there wasn't really too many places to go. I've just been kinda waiting in the funeral parlor, hoping a ride to something else would come while I mostly browse the niche subreddits.

It's my hope that this incident starts the seeds of old forum culture as expressed through multiple lemmys. That's a pretty ambitious hope, but still. It's well past the time for the big social media networks to break up.

[–] TempleSquare@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

It's normal to grieve. If reddit were a spouse, I'd have one hell of a marriage (in a good way). Eleven years and multiple hours of interaction each day?

I've grown concerned how reddit has such a monopoly on message boards. (As I am still concerned at the monopoly Twitter has had). Like, it's to a point where I was googling the word "reddit" next to my question to get good answers. This is a testament to the community there.

The nice thing here is that Lemmy demonstrates that some competition exists. I can still have a fun chat online without relying solely on one company.

[–] jursed@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

for me its going to be very melancholic to see something I've (unfortunately) spent years on. I will actually be sad to see it go, not the app itself but all the smaller communities and the wiki's and all the knowledge that was shared. It was inevitable but I didn't think it would be so soon or so quick.

At the same time, good riddance.

[–] rss3091@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Yup. I've been on reddit for the past decade, on and off, through a couple of different accounts (got banned from r/comicbooks for posting a spider-man comic in its entirety), and I discovered so many great books, movies, tv shows through it. I gave therapy a shot because of people on r/getting_over_it, and it's made a significant difference in my life.

It just sucks how much awesome stuff and communities are going to be destroyed because of corporate greed.

[–] melodicangel@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've never been too sentimental about anything dying or changing into something else. Especially with Reddit since the CEO is so hell bent on converting it into your typical social media.

But no, I'm not too sad about it. Everything has it's time. Things come and go but the memories you make there certainly aren't invalidated by things going to shit.

[–] SoaringDE@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago

I'd be more sad if the CEO wasn't such an idiot.

[–] bnaur@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Sentimental in the sense that I have been a Reddit user for 16 years and this makes me feel really really old. And in internet years Reddit is even older, I would have excepted it to die already years ago and it seems exceptional that it has kept going for this long.

Back when Reddit was starting to get popular I was mildly annoyed and suspicious of it and all these other new fangled web2.0 things but slowly it replaced random forums, news groups, irc and other old school platforms for me. To me Reddit sits somewhere between those and the more modern and "social" web platforms and as such it feels like a relic from the early 2000s that probably has no place in the modern internet. Bit like me myself actually ("Hey, you should post that on Reddit!" is the usual ironic response that I get from my kids whenever I say something really funny or insightful...)

And like others here I'm worried about all the niche communities and losing the vast source of content that Reddit has accumulated. Sure, most of it is low effort shit as usual but especially with how bad Google has become Reddit is now my first choice when I need to get an overview of some new topic.

That said I have been planning to delete my Reddit account for a while now. After all these years it has got stale, the hive mind is predictable and it feels like I have seen all the same conversations and topics already too many times. I don't need to read any threads on more popular subs since I already know what the most upvoted opinions, memes and jokes are going to be. And it seems like every few years they piss off their userbase in some way, who then threaten to quit and find something better and surely this the end of Reddit, and then nothing happens.

It's old. I think it's time to let it go now.

[–] madmonki@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

If enough people comes to lemmy it will be the same content. No need to mourn a big centralized social media platform.

[–] Kaiser@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I'm going to miss it for sure. I keep finding myself starting to go to reddit when I'm bored. Its going to take some time to get used to the nuances of Lemmy.

[–] Monkeyhog@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not really, This seems just as good, plus its a smaller community so not as many assholes.

It honestly feels more like leaving a bad relationship. I didn't realize how bad things had gotten until I left.

[–] Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Not really? Reddit has been on the downhill slide for ages now. I made this account two years ago, but there hasn't been enough content here to really do anything with until now. For me, it's like "eh, eff em," and has been for awhile, even before the API changes.

[–] hydra@lemmy.one 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

IDK...On one hand, we lose a repository of content and information. On the other hand, people will move to federated, non-megacorp-controlled/ran places like the Lemmy federation and safeguard our future. I'm personally excited if it means priming the pump for a mass migration to the Fediverse as a household name. However Reddit was the sole savior of enshittified Google Search since like 2017, and if it goes away that means Google Search will also stagnate heavily. People usually migrate from proprietary service 1 to proprietary service 2 so I really really hope people keep flocking to Lemmy despite the excessive load concerns. lemmy.ml and beehaw should close registrations at some point to distribute the load more evenly though

[–] donio@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It kinda feels like this whole mess is giving me permission to leave. Like when you know that you are in an unhealthy relationship but don't know how to get out of it and suddenly your partner says that maybe you should start seeing other people.

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[–] rskn@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Nope they did this to themselves. They are just trying to squeeze more profits before they probably sell.

[–] daychilde@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I was there from 2009, when they welcomed me and asked me to do an AMA while Fark mods temp-banned me accidentally. lol. I spent a lot of the last 14 years on reddit creating some communities, moderating default subs, stepping away twice, but going back each time.

Well, this is finally it. I'm an old.reddit user, so not directly impacted by this, but it's just a sign that reddit is dead. It's been dying.

I got into tildes thankfully, as the discussion there is great. And now I'm over here, as I know there's a large influx from reddit, so hopefully these two sites will fill that gap. :)

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[–] isosphere@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I am so excited for it to die and be replaced by an ecosystem that isn't controlled by individuals. To that end I think it's really important that we get account moving functionality; no admin should be fully trusted.

[–] regex@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've been using Reddit since around mid-2009 (pre-Digg exodus). In my honest opinion, the signs of decline on Reddit have been bubbling for a while, and that's forgoing any consideration of operational/executive decisions that have been made along the way.

Don't get me wrong, Reddit even in 2009 wasn't a consistent bastion of quality, productive, insightful discussion, and a good amount of posts on the frontpage on a given day were memes (not to say those are inherently "bad" posts; peak f7u12 anyone?). But the discussions that were had were, for the most part, friendly and/or constructive in some meaningful way. Over the years though, as the userbase grew and the site became increasingly "mainstream," I noticed there was an uptick of either one or both of two things: 1) low effort posts/comments and 2) sheer vitriol in discussions.

When you combine those two things, you get what -- in my opinion -- is a social media platform with high levels of "engagement" that VCs/execs love to tout and leverage (see Reddit's recent IPO ambitions), but ultimately, a platform that's merely a shell of what it once used to be.

As that happened, I found myself using Reddit less as a "fun" social media platform and more as a tool -- using it for discussions and/or information about niche hobbies, interests, news topics, etc. While the dominance of forums in that area may have been overtaken by subreddits over the years, I don't think there was anything particularly unique about what Reddit as a platform was doing to help these sort of communities exist, and I really doubt that Reddit will be the last place these communities can thrive.

[–] gotofritz@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Mourn the site that allowed toxic subs like the_donald or worse to recruit and prosper? Hell no. I will mourn small communities if they leave, but I don't believe they will. Lemmy is a good idea, but judging from the twitter / mastodon migration (or lack thererof) I am not holding my breath. The fact Lemmy's main devs are tankies makes mass adoption even less likely

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