cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
There might be some kind of case to be made that reddit did get too big for what it was, but lemmy won’t have to worry about that until it’s at least a hundred times its present size.
Lemmy is already struggling with many of the same issues as Reddit; poor and / or objectionable moderation or moderators, bots and bot activity, politically motivated disinformation, groupthink, brigading, and censorship.
Scale makes the problems more noticeable because it makes them happen more frequently but it doesn’t create the problems. It’s the same with Commercialization, it’s doesn’t create those problems it simply highlights them.
i think the main problem with lemmy, is theres too little content and too little users. and especially users being so fickle they immediately jump to an even smaller platform.
Going to have to disagree with you on that. Many of the problems it causes (rampant ads, algorithms tuned for maximum retention and engagement) were directly caused by the commercialization.
Fair, I hadn’t considered those specific issues and I agree that they are specific to commercialization.
And many of those problem are here because it’s the same people. There’s a significant fraction of the Lemmyverse that is made up of people who object to effective moderation, who see being censured for breaking rules around behaviour or decorum as unacceptable “power tripping”, and a significant fraction who are authoritarian by nature and see the ban hammer as the first line of defence. A large chunk of the current population are also into groupthink and political disinformation.
There’s just a… frustrating number of bad faith actors hanging around. They used to hang around on Reddit, and helped plant the seeds of Reddit’s culture. Now they’re here.
thats why i block and avoid those instances and communities. its impossible to do this on reddit.
I started with BBSs back in the late '80s, moved to the Internet in the early 90s, then the WWW in the mid-late 90s, and was doing Admin / Mod work on forums by the year 2000. So believe me when I tell you those “those people” have always been online. ALWAYS. Those users are not a Reddit creation and I know because I was encountering them for decades before Reddit existed.
Hop on the wayback machine and cruise back to the earliest ./ posts if you want a taste.
The larger that Lemmy gets the more of “those people”, however you define that group, will show up here and increasingly they will not be Reddit Refugees.
I’m wondering if it becomes an issue long before that scale actually. Like I’ve been maining lemmy since the API times and I’ve seen things change a lot since then.
Like there weren’t so many posts, communities, or new accounts all the time. Not that I’m complaining considering I was part of one of the first big “eternal lemtember” waves.
It’s just become a real social media with all that comes along with it. We’d be smart imho to figure out some of this shit before it becomes a problem, because it’s not like there’s a marketing team running ab tests to direct things.