TheSpookiestUser

sh.itjust.works would like a word

People like to think that they’ve made some far-reaching change with what little actually happened. The painful truth is: they didn’t. There wasn’t a big hit to the userbase, most people on Reddit already hated moderators and didn’t give a shit if they got removed, and overall people caved far too quickly (how many people folded instantly when their internet moderator position was threatened? (I say this as someone who was one of those moderators that flat out quit everything and nuked my account rather than continuing to toil for free for a corporation that hates me)).

The actually important thing that was accomplished by the protesting was platforms like Lemmy getting enough of a userbase boost to become stable - in the future, Lemmy and others may be able to act as viable alternatives to Reddit, because there’s already a community here (however small). Reddit will continue to enshittify, and people will continue to leave in small numbers that may escalate to big numbers if they commit a truly massive fuckup. The more heavy Reddit users (read: more invested, not necessarily more active) are small in number compared to the vast majority who lurk, don’t give a shit about any ongoing meta-drama, and don’t particularly care about any changes to the UI or browsing experience as long as they can still get an endless feed of memes.

Even if it hurts to realize this, it’s important to make sure people get this message beat into their skulls so that we aren’t stuck with a bunch of Redditors (derogatory) with over-inflated egos that think Reddit will bend over backward to appease them, then cave as soon as they receive literally any pushback from the corporation running the site.

I only really wishlist games that haven’t come out yet that I’m interested in, to remind me to buy it when it comes out. Only about ten items on mine.

Wouldn’t be the weirdest rebrand recently, honestly

I am subscribed to over 100 channels, ranging from daily uploads to 1 video every few months. Frankly I don’t need more stuff to watch. When I do want to find something new, it’s either a recommendation from a friend, something I saw on a different social media, or something I searched for myself deliberately.

This change isn’t a good thing, it’s Google trying to pressure more people into giving up more data, but the “threat” of them removing their algorithmically recommended content from my feed is not a threat at all, it’s a bonus if anything.

I’ve heard about Threads, which frankly I think will never pan out (they have no particular reason to encroach on this “market” given how small and usually anti-corporate it is here - I think they only mentioned ActivityPub as a buzzword), but Tumblr?

Me getting a notification I sold a trading card for 3 cents on the market

Lots of Valve stuff - Portal 1 / 2, the Half Life games, and Left 4 Dead 2 all go on sale for like a dollar very often. Team Fortress 2 is flat out free to play, if you’re willing to either pay like $2.50 for an item to unlock your account or put up with a bit of f2p bullshittery. Put almost 4000 hours into TF2, it’s my all time favorite game.

At the least, put the screenshot and the link in the post. We can do both, people.

I even get why, images inherently get more eyes on them than articles through links, but the least we can do is include the source in the post body.

Source on the image? Seems to be a snippet of a longer article.

EDIT: looking up the text of the image gives me https://inshorts.com/m/en/news/kerala-man-loses-₹40000-as-video-call-from-friend-turns-out-to-be-deepfake-1689663557129, which is just the snipped text, but points at

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/deepfake-scammers-trick-indian-man-into-transferring-money-police-investigating-multi-million-rupee-scam-101689622291654-amp.html

as the source. I get images get more engagement than links, but it’s important to have the source handy.

They aren’t universally hated. No one likes them, sure, but as with a lot of things the silent majority is in the “doesn’t give a fuck” camp. This is the camp Reddit is relying on to keep using the website no matter what they do.

Now as for why, beats me.

Rise, my brothers

See, but the fact you actually committed to leaving means there’s a lot more people even more casual than you still on reddit.

The point of contention which is why I believe as above is that the standards of most people still on reddit are fairly low. Reddit has been going downhill for years, this much is known; it’s only now, with this latest screw up, that I, (assumedly) you, and many others have decided to jump ship. I, personally, willfully ignored much of the enshittification of reddit, content that I could use third party tools and apps to make up for it’s deficiencies; now that reddit is showing they don’t care about us and are tearing down those tools, I’m gone.

But for many others, they don’t care about any of the current goings on. Many do not even understand how the site actually works, confusing mods with admins as the same thing and not even getting that a sub could shut down (I was a mod, and saw many pieces of mod mail that amounted to “why can’t I see posts here help”). Their standards for how bad things can get until they’ll make a change in their browsing habits are surprisingly resilient.

I doubt we will see any big dent in numbers so soon, if at all. The brutal honest truth is that most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else. This is why subreddits protested as they did, interrupting the content feed with blackouts and extremely niche rules.

What may actually happen is that a lot of the content creators leave, which will decrease the quality of the site in the long term and maybe push out the casual user when the content gets bad enough. This is not something easily quantifiable, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

But personally, I’m ok even if reddit isn’t toppled. Now that I’ve stopped using it, I have no stake in the matter anymore.

Also need NFT collectable avatars, can’t forget those!