The CEO is a total scumbag and Apollo closing down.

I left Reddit because I gave them so many years of dedication (and $ via Reddit premium), not even considering the fact I bought coins on multiple accounts.

1. Reddit became way too focused on Karma. Karma is great in concept, but more than half of the users are only posting for internet points at this point. It takes away from the validity of posts imo. How many “I stopped drinking for 30 days!” posts did you see on there with like 70k upvotes and thousands of karma?

2. The amount of not genuine posts is alarming. People have become addicted to the upvote/downvote system moreso than boomers on Facebook have become attached to their pages.

3. The amount of hate speech, misinformation and blatant lies the site actively promotes is insane.

4. They literally made everyone NFT wallets…???

5. NFT wallets?? Why the fuck was this ever approved? Oh yeah, more $, and something else for Spez to add to his IPO rubbish. Hey look at us we have some NFTs too type beat.

6. The userbase is pretty shit and Spez has even admitted to not caring about the people who made his site what it is.

Why would anyone ever stay on a site where the literal CEO says he doesn’t need nor care about you?

That one article that coined the term ‘enshittification’ and made me realise centralised, for-profit social media will always turn garbage after awhile. I’m tired of changing sites every few years. Time to use something that’ll stay good this time.

I was on the fence about it until the Spez AMA. Then, I decided I’d be leaving on the 30th.

Then, I had a user call me “fucking stupid” for supporting a sub shutting down, and that was the final straw for me. I had seen how friendly people on Lemmy are and this showed me how toxic Reddit is by comparison. So I immediately nuked all my comments & posts and deleted my account. This was around two weeks ago and I’ve been much happier here.

Losing Apollo was the main reason.

However this whole saga unveiled other disturbing things such as how Reddit is leveraging its communities for advertising in this post: https://lemmy.world/post/837198

Spez

Honestly I was using reddit app on all my devices, but I kinda despise big ass tech companies who think they are too big to fail no matter what they do…

So, here I am.

When I first learned that Reddit would be pricing out third-party apps I was angry and upset, but I still entertained the notion of maybe continuing to use old.reddit on the desktop (until they inevitably killed that). I like many of the communities there and didn’t want to give them up.

But then came the AMA and the leaked memo and the crushing of the protests with threats and strongarm tactics. Everything spez wrote dripped with contempt for the community and the moderators that had made the site what it was through their unpaid labor. The message became clear: “Let the little users cry it out. They’ll have their little tantrum and then they’ll settle down and accept that the reality is that we can do anything we want to them and they have to just accept it. Their communities, their conversations, their culture, it all belongs to us, not to them. We have everything and they have nothing”.

I’m not going back to that.

Reddit, like Digg before it, was a gathering place, where people could post or consume content, and interact with other users. It was much like a town square, where people can set up their soapbox and bark, or where a person could go and listen, interact, and enjoy.

Reddit is now like the Home Owners Association for that particular town square, and are actively trying to control the entire experience, by acting like they own the soapboxes, and as though the barkers are now obligated to ensure that content is HOA approved.

That kind of neighborhood holds no appeal for me.

Rif is getting shut down. And most of the sensible people seems to be moving to kbin+lemmy. I just followed suit.

Put simply, I’m tired of being the product, and it’s obvious that Reddit wanted to implement more data harvesting and more advertising to their platform. Couple that with the outrageous cost to use their API, and it’s bye, bye Reddit.

Losing RiF, I can’t use the official app it’s trash.

I was a mod on Reddit so I was personally aware that for years Reddit’s mod tools have been totally inadequate for the job, that Reddit has been promising to give us something better, and that Reddit has failed to deliver. Honestly, it was even worse than just not delivering: we’d get new tools that didn’t solve the main problems, were only available on the iOS app, coming to Android eventually, and coming to the websites never. Third party API tools were the only thing that made modding vaguely functional, even on a small sub.

I’m also a supporter of accessibility in apps, which is also something Reddit has been promising for years and Reddit has failed to deliver. Again, third party API tools are the only thing that makes Reddit vaguely accessible right now.

Reddit’s API changes are not realistic to implement in a single month. This was made clear early on and Reddit has refused to budge. So at this point Reddit is knowingly upending an ecosystem that makes their site usable by groups of users with no first-party replacements ready. And given their history of failing to deliver these very tools, I have no confidence that they will ever do so.

And THEN the Spez AMA happened. I was hoping he’d listen to the community, engage with our concerns, or at the very least actually do an AMA. Instead he got caught lying, he got caught astroturfing, and he inadvertently made it clear that the real issue was that he was butthurt over these third party apps being better at business than Reddit was. Oh, and later we found out the Reddit CEO really admired Elon Musk’s handling of Twitter, a platform I left for all the reasons Spez seems to like it.

Even if none of these issues affected me personally (which they do), Reddit has made it clear that I just can’t trust them to run a fair and functional platform. They do not take their obligations to their users, mods, and business partners seriously. If they don’t like the way the game is going, they’ll change the rules without warning. They will promise features they will not deliver even when those features are essential to their site working for the users who keep it alive.

I don’t want to help Reddit build what Reddit wants to make anymore.

Removed by mod

I can’t say I definitely won’t go back…I like Lemmy’s community better than Reddit’s but I’m not sure it’ll ever be as popular or as reliable as a source of info as Reddit. I think the Fediverse runs into similar problems to Linux, where it’s definitely superior in most ways to the nonfree competition, but that superiority goes hand in hand with inaccessibility to non-nerds. I like Tumblr’s community less than Reddit (and Lemmy, Reddit, and Tumblr are the only three social media sites I even find the community tolerable, though I don’t have Mastodon because I don’t have anyone I want to follow there) and Tumblr has never been useful for searching info.

But let me tell you, Spez’s conduct and praise of Elon Musk is what has me considering not going back. It’s just…he tried to act on the pulse of the userbase and failed spectacularly. Also hearing that Reddit is a noticably higher percentage assholes after the protests started.