OpenStars

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)

I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.

One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).

Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.

Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.

The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.

TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?

(though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)

A study on astroturfing on Reddit, written in the style of Reddit by an astroturfer - oh the delicious irony? :-P

Spez is unlikely to ever do anything unless the Musk has already said that he wanted to do it.

At which point you might start to worry that both X and Reddit may join us at some point? But consider this: if Spez ever did tell people that he wanted to do that, it would take their programmers 20 years to write the code to make it happen, and by then we’ll all have moved on to direct thought sharing over the Web10.0 anyway. :-P Whereas if he simply bought the code off of somebody else who already made a fully-functional copy, then like Alien Blue - the forerunner to Reddit’s official app - it would still self-destruct in his hands, converting itself into a pile of dung. At which point we simply defederate from it, no worries.

Here we are free.

Think of it from the LLM’s perspective - in the general pool you have common English, you have less common variations such as this, and then you have whatever the heck people like Kid Rock are doing…

Bawitdaba, da bang, da dang diggy diggy
Diggy, said the boogie, said up jump the boogie

People have covered most of the bases here. The hardest part is that if you don’t go back soon, you will find that door is closed to you - at least to finish what you started, without having to start mostly over again. College can definitely be worthwhile, but whether it is worthwhile TO YOU is the issue. Also, once you get used to receiving a paycheck and not living on like Ramen… it is next to impossible to go back to being poor and spending every waking moment (and beyond) studying, especially for some undefinable end goal. But on the other hand, I’ve seen it done with like 15-year gaps in-between dropping out, joining the army/navy/whatever and then going back to finish up. Definitely think through all the angles here, b/c you don’t want to do anything that you will regret later - including wasting more time chasing something that you don’t really want to begin with.

Yes, it is sad, but we do what we must. :-P

Me too:-)

Edit: well, okay so not 3-8 hours every day, but it still was better to cut back.:-)

Believe it or not, that GIGANTIC, absolutely un-missable disclaimer was not there yesterday… or at least it did not show for me for whatever reason, definitely on mobile Firefox and I thought I had also looked on desktop but now could not swear to it. I cannot offer definitive proof but here’s a snapshot from Sept. 28 - not quite yesterday but long after July 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20230928153646/https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit but still is missing that disclaimer. In any case, thank you for the note of caution: possibly results might be comparable across subs but perhaps not pre- vs. post-API changes.

a) a lot of accounts are bots, and depending on how they are implemented, a LOT of these have remained (or even were created) after the API changes - remember, it’s easy to spin up 1000s of these to each provide small traffic so as to not run up against the API limits. Overall, I suspect a ton more bots are there now, b/c the bot defense effort was suspended, b/c unlike a single bot, that one needs to look at ALL traffic (I suppose it could be re-written from scratch in a decentralized manner but… the developers did not choose to do that).

b) a lot of people who remain on Reddit, including myself, offer it WAY less traffic than before. I used to be a mod of a small sub, which I quit, so I went from checking it almost literally hourly, so at most once a day, and most days I do not even comment at all. Also, I used to browse r/all (actually, “popular”), but now I never do, instead preferring Lemmy/Kbin for that. My personal traffic dropped off a cliff just like this image shows, in fact probably a lot more so. Although I still do visit that small gaming sub, b/c while there is a version of it here, instead of like 5 posts a day we get at most 1 per week, which less than a handful interact with. So that is not an “exodus of users” so much as a (vast) reduction of interaction, which still impacts their advertising revenue and thus the continuity of Reddit as a corporate entity.

c) as people are saying, not everyone came to Lemmy/Kbin. Some went to Mastodon, others just stopped going online as much, and like myself I comment now a lot less than I used to, though I read just as much (here, not there). So just b/c the traffic did not come “here”, does not mean that it did not leave “there”. i.e., think of the shock of the event as making people regress more to lurking and not feel as comfortable interacting, especially given the lack of ability of smaller magazines (what are those called on Lemmy again?) here. Thus, even if they did not “go outside”, they still may not be interacting on Reddit.

Asking the right questions here!

I have had it with all these doucheshit snakes on this twatboy plane!

(from another comment) just doesn’t work…

I find it very interesting that this is reportedly one of the top subs on all of Reddit: “Comments Per Day” ranks it #1, by Subscribers or Posts Per Day it is #2, Growth (Day) and Growth (Month) are both #5, Growth (Month) and Growth (Year) are both #4, etc.

Not only that, it is by far the top sub by this “Comments Per Day” metric: it shows 15828 Comments reported in a recent 24-hr period of time, whereas the next highest sub is r/worldnews with a mere 5153 Comments Per Day, then r/AmItheAsshole and r/nfl also ~5k, then others rapidly falling further like r/NoStupidQuestions and r/AITAH each ~3k, etc.

To reiterate: this is the #1 sub over all of Reddit, with >3x more comments per day than any other sub, and like more comments than the next 3 subs all combined… and it still has fallen off a cliff, even by this same exact metric.

I do not know how reliable subredditstats.com is overall, but even if it were not so good lately, so long as all the stats are more or less evenly biased across all the subs, we should still be able to learn something from these comparisons? (please add a correction if you know of some evidence that this is not true) One caveat is that it might be harder to compare now vs. pre-API changes? But if it can be believed, the numbers fell from a peak of >100k in June 2023, to a more average ~75k, then dropped like a rock in July to ~15k and has remained hovering around that area ever since…

I do not visit popular subs on Reddit anymore, just one that has refused to migrate to Lemmy/Kbin, but this sounds entirely believable to me. If you click the links to the top posts, the very title titles of the posts and top comments to them also showcase the change: like the #2 top post to that sub is “Now that Reddit are killing 3rd party apps on July 1st what are great alternatives to Reddit?” w/ 78.1k upvotes, and has the top comment w/ 5.2k upvotes of “I might get back into reading books after over a decade.” (and other comments likewise, pointing to Reddit alternatives, and angry exclamations about the 3rd party apps going away)

In short, THIS seems to be the evidence that we have been waiting for all this time, about just how far Reddit has fallen / died off?

Although comments on Lemmy/Kbin I do not think have risen by +~50k or so per day, so I wonder where all that Reddit traffic went? Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.

Edit: I nominated this post to m/BestOf.

Most of us already have:-P

It probably depends on the magazine… but yeah, people are still people:-).

A lot of the contributors to Reddit refuse to move to Lemmy/Kbin, and at this point I do not blame them - e.g. my notifications have not been working for over a week now, plus ~80% of the time whenever I try to upvote or boost something, it forgets who I am and I have to login again (actually it’s not a probability thing: it seems if I do something within seconds of visiting a page it always works, while after a threshold is passed then it never works). Plus on kbin.social at least I believe there are no moderation tools at all. Given how hard I’m being trolled on Reddit (b/c I did not kowtow to a hardcore cadre of power aboosers), I could only imagine how horrible the experience would be if even mods could not remove things? (or… something? easily? at all? I do not know the details) This technology just was never ready for deployment at this stage, and especially kbin.social still seems to be in the alpha software stage. Ofc, even so I am still enjoying it more than Reddit, whenever I do get to speak with an intelligent person, like now:-).

You are not the only one to think these thoughts. Check out the article linked here if you want a fascinating read - I could not put it down! Except I had to, for breakfast then work, but doing so really bugged me!:-P It was just so PERFECTLY aligned with what I had been thinking myself also, which the Reddit protests had spawned in me: in short, Reddit’s actions were evil, but it may have done us a lot of good actually… if we pay attention and learn from it all. i.e., the problem was never Reddit, but inside of us all along. Okay so Reddit is also a problem - or a whole series of them actually:-P - but also it is our natural inclination to go that “easy” route, which for-profit corporations are very much looking to exploit, but also there are free ways to reach that same end (which is not a good end).

On the flip side, it could be a Russian troll farm, and Reddit is not even aware of these efforts made on their behalf!?:-P

I dunno, it seems like it accomplishes its primary purpose well enough? Too bad for you that purpose is to deliver ads to the user to see while doomscrolling…and nothing else.:-(

Some thoughts:

If there is something you see that is missing - particularly documentation - then perhaps that is an excellent place to start? The older devs may have just been waiting for someone like you to come along and could be ecstatic to hear that you want to make that. Maybe they used/continue to work together in a company or are old friends or sth and did not need that, so you could break the project wide open, making it easier for everyone who comes after you, possibly also changing the very culture of the project and encouraging the more senior devs to write documentation as well, as they make new things or solidify an existing foundation before extending into new territory. And there are so many forms of documentation - Pre/Post conditions, listing dependencies/interactions, plus overall description of assumptions made - that even if some of that exists, the project could perhaps still benefit from adding more, especially from the perspective of a newer team member.

Do not neglect the “people” side of things - maybe try to connect to some of the more senior devs on Discord or wherever they are first? Like on the plus side they could give you pointers, tell you what you can ignore, send you links to documentation that would have been hard to find on your own, etc. Seriously: imagine spending 6 months writing documentation for an enormously-complicated aspect of the code (like a major, central class + all of its dependencies), only to see the entire thing discarded & replaced, and you find out only then that it was always intended that way from the start. (still not a deal-breaker, b/c most of that “6 months” would be you learning stuff and getting familiar with generalities, so not entirely wasted, yet not entirely productive either if you could have been told to have picked a different entry point into the project) While on the minus side, if you see that they are just flat-out idiots, then you can abandon the project now and move on - that is a thing that can happen, and it is better to know ASAP than to only really be confronted by that a year or two in.:-(

Perhaps also consider your “fit” for the specific project. If you are good at many things, but not at the specific things involved there, then there will be a greater cost for you to work in that area, and you will spend more time “learning” and less time “contributing” (plus, how much time will people be willing to devote to helping you do the former, when you have done none of the latter yet?). Ngl, depending on the number and styles of languages involved - e.g. a script that calls an optimized C++ library that then feeds data into making an SQL query that uses a REGEXP into a database that has literally zero documentation anywhere… and so on - and your prior amount of experience with each of them, could take a good several YEARS to catch up, as only a side-project. Even if your expertise could help them - e.g. if you are great at UI/UX while the senior devs are more full-stack but almost exclusively focused on the back-end side - there is still the matter of you needing a way to deliver your contributions to them, i.e. understanding the existing codebase enough to be able to modify it to implement your ideas.

I hope this helps!:-)

I also am on kbin.social, and I do not even have the “Hide NSFW content” turned on, and I almost never see it. I haven’t had to block anything (maybe once?), and in the <1/1000 chance it pops up, it is blurred by default.

It can randomly show up in the Active People area though.

Lemmy/Kbin is a wild, uncharted frontier, still alpha version software and very much in active development, it does not just “take care of people” like Reddit and Twitter did - you may want to not browse it at work then. Also, even if you successfully blocked every single porn magazine, as you see a new one could come up and blow up your entire All feed at any point in time -> that approach was never going to be 100% successful.

So it may be worth the pain of switching to Kbin, b/c that will work? Note that you will lose everything that way - account migration is something promised but not yet implemented iirc - but you can still see all of the communities you subscribed to before, from the new server (you will just have to subscribe to all of them again, plus block all the others, like I unsub from every foreign-language one that I see).

Flush