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- cross-posted to:
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Paywalling the API and therefore killing 3rd party apps killed reddit… banning anyone with an opinion killed reddit…
Nazi sympathizing has already ruined Reddit.
That shithole has been sanitized for advertisers, which means banning anyone who talks about resisting the fascist slide America is currently in but allows /r/conservative to exist for foreign actors to spread misinformation from.
Fuck Reddit, fuck Spez, those Nazi fucks will get what’s coming to them if we’re lucky.
Reddit ruined reddit for everyone. AI has nothing to do with it. Well except Reddit making a deal with google to sell everything on their for training AI. But again that is Reddit ruining Reddit.
Agreed. And this has taught us some things about communication. About how it works when it’s hooked up with capitalism, government and/or the general population.
I personally think it works better without that stuff.
No, Reddit ruined Reddit for everyone. The AI slops are simply what replace the people who left.
The day they got rid of reddit gold and started cash grabbing hard was the day the writing was on the wall.
They got rid of gold?? When?? I left reddot and came to Lemmy in the third-party apps exodus and haven’t even looked back
Ages ago - they tried to make it all these flairs and sparkles and whatever. Maybe it’s back lately?
Oh, I’ve looked back. It’s hard not to rubberneck at such a horrendous train wreck. Especially when I was just a passenger on that very train.
I left reddit during the great API massacre as well, then I went back to only be taken out by the great Trump massacre of '24 where they banned a huge chuck of the community that had any anti-trump sentiments in their profile history…because Trump threatened them.
Now I have been banned 6 more times, just by AI detecting language it doesn’t like and its catalogue of dislike only continues to grow.
They pretend that humans are reviewing ban appeals, it is clear that they are not. The AI is banning more people than they could possibly keep up with. Now, more often than not, there is no reply to ban appeals whatsoever.
Spez is a spineless coward who threw the reddit community overboard a long time ago and continues to do so whenever it suits him. Reddit exists only to shit money for him now.
It has been left twisted and corrupted in favor of the conquest for money and controlling public opinion
I’ll be back to fight the good fight just as soon as I can create a new account and switch VPNs
Wasn’t spez the pedo sub moderator?
It was when they fired Victoria for me
Yeah, also the people. The comment sections are cancer. Lame jokes from dickheads that don’t add anything.
This is key.
If there weren’t bots…Reddit would make its own bots. Reddit dances a fine line of allowing the population to be a certain proportion of bots because they increase real engagement by picking fights with its real users, as well as creating never-ending “content” for people to read and vote on. They only ban bots when real users notice they are bots - which is less and less frequently - even though Reddit has the tools and information to ban them long before that point.
Reddit could easy eliminate almost all of them, but that would be expensive and they’d lose real users as a result.
Exactly. This is like blaming rats and cockroaches for dirty town.
No, they won’t be there (as much) in a cleaner town.
Yeah, after reading the article, it was like, oh, so the same fake stories but actually grammar corrected?
Also, most people who sre like “i have this tells tl detect AI” would not know at all whether something is AI or not lol
I used to have a reddit account and truly enjoyed it - but I quit when it became obvious that most of the site is simply run by bots that aim to stir the pot and divide people. I still read various reddit posts - but there is no longer any real knowledge to be gained. Mostly, I now just experience frustration, mistrust, and disappointment.
all they had to do was install comment and post captchas for each and every interaction, but that might hurt interaction metrics and thus the stock price so AI slop and eventual implosion it is instead.
I suppose it’s the way of so many sites: Initially, they pursue some higher goal, which attracts users. Once people start participating en masse, the focus quickly shifts and it becomes all about making money - which is fine as long as there is a balance. They lose out once the scales tip too much in the direction of profit while the initial purpose becomes more of an afterthought.
It’s ruining everthing it touches. Reddit is far from the only victim of that garbage.
Reddit is already ruined and has been for a while. And it’s been ruined by the greedy Reddit CEO.
Yeah AI had nothing to do with it. Ruined waaay before AI took hold. That’s why I left.
The UI was becoming unusable, the policies were unreasonable, the greed got to them, etc, etc.
Yep. It was headed downhill with the bots, reposts, karma farmers, hive-mind, troll farms, and of course the reddit c-suite “purging” the site of things like WPD, morbid reality, spacedicks (yeah, not subs for everyone, but noetheless…not hurting anyone), getting rid of Victoria, getting rid of mods and leaving petty power mongers and sycophants in place, and allowing shit like The_Donald and similar subs to run unchecked. The forced commercialization, crushing of protest and reddit app was the final straw.
Also the turtle fucker that is a mod everywhere. I’m so curious how they make money being a shitty person.
Let’s be real…Reddit itself is moderated by AI.
People who moderate subs should be called “hall monitors” or something. It’s rare to find moderators who are actually moderating with impartiality, rather that being petty and taking sides. They also have tools to exploit the Reddit auto-mod system.
It was enshitified ages ago.
There’s no point in taking moderation seriously. It’s a volunteer position and the tools to handle slop aren’t there.
I hear they’re bringing back digg.
I also hear it’s a former Reddit C-suite that’s bringing it back, so it’ll probably be more of the same.
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no ; reddit is ruining reddit for everyone.
I beg to differ: spez has ruined reddit for everyone.
Not for himself, as he just joined the billionaire club. I would probably have ruined it for a billion as well, if I’m being completely honest.
I don’t think I would. If it were a zero-sum game where I either have good reddit and no money, or modern reddit and a billion dollars, I’d probably take the money. But its not like spez was a broke man barely surviving paycheck to paycheck before he ruined it. I just don’t understand the greed rich people have to constantly take more for themselves when they’re already doing great.
They’re not competing with you or me in the conspicuous consumption game. They’re competing with all the other rich people.
because the thing they strive for is getting more. it’s about status. they only give it away if it somehow nets them more wealth.
Enablers get payouts too, though.
Wait till those he sold it to find out that the membership numbers are full of people who have been permabanned and won’t ever see their ads.
It’s a problem inherent to centralized online platforms.
That’s when things started going off the rails yes. Remember Victoria and the good ol days?
⭐
{lemmysilver}
nah reddit is fine for loads of things
better than lemmy in fact but then it has FOUR orders of magnitude more active users
no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no;
Yeah, that happened way before the current AI slop bubble.
Yes it did. Making up variation of the same story in order to farm upvotes used to be done by humans.
But the strategy of throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks has now been industrialized with AI, because the machine can produce tons of cheaper, faster, smellier shit.
Reddit and generally socials are basically the perfect application for AI. Unreliable results are not a bug but a feature. You have thousands of humans helpfully training it for free by up or downvoting the result. And the AI companies get a machine trained to persuade large groups of people of any made-up story.
Don’t need ai for that. Before AI, bots would simply copy top post from a year ago to farm up votes, and then sell the account to marketers.
The AI slop is just extra piss in a lake full of piss.
Reddit was one of the most human places on the Internet, until King Steven the Turd decided that it’s human interactions were a valuable resource that he could sell.
Now, it’s all just bots talking to bots to learn how to sound human.
i loved reddit. I was on it since nearly the beginning. It’s a sad day where reddit has ended up. Aaron Swartz would be rolling in his grave if he could see where reddit ended up.
The engagement bots constantly peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction is what drove me to Lemmy. I was there early on, and it was awesome. As its popularity grew, it became less nice, but I still enjoyed going there. In the end, I didn’t feel like commenting because I knew that I’d just get hit with stupid responses calculated to draw a response. It just felt harassing.
peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction
They’re here, too.
I occasionally see comments to the effect of, “Oh, really? Can you tell me more about that?” That seem pretty likely to just be bots trying to generate data on certain topics for AI training. Thankfully, most people seem to ignore them.
I occasionally see comments to the effect of, “Oh, really? Can you tell me more about that?”
Fuck. Am I a bot?

Oh, really? Can you tell me more about that?
I’ve got news for you, mate. You might be a bot. Have you visited your neighbourhood robotologist to get a diagnosis?
And maybe consider a robotomy.
I saw a pretty good short sci-fi film a year or so ago about a woman accidentally finding out that she’s a bot.
Bro you can’t just say that and not mention the name. What was it?
Here you go
Different book, but try We are legion (we are Bob)
That’s a good book, not terribly deep but very much fun to read. I’m sure bots thinking they are human has been done several times. First show that comes to mind is Westworld, which is kind of centered around that idea.
Bob only thinks hes human for about half a page?
I wish I could remember. It was definitely on YT. I think it was in German with subtitles. It wasn’t long. Possibly was someone’s film school project.
Dutch actually
Westworld
Whatever happened to that show?
Beep boop fellow clanker.
Can I ask you a question?
Wait, was that reply to me with a “Can you elaborate on that” comment a bot?
Digg 2.0 jumper in 2009. I always thought there would be a new Reddit after 2014. But it took 10 years for Lemmy to show up.
Now, it’s all just bots talking to bots to learn how to sound human.

Maybe in 2012. Once it started to be a right wing information warfare battlefield it got pretty insufferable. Like a lot of the niche content was still there, but the broader culture changed immensely.
No, there’s a lot of human bigotry too.
Did spez change his name to AI?
reddit already ruined reddit for everyone long before AI was a concern.
I mean that’s why we’re here…
People still use reddit, thought it was a bots only network
And yet it still had room to get worse, and it’s still not even in its shittiest form.
spez ruined reddit for everyone
What? What did the moderator of r/jailbait do now?
That one always rung a big hollow to me because of the timeframe of it. At the time he was made a mod there, invites didn’t exist. Folks could just be added to subs- it was actually a method for trolling. At the time, I could add Steve to r/SteveLovesDiddlingKids, for example, and he’d have no say in it. They changed it to an invite system after a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That said, one can quite readily say that spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years knowingly (Including it being a subheader for reddit on google searches, and it getting nominated for subreddit of the year along with several votes for it.) and only got rid of it when Anderson Cooper did a report on CNN about it.
a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That’s absolutely hilarious.
spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years
spez did not work at reddit between 2009 and 2015.
On one hand yeah in that timeframe, on the other hand it’s not like his homies weren’t there. Further, subreddits came to exist in 2006, and people could make their own in 2008, so he had a year’ish of r/jailbait existing to do anything about it, and chose not to.
I don’t especially want to be in the position of defending either spez or r/jailbait, but I was on Reddit at the time and I do think I should explain how 2008 was a different time on the web.
There had been a number of attempts to censor and age-gate the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People involved in creating internet tech and building its culture were almost universally against anything that even smelled like censorship. Much of the early userbase migrated from Digg in response to Digg censoring a leaked DRM key. The only sitewide rule on Reddit was “don’t break Reddit”.
When r/jailbait finally did get banned in 2011 and Reddit’s first content policy was imposed, that decision was unpopular among Redditors even though most thought sexualizing young teenagers was disgusting. It signaled a change to what Reddit was, and people rightly feared that it would lead to significantly more restrictions. Now I have to enforce a rule on r/flashlight that people can’t sell flashlights designed to be attached to guns, and I don’t want to make or enforce such a rule.
Creepy little shit.
Reddit was ruined for me a couple of years ago and AI wasn’t involved. I no longer interact there but I do still read Reddit occasionally. Personally I find it difficult to wade through hundreds of one-liners without forgetting what the post was about.
I mean, yeah, I left during the first wave of API changes and before the company went public, but the AI has definitely made it completely unusable.
Every sub I was active in has become one of two things:
- Bot spam
- Dead
I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.
I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.
Are you me? Because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I set my default browse experience to Top 6 hour and then scroll All.
I do miss the community aspect of Reddit. There were other users who I ran into regularly in the comments. And usually not in a hostile way.
Hell, there was one sub where I was invited to the mod team because of those interactions. I did that for a couple years and continued to be active in the sub until Reddit start pissing off mods. That and my main “friend” on the mod team had his account nuked by Reddit after he fell for a troll.
Reddit removed every comment he had ever made, including wonderful and well cited rebuttals of the right-wing bigotry of the day.
So yeah, I logged out of that reddit account and have never logged back in, instead I use a burner account and try not comment on anything.
Reddit removed every comment he had ever made, including wonderful and well cited rebuttals of the right-wing bigotry of the day.
Probably more of the motivation than the listed offense.
Could have been. Reddit never actually told us anything. One of the other mods got a private message on another channel (discord maybe?) from the missing mod about it. But details were light, and the missing mod never even tried to return to Reddit. Said the ban was good for his mental health.
Then there was some Subreddit specific drama, and Reddit admins actually did the good thing. Then the API change, the blackout, and a couple other things that specifically fucked over mods. So I too, mostly left.
Remember r/reddit ?
I do indeed. I didn’t actually have an account back then, because I was mostly browsing from work… I also mostly frequented Digg until the 4.0 fiasco.
Yeah if there was a niche Lemmy sub for everything I would no longer visit Reddit at all but I can’t get my Nightreign fix here sadly
Redlib FTW
Edit: current fork
That thing hasn’t been maintained for almost 3 years.
There is a fork that usually works: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
Nice. Thanks. I’ll install it in a Proxmox LXC.
Someone should write a Reddit client that automatically hides the top two comments and all their children, because they’re inevitably stupid jokes that add nothing.
Oh right. No one can make new Reddit clients anymore.
Now AI is also ruining reddit users ruining reddit!























