Simple question: Will you go back to Reddit and other centralized social media platforms, if Reddit step back from the API changes? The benefits of Reddit are obvisiouly, it has million of users and even small communitys have thousands of users.
For me it’s pretty clear, after deleting my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Discord accounts, the decentraliced Fediverse is my future in social media. Even with an very much smaller community, i’m not willing to be treated as ad-cow for the big corps.
But what do you think about your future in social media? Fediverse or Reddit, Meta, Google and all the others? Or will you go safe and use both, to have an backup option?
(Image by Alan Frijns from Pixabay)
inb4 sorry, long wall of text.
I’ll stay across multiple fediverse instances, likely including lemmy.ml. I won’t be back to Reddit, not even if Reddit rolls back all the third party app changes, and if spez is fired.
There’s a reason my Lemmy account is two years old, not new: I am already extremely displeased with Reddit, for years. (More than two, by the way.)
It is not just the admins and the businesses. It’s also the moderation system:
I don’t think that the users becoming moderators in Reddit are intrinsically bad people, I was myself a moderator there, but the whole moderation hierarchy boils down to “everyone competent will eventually leave, and the top mod will be eventually a clown with too much time at hands, too little reasoning in his head, and too much power hunger in his stomach”.
It’s also in large part the userbase. Users there behave like braindead morons: they’re assumptive, context-illiterate, they don’t even see what’s wrong with “X said it so it’s true/false” and prone to oversimplify complex matters, in a way that boils down to “u think dat 50 is not 100? than u think dat 50 is 0? dats dumb lol lmao”. And they are extremely disingenuous.
I don’t think that it’s due to inability to reason; I think that it’s the environment of Reddit dictating how you should behave there. What I described about the Reddit user might potentially apply to myself, too, when I’m there. And I don’t want to feel disgusted with myself.
It should not be a surprise that the userbase is like this, when the admins set up the example. A site that launched itself by expecting users to be stupid enough to notice “this place is empty, it’s all sock-puppets” is bound to attract stupid users.