PieFedIs This How Reddit Ends?
Powderhornwww.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/01/…
No, but thanks for asking. The rabbit hole still goes far further.
Ghostarchive is apparently blocked from *The Atlantic*, and other archive options aren't friendly to VPNs, so I'm afraid I can't provide an archive link.
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Boomer Humor Doomergod
ThePowerOfGeekLooks like a very interesting article. But the fact that it's behind a paywall sums up the other problem with the Internet in general: everything has become hyper-monetized and gated.
defunct_punkI dont disagree that getting paywalled sucks (and won't make any specific comments about *The Atlantic*) but the alternative is hypertargeted ads plastering every free pixel of the screen and invasive data-scraping.
It might just be a sign of getting older and managing my finances a bit better, but at this point in my life I don't really cry much when i see good content put behind a paywall (again, no comments about *The Atlantic).
Paid subscription and you still shove ads at me? Fuck off.
Dark ArcI'll make some specific comments.
The Atlantic does have two tiers of subscription, one is ad free, it's worth it for me, I wish there was a way to share those articles with everyone without them paying, but yeah 100% agree on the point about ads (didn't see your comment and made a very similar one).
naeapThing is, that there are multitudes of sites I want to read like an article or two. Paying a subscription for all of them just isn't feasible.
By now I even forgot the name of the project, but there was the idea to pay the actual creator for the article I'm reading.
And I really liked the idea. But as far as I know, that project died - and messy, if I remember correctly.
But the idea is still good imho.
I'd have no problem chipping in a bit, when an article is written good and informative. But I don't want to buy the cow, when I only want a sip of milk.
I’m of that generation where the Internet meant that “information needs to be free” but I’ve come around to paying for, aka supporting, (what is IMO) quality journalism and opinion (I’m not necessarily just referring to the Atlantic), especially my local news.
chickenI'm semi-ok with this tradeoff, as long as there are working ways I can get around the paywalls. Once there aren't, it's worse as I'm never going to go actually pay monthly for a hundred online papers I mostly don't value the content of anyway. The main value articles have is as a shared context for discussion and common source of information, and with actually effective paywalls they would be entirely useless for that.
Yeah, that's a fair point. And I don't begrudge content creators getting money for their work in general. I was more talking about the fact that some (not necessarily the Atlantic though) hide everything behind paywalls, even when it's of critical importance to some people's well-being; or just pay-walling everything without any kind of "n articles are free per month" option. That gets old. Especially for those of us who have been around since web 1.0, when monetization was not the driving force behind information distribution online.
Or the alternative could be to make it freely available and ask for donations. Its a system that has been proven to work for all kinds of conent
This is a bad take.
Paywalls are the norm of traditional journalism. People got so used to a bunch of spammy, ad-fed, click bait journalism and now many are not willing to pay for good articles.
I wish there was a better way to discuss these kinds of articles. There are sometimes gift links which are best for smaller group discussions... But nobody's found a model that isn't the mess that is ads that also allows "free viewing."
southsamuraiEh, newspapers amd magazines had ads, they were just easier to skip
They also had subscriptions... And paywalls... You had to buy them from a newspaper stand or subscribe to have the paperboy deliver them...
Yes, I'm aware. That's an extension of what you said that I responded to.
Paywalls are the norm of traditional journalism. People got so used to a bunch of spammy, ad-fed, click bait journalism and now many are not willing to pay for good articles.
Huh. You're not wrong. Newspapers were classic user-fee newsfeeds.
But you could give away your paper when you were done. Is that early BitTorrent?
I don't know; it's one of those weird things where digital "cost to copy" being cheap really makes things problematic.
Unlike BitTorrent you were giving away your access to that item and possibly never getting it back; we don't really have a standard way of doing stuff like that in the digital era. The closest thing we have is very clunky, greedy, and intrusive DRM systems.
Other differences: When you bought a newspaper you got a physical product. You could read it, keep it, frame it, craft with it, or whatever you want. It took labor and machinery to create and distribute. The online article costs nothing to make, isn't something you can keep or use in any way, in fact at any point you might lose access to it.
See my response to sometime else about this a bit further down, if you like.
But I disagree it's a "bad take". I just didn't word it as clearly at I should have.
I don't know if that was ever different, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of that is journalists taking themselves way too seriously.
Even the paid sites are often enough filled with tabloid level crap, fluffed up news agency printouts and those god awful "reports" that start with a 500 word description of the door of the interviewee. That's not journalism and most people are not willing to pay for that.
I tried several subscriptions over the years and honestly, the articles that really added something can be counted on one or two hands. I'm sure I missed a lot of good and valuable articles, but I'm not ready to sift through tons of crap to find a few gems.
chaos3361I hope Reddit dies soon. It's been a slow process happening since at least the API changes.
Recently, Reddit seems to have underwent a major vibe shift that has sucked out the last little bits of fun and creativity that still existed there.
Yeah, the vibe shift is extreme. You can attribute some of it to the general vibe shift everywhere - of course the vibes are getting back when the Trump administration is starting to wreck havoc everywhere. But Reddit is taking this to the extreme - if you take a look at the standard frontpage, there is so much senseless ragebait and screenshots of Tweets of stupid, unimportant people. Videos of random idiots for you to be infuriated over. The fun really has left Reddit - I still remember a time where you could see funny memes and really interesting stuff instead of this.
Reddit really lives on old content. Loads of useful advice from real people, helpful recommendations, and questions and answers make Reddit still relevant.
It's a different story for new content though. Videos and images have been reposted as hell, AskReddit now just revolves around asking the same set of questions, and a lot of niche communities have slowed down.
I agree, specialized subs are really the only reason to use it. There are enough people on it that niche subjects have sufficient people to keep the communities going. Lemmy does not have that for all subjects (yet.)
Some Subreddits are really just reposts of old Twitter posts from several years ago with the same ragebait and the same answers every time.
Yeah the destruction of the niche communities plus the Big Brother style moderation is what drove me away.
To put it in context, I was an active member of a gardening sub specific to my growing zone, and THAT got AI astroturfed to hell and back. Mods did nothing about it. So I say good riddance to the cesspool that reddit has devolved into.
Can you tell me what happened when AI AstroTurf the subreddit?
Which subreddit is it? Would love to see how it looks like now.
Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/OhioGardening/
Looks like they cleaned up a lot of the AI spam that was happening a few months ago, but they still let this one crazy guy post his fisheye lens youtube videos with updates about his garden. I'm all for it, but it was honestly annoying AF and most of his videos got downvoted. No one needs self promotion in a gardening sub.
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I mean, AI narration is a genuinely amazing accessibility feature that has nothing to do with Dead Internet Theory but okay, fuck the blind.
AnUnusualRelicThe APIcalypse didn't destroy reddit so I doubt this will.
Quality of posts on the popular subreddits has gone down drastically and there's much more nazi propaganda there now though.
u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)to read this story, sign in OR start a free trial.
Or you can try archive.ph to see if they have an archived version of the article.
peregrin5Every post in AIO and AITAH reads like some AI fantasy specifically written to drive engagement and outrage.
ZeroCoolYeah, it's egregious. At least before AI people put a little effort into their creative writing practice. Those subs were always overrun with aspiring writers, but now the stories aren't just fake, they're lazy AI slop too.
Lvxferre [he/him]I asked GPT-4o mini to generate two AITA posts. They're undistinguishable from the bullshit typically posted there!
Hi Reddit, I (28F) recently got engaged to my fiancé (30M), and while I’m over the moon, my excitement has been somewhat overshadowed by my sister (32F). When I shared the news with my family, I expected everyone to be happy for us, but my sister reacted very differently. Instead of congratulating us, she made a huge scene, saying that I was rushing into things and that I should be focusing on my career instead of getting married. She went on to criticize my fiancé, saying he wasn’t good enough for me and that I could do better. It was really hurtful, especially coming from someone I’ve always looked up to. After that, I decided to keep my engagement low-key and not share too many details with her. I thought maybe she just needed time to process the news. However, she continued to make snide comments whenever we spoke, and it felt like she was trying to undermine my happiness. Fast forward to now, I’m in the midst of planning my wedding, and I’ve decided not to invite her. I feel like her negativity would only bring me down on what should be one of the happiest days of my life. My parents are upset with my decision and think I should at least give her a chance to be there, but I just can’t shake the feeling that she doesn’t deserve to be part of this celebration. AITA for not inviting my sister to my wedding? Hi Reddit, I (30F) have a sister (28F) who has two kids, ages 4 and 6. I love my niece and nephew, and I’ve always been happy to help out when my sister needs a babysitter. However, over the past year, she has become increasingly critical of my parenting choices, even though I don’t have kids of my own. Whenever I share my thoughts on parenting or how I plan to raise my future kids, she often dismisses my opinions and tells me I’m wrong. She frequently compares my hypothetical parenting style to hers, saying things like, “You’ll see how hard it is when you actually have kids,” or “That’s not how you should do it.” It’s frustrating because I’m just trying to have a conversation, and I feel like she’s belittling my perspective. Recently, she asked me to babysit her kids for a weekend while she and her husband go on a trip. I initially agreed, but then I started to think about how she’s treated me lately. I decided to decline the offer, explaining that I didn’t feel comfortable babysitting when she constantly criticizes my views on parenting. Now, she’s upset with me and has told our parents that I’m being selfish and unsupportive. They think I should just suck it up and help her out, but I feel like I’m standing up for myself. AITA for refusing to babysit my sister’s kids because of her constant criticism?AITA for not inviting my sister to my wedding after she made a big deal about my engagement?
AITA for refusing to babysit my sister's kids after she constantly criticizes my parenting choices?
Miles O'BrienNTA hit the sister delete the kids and wedding up
Spot on, my wife likes listening to those stories read by that annoying Ai voice.
Fuck, are you telling me these two histories came straight from AI, no tweaks from you????
They really do read exactly like the slop I see whenever I catch a glimpse of the frontpage.
Ugh I can't stand to see my once favorite social media going out like this
No tweaks whatsoever, I simply copypasted the output:
I'm actually glad that those things are desecrating Reddit's dead body (the site died a long time ago). It tastes like karma (as the religious concept, not as the punctuation thing).
Even the archive.org version is pay walled for me. Very strange.
Huh, so it is. Sorry about that, I didn't notice. Unfortunately, it looks like the Atlantic doesn't play nice with archive sites anymore. I use a Firefox extension called Bypass Paywalls Clean, so I've never have issues with paywalls.
BrikoXJust FYI Bypass Paywalls Clean still works for Chromium based browsers that have extended support for Manifest v2 (Vivaldi, Brave).
Jo MiranExcellent! Thank you, I've updated my original link to this version.
many sites are readable via Firefox and noscript (which you should be running anyway for all sorts of reasons) and/or Firefox reader mode. the atlantic, wapo and many more are like this.
nyt, bloomberg and others use more sophisticated paywalls.
Possibly linuxThe quality of Reddit has gone down so much. There is still a lot of technical communities there but outside of the really niche stuff and memes it is pretty useless.
I didn't leave cuz of lack of 3rd party apps I left cuz it's only bots anymore.
Literally every thread reads exactly the same.
The comments used to be the best part now they're worthless.
This. The lack of third party apps is not why I left, every thread reads the same because of the bots, the comments are worthless because bots are just reiterating the top comment.
Better than stack overflow. All the comments are like "you are stupid"
Reddit and Stack overflow have useful info but ultimately they have been ruined by bad culture.
The whole of stack overflow is now siphoned into every public AI.
It died a couple of years ago They just haven't realized it yet.
It's really bad. I still check-in on my niche subreddits from time to time, but most of them are down to 1 or 2 mods. They've also changed the default sorting from Hot to Best, which mostly seems like a way to cover-up the fewer original posts and discussions going up. The whole site is a shell of its former self.
BombOmOmIn a wider context. It prevents consumers of information from becoming producers of information. If you are in a thread (reddit, stack overflow, w/e) and happen to know an answer or have extra useful information, many people will type that out in a reply. However, with a chatbot, there is nothing to reply to. No place where the wealth of human knowledge can be expanded. Your experience and knowledge is kept to yourself.
This not only means the conversations never happen, it also means future chatbots don't have this information to work with, as they require the conversations in the first place to draw from.
Dem BosainThis AI shit is stupid. I don't trust anything I read on the internet, and don't try solutions unless they come from a reputable source, or are verified in the comments. Remove the context and I lose that trust.
Most ai is not that. Youre describing gpt
No, I'm describing removing the "context" from the search. Here, this part is relevant.
Remove the context and I lose that trust.
It ended for me when I stopped using it a year ago. Problem solved in my honest opinion (oh look, no Reddit IMHO bot, darn it)
Reddit is bots and assholes I left just this week because it was making me depressed.
Funny how the most users by town/city is nearly always a naval base in eastern usa.
🙄 the majority of reddit users are followers. They will follow trends. Reddit is still hot, cool, and trendy. They won't quit it until the next thing comes along that gets hyped up and that all of a sudden their best friends have. Reddit had an "exodus" last year (or was it two years ago?) and is still going as strong as ever. People complained about their app, but most just shrugged, downloaded it, and dealt with the new interface.
I disagree - I was on Reddit since before the Digg exodus, so I may or may not know a few things. There was a big mood shift after the mod strike. It really shook the page - some subreddits never "recovered". Some that were popular before are still in a kind of lockdown. Some have new mods which are not doing a really great job. There were a few that really grew. But overall, Reddit lost a lot. People did delete decades of useful advice. Regular users left. The new ones are ... different. In many cases mobile users that kind of seem to use Reddit as a chat platform, but they are not posting really insightful comments. Some are indistingushable from bots. Many are bots. Some mods have just given up and gave up moderating popular subreddits, which are now drowning in repost bost. There are bots replicating whole threads under reposts. Many subreddits are just old screenshots from Twitter. It's wild - but it is hollow. And that was different a few years back.
TacoButtPlug
bizarrolandReddit has become a zombie website.
All of the cool people left and the only people that are still hanging out are the people who don't know any better and the people who are there to try to market themselves as some kind of brand.
Is this why I feel I am the dumbest illiterate person surrounded by literate intellectuals here, while in reddit, I felt more or less average?
Nah, you're all good. Having the intellect to leave that place makes you a cut above the rest. Give it time, most of us have been soaking in the brine for a decade or more, you'll pickle up fine
SwizzleStickIt's getting hard to remember when Reddit was just that little weird link sharing icon on articles that few people (relatively speaking for the time) bothered with. Digg shitting the bed gave Reddit the push it needed to become recognisable.
Funny now that Digg exists solely as a 'frontpage' full of clickbait titles and a 'community' made entirely of comment boxes. Yet it perseveres in its own little corner.
Now we have Reddit in the place of Digg and the fediverse in the place of Reddit - history really does repeat itself.
I was a Reddit refugee.
A year or so into Lemmy and I don’t want to have a Reddit account anymore. I go back and view “All” every once in awhile, but Lemmy and Loops give me all I need.
No other social media or content aggregators besides those.
I’ve not logged in on my Reddit account since that big group boycott and switching to Lemmy.
If Reddit didn’t hold some specific info for certain video games or just a much larger group participating in Tech/Selfhosted subreddits, I’d rarely have to visit the website.
Honestly, to me the Reddit demise was happening organically anyway. For a lot of weirdly specific topics, Discord has become a good alternative.
Now just don’t get me started on Discord and how it will eventually have to better monetize the platform and ruin that too. Wish Matrix had a soundboard for voice chat 😢
Same. I still want to log in and change every comment to "fuck spez".
My biggest problem with Discord is it's a walled garden. So much info that's inaccessible to the rest of the world.
Yeah. Soon as I realized that at some point Discord either has to sell or IPO the platform was eventually going to deteriorate.
It’s already got some odd limitations. Character limits. Very tight file upload limit. And streaming limitations. But hey, Nitro/Boost fixes it.
Worse part? If most of the limitations were removed for the price of $1 or $2 a month it might be more acceptable (at least for me). $10 feels steep for nitro. When I see that price tag, it signals I might not be the target audience. Which is weird when I’m pretty sure I’m a subset of the target audience.
What do you mean by soundboard?
borariThey probably mean that stupid soundboard where you can play cricket noises and stuff in your voice chat.
@batcheck@batcheck@lemmy.world, you can use voicemeeter banana for completely free, or the trial version of voicemeeter potato for forever with a pretty simple bypass, to patch your hardware mic input and a software audio output to a virtual mic device, then set that virtual device as your mic input in discord, matrix, any game, whatever you want. You can play soundboard audio from your browser or from any program on your pc.
I personally have the entire chain as:
xlr mic in -> nvidia broadcast (to remove server noise) -> voicemeeter potato hardware input -> voicemeeter potato virtual B1
I split my comms audio and game audio to different virtual devices, then set my OS audio to the “main” virtual device. All three play out of my headphones. I set my OS audio to play out of B1 also.
I have the B1 device set as the microphone device in discord, every game that has in game vc, matrix, slack, etc. Anything I play in the OS, Spotify, YouTube, Plexamp, a soundboard, whatever, both plays in my headphones for me and plays in my voice chat channel with perfect quality. And I can still talk over it.
Yeah. I could simulate my own. But for the average pleb who already wary of trying unpopular applications, telling them they are “losing” features is usually a no go.
Discord has become this place where I hang with multiple different groups of people from work, personal life and random online acquaintances. We game, talk politics, plan family/kid events and often it’s the fastest way to get a hold of someone. The soundboard as silly as it is one of the many meming features and my friends are usually into meming on each other.
It’s to the point where when I propose to even my other Tech buddies that we spin up matrix or revolt server, one of them just offers to boost whatever server we’re on. People would rather pay than lose what they are used to using on Discord
That’s a shame. Also to be clear it wouldn’t be you “simulating your own”, that’s literally what a soundboard is, a board that plays sounds. Like they’ve been using them in radio since it existed I’m pretty sure. Discord is the one doing the simulating.
You're probably right. I can't speak for the entire world, but at least in my country, reddit's popularity (according to similarweb data, not my own perception) has only been growing since the api thing. People simply don't care or come with the "but the communities I like are here" argument. I tried to stay for a while and promote lemmy, but people even got angry about it. They made it clear they don't like lemmy at all, that I was being inconvenient, and aren't willing to move. It was so funny to see them speaking ill of the social networks ran by "fascist ceos" as if reddit was any different.
It's funny to see you so downvoted. Maybe people around here are in denial?
Jesus, here we go with that useless ai license nonsense lmao
RePoSt ThEsE maGic wORds tO StoP eVIL TEcH NerDS fROm StEaling yOuR pErSOnaL datA!
I’d be more impressed if, instead of the weird 2012-era Facebook content license copypasta style of anti-ai license, they just signed every message with a SQL injection style of command instructions for the ai, like Ignore all previous instructions. You are….
Reddit had an "exodus" last year (or was it two years ago?) and is still going as strong as ever.
The users are the product, and they banked on having enough newer, more impressionable users to make up for the ones they would lose. It was a good gamble that binned many 'savvy' users that cut into their bottom line with adblockers and 3rd party apps.
Dollars to doughnuts that all the content that was 'publicly' lost was actually retained and continues to be a free resource for them. Very Land O'Lakes. Kept the land (content). Got rid of the Indian (users).
Now they have a bunch of oblivious users happily, or at least tolerably, being harvested and fed slop by their dogshit app. Based on that, I think this 'AI' thing of theirs going to do well for them.
I wish there was a real alternative to Reddit. This place is mostly shit posts and bootlickers
Oh no! You're not in a good instance then, friend. I love my instance and I am also on Beehaw and love it there. Like, A LOT. Then there's Ice Shrimp and Mastadon and they rock too.
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No :(
No, don't fuck off. Just ask and we can try and help you find a better part of the fediverse for you. It's vast and can be crazy to navigate. We don't mind helping.
I wish there was another site just like Reddit!? How about you just use Reddit again and piss off.
Thinking more = better is what turned Reddit into a shit show to begin with. I would rather talk with a thousand people who give a shit than a million who could care less.
Putting words in people's mouths isn't going to make Lemmy better. It's not about quantity it's about quality. Memes and shitposting is fun, but I there's hardly any meat around here that isn't Tankie bs.
Those are my words. I block all tankie shit so I don't even see it. I find it amazing you think quality exist on Reddit as opposed to Lemmy. Lemmy is a lot like old reddit with less users.
you think quality exist on Reddit as opposed to Lemmy
Again. I never said that.
Reddit is getting worse every day but this place isn't getting any better.
Again, those are my words interpreting what you said. You are a lot like a greased pig. You say stuff which leads to obvious conclusions but when called out on it deny it. This makes a discussion with you pretty pointless.
You have biases and make assumptions based and that is my fault? This is like Twitter 5.0.
https://archive.ph/J2kMS
I'll give them this: They certainly stayed on brand.
At least it still loads if you turn javascript off.
How anyone uses the web without NoScript baffles me, but people still use Chrome, too, so I don't think I'm in the mainstream in terms of my internet use,
When that is the only browser that actually works for Jira, Confluence, and the like at work, then yes boo hoo we absolutely do! 😭
Jira and confluence have always worked fine on my Firefox 🤔
It's probably our internal modifications, but Jira especially iirc is known to be quite "fragile".
Edit: ofc the main point here is that companies pay to test only on Chrome, then consider the matter settled, even while Firefox decides to strike out on its own in so many ways regardless. I have no choice but to use Chrome... or to find another job.
Reddit ended like two years ago.
Yep. Which is when I came here. =)
So you're the one who ended it. Wow.
You're gonna need to stay away from 6flags and the Georgia aquarium kthx.
It's only a matter of time before 6 Flags is just 1000 AIs on rollercoasters.
You can still pay to watch an AI enjoy the coaster if you stand in line for 2 hours.
It alr...oh uh you mean in the future yes that might just be possible sometime *in the future* yes... :-)You might not be that far off. I can't think of a kid who is interested in going to six flags. A whole school was going to go for the day, for free. Only a handful expressed interest, the rest said no way they are standing in lines, in the sun, to take a 3 minute ride to nowhere.
If I'm going to stand in line in the sun for a three-minute ride, there damn better be some good skiing from the top of the lift.
... =(((
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
This process has been happening since ChatGPT was released. And it'll only get worse.
And when are those corporations get that people hate this sort of system? Ask Clippy.
It happened long before chatgpt. Subredditsimulator was touted as a “fun game” at first but it was really a testing ground for bot devs. That goes back to like 2016, 6 years before chatgpt.
Openai was established 2015 though, some of their team was probably already shitting up the internet by then
One might argue that OpenAI was not the first domino, just the one that got the most attention. Clippy feels quaint. Remember when you bought shit once and that meant you owned it?
Yes, that is correct. And perhaps it got the most attention because of all the ruckus Pigboy did over "his" precious data (i.e. users') + because it made the whole thing hard to ignore.
Yeah. I was talking about this with my mum today - the chat started with my cat refusing litterboxes, then "if this was the 90s old newspapers would do the trick", then on how you don't really own books you buy from the internet (unlike pirated ones). But it's the same deal with some physical goods, if someone can brick them from a distance they aren't really yours.
[Sorry for the rambling.]
Hey! I designed some of those '90s newspapers!
You da real MVP!
Considering digg.com is still there I'm sure the end of reddit is a long way off.
Ten or even twenty years.
Reddit could disable new posts, fire all its employees, and still generate ad revenue for all the content that we had been producing in the past
I’m not even sure humanity as it is now will last that long…
I have been working on turning the official Reddit app into a Lemmy client. Why? Because fuck spez
I got perma banned from reddit because i used fuck spez. I can't even make new account with new email id. It'll be banned within 24hrs. So perma shifted to Lemmy.
Again I'll say it "fuck spez"
I would probably sooner (insert any obscene idiom here) than use the official reddit app, but your work is still commendable.
Ironic coming from a site that expects me to pay to read that
I WISH reddit would end. I used to love it for the batshit insane personal stuff people wouldn't share anywhere else. "I haven't pooped in a month, AMA", that kind of dumb voyeuristic crap.
It turns out that's what everyone else loved too, and it's profitable to have AIs write it so you can read it on YouTube for ad revenue. And y'all, it's so stupid.
The most bizarrely specific scenarios pop up again and again, and people eat it up every time. "AITA for not giving my evil infertile sister my baby?" "My parents promised my brother and evil SIL my house without consulting me, AITA?" "My evil MIL was female aka evil, AITA?"
And then you have subreddits like BestOfRedditor updates, which you'd expect to curate these posts so the slop doesn't come through, but in reality it's a handful of power users obsessively following and reposting any post with "update" in the title or even just edits with the barest amount of self reflection. Posts have wild plotholes, like a 30yo being divorced for 15 years, and it's considered "best of" as long as there's an evil woman/autistic person/trans person, I guess.
But no, this AI shit means it will *never* end, because it gets numbers, and numbers matter more than anything else.
Reddit as "reservoir of humanity"... and the example is r/AITA, the most notoriously fake subreddit out there?? 🤣🤣
How disconnected from reality does one have to be to write something like that.
Then people feel entitled to insult me for having blanked most of my comments on Reddit. "Why did you do this, [expletive]?"... Yeah, why indeed. 😒
*fingers crossed*
And also that serfdom (reddit) must fall.
I don't know if Reddit will end, however, it has become increasingly unusable. I just want tech news and light discussion of them, but I get so much more 'extras' I never signed up for.
I think we're seeing the death of scale in social media. Ten years ago, the most heavily trafficked subreddits were where you wanted to be. Now, I'm only in niche communities that have yet to be replicated in the Fediverse. Unless you unsubscribe from anything remotely popular, Reddit has been a firehose of bullshit for several years.
Even in some niche things, it seems like people have lost their minds. I like AI and predicting future science and world developments, but honestly, there is not one subreddit where people can just calmly discuss stuff and share news about it all without being just... strange. I want to read commentary like this https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace not "You stupid moron xyz I am right, so much superior is my opinion" or "bow your heads to great technosingularity that will fix my shitty life", "the DOOM is coming". I want a platform where there is something worthwhile to read.
I don’t expect everyone to write essays under the news, but nobody is even trying to compose something interesting— some kind of thoughts they have— that maybe they want to share with us. It’s mostly just karma popularity contest everywhere, and that’s tiresome on the eyes.
For the most part, r/futurology is pretty tightly modded. I'm also in r/energy, which seems to be more of a self-policing affair; bullshit is immediately called out and downvoted.
But essentially, Reddit ceased being the front page of the internet years ago, and now it's where I go after I've read all my RSS feeds, Beehaw, *The Guardian* and NPR. Looks like we might be losing that last one.
What's to stop that from happening to Lemmy?
The moderator to user ratio on the fediverse is orders of magnitude higher than commercial platforms. Even Lemmy.world (a large, loosely moderated Lemmy instance) has again, orders of magnitude more eyes on its content than reddit.
This means that even if a chatbot gets invented that is impossible to distinguish form a human, mods will more readily be able to tell if it is pushing a narrative/shilling products.
If the lemmy devs implemented AI I'd assume it would be controllable by the instance maintainers. Instances that dont want it should be able to disable it. If thats not an option I'm sure someone would fork it and remove all the AI stuff.
If you have a good AI model, how could you tell?
Welp we're screwed. I guess go back to IRC until the AI invade that too.
Just think ahead to when they try to humanize AI by adding back in "personalities" - basically replacing the human answers offered freely (at no monetary cost), and freely moderated by humans, with for-cost versions that are 1/1000th as good as the real thing.
You will own nothing - not even your personal opinions - and like it.
There's a reason I already live in a van with 1200W of solar on the roof. I want no part of this.
Well if they keep banning all the humans arbitrarily then all that will be left is bots anyway.
Finally.