Reddit is kil
no
Another loss for the open internet!
While I’m still mad at this a little, because I do find Reddit threads useful to read for opinions (especially old pre-2023 posts), fortunately Steve Huffman and co have been enshittifying the site into an slop feed for morons for 5+ years, so I don’t really care. How? Well, in 2022 they introduced a new algorithmic feed, later making it the default, then in 2023 they removed the old, traditional “subscribed subreddits” feed.
And with that, as soon as Reddit fell into the attention-centric design pattern like its competitors, my use for it stopped existing.
To be fair, Reddit has already been ganked for what it was worth. Just ask any LLM what you need and it will spit out exactly what a Redditor would say. Hm, I wonder if my old posts and comments have ever been used as training data?
Actually wait who cares lmao
- Reddit is like a good 40% bots and that % is only going to ticker up over time. This is what Reddit wants. They benefit from this.
- The platform is dead anyway and not only has the objective quality of posts gone down significantly over time (as those with a molecule of intelligence realised it was about to become a shitfest),
- It’s 70% botted posts, comments and upvotes, mainly from people buying accounts trying to not-so-subtly promote their product, or AI SEO farm, since Gemini ranks Reddit as a whole as a good source.
- They censored the site to death (no source, just look into it, it’s obvious if you used it before, say, 2019).
Also this guy puts into words what I was gonna say pretty well! It’s bots all down the chain. Pretty ironic considering their tagline…
Flogging a dead horse
I don’t really give a fuck anymore, but about 3 years ago, they perma-banned my account, which had 60,000 karma, and was 7 years old. Suspiciously, though, they didn’t remove the content of my posts - only remove the poster ID. So now all my posts attributed me as the unidentifiable”[deleted]“.
Normally I wouldn’t care, because I thought like, absolutely zero people read anything I ever posted on there, so I wasn’t really giving as much as I had taken. However, I was clearly wrong!
Before its deletion, I had one singular comment I posted that got 3 upvotes. In this comment, I offered a Minecraft mod download to people if they added me on Discord, since said mod was effectively impossible to find + download - despite being really cool, at the time.
Through that comment, I got about 80+ friend requests from random people asking me for it! And this is a comment with 3 upvotes, by the way. Now imagine how many people have read my other shitty comments and posts.
I asked them if they could delete the actual comment’s content (instead of just my name) wholly under GDPR and they told me to verify with my ID! I will not be doing that! Fuck you, Reddit!
Footnote
While researching for this blogpost, I found that they’re also killing off RSS thanks to scraping. RSS as in the web feed format developed by the late Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz! This is kind of unrelated - but it’s a bit poetic! I think, at this point, based off his actions, Spez would kill a family member to make his share prices go up,
Here’s another good comment I saw online:
