🤔Am I overdoing it with all the reddit-related posts? archive.is/SFcRn
I feel bad for users over there, at least the long time users who know what it was. I’ll admit, when I moved over here I felt genuine remorse, guilt, and anger. I realized I was literally going through mourning, which sounds silly for a website, but those were communities I joined over a decade ago that I was walking away from.
People have asked me why I started a Taylor Swift community over here, and it’s really because of those nice, friendly communities over on Reddit that I had to walk away from. I know how hard it was to leave those ones, so maybe I can run a couple of the ones that I enjoyed there to help the next wave of folks so they know there are some of us here already who have gone through it.
Emotional, probably, but honestly just felt betrayed and angry with how they treated us long time users, the ones who were there at the very beginning. They chose some hussy ill dressed homewrecker IPO over us long term stable and loving users.
Ignacio@beehaw.org 1 month ago
I just hope that the IPO backfires, or that users suddenly realise how shitty that webpage is and they leave.
Kichae@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
The lessons from Twitter are clear: most people will not leave bad social media without a better replacement. They’re attached to their history, and attached to their routine. It getting worse does not change that.
Mastodon didn’t scratch the Twitter users’ itches, and it doesn’t look like Lemmy will scratch Reddit users’. These aren[t the people that populated the Internet 20 years ago.
They’re the people who never would have touched it, because it was too technical, had too high a barrier of entry, and saw it as niche.
It’s time to stop focusing on whether Reddit succeeds or fails. They’re not going to fail. Instead, it’s time to make an internet of niches again, for ourselves, without the Twitter and Reddit users.
thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 1 month ago
Yep. My dad uses Facebook, Reddit and Youtube now. I remember having conversations with him where he was confused about why anyone would ever want to use Facebook and what the point of Youtube is… it just wastes time. When I first exposed him to AMAs I thought he would be interested in, in like 2012, he was like “It’s really cool that you can talk to this person, but there’s so much noise and joking around… how are you supposed to follow it all?”
Now he posts on reddit for help with home improvement projects and watches youtube channels about classic cars and how to fix your garage door opener and talks about stuff he saw his other Boomer friends post on Facebook. It’s a weird roll reversal, because now I’m like “I’ve left every single one of those enshittified platforms.” But it took him years to get on them. It would take him even longer to get off.
thejml@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I think it’s important to say that while history and routine are part of it, social networks are only as useful as they are populated. If your friends and people you follow are all on Twitter, you’re not going to jump to Mastodon. If the content creators start switching, people will likely follow… but they won’t switch unless their followers switch.
I switched to Mastodon when Twitter went to X, and cold Turkey dropped to Lemmy from Reddit when the API scandal hit and the only thing I miss is most of the reason I was in those platforms in the first place, the content creators.
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
You don’t need a better replacement. People just need something that keeps them in the app longer, these sort of “dark patterns” that are often mentioned. The app can be total shit, as long as it manages to engage users. That’s why something like Lemmy or Mastodon is not succeeding with the general population because they explicitly have been made not to utilise such things.
Gaywallet@beehaw.org 1 month ago
Yup, if anyone wants to “replace” these platforms, they need to make them very approachable to tech naive individuals. Most people have close to no technical skills, and nearly everyone on federated software seems to fail to recognize this.
Ultimately I am in agreement that we shouldn’t be trying to drop a replacement to these platforms directly in. We should be offering an alternative, something fundamentally different, because those platforms have failed to fulfill our desires and needs from social media on the internet.
TheBierFrau@mstdn.ca 1 month ago
@Kichae @Ignacio it won't fail - yet. Reddit is like Facebook 10 years ago. The people on it are mostly older and have built a community on it and don't want to leave that. TikTok is where the new growth is. Younger crowds see the mess that is Reddit and Twitter and don't even sign up.