Why is this subreddit now just askreddit for movies?
Some time in the last few months, r/movies has been entirely consumed by askreddit-style questions like “What’s your favorite hidden gem??” or “What actor fell off the map??”
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What is now causing all these unique, seemingly-non-bot posters to suddenly start flooding this particular subreddit with their discussion posts, instead of going to askreddit? Did the whole reddit protest shit change the moderation rules? Has the subreddit been infiltrated by a secret Buzzfeed content farming cabal? I unsubscribed from r/askreddit because I got sick of this shit, but now it’s back on r/movies!
What is going on??
I think the comments are most interesting though
Because the audience for reddit has dwindled since July. Reddits offial site and app push controversial posts over just well yovkted ones. Most controversial posts asks inane questions. Then there’s bots reposting those questions for karma and then websites juicing social media for content to get crammed down your throat via SEO.
They should make a second internet just for people
This all started with the boycott.
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I’d assumed things would go back to “normal” after the boycott, but it looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?) Maybe reddit will regret removing the 3rd party apps, after all? Maybe we’ll just accept a future where niche subs become little more than BuzzFeed polls, but we get paid if our poll does well, so users won’t care?
It’s because Reddit is trying to drive engagement. I don’t know if you noticed, but since the purge of third-party apps, the comment sections have been kind of meager, and things don’t get as many upvotes as they used to. Heck, half the comments act like bots anyway. It seems like reddit has been distilled down to those most addicted to it and has taken a hard lean into all the most extreme views.
When Reddit killed third party apps, the quality fell off all over the place. It took me about a month to realize the timing and why r/all had so much AITA rage bait stories and celebrity gossip and stuff now. I think a lot of the quality posters and people who liked more high brow discussions just left Reddit.
This makes me sad. Not just because of what happened with reddit, but because I’m still missing that high-brow discussion. Most of my reddit comments were replies to other people, rather than top-level comments, and I spent more time reading comment sections than I did looking at the content they were discussing.
I like it here, but I don’t feel like I come across the depth of content I did on reddit. I don’t mind the lower quantity - that’s expected on a small platform - but I’m definitely not enjoying the lower quality. Most of the activity seems to be around memes and American politics, neither of which particularly interest me, and most of the comments across most posts feel fairly unsubstantial. It’s so much rarer for me to find something I want to reply to on here than it was on reddit.
I don’t mind the lower quantity - that’s expected on a small platform - but I’m definitely not enjoying the lower quality.
I think the issue here is that there’s a sweet spot where quantity and quality are in equilibrium. You NEED a certain quantity before you have a high chance of finding insightful comments on a given topic – to simplify things, if there’s a 1% chance a given comment is going to be from an expert with great insight, you have a ~9.6% chance of finding that on a post with 10 comments and a ~63% chance of finding that on a post with 100 comments. The threadiverse just hasn’t hit that threshold yet.
Of course, there’s a tipping point which reddit is long past, where higher and higher quantities start to drown out the insightful posts with memes and quips, or downvote and mock them with a confidently wrong counter-opinion the mob wants to hear more.
I hope the barriers to entry with decentralized services that the masses find “confusing” are such that we eventually manage to reach equilibirum and not tip too terribly far past it.
Oh I agree completely (and thought about going off on a tangent about “critical mass” myself but decided against it). It’s a rough path towards reaching that point, though, if we can’t have enough discussions to draw those kinds of people in and keep them around in the first place. I agree, also, about the “signal-to-noise ratio” on reddit being too low in general nowadays - especially post-third-party apps controversy - although I think that’s preferable to there simply not being enough quality content in the first place; good moderation (not that reddit has much of that nowadays…) can deal with the noise, whereas it can’t make up for lack of substantial comments.
I’m not sure what the best way to address the barriers to entry to the fediverse might be, but I’ve thought that the various apps either hosting their own instances or partnering with other instances to funnel users towards them and streamline the signup process would probably be a good first step. I think having some barrier to entry is a good thing, though - so we don’t tip too far past that equilibrium.
I’d like to see more outreach initiatives in posting Lemmy content to Reddit. Nobody not specifically looking for Lemmy is going to even be aware that it exists. Think about how many times the same posts hits #1 on /r/all. The API protest was massive and I would still guess that less than one percent of Redditors have even considered alternatives like kbin/lemmy exist.
I’m personally not worried about growing too much because instances can only get so big and still afford to be online. There’s no incentive to grow an instance beyond sustainability.
I thought I might leave Reddit entirely, but then I realized this as well. So I have taken to posting some things exclusively here, some very few things also there, and when I do post there I post here first then just share the link.
On the other hand, keeping in mind that my “here” is Kbin not Lemmy, I’ve more or less ceased most of my encouragement to try to get people to join b/c of all the bugs that have been present - some of which seem fixed now but overall the set of features present in Kbin is very much behind Lemmy, which is itself enormously behind Reddit still. It makes sense: people were “hopeful” about Kbin/Lemmy, but to actually realize that hope has been slow going. And that too makes sense: Ernst has had family issues that MUST take priority, although it has greatly slowed down integrations of fixes that others have offered into the main code, for a time. And too there is the fact that Kbin, like many Lemmy instances, has been under DDOS attack. These things take time to develop even under the most ideal circumstances, and all the more so in the face of such challenges. Overall, Kbin is still alpha version software at this point.
And even Lemmy is still just a beta version. e.g. just to name one example: you still cannot migrate from one instance to another across the Fediverse, so whatever instance you choose to join is basically a permanent decision - like if you ask all your friends to come with you from Reddit and then jump ship yet again, you risk alienating them by leaving them behind as you hop around looking for the greenest grass. Joining instances here is nothing at all like casually joining subs on Reddit - they will need to learn all about that, and what it means, and how to curate their experiences here, etc.
In comparison, for now at least old-reddit or even new-reddit on a mobile browser with ad-blocking meets many people’s needs, especially with “everyone” more or less remaining behind on Reddit, and it is a tough sell to try to tell them to give all that up for an objectively worse UI/UX experience (the cost-to-benefit tradeoff is worthwhile to us, but is it to them?). At this point, those with the “early adopter” mindset are already here, and more importantly the content creators have already made their choices too. (Though if Reddit kills off old-reddit, that could change things in a BIG way)
I am not saying that there would be no value in such outreach initiatives, just that they have already happened and yet here we are. At this point it may be worth looking into the reasons why people who already know about Lemmy/Kbin have not chosen to come here. And on some level we just need to be okay with the fact that we are likely going to be small for a long time, especially as the code continues to be developed to help it catch up.
Unless Threads causes things to change much more quickly… which it very well could.
(edit: added UI/UX)
Many of us are still piecing together where our new homes will be on Lemmy. Several of the popular subreddits were re-created here but the content is largely bots cross posting reddit content that sucks. It’s taking longer than I expected to find content I enjoy interacting with too, but I suspect that’s a problem that can only be solved by continuing to interact with those posts as you find them.
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Agreed, I had largely the same usage behavior as you. Blocking dozens of meme communities managed to filter out most of the junk but substantive topics and discussions are still rare. While things seem to be decelerating lately, I’ll be sticking around in the hope that over time the sort of thing we’re looking for grows.
Same here. I miss having actual discussions in comment threads once in a while.
I agree with much of this. Though, I’ve been here for a couple months now (only just made an account) and I’ve noticed as the posts have become a bit more diverse. The commie stuff is a little wack/comical but eh - I like my commies out in the open and proud of who they are.
While I don’t think Reddit is going to collapse anytime soon or anything, any moderators that chose to stay after seeing how little Reddit cares about them, are not going to be the sorts of people with a bold vision on what they want to see in a community. What remains of the culture is just going to get more and more generic as evidenced here.
It’s not going to collapse its just going to turn into Facebook.
Right wing memes and every post is gonna be the “did you know there aren’t any words in the English language with two o’s next to each” level posts where dozens of people leave the same comment to prove how clever and unique they are.
Basically it’ll be full of people with nothing better to do because everybody else went to a site that wasn’t a charicturature of a robber barron wringing pennies out of people.
My question is this: Does Spez know? And how? Do they have analytics tracking the same decline we are aware of via anecdotal evidence but they are looking at in in a graph that resembles the Hindenburg’s last landing?
looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?)
Nah we’re doing the same shit just on Lemmy now
Are they not allowed to mention lemmy or do they not know?
If people don’t know, how can they be reached?
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There’s more normal people on Lemmy than you think. I posted the other day that this place really needs to try to be less of an echo chamber if we want to grow it at all.
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You are not wrong! I guess that we just have to accept that Social Media is as perverse as it is. Never in the history of my life I thought, oh hey you know what? I want to know all of the political views of all of my friends and associates. I think that actual pornography is less terrible for you than social media in most forms.
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I’m going to keep repeating that until it’s popular. I think we need to start to view social media like it’s a porn addiction
It never was about the quantity of users leaving reddit, but the quality. Those that didn’t care about the changes were not those who were posting the most. They weren’t the moderators, the power users, people making original shit. Those all cared about the site and about the changes.
And they all left.
Where did they go? They sure as hell aren’t here.
I definitely noticed in the immediate aftermath of the Great Enshittening, how the quality of the discourse on subs fell through the floor. The people who left seemed to be the ones that had some level of empathy, leaving shithouses behind to snipe and gripe everywhere.
Empathy would make sense, given the tendency of empathic people willing to actually protest instead of being indifferent
Reddit is a website rotting from the inside out. Can’t wait to see how much of a disaster that IPO is going to be.
I’ll be very surprised if they even make it to an IPO before downsizing and becoming irrelevant. I don’t think Reddit as a company has ever really turned a profit and their major private shareholders have been actively cutting their valuation multiple times. Couple with the spiking interest rates and it’s just about the worst possible time to be IPO’ing.
A great reminder that !moviesandtv ( @moviesandtv ) community exists!
