i started visiting reddit back around 2009 when places like digg and fark kept linking over there. i liked it because it had a design that the average person wouldn’t like - the old design. they sorted comments in a new way that i liked. it’s been a slow boil, but look at the reddit monstrosity now. the redesign is puke-inducing, and there really isn’t any point in the vote sorting any more because people don’t upvote for visibility any more insomuch as just use it as like/dislike. there isn’t even any benefit in trying to point that out any more either, because today’s reddit users just don’t understand that approach to votes - and it really, really sucks.
yo - upvote it if you think it’s worth it for other people to see it, whether you agree with it or not. it might spark a debate. it might sway opinion. but either way, voting for visibility is the best thing to do on a SMALL forum like this. Appreciate lemmy while it’s still small!!!
AND fwiw - your upvotes should probably not be monitored. that would just be a huge dick move (sorry, it took me a sec).
Im not going to upvote something if I don’t agree with it. I understand the power of voting, it increases or decreases visibility. But I am not going to willingly increase the visibility of something I don’t agree with.
Imagine if someone comments with what you see as a stupid take, but phrases it as a legitimate question indicating a willingness and even eagerness to learn: I often upvote such, bc that’s an attitude that I’d like to see more of. The alternative for them would be to keep silent and remain in their ignorance?
Conversely, someone that says “^This” - I may likewise agree with whatever they responded to, but that’s what upvotes on the latter content is for, and there’s no need to also upvote the former along with that.
Considering e.g. a thoughtful, insightful, well-researched post with a conclusion we completely disagree with and feel is likely to lead to negative outcomes - but is still a perspective that should be understood if we want to be well rounded:
Binary up/downvotes have a really hard time of capturing what we want to see reflected as our assessment.
As someone from the U.S., it seems like that concept has practically disappeared from the country. The nuances of civil debate, including the acknowledgement of differing opinions as valid, don’t exist in most of our popular media (both traditional and social.) We’ve been conditioned to react to things immediately and intensely using our emotions instead. There has been a slide toward this state for decades, but it’s come to the point where a lot of people genuinely struggle with separating “thing they personally disagree with/don’t like” from “thing that shouldn’t be said/heard/shared.”
(Not saying that’s the case with OP, just that it’s definitely a thing that’s been going on.)
that’s exactly the ideal! i know it feels weird these days to upvote something you don’t like, but it isn’t about what you like. it’s about what you’re showing approval for to the next person.
I feel like the admins over there really take for granted how much people care about Reddit. The more they degrade the sense of community, the more it continues to crumble until users feel that there’s no point in going back.
With how many posts are just pure AI generated rage bait, it’s becoming more clear by the day how little worth there is left on Reddit.
It likely looks to them as if the accounts that remain to be moderated are humans, the same as it was in the past, even though it’s no longer that way now.
Did they change the way things are formatted? Such as the [removed] comments now just appearing as [deleted]? Deleted would imply the users removed their own content while removed would imply the mods or admins removed it, at least that’s how things have always been. However, I have only been seeing a sea of [deleted] lately.
After the API kerfuffle, a lot of users who left also used tools to completely erase their content from the site, which explains the sea of [deleted] posts and users. You may also see comments and text body posts that are full of incoherent gibberish because one of the tools didn’t delete the content in the normal way, it simply edited the content to be a bunch of random gibberish.
it simply edited the content to be a bunch of random gibberish.
I used a tool that did this. I also used it on purpose because I figured it would make the content more difficult to farm. Lots of software doesn’t actually delete anything when you delete it, but it’s a lot more work to put versioning in and then you’d have to go search the version history to find a version that wasn’t mangled to farm it…so that’ll all theoretically make it more difficult for them to find what I originally wrote.
i just ended up deleted all my comments on my last 2 accts, so they cant be farmed, unless reddit undeletes them. wonder when reddit is going to pull a FB ressurection, revives your account but controlled by AI bots for right wing disinformation.
They’ve already been caught doing that - well, not for disinformation spreading but for engagement appearance, around the time Reddit was doing its IPO so needed to hike its stats to give to advertisers as quickly as possible. While entire posts, comment for comment, though with different usernames but the identical responses to the identical questions, and then deeper responses to those, and so forth.
So they don’t need the appearance of older accounts - they can manufacturer whatever they need, from scratch already. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they created “10 year old” accounts at will.
I think the USA has taken a deep dive in international standing since January 2025, and Reddit is a USA-flavored USA-centered content publisher in terms of front page community. Things were pretty anti-USA with all the support of Israel in 2024, but now in 2025 with Elon Musk being the center of all USA society attention every minute of every day, sites like Reddit are being turned away from (or people only reading to mock the USA) - where the HiveMind is extremely USA technology consumerism / technology lifestyle worship.
For example, I never witness anyone on Reddit criticize Apple Computers for funding Twitter / X in 2025. It’s tech addiction as the primary religion on Reddit. And I think those outside the USA are sick of that machine lust / machine mind behavior of Elon Musk, Zuck, Amazon, etc.
“Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.”
― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992
Reddit is historically US tech workers. When the userbase was younger they were still some what anti-establishment. They have gotten more institutionalized as the years have gone by. They support big tech. They support the tech bro oligarchs. Their livelihood is tied to the fate of the US oligarchs. They are the sycophants. The yes-men.
Anyone who has been around before the tech oligarch era can attest to how different things are. What we have today isn’t anywhere close to the type of anarchist, anti-establishment type of nerds of the older internet eras. Today those types of people are all but extinct.
As you said, nobody actually talks critically about the tech industry. It’s certainly not in the way people used to. The term “walled garden” has long ago fallen out of the internet lexicon. The tech monopoly took root. The dominant narrative became of those in support of single closed ecosystems.
The tech nerd sycophants took over. There haven’t been competitors so long. There’s only one reddit. Only one twitter. Only one facebook. Only one youtube. And the prevailing mindset of tech is in support of this. Nobody speaks out against it. These companies have written the paychecks and funded the retirement of all those nerds.
For example, I never witness anyone on Reddit criticize Apple Computers for funding Twitter / X in 2025.
By funding you mean resuming advertising on the platform, right? I am not aware that Apple is financing X directly. In the end it is money in Musk‘s pockets, I know, but the distinction is worth pointing out nonetheless.
These are the kinds of helpful comments that made Reddit a great platform to visit, once upon a time. Now, I’m glad that we still get to read this type instead on the Fediverse.:-)
It’s the influence on people’s behavior that’s far more my concern than the faith I have in people expressing self-awareness they have in terms of what they say (what you hear them say). Absolute addicts to technology can often not discuss their extreme addictions. You can witness the behavior all over in public since year 2010.
“One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.”
― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992
The USA population and society has really lost all sense of what life was like before there was a constant notification stream of antics from billionaires. People are absolutely engrossed in the screen game of LOL at Donald Trump and Elon Musk so much they have no sense of life before 2008. There are huge numbers of people in March 2025 behaving as if Donald Trump is a new event and have lost every sense of him having been elected and in office in 2017.
worldnews was a plague, i had to block that sub. i was also reminding people in pics sub how the pict was about gaza and it wash bashing on biden pushing propaganda, and also gaza conflicts in the past had very little effect on elections, i just block and report those people. mostly it was inappropiate for that sub too.
I never understood WorldNews. I said back in November pretty plainly that Trump won and so I fear that America would eventually leave or attack NATO. I said I was afraid that Trump would side with Russia outright. That we would abandon our allies in the Pacific, too. That our inaction would create a gap for China to fill. That the gap might be big enough to embolden China who then might make moves on Taiwan.
And I was downvoted (which is fine) but the comments I got were kind of bewildering. The people who engaged with me were trying to convince me that Trump would never side with Russia and there is no evidence ever of this.
And of course here we are now. And all of these things are happening.
The whole Gaza thing you mention—I understand the outrage—but I wonder how much of it online was manufactured in places like Pics because of the election.
Seeing the conversations here on Lemmy makes me think…there’s something very weird going on on Reddit. I’ve rode out Reddit drama over the past 12 years. This is not the narwhal at midnight website. This is something very dark.
Yes, but note that it was happening here as well. Certain places here were HIGHLY active in the BoTh SiDeS sAmE activity, just prior to the USA election, and similarly influenced other elections world-wide. Learn which places these are, so that you can take full advantage of the Fediverse, which isn’t “a place” so much as a forum software that allows many many places to share their content - but all sides here are NOT equally dedicated to truthiness.
Here is one example:
Judge for yourself what you think might be the intention for making and spreading it… although if we are going by the mantra of the effects that it may have caused possibly being the reason for which it was made, it looks to me to suggest that people in the USA should not be enthusiastic about voting or encouraging others to vote for Kamala Harris.
Edit: to be clear I’m not suggesting that Lemmy is “the same” as Reddit - in some ways we are worse here, being even more authoritian than Reddit was (or rather “is” I guess:-P), but in other ways it’s so, so much better, in that we can pack up and move to another instance and simply carry on, having access to the vast majority of content as before (exceptions include defederations and a DM directed to our old account won’t follow us), which was (oops, “is” again:-) not true for Reddit.
rather suspicious since only bots have those types of accts, i have a hunch reddit is actually accessing those accts or allowing bots to take over the accts. i heard people couldnt log back into thier old accts
No they aren’t. Those users have long since left Reddit lol
Yeah, it’s a playground for bots and misinformation now
i started visiting reddit back around 2009 when places like digg and fark kept linking over there. i liked it because it had a design that the average person wouldn’t like - the old design. they sorted comments in a new way that i liked. it’s been a slow boil, but look at the reddit monstrosity now. the redesign is puke-inducing, and there really isn’t any point in the vote sorting any more because people don’t upvote for visibility any more insomuch as just use it as like/dislike. there isn’t even any benefit in trying to point that out any more either, because today’s reddit users just don’t understand that approach to votes - and it really, really sucks.
Hmmm, perhaps people should start linking threads from here on reddit…
Believe it or not: straight to jail.
Wouldn’t reddit be the jail in this situation?
Heh. Don’t do that from an account that you like or has a lot of karma.
Reddit admins are a bunch of shit eating peckerwoods now.
you can try
I want to upvote this because I like it, but now I’m conflicted because I don’t want to inadvertently abuse the upvote mechanism.
yo - upvote it if you think it’s worth it for other people to see it, whether you agree with it or not. it might spark a debate. it might sway opinion. but either way, voting for visibility is the best thing to do on a SMALL forum like this. Appreciate lemmy while it’s still small!!!
AND fwiw - your upvotes should probably not be monitored. that would just be a huge dick move (sorry, it took me a sec).
Im not going to upvote something if I don’t agree with it. I understand the power of voting, it increases or decreases visibility. But I am not going to willingly increase the visibility of something I don’t agree with.
Imagine if someone comments with what you see as a stupid take, but phrases it as a legitimate question indicating a willingness and even eagerness to learn: I often upvote such, bc that’s an attitude that I’d like to see more of. The alternative for them would be to keep silent and remain in their ignorance?
Conversely, someone that says “^This” - I may likewise agree with whatever they responded to, but that’s what upvotes on the latter content is for, and there’s no need to also upvote the former along with that.
Considering e.g. a thoughtful, insightful, well-researched post with a conclusion we completely disagree with and feel is likely to lead to negative outcomes - but is still a perspective that should be understood if we want to be well rounded:
Binary up/downvotes have a really hard time of capturing what we want to see reflected as our assessment.
Edit: blessed be thy highly-voted child comment
As someone from the U.S., it seems like that concept has practically disappeared from the country. The nuances of civil debate, including the acknowledgement of differing opinions as valid, don’t exist in most of our popular media (both traditional and social.) We’ve been conditioned to react to things immediately and intensely using our emotions instead. There has been a slide toward this state for decades, but it’s come to the point where a lot of people genuinely struggle with separating “thing they personally disagree with/don’t like” from “thing that shouldn’t be said/heard/shared.”
(Not saying that’s the case with OP, just that it’s definitely a thing that’s been going on.)
that’s exactly the ideal! i know it feels weird these days to upvote something you don’t like, but it isn’t about what you like. it’s about what you’re showing approval for to the next person.
I don’t know if you like music like this, but it made me smile so why not share? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW48BueSJzo
Same as any social media site.
Reportedly Reddit was not always that way though, earlier on.
I feel like the admins over there really take for granted how much people care about Reddit. The more they degrade the sense of community, the more it continues to crumble until users feel that there’s no point in going back.
With how many posts are just pure AI generated rage bait, it’s becoming more clear by the day how little worth there is left on Reddit.
It likely looks to them as if the accounts that remain to be moderated are humans, the same as it was in the past, even though it’s no longer that way now.
[deleted] is a common user name there!
Did they change the way things are formatted? Such as the [removed] comments now just appearing as [deleted]? Deleted would imply the users removed their own content while removed would imply the mods or admins removed it, at least that’s how things have always been. However, I have only been seeing a sea of [deleted] lately.
After the API kerfuffle, a lot of users who left also used tools to completely erase their content from the site, which explains the sea of [deleted] posts and users. You may also see comments and text body posts that are full of incoherent gibberish because one of the tools didn’t delete the content in the normal way, it simply edited the content to be a bunch of random gibberish.
I used a tool that did this. I also used it on purpose because I figured it would make the content more difficult to farm. Lots of software doesn’t actually delete anything when you delete it, but it’s a lot more work to put versioning in and then you’d have to go search the version history to find a version that wasn’t mangled to farm it…so that’ll all theoretically make it more difficult for them to find what I originally wrote.
i just ended up deleted all my comments on my last 2 accts, so they cant be farmed, unless reddit undeletes them. wonder when reddit is going to pull a FB ressurection, revives your account but controlled by AI bots for right wing disinformation.
They’ve already been caught doing that - well, not for disinformation spreading but for engagement appearance, around the time Reddit was doing its IPO so needed to hike its stats to give to advertisers as quickly as possible. While entire posts, comment for comment, though with different usernames but the identical responses to the identical questions, and then deeper responses to those, and so forth.
So they don’t need the appearance of older accounts - they can manufacturer whatever they need, from scratch already. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they created “10 year old” accounts at will.
I don’t think they care, they already got their payday by going public.
they get thier money from google and openai.
I think the USA has taken a deep dive in international standing since January 2025, and Reddit is a USA-flavored USA-centered content publisher in terms of front page community. Things were pretty anti-USA with all the support of Israel in 2024, but now in 2025 with Elon Musk being the center of all USA society attention every minute of every day, sites like Reddit are being turned away from (or people only reading to mock the USA) - where the HiveMind is extremely USA technology consumerism / technology lifestyle worship.
For example, I never witness anyone on Reddit criticize Apple Computers for funding Twitter / X in 2025. It’s tech addiction as the primary religion on Reddit. And I think those outside the USA are sick of that machine lust / machine mind behavior of Elon Musk, Zuck, Amazon, etc.
“Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992
Reddit is historically US tech workers. When the userbase was younger they were still some what anti-establishment. They have gotten more institutionalized as the years have gone by. They support big tech. They support the tech bro oligarchs. Their livelihood is tied to the fate of the US oligarchs. They are the sycophants. The yes-men.
Anyone who has been around before the tech oligarch era can attest to how different things are. What we have today isn’t anywhere close to the type of anarchist, anti-establishment type of nerds of the older internet eras. Today those types of people are all but extinct.
As you said, nobody actually talks critically about the tech industry. It’s certainly not in the way people used to. The term “walled garden” has long ago fallen out of the internet lexicon. The tech monopoly took root. The dominant narrative became of those in support of single closed ecosystems.
The tech nerd sycophants took over. There haven’t been competitors so long. There’s only one reddit. Only one twitter. Only one facebook. Only one youtube. And the prevailing mindset of tech is in support of this. Nobody speaks out against it. These companies have written the paychecks and funded the retirement of all those nerds.
We’re not extinct, just older.
Sad thing is that the number of people your age or older only goes down.
Not anymore, on the Fediverse, and I’m here for it.:-)
By funding you mean resuming advertising on the platform, right? I am not aware that Apple is financing X directly. In the end it is money in Musk‘s pockets, I know, but the distinction is worth pointing out nonetheless.
These are the kinds of helpful comments that made Reddit a great platform to visit, once upon a time. Now, I’m glad that we still get to read this type instead on the Fediverse.:-)
yes.
I rarely hear about apple at all. And most of the time it’s people bitching about them make the space bar a suppository
It’s the influence on people’s behavior that’s far more my concern than the faith I have in people expressing self-awareness they have in terms of what they say (what you hear them say). Absolute addicts to technology can often not discuss their extreme addictions. You can witness the behavior all over in public since year 2010.
“One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992
The USA population and society has really lost all sense of what life was like before there was a constant notification stream of antics from billionaires. People are absolutely engrossed in the screen game of LOL at Donald Trump and Elon Musk so much they have no sense of life before 2008. There are huge numbers of people in March 2025 behaving as if Donald Trump is a new event and have lost every sense of him having been elected and in office in 2017.
13 years there and millions in karma. I left when they chose to become Zionists and hate-mongers
worldnews was a plague, i had to block that sub. i was also reminding people in pics sub how the pict was about gaza and it wash bashing on biden pushing propaganda, and also gaza conflicts in the past had very little effect on elections, i just block and report those people. mostly it was inappropiate for that sub too.
I never understood WorldNews. I said back in November pretty plainly that Trump won and so I fear that America would eventually leave or attack NATO. I said I was afraid that Trump would side with Russia outright. That we would abandon our allies in the Pacific, too. That our inaction would create a gap for China to fill. That the gap might be big enough to embolden China who then might make moves on Taiwan.
And I was downvoted (which is fine) but the comments I got were kind of bewildering. The people who engaged with me were trying to convince me that Trump would never side with Russia and there is no evidence ever of this.
And of course here we are now. And all of these things are happening.
The whole Gaza thing you mention—I understand the outrage—but I wonder how much of it online was manufactured in places like Pics because of the election.
Seeing the conversations here on Lemmy makes me think…there’s something very weird going on on Reddit. I’ve rode out Reddit drama over the past 12 years. This is not the narwhal at midnight website. This is something very dark.
Yes, but note that it was happening here as well. Certain places here were HIGHLY active in the BoTh SiDeS sAmE activity, just prior to the USA election, and similarly influenced other elections world-wide. Learn which places these are, so that you can take full advantage of the Fediverse, which isn’t “a place” so much as a forum software that allows many many places to share their content - but all sides here are NOT equally dedicated to truthiness.
Here is one example:
Judge for yourself what you think might be the intention for making and spreading it… although if we are going by the mantra of the effects that it may have caused possibly being the reason for which it was made, it looks to me to suggest that people in the USA should not be enthusiastic about voting or encouraging others to vote for Kamala Harris.
Edit: to be clear I’m not suggesting that Lemmy is “the same” as Reddit - in some ways we are worse here, being even more authoritian than Reddit was (or rather “is” I guess:-P), but in other ways it’s so, so much better, in that we can pack up and move to another instance and simply carry on, having access to the vast majority of content as before (exceptions include defederations and a DM directed to our old account won’t follow us), which was (oops, “is” again:-) not true for Reddit.
I still see active accounts over a decade old
rather suspicious since only bots have those types of accts, i have a hunch reddit is actually accessing those accts or allowing bots to take over the accts. i heard people couldnt log back into thier old accts
There are bots too but you can tell a bot. Usually anyway.
They didn’t all leave. It’s not a hive mind. Especially since reddit got popular and the original base got fragmented and whatever.
Reddit bad!
Now where are my upvotes?