I’ve been on there for 12 years and it’s been a pretty steady decline since then. It was actually even worse before I joined, like a free range cesspool of edgelords, bigots, and adults wanting to fuck teenagers. There was a period where a lot of the shit was chased off before it started heading towards the corporate direction; that was probably when Reddit was at its best
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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all adults are banned lol, its just a fresh pool of teenagers every year woth just enough karma to start commenting/posting
I was there from day one.
When Spez implemented user registration, I was like the 5th sign up and I ended up mailing him his own source code because he had his server misconfigured to report verbose errors.
All this to say, the site has always sucked. From day one it has sucked. It has never not sucked.
Edit
I feel like Reddit in general is remembered far more fondly than it ever has a right to.
For those that believe Reddit was some bastion of intellectual discourse, it never was! The very first or second conversation I was involved in (remember it didn't even have users or comments at one point) immediately devolved into people calling each other robots and morons.
It just immediately cast my mind back to the BBS days where there was some cool techy people but lots of people that were just... there... And bored... And stupid.
I didn't never really changed from that formula. Reddit grew somewhat in tandem with overall NA society's ability to just get on the Internet. And it was always just a slice of society, never really any special qualifications or commonalities generally speaking. It's very naive and myopic to think that it was a Tech community. It's every dingbat you've ever met in your life and all the cool people as well in a giant heap. Please don't kid yourself.
Politics immediately took over the site. And as most people know, the dialogue surrounding American politics is most dignified by taking place within a monkey house at the zoo.
Politics was immediately quarantined into its own special sub thingy.
Spez being the absolute moron that he was, implemented communities instead of tags which is what the fking site actually needed. It was very obvious he had bananas in his ears at that point, and he did not want to give selective content control to the users. He didn't even want to implement communities, he was that against it.
They refused to show at the outset that giving users the ability to categorize content mattered. They wanted it to be a fire hose of content right from day one.
Later, they did an amazing public relations job of faking community and faking community spirit, while they had secretly embedded social media managers from outside agencies plugging most of the content onto the front page.
I can't remember the first time Reddit lost its virginity or perhaps had its heart broken, maybe first coming of age... when we collectively rooted out that one of the biggest community builders and participants was actually a plant! I might be wrong but somewhere in the back of my mind I remember the username Sahadra(?).
It was a bad sign when they started purging subreddits in '17 of certain questionable topics.
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I know you didn't likely put too much specifically pointed thought into your phrasing of 'feels like a communist regime', but please do realize you are describing a hypercapitalist, shareholder driven, investment seeking and profligate monetization enacting regime, governance structure, moderation style.
Reddit is now the Pepsi Ad with cops and protesters getting their Pepsis and singing kumbaiyah... and then the after credits scene is the cops finish their Pepsis and beat everyone's heads in.
This is enshittification.
This is the relentless and ultimately brutish and stupid drive to extract as much wealth as possible out of anything, in a way that actually destroys the thing, manifest in an online message board.
Lure in the user base, lock down the market demographic, destroy competition as much as you can, and then squeeze every penny out of em when they have no alternatives.
Fuck Spez, RIP Aaron.
EDIT: Oh also, you are a lemm.ee user, your instance is shutting down at thr end of June, you may want to look at setting up another user account on another instance.
Phrasing like that reminds me of all the "this is the commu-social-marxism the libs want" and it's just a picture of current capitalism.
I'm being nice because this person is a refugee, the fact that they are here, describing what they've experienced and witnessed, realizing that it is bad and another place could be better... it means they've got a good head on their shoulders trying to escape the hivemind.
Please don't lose them in the pattern buffer, O'Brien =P
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to this i'd like to add that when i browse there sometimes i keep seeing people saying things like "this is reddit libs are everywhere" "this is reddit even slight conservatism will make people call for a death sentence" or "this is reddit you can't say anything non-progressive" and those are getting many upvotes, whilst anything said that'd paint you as anywhere left of centre will get you downvoted.
it seems like the conservatives have taken over and yet they still feel like they're surrounded
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The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall.
OP,. you're not thinking of communism. You're thinking of authoritarianism and hierarchy. This is what happens to all hierarchies. Go to almost any for-profit corporation, and the same stifling of freedom will be on display. Marxist-Leninist regimes are hierarchical and authoritarian, which is why they act the same as any corpo, but that's not due to "communism"
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Ive been around long enough to know its an inevitable cycle, hopefully federation saves lemmy from the same fate.
That was my next question… is it inevitable? Like the fall of every major power in human history. At some point they break.
Expect some (additonal) really nice privately owned Federated instances to launch after Reddit finally dies. (Embrace - Twitter and Mastodon are far enough along that Bluesky exists, already.)
They will have all the usual features, but also a few surprisingly nice additonal (closed source, added by corporate sponsors) features. It will cost some mild annoyance when visiting from an open source truly free federated instance. (Extend)
Eventually the new features will result in lost compatibility with the rest of the fediverse. Users on the new platform can enjoy the rest of the fediverse, but other fediverse users cannot reach any content contributed by users of the new platform. So everyone needs an account on the new platform, to enjoy it. (Extinguish)
Then the new platform enshitifies. (Enshitify)
This prediction is primarily based on how Google managed "Google Talk" when it joined XMPP. Many feel XMPP did not survive it. I still use XMPP, but many folks I talked to on XMPP do not.
The recipe is: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Enshitify.
I'm not sure about this, but does defederation or blocking work both ways? I.e can an instance stop federating their own content to another instance? I would think so. It seems like corporate instances be pretty effectively boycotted like that.
I'm not sure about this, but does defederation or blocking work both ways?
I think it's by choice in each direction? I'm not sure.
I.e can an instance stop federating their own content to another instance? I would think so.
Yes. And I think that's our best defense against what happened to XMPP. Opinions vary, of course. I guess it'll be up to each instance owner how they handle it.
It seems like corporate instances be pretty effectively boycotted like that.
I hope so. I worry because they say "history usually rhymes".
At the very least, the fediverse was designed with knowledge of lessons learned from XMPP. And I'm certainly, myself, less naive than I was when I fell for Google Talk. Hopefully others are too.
Almost certainly yes, once lemmy gets big enough and people in power actually give a shit about it.
The nature of the internet is something has to be hosted somewhere, no matter how obscure eventually there's a source and assholes can apply pressure on the source / host.
Most people running an instance don't have the money nor will to fight governments and mega corps when they uncorck their bullshit attacks
Exactly. Not communist though, fascist. Communism is something entirely different.
But its also clear that this happened because to thrive in the capitalfascist system, you need to adhere to the rules:
- strong hierarchy
- ideologically homogenous
- strictly controlled ingress
- constant fear of being excluded
- pushing individualism and competition
Its the same everywhere and it is scary.
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it feels like a fascist regime
Fixed. Pete boy wants to get rid of the progressive content he deems offensive, so that he gets better showing with the other white techbros come shareholder day.
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And for some reason, I just want to see it burn.
Technology under capitalism will be used first and foremost for the violent enforcement of capitalism. While extreme censorship is a relatively mild form of "enforcement", it's still a fundamental tool. The hegemonic narrative must be defended at all costs. Just look at the media, politicians, corporations, etc. It's all the same tales.
By 2015 it was already a hollow shell of what it had once been, and by 2020 it was spiritually completely dead. Now it's just shocking how far it's continued to decline, far past what I'd come to think of as rock bottom
I really feel like it peaked in 2012 or 2013. Hot on the heels of the "rally to restore the sanity" (which proved the true power of Reddit, but was co-opted and defanged)
Lots of big AMAs but they could be very chaotic.
Allowed content wasn't quite as wild as two years previous but it was still possible to find some real taboo/NSFL/disturbing/subversive communities of all sorts.
The userbase was large but still most of your friends would make fun of you for going there, and your parents didn't even know it existed.
The admin team was still pretty small and they even would make a point to hire users who understood the culture and spirit of the site.
I'd agree that it peaked a long time ago. I joined in 2008 or so because my teenage sons had joined. We didn't know each other's IDs, I wanted to know what they were interested in and found a couple communities I liked for myself. Every year it got less inclusive and the toxicity that was contained to some communities started to spill over. I had already left when the corporatization started in earnest.
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I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps
Most of those are not real users and never have been.
By reddits own admission 50% we're all bots. I think it was reported in the tech sub like years back. Reddit wants to be a Facebook clone.
This post feels like something I wanted to write. I agree 100% I want to see that shithole burn