The man speaking in this clip is Nilay Patel. Hes the Editor in Chief at The Verge.
He also used to be a lawyer before moving to journalism full time. So he knows Bullshit when he sees it.
I used to think that The Verge were just a bunch of Apple zealots who couldn't even do a pc build video properly. They've come along way since then. Reddit would be absolutely insane to try and take on something like The Verge.
Side note , Nilay also has a podcast called Decoder where he interviews the heads of companies to get an idea of how they run and what their goals are. Its a pretty good show and I reccomend it. The one where Nilay takes on the head of Substack was hilarious
I haven't been back to Reddit since the first day of protests.
Not gonna lie though, I miss it. The niche stuff I went to Reddit for in the first place came here during the drama, but despite an initial push to get some replacement communities going here, they've gone almost completely inactive now.
I didn't visit reddit on purpose for two full months. I still don't have the app installed.
I have to admit though I am visiting for game threads now that the NFL has started up. Sports is non-existent on Lemmy. I'm participating in the communities for my teams, but there's like half a dozen of us in each one. It just isn't the same thing and I realized that dicking around in comment sections is a big part of how I enjoy sports these days.
They're still not getting content from me, I'm not going to use their app. But it's hard to keep completely away when there is simply nothing even closer on lemmy or anywhere else.
Yeah I love Lemmy but I don’t see it taking off. The separation of federation instances is confusing for new users. There are plenty of communities but they all feel isolated due to the same community existing on multiple instances. There’s a reason why the biggest communities are all Linux/Programming related.
I feel like development of Lemmy has slowed the past few weeks too. I've been following plenty of issues on GitHub both on the front-end and back-end, and there just hasn't been any progress on them. It's a shame because Lemmy has so much potential, but I'm with you I just don't think it will take off. With that said, obviously I will keep using it, and I'm not going back to reddit. It's a shame because I really do miss the smaller niche communities on reddit but reddit is dead to me now because the CEO is really quite the dickhead and I refuse to go back.
I’m going to get crucified for this but without monetary incentive I don’t see improvements coming anytime soon. I respect the Lemmy creators but they’re running on donations and goodwill. Reddit/Digg had a team of dedicated employees working on the user experience because it was their livelihood.
This is true but aren't the two main Lemmy devs paid to work on this full-time? That's something at least, it's better than being truly unpaid to work on this.
Without actually having looked at the issue track but knowing how such things go down: Less visible progress should be expected right about now even presuming constant development efforts.
The great migration brought many users and uncovered various bugs and requirements for new features and devs have been scrambling to address as much of it as fast as possible -- which means going for low-hanging fruit first and if it's not low-hanging, hack around the issue to produce a quick fix. Now that the worst is over proper software development practice dictates that you should worry more about addressing technical debt you just incurred as well as refactor and redesign until high-hanging fruit are hanging lower so you can pluck them. Doesn't make sense to build 100 ladders when you can take an axe to the tree and fix everything with three very well-planned and executed strikes.
According to Google trends, the people who left are an insignificantly small number, Reddit has still grown in search popularity over the last year. However, if you've browsed Reddit since the shutdown, you know that this isn't the whole story, engagement and quality are both down.
I disagree, you can see so much on the old layout specifically because it's a wall of text. The new layout is unnecessarily bloated and takes up your whole screen on every device you view it from, so you can barely see more than one or two posts at a time. It removes the ability for the user to freely scroll and look at things that interest them, and forces the user's attention onto exactly what the algorithm wants them to. The new layout removes a ton of agency from the user.
I think for two simply have different use cases for Reddit.
The old ui is great if you see Reddit as a text aggregator. You want text or headlines and click on the content to see it. Images are almost meaningless.
The new ui puts a focus on visual connect. Images and videos are the focus, you don't have to follow links most of the time, because the content is embedded.
Those are two very different approaches. Neither is doing a great job of achieving their goals, though.
I don't know what it is, but people there seem to be turning nastier and nastier. Like for instance, I posted some technical question on an electronics subreddit earlier, and something in my post - not sure what - landed me a -15 score, and people replying that if I didn't like it I could fuck off. All I said was that some component wasn't placed in a terribly convenient location in the new design, and the people who posted angry and rude comments weren't even the designers. I mean what the actual fuck...
It seems a lot of subreddits I used to enjoy participating in are now full of people in a really antagonistic mood, and I often hesitate to post anything there now because I know it has a 50% change of turning nasty. And so instead, whenever possible, I post in the equivalent Lemmy community because even though they have a hundred times fewer users, it's a much less frustrating experience.
I come interact on Reddit or Lemmy to have a good time, not to pick up a fight and get insulted by passive-aggressive internet lusers with frayed nerves.
To be fair, that description of being piled on by angry people who are looking for an excuse to be angry could easily describe a lot of threads I've been in on the Fediverse lately. Seems like there's an unfortunate mood going around right now.
I'm not unconvinced that R×ddit isn't completely overtaken by shills & people who have swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.
Have a critique? See a flaw? Something that bugs you about a product? YOU'RE WRONG, IDIOT!!! EVERYONE LOVES [thing] SO YOU ARE STUPID FOR CRITICIZING IT!!!!!
Quiets down the detractors. They don't have a voice.
Quiets down anti-capitalists, politically-motivated folk, logic-minded.. you know. People who cause trouble for those with something to sell you.
The reverse happens on Lemmy too in some community. Like for example the fairly [email protected]: it's a radical anti-capitalist, probably pro-communist and most assuredly pro-anarchist community, which is generally fine by me. But if you go in there to express a reasonable opinion that isn't "burn all corporations" or "kill all capitalists" and expect to have a reasonable discussion, that's just not gonna happen. You'll just get modded down. It's not so much a place to discuss anything than a big anti-capitalist circle jerk.
So you can find places where people are angry and nasty like on Reddit here, but usually you kind of know in which community you'll find the anger. On Reddit, the anger is everywhere and for no reason, including on subbreddits that aren't the least bit controversial. And even if you don't criticize a product or diss a company or its products, most Redditors are ready to jump at you because... well, they seem to feel the need to be aggressive.
I'm fairly convinced the nature of the platform turns them like that: Reddit is subtly aggressive too and I'm convinced it rubs off on its users.
A lot of Lemmy markets itself as a highly free-speech platform. Which is fine..... but I've been around the internet enough to know that sites with anonymous free speech attract all kinds of folk who may not have the best of intentions.
Lemmy is far from some kind of online utopia. Make no mistakes about that!
Lemmy is far from perfect, and I'm 100% certain it's going to become completely terrible as soon as a critical mass of the morons currently haunting Reddit transition over. But for the moment, it's refreshing, the signal/noise ratio is still high, and it doesn't feel like you're being exploited for your data and advertised to all the time.
Attitude is the main reason I started looking for reddit alternatives over four years ago, not ui or privacy or moderation or the api stuff (which came a lot later). I have a lot of theories for why it happened (that aren't just the capitalism and astrotufing circlejerk) but they're hard to back with substantial evidence
In my opinion. The majority of computer/phone users is not very technical. They get used to how something they use works. It keeps working as is for a long time.
Then when small changes make it worse, they just accept them. Its just a bit worse. No biggie, then at some point they are used to the new normal. Something else gets worse and the whole thing repeats. It has to be literally unusable before such users switch to a new thing. Like reddits servers need to shut down, that kind of unusable.
True, I honestly don't get it. In everything in life if I don't like something I find something better or try to fix it. I hate relying on some entity blindly putting my trust into them. I will genuinely never understand the blind trust people put into anything and everything. I can't tell if it's ignorace or apathy
None of the niche communities I am interested in exist on lemmy. Maybe they will eventually, maybe they won’t. It’s more or less useless beyond doom scrolling. I miss reddit because I miss having all of my useful forums in one place with a better thread format, and I didn’t need to remember a bunch of accounts to participate in something like /r/tipofmytongue or /r/bikewrench periodically. Lemmy is just a political news space with memes and that’s not going to attract everyone.
Oh, I should clarify. They exist, but nobody uses them. So they’re useless, like asking a ‘genuine’ question and then disagreeing with answers you don’t like.
You may have legitimately misunderstood that I meant better format than normal forums. I’m using lemmy, I know it’s the same layout as reddit
reddit has a huge backlog of billions of posts. until lemmy keeps up with it, i won't completely leave reddit, because my favorite part about reddit is exploring obscure communities, which lemmy does not have. (I'm using lemmy for actual discussions and stuff) Also I think it's still the most decent network out of all big tech ones, i.e. it's not as bad as fucking Instagram or whatever...
Well yeah, I get the backlog of post. Reddit threads from 4+ years ago still come up when I Google something. I mean actively using reddit. The obscure communities can be made and will be once more people use lemmy. Reddit didn't have them at the start either
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