Happened with the feed of Facebook. originally was a true social network where you scrolled through what your family and friends posted. Now it is a algorithm designed to maximize attention and sell influence,
Happened with YouTube. Used to be really pro independent user … now the search functionality is barebones giving you maybe one or two results… the rest promoted content.
TikTok just straight up controls what you consume from the get go
Reddit wants to join in the same model. Heavily corporate moderated content masquerading as “use content.
Sadly I am not too hopeful for a new platform. Any true open forum upvote downvote platform will be torpedoed before it can get going …
I hate to admit, but this comment pretty much sums it up: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/209870 (first part talks about communities in general, the rest is about r/Dota2 in particular - but can mostly be applied to most other subreddits)
I really don't want it to be like this, but it sums up perfectly how I feel about it. I'm not on Reddit to make posts - about 99.999% of time I don't have anything to post, and those five minutes a year when I possibly do aren't today. I'm lurking around, then maybe participating in comments, chatting with people or just expressing My Importantly Worthless Opinions(tm).
I've checked out Fediverse and it's essentially empty. Those who make all the posts I was commenting on haven't moved there. If they will, I will visit, for sure. But if they won't (and seems that they won't) - I won't stick around simply because there's nothing to do there for me, personally (I'm no content producer).
Blackout doesn't address this. Neither are all those "check out Lemmy/Kbin/... posts" I've seen.
Reddit knows this and that's why they call users like me "noise". I guess, moderators included (as I get it, most mods don't post - they have a different role)?
I hope Reddit did their due diligence in this. My feeling is that the people who found a 3rd party client and even paid for it are the ones in the 0.001% who produced the content for the rest of the people.
But we'll see in a few weeks if /u/spez starts forcing subreddits to open.