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 was trying to find video essays on Cyberpunk, the worthless search kept giving videos of the stupid Cyberpunk 2077 video game. I had to use Google search to find what I needed.
Also YouTube search likes recommend me unrelated stuff too nowadays. For heaven sakes, can we have a search that just do its damn job.
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)?
Thinking back to around 1995-2005, I really regret how so many "search" tools (both online and in certain OSes) have become opaque and unreliable "let me guess it for you" engines. Features to correct them when they are wrong--like negation of terms--are sometimes unreliably badly/non-documents, or nonexistent.
It's not a lack of knowledge or skill--FFS Youtube owner Google has its own history as a search engine there--but all the commercial incentives aligned for Enshittificiation, and I wish I knew how to fix it.
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.
Random data point: I paid for Apollo Pro (not Ultra - it didn't have any features that I wanted), and turns out I've lied about 99.999%, it was more like eight nines as I have a Reddit account since 2011 and my only post ever was on r/KeybaseProofs. I thought I had some questions that I've wanted to post, but it seems that I've always solved them without ever posting, just searching for answers harder - so my memory had failed me.
Apollo is convenient and features were totally worth the money. Even for someone who only browses and posts only comments. The official app is no good.
So... I don't know. I share your hopes that everyone else is not like me (but then why no one is posting on Fediverse?)