2y ago

Where did all this reddit hatred come from?

I know we pretty much all hated spez for all the shit he pulled, but a few weeks ago the tone towards reddit itself around here was more neutral. People liked it here on Lemmy a lot better, but people weren't hating on the old place so much.

Recently I'm seeing this huuuuuuuge surge of just pure fucking hatred leveled at the site itself. Anyone else notice this or is it just me?

I mean, I was there because I thought it was alright. I hated spez for fucking it up and completely screwing his communities over. But I never hated reddit itself, and I still don't. Otherwise I would've left a lot sooner.

Do you personally hate reddit? If so, why?

215 comments

We’re moving through the stages of grief. Many of us seem to be on “anger”.
- Ohhhhhhhhh... you might be right. That's an interesting thought, thank you.
- 💯i was in strong anger last week.

That tends to happen when a site you frequent suddenly decides a portion of its users will have to visit with the worst experience possible or leave.
Additionally, false accusations and actions taking by Steve and Reddit admins only poked the wasp hive even more.

I think it also ties into a larger portion of people being fed up with corporate social media and corporations in general. All the ads, tracking, and shareholder profit driving decisions instead of what makes a product “good”.

I loved Reddit until I realized they were just going to do whatever they wanted and the community, apart from creating free content and work, didn't matter. But the lying about discussions with the app creator was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Suddenly they weren't just a bully, but they were a proven lying, dishonest bully. Everything that they say going forward will be suspect, so I decided to walk away. Who knows what they're doing with my data/content. I know what they're telling me. I don't know what's true.
I deleted most of my posts from my nearly 14-year history except for a handful that I think need to stay up and a couple of others that I'm testing something on. I log in every once in a while to leave any groups that might have unlocked since I was last there and delete those posts too.
I don't hate them. But they've lost my trust, and I don't see any way to regain it.
There could have been other, better solutions. The biggest problem right now is that the only tool in Steve Huffman's toolbox is a hammer.
- More like a bent tire iron he borrowed from Elon. A hammer would be quick and efficient at least, two things which he is not.

I loved Reddit, but after the API shenanigans and the doubling down I went sour... and then I read the latest TOS...
You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
i.e. whatever you post WE own forever and we never have to credit you. It's so horrifyingly immoral.
- I bet they're angling to sell data for AI training.
  
  Didn’t they straight up say that at one point? And I don’t begrudge that: it makes sense. Potentially the next big wave of hotness is being trained on existing content like Reddit. They are potentially profiting off Reddit. It’s fair that Reddit should get a cut of that.
  But there has to be a better way than to go through swinging a hammer side to side and not caring who you bludgeon
- That's a pretty standard TOS clause for any website that hosts user content these days.
  
  Stack exchange is CC licensed, and they host a lot of user content.
  
  I've not seen this "waive moral rights or attribution" in any other site. It's not in Twitter's, it's not in Facebook, I don't think it's even legal in a lot of jurisdictions (moral rights cannot easily be contracted away).
  
  Which ones?

I remember being introduced to reddit years ago. It was still new and unknown, there was in-jokes and cringey bacon narwhal shit I don't even quite remember. It was fun, it was cringe, it wasn't doomscrolling it was genuine engagement and I really enjoyed it.
Then the longer I spent on it the more hostile it became. Almost every comment thread is full of contrarians looking to argue with you just to get more upvotes and edit: omg thx 4 awards!!11! bullshit, bots "correcting" people's spelling and telling you how many consonants are in reverse alphabetical order in your username omg so cute! it just became regular, boring old social media.
Then the leadership bullshit kept just getting worse and worse and worse, every time you hear anything about what reddit (as a company) does it's just more and more hostile to users. The API/app changes and the way it was handled was the last straw. Users don't hate reddit, reddit hates it's users, the company has shown nothing but contempt for the users and unpaid moderators for years and I'm just sick of it and that long term animosity coupled with the last set of changes? Yeah, fuck reddit.
- I've never understood why people hate other people editing their posts with thank yous. What was the big problem with that?
  
  The edit: omg thank you for awards/upvotes comments just feel like such a self-congratulatory circlejerk, as if the point of the post was to "win" at reddit by getting the most points. The "meta" around reddit itself became less of a discussion and more a game to play to get the most points.
  To be clear, I don't directly hate the "thank you" post edits, I dislike that they're a symptom of the "meta" of reddit becoming less around the links it aggregates and more around itself, maybe?

Mine mostly comes from how they treated Christian, the developer of the Apollo app. Ridiculous.
- Also remember their behavior towards Aaron Swartz

Reddit can't be divorced from the leadership. If you hate the direction leadership is taking Reddit, how can you still like Reddit itself? What is it apart from that?
This argument makes more sense to me with Lemmy. Yes, if you hate the direction one instance admin is taking their Lemmy instance, it doesn't make sense to hate Lemmy as a whole… but Reddit has only one "instance," so if you hate the "admin," you hate Reddit.
- Yeah, I started picking up on this. I draw a clear distinction between people that make decisions, and the tools they use to bring those decisions to fruition. To me, reddit is an inanimate thing, and hating it is no different than hating a rock or tree. I do understand now that I am not necessarily normal in this, though.
  Thanks for the response.

Having been there since the pre-Digg days, I simply hate what they're doing with the place. It hurts to see something you've enjoyed and contributed to over the past 20 years become the antithesis of the free and open internet it once represented. Every change they made to the site since they tried to migrate off the old.reddit.com interface has been a negative one for the users. The sudden acceleration of those kind of changes has made the site both unreadable (content is beyond stale now) and worthless to participate in.
I think for me, this disappointment turned to real visceral antipathy when I saw this page - it looks like something the CCP would design for kindergartners. It's not a place I want to be a part of at all, and I don't want my past contributions to fuel it.
- That is also very helpful, thank you. I can see that pissing people off.
- I'm sure it's just a coincidence that they repeat the word "community" like every fourth word all the way through that insipid swill. It's definitely not a pathetically transparent attempt to retroactively stake a claim on the term that lemmy - the Reddit to their Digg - uses for its subforums.
  
  People on reddit have been referring to the people in their subs as a "community" forever. It's definitely not that deep. They don't even know or care what Lemmy names anything.

Pretty sure the only people still talking about Reddit are the really passionate people that hate or love it. I am neutral and therefore stopped talking about it.
- Exactly the same boat. Just trying to make Lemmy work now.

I hated it, I only just barely put up with the toxic community so I could still visit my favorite subs only (I used apollo so I could ignore the garbage that’d be recommended to us constantly). I used the app-pocalypse as an excuse to leave. Now I only lurk there for the ooh-la-la subs, but as more and more creators there have lately been moving to lemmynsfw I might not even need those subs for much longer.
- Hello, Apollo user. Have you tried wefef.app?
  
  Yes, it’s great. I’d also recommend Memmy since it shows downvotes and upvotes separately instead of net score (which lemmy does, idk about the other reddit-like federated sites) to discourage circlejerking

We're still discussing Reddit? That's so 2.5 weeks old 😝 moved here because of spaz' rule, not because I hate Reddit. It was a fun time which will be remembered.
- It's time to hate the looming threat of the colossus that meta now setting eyes on gobbling up the guppies. It makes reddit stuff look so trivial in comparison.

Almost the same thing happened on Reddit when everyone migrated from Digg. It's so similar, in fact, that I wonder if maybe this isn't a normal thing.
- I suspect it's more users migrating over to here. I am coming here more than on Reddit now because of Reddits actions. Just trying to get used to Lemmy. The vibes are friendlier here, that's for sure. I imagine that won't last once even more Redditors come this way.
- I never used Digg, so I never got to see. That makes sense that it might be a pattern of some sort though.

Hate is a strong word, but I don't like the power that comes with an extremely centralized internet. I also don't like the ad driven internet. So Reddit as a website is no good in my opinion.
- I picked it intentionally, hoping some people feeling some actual powerful emotions might try to explain why. Regardless of what I think of it intellectually, I don't experience strong emotions towards it. I don't miss it, I don't hate it, my emotions towards it are very neutral.
  I'm curious about others though. Emotionally, not intellectually.

I'm indifferent about Reddit. I'm just here because I want to see open-source and the fediverse do well.

It didn't help that the reddit admins banned a huge chunk of moderators who refused to comply with their decisions. That sort of thing doesn't sit well with creators.

You're seeing it more because Reddit has made a series of decisions, in rather rapid succession within the last few weeks, that were widely disliked by longtime users of the platform. API restrictions, the crackdown on NSFW content, major bugs with the official mobile app, mass deletion of DMs, removal of Reddit Gold and the rumored upcoming "creator program"...
All of this has come down the pipeline in a relatively short amount of time, and is pushing people to the point of vehemency.
- That DM deletion was just pure lazy bland evil.
  I'm assuming they did it because they didn't want to spend engineer time improving their message system. Or some old USB disk on a forgotten computer had filled up.
- Yes, I myself am a post-blackout refugee. We were not constantly shredding reddit at every opportunity 2 weeks ago. Despite having all left because we no longer found it acceptable. This change is what I'm trying to explore.
  Not spez fucking shit up. I know all that happened, I talked about spez in my OP. It explains hatred of spez, but not the entire faceless website that doesn't actually have any consciousness or decision-making power.

It came from Reddit being stupid as fuck.

For me personally, I joined Lemmy a couple days ago because Reddit shut Joey off with now notice amidst trying to negotiate payment for a paid API. Maybe the users you're noticing are in a similar situation. I personally have no issues with reddit but I was a lurker there.
- Joey was great, I still feel bad for the dev

My experience with reddit is that users have always hated reddit, 13 years ago it was the same thing. We all bashed reddit constantly. My experience was that we only used reddit because there was nothing better.

The API changes were the trigger for the recent controversy and the fact that they may be forced to use the buggy official app instead of an unofficial but stable and well developed app pushed people too far. The API change is what caused the blackout and disgust for Reddit.

Love can quite easily turn to hate. Strong emotions still, just in another direction.

I do think there are waves of people moving from Reddit to Lemmy for one reason or another, each of them infuriated with Reddit and needing to express it. We had the wave of people that reacted to the news of the API changes, people that moved over after Reddit responded poorly to the protests, people that moved here after their Reddit app of choice stopped working, people after the latest set of third party apps stopped working, people after Reddit removed gold, people after the app icon was changed...
\
\ People are at different stages of dealing with Reddit, some of us who left sooner have moved on, some people are moving here currently outraged with Reddit, and some are in between.
\ I imagine we'll keep seeing these waves of people for a while, and that's ok, the best thing we can do is validate their feelings toward Reddit, welcome them, and keep the memes rolling.
- Very well said. This encompasses the conclusion I eventually came to myself from reading people's conversations in this thread.
  
  Yeah. That's also what i've told people. It just takes some time for things to settle, until a new balance and new culture is established. We need to figure out a few things, maybe cry or get angry. Solve technical problems and so on. There are real feelings involved and a few people have lost a place they once belonged or a community they liked. I still see disappointment, frustration mixed with excitement and curiosity for something novel. Things will settle down and the past feelings will become less important.

I don’t hate it, but every time now that I get linked to a Reddit post, I look at the comments, and every time I get a little more shocked at the amount of low-value, hateful comments over there compared to here.
In other words, I don’t hate it, but I feel like it hates me.

I always hated the UI, especially attempts to “improve” it, but that was mostly an inconvenience. And I don’t like being pushed toward an app, with increased tracking bullshit, just to view a web site
I don’t know what happened with the AMA person a while back but after she left, that was no longer worth subscribing to. It appears to be a sign of Reddit management killing their future
The reason I liked Reddit was the content, the discussions. However those are highly dependent on the mods and the super users, and Reddit seemed to start hating them, all of them. All of them at once. How are you alienating the very group of people who are volunteers responsible for making your site compelling? Who are responsible for your success?
I don’t hate Reddit but management made a change likely to degrade my reason for being there. I’m here to see if I can encourage development of a new alternative ….. but yeah I was actually hoping the boycott would make a difference

API changes should have come into effect on July 1st, but they have been doing a prolonged rollout (a lot of the popular apps closed on June 30th) so that shattered some hopes for people that believed the blackouts would work.
And they also managed to make a lot stupid comments and other decisions between then and now. Combine that with people already being unhappy and some hostility towards the company is not out of the question.
Hating platform is unproductive, but emotional response is a very human thing. I'm just happy new alternative platforms came from Reddit greed and they are thriving. I stopped following all the Reddit-focused communities and I don't even keep up with what's happening there.

If you think about the chain of events, it makes sense. While there were people using lemmy pre-exodus, the giant leap in userbase is a direct result of the exodus of users from reddit.
So it stands to reason, as that core group of people interacts with each other, and is then exposed to further shitty behaviour from reddit CEO... considering they were unhappy enough with reddit to move in the first place, it's no surprise that exposure to more and more shitty behaviour leads to that feeling hardening.

Hate? Nah. I don't care enough about it anymore to hate it. They are all welcome to enjoy it if they wish.

I have disliked the direction of reddit ever since they made the new interface and removed css rules from subs. It was the first time, of many, that I saw reddit take something from the community and screw it up, all just to make the website more boring. It was especially annoying in that it removed text flairs from support and marketplace subs and forced people to come up with external systems.
They did it more often. Things like Reddit Gold were not first made by reddit, did you know? The whole API thing is just the concrete slab that pulverized the camel all the way to hell. Of all the things they took or took away, taking away the app I was using since years before they even made one was just too much. I can go from passively disliking them to actively hating them.
Plus, what ideas did they actually have that was original or good? "Hey guys, we stole Facebook's chat". "Hey guys, we added crypto". The community makes bots that mediate debates, convert video format or do reminders, meanwhile reddit busies itself by ruining the Relevant option on its already bad search and then fucks off while stating "eh, you fucking degenerate nerds use site:reddit.com anyways"
- reddit's whole api used to be open and any user could run scripts with a bit of php. it was incredibly fun and interesting.
  
  Wasn't one of the now deceased founders the creator of RSS and a heavy advocate of open internet?

I feel a part of it is similar to anger of the natural process of grieving. Many of us spent years contributing to the platform and enjoyed just spending time with other like-minded members of subreddits. I personally loved reading the chains of comments. Reddit was a great source of pleasure; a place for sharing humor, frustrations, and other random cool things. Much of what made it enjoyable, including he third party apps, was taken away in a fashion that felt like the user base was betrayed, hence the utter vehement expression of some former users. It will pass in time.
- I do hope it does, I don't particularly enjoy the hating in general. Kills the chill vibes around here. Which is why I'm trying to understand it better.
  I was a post-blackout refugee myself, I'm not OG Fediverse. But the tone in those initial days of migration were overall a lot more chilled out. It's really not until this past week or so that it feels like the hate machine is firing up.
  I was wondering if maybe people were still blaming the hacks on reddit or something, I know that was flying around for awhile.

I’ve hated Reddit for a while now and was originally happy to move to another platform but I’m already seeing lemmy start to show the same behaviors I hated Reddit for so I don’t think I’m gonna last long on here anyway
- Remember you can always just move to a smaller Instance and block the most annoying ones. Key difference here.
- Yeah, it was great with more content. Or was it - so much of it is just stupid articles written as clickbait or strongly opinionated pretending neutrality.
  And all the bad memes… really wish I could block communities my regex.
  But I kept visiting Reddit while Apollo was up, so… and there are good Content here as well.
  There are still more sane alternatives, like joining Beehaw and stick to local communities, or check out Tildes.

It reminds me of watching a particularly nasty break-up play out, with emotions running high and lots of bile being spewed.
I dunno - I never especially liked Reddit in the first place, so it's just a thing I see others do. I moved there sort of grudgingly about ten years ago because there just weren't any other visble alternatives, and I've been more or less actively looking for a replacemnet all along, so when the threadiverse took off, I was ready.
But I suspect that for a lot of people, it's essentially that they invested a lot into the relationship, and then suddenly their partner betrayed them, and now they're pissed.

I've seen the opposite. A few days into the blackout, I saw someone post this meme about dictatorships where they (literally) put a picture of Spez right next to Tiananmen Square

Since threads and some instances not giving a strong stance on whether they will block them my hate has shifted to Meta. They are the bigger fish now.
Also, new people are still coming in. I'm not in the loop on new drama anymore like awards that were mentioned or whatever. Going to guess people coming now are fresh on their hate like people before the api deadline were.

Censorship, closed down subs, powertrip mods.
Try to appeal a sub ban from your alt account? That's a paddling.
- A few of you keep saying “censorship” yet none of you provide evidence other than “I got banned.”

Reddit used to be a lawless land that didn't care about comedy accounts or multiple accounts or shit posts. No one ever got banned. No one ever got censored. It was fun. People didn't take it that seriously.
The last few years however it's been turning into basically any other social media site. Politics everywhere, censorship galore and bans handed out willy nilly based on nothing more than ideologies and opinions, mods and admins tightly controlling narratives of threads and entire subs, and just slowly eroding what made it a fun site to visit. Certain political ideologies have taken over and anything outside of those opinions is insta-banned. Going to Reveddit or uneddit (i think thats the name of the second one) and looking at any "hot topic" thread was eye opening - mods and admins removing dozens/hundreds of completely harmless comments because they didn't like the opinion that was shared, leaving no trace that the comments even existed, giving the perception that there wasn't any censoring going on.
I don't hate reddit. I deleted my 12+ year old account and left because it isn't the site I liked, and an alternative now exists in Lemmy. I think Reddit is a shitty site now that is basically a highly censored astroturfed political site, but I don't care that I'm no longer using it.
People on here are hating reddit more now because more and more people are coming here from reddit because of the shitty things reddit has been doing.
- sadfasfasdf
  
  I'm honestly missing them. Would you mind pointing out a couple?
  
  Watch out so you don't cut yourself on all that edge.
- I suppose that would lead to a lot of associations. Personally I blame all of that on the people that actually did it though, not just reddit as a whole, which I just view as a successful website. The actual real life people who did those things and made those decisions are the ones that deserve the real condemnation.
  
  And the actual real life people who run reddit encouraged them, or ousted them for actual real life people who would do it.
  The shitty people who enable shitty policy are shitty, but I try to focus on the fact that they're just enablers.
  
  True, but the problem is that the real life people that did those things are all anonymous admins and mods that face no repercussions and give you no way to appeal or reverse anything. They're the ones controlling the site and ruining it, much like how lots of people now think that Elon Musk is ruining twitter. Is it twitters fault or musks fault? They're one and the same.
- It's hard knowing that your favourite small subs are a ticking time bomb; once they get too large they tend to be too strictly controlled and the content quality drops.
  
  People act like strict moderation/“control“ is universally bad, yet AskHistorians is often held up as one of the best subs ever created. Do you know what makes that possible? Do you know what would happen if they relaxed the rules?
- Exactly. Reddit used to be fun. anarcho communists and hardcore libertarians could trash talk, debate, and banter. people on the site were just fun weirdos. nothing was personal, very little was seriously political.
  then everything became serious business, and no more fun was allowed and mods became growth-grubbing ban-happy nutcases who only allowed 'correct' opinions, and the site became useless as both a source of entertainment and education because it became about perpetuating the very serious bullshit bubble of your sub at all costs.
  i have been mostly having the same opinions for a decade on reddit. the past couple of years my pragmatic thoughts are now a bannable offensive because they aren't so far-left or far-right nonsense.
  
  As many mistakes as Reddit has made, I have no desire to return to the time when we had FPH, “ham planet,” and c—ntown. I definitely have no desire to see creepshots or jailbait return. I think your rose tinted glasses are a little too thick, my friend. It was not all sunshine and rainbows lol
- I really miss the 'fun' part
  There used to be expat circles where it was a great for expats just to vent, China, Japan Korea and Thailand. Making fun of Redditor who are absolutely naive about a country and found 'love' on wechat, to archetypes, making fun naive locals, to self deprecating humour like violently shitting yourself from food poisoning or how squat toilets are racist against caucasian-chinese because white people can't squat to shit. Then I guess some Asian Americans do not understand the country well enough to get the context and then one day it's all gone.
  2balkan4u is a great example of this, just users from the Balkans bantering then admins saw this as a 'hate' subreddit and just gone, people knew it banter and a gross exaggeration of beliefs and perceptions about other countries which has been a ongoing thing for last 1000 years. Yet Reddit admins put a stop to that, banned the entire subreddit. For a website that preaches tolerance, people outside of American culture do not see black and white in race, sexuality or politics yet be completely ignorant to the point of intolerance.
  Reddit is now seething and hatred.
  
  100% this.
  Everyone is just looking to be outraged these days. They want to find something to complain about so they can get it banned so they can feel good about themselves.

You know, I've seen worse than hate here. I've seen apathy.
- Eh. I think hate is a downgrade from apathy. Hate turns you into something worse than what you hated, eventually. It's just a poison, and outside of physical violence it serves little purpose. It just clouds the mind of the holder.
  Determination does not require it anyway.

seems pretty obvious

For me, it's the strictly enforced lack of ideological diversity. Anything other than the mainstream far left ideology is immediately censored. It's a stupid echo chamber
- @activator90 Is it "mainstream" or is it "far left?"
  @Candelestine
- far left, mainstream, in this world with desantis and rampant transphobia?
  or are you just mad you can't drop slurs and talk about hating minorities?

215 comments