Half my feed is AI generated engagement bait or marketing disguised as content. It’s a bit of a wasteland compared to what it was
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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Fedibridge
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It’s not dead…but it’s certainly an enshitified: husk of itself.
The way I described Reddits’ current state to somebody who asked was: “A bunch of bulletin board/chat rooms moderated by wanna be despots…all of whom rely on an overarching AI moderator that’s constantly sniping users and handing out bans for benign content. In between Ads and bots trying to instigate you or farm your clicks.”
it’s basically turned into a weird Orwellian advertisement delivery service. All the mods who turned their pages black should have just left.
It's not dead, it just lived long enough to see itself become the villain. Reddit used to be about communities and people. Now it's about bots and defending pedophiles. And falsely accusing devs of blackmail and shuttering the API when said dev brings the receipts. That, too.
Of course, said dev's app got open sourced and ported to Android for Lemmy users, so there's that. I don't know much about coding and source, but both Voyager and Mlem look like they got the best parts of Apollo. And that's a good thing.
Reddit used to be about communities and people. Now it’s about bots and defending pedophiles.
Reddit has always been full of people making excuses for or normalising pedophilia.
Fucking r/jailbait existed and u/Spez was mod. The pedos have always been in charge of that dumpster fire of a site.
To be fair, at the time the mods could make anyone else a mod. That's why they did as a joke by temporarily making current reddit CEO Steve Huffman a mod of the sub. What is genuinely damning, is that they gave the moderator of that subreddit a custom avatar, and IRC would have voice conferences with him to coordinate the handling of it. Basically on a first name basis and friendly terms with him.
There has always been a big overlap between moderators and admins. It's likely some power mods are reddit staff. A few years back, reddit hired a new admin, who was formerly an adult moderator of /r/teenagers. It later turned out her father had tortured and raped a ten year old and her fiancé had tweeted about children having sex. On reddit she abused her position as admin to automatically censor any mention of this on reddit. This only came to light when the moderator of a national subreddit was automatically banned for sharing an article which mentioned her name in passing.
Obviously she was fired and reddit said she'd been improperly vetted, but given reddit's history with this kind of stuff, that seems unlikely.
Full article, I may have misremembered something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_Knight
No app needed, the PieFed and Lemmy mobile websites work fine, and support push notifications as well.
It’s complaining about bots on Reddit. I honestly don’t think Lemmy would stand a chance if bots decided to come here instead.
Piefed is actively working on tools and mod detection to target this lol
We just need a web of trust where humans tag other known humans and follow other accounts. Every post could be labeled with a tag that shows how many degrees of separation you are from an account that's tagged the poster as a known human. Then the tech can evolve with a ranked trust hierarchy where you can follow someone but not accept their "known human tags" if they're a foolish friend that accepts AI selfies as proof of humanity.
Webrings/WoT is back! The crab/train of the internet is still the solution everyone falls back to.
We just need a web of trust where humans tag other known humans and follow other accounts.
Wasn't it what blogs were all about and... still are? ;)
I haven't seen any system like that for blogs (or anywhere yet)
I was referring to the 'trust' and to the 'following' parts, using RSS feeds and blogrolls/curated recommendations as, back then, those could be very impactful to the visibility & popularity of any blog depending which... human being... made the recommendation. Meaning algorithms & bots were and, for the most part, would still be that useless crap they should have remained ;)
Probably a path we'll have to go down the line.
This is a great idea.
Already here. If regular users see this place being mentioned somewhere, so do the scammers and bots.
Claims Reddit is dead, then proceeds to say Reddit is not actually dead, and admits they are just looking for attention. That's so Reddit!
The Reddit of a decade ago is long dead. As is the Reddit of 5 years ago. As is the Reddit of a couple years ago.
Reddit has always been ever changing. The users change. The popular topics change. The drama changes. The rules change. The inside jokes change. The discourse changes. The site itself changes.
If I were throwing out random poorly supported theories that make sense to me (and maybe only me): I bet the site is doing fine, even by real metrics. It's just that the demographics have shifted, leaving "older" accounts feeling a bit out of place.
While I'm confident that bots and AI are pumping the numbers, my assumption is that Reddit is now focusing on new/different markets with potential for lots of growth, like users in regions outside of "The Western World". For example, the past few times I've gone over and looked, the front page is full of posts from subs catering to people in India. Even in less regional subs, if you look at comments and submissions, it's clear that more and more users are from places like Southeast Asia, China, India, etc.
So, when the topics and humor and discourse and design and everything else start veering towards a new demographic, and particularly when it's a demographic that you're not part of and have limited familiarity with, I totally understand why it feels like the place is dying to someone especially if they are from USA, Canada, and places like that.
Reddit changed a lot over the years, sure, but everything on the site now is just pure fucking garbage.
It's just YouTube videos and TikTok's.
I've taken shits more entertaining and informative than 90% of the shit posted on that site.
Its been pretty much the saame for me, but I always used reddit as news and niche discussion. I unsubbed from the defaults over a decade ago and never mingled with anyone who looked at popular or all because fuck normies. Hated the amount of libs on reddit so just stuck with r/anarchism, and always hated r/politics.
To this day I never look at reddit for popular news discussion because its a horrifying circlejerk there. At least here downvoted comments arent hidden/lower. I still see contraversial opinion, even if downvoted. Comment votes dont seem to mean much thankfully here.
It wasn't just rage comics and advice animals; it was new atheism, tech bro libertarianism, I Fucking Love Science rationality and skepticism and grammar nazis to boot. Celebrities like Adam Savage were all but worshiped, and Ron Paul was bigger than Jesus if all you went by was the default subs (which are no longer a thing).
Holy fuck don’t mention Lemmy; please don’t mention lemmy to these peasant-brained annoyers (Adam Savage is okay I guess)
I've met Adam Savage a few times in comic con meet and greets. He was very nice to me and seemed to really enjoy interacting with fans, that being said he was "on the clock" so I have no idea how he is privately. I always found those celebrity cults of personality weird as hell, at least people seem to be more aware of what a parasocial relationship is now.
You're like the Bitcoin cultists on nostr that want nostr to stay small.
You're on this tiny niche platform complaining about how the bigger platforms have decayed, but you have the same desire for echo chambering and ideological cultism that drives the decay on bigger platforms
Yeah, no, that guy sounds annoying and I made a joke about it.
Lighten up, I’m not the fuckin mayor of lemmy.
Fair enough
The big platforms decay because of a commercial drive towards encouraging anger and outrage due to how engaging they are.
That too, yes
Someone should mention nostr. Wonder if anyone has. It doesn't have a reddit clone app available right now, but it inevitably will, and it's the only social media thing I know of right now where you're really pretty much immune to bans
Just checked it out and scrolled the feed for a hot minute, literally 2/3 of the posts are pumping bitcoin - I'm out.
Some apps like Primal (guessing that's what you tried but could be wrong) are "controlled opposition" that promote Bitcoin content as much as possible to keep other users out, keep nostr small, and keep platforms like reddit / Fox News / etc at the top. This has gone on for years, they filter out all the non-Bitcoin users the way they filtered you out, and they keep building up more and more Bitcoin cultists to make the wall stronger.
You should definitely keep trying. If you don't hate Bitcoin enough to take the opportunity to annoy the cultists by calling out their bullshit, you shouldn't hate it enough to be driven back to places that can waste all your invested time by banning you. There are also apps like asknostr.site that you can find specific uses for while you wait for the "general social media" use to get more competitive with whatever else you prefer (like lemmy)
Why would you think being immune to bans is a good thing?
nostr creeps me out.
Why do I need another fucking app for something that a web browser can already do? This is why nostr will never get rolling.
I don't know what you're doing with your web browser but I use mine to post on nostr without getting banned. Didn't really have anywhere to safely post without getting filtered before nostr