Fediverse

Size is what makes a network attractive to commercial exploitation. An open network like the Fediverse might not be commercially exploited by its infrastructure owners, but any participant can do so.

Reddit basically has fucked over their voluntary mods. If you have a bigger subreddit with several millions of users modding that is nearly impossible. You'll get all those trolls, crazy people, nazis and fanatics with too much time. You'll have to deal with astroturfing campaigns from companies with millions of dollars of budget and state sponsored desinfo campaings. You also will have do deal with all that cultural war bullshit. You subreddit can be about cute baby cats, but you will have to deal with MAGA bullshit, somebody will bring the war in Gaza into your place or post Putin with a cat. Karmafarming bots. Users will really insult you and accuse you of powertripping and being a Nazi.

You will have to do everything in your free time. Reddit will not pay you. Reddit will not really support you. You are alone responsible to build a mod team. You can't pay them either. Spez will laught at you while earning millions. He will insult you if you speak up. You can't close your sub. And then you will get burned out and leave. The sub will then be overrun by absolute trash.

I quit Reddit because of the ultra leftist moderators. You can't have a different opinion or you get banned.

Every now and then I end up on that site (usually from searching for something and then absent-mindedly clicking to the homepage from there) and get whiplash at just how horrific the whole front page is even on its default logged-out setting for racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and other far-right talking point news stories.

no it was before commercializaton, IPO crisis. it was when they started leaning on political/news content so much that any talk of politics that is easily misconstrued , i mean very easy to do, you get a ban. turns out political engagment, especially with russian bots increases traffic to the site. than 2023 happened, and then the ban purges happened, reddit is pretty much in self-destructive mode right now. the more they placate to the gop, conservative censorship, the smaller reddit gets as a platform for discussing anything.

There was a quiet exodus during the_donald era. That whole time from 2016 - 2020 was very strange. Nobody talks about it. Except for the minority of us from the before times.

For reddit corporate there was a serendipitous confluence of events.

• Right wing US politics trolls caused a quiet exodus.
• A pandemic happened causing everyone to be stuck at home doomscrolling.
• Reddit was doing a relaunch, with a new site design and official app.
• They were preparing to IPO.

Basically reddit corporate got a free reset. One that Digg could have only dreamed of. Much of the old unprofitable userbase left. Ragebaiting trolls overran the platform. Fresh userbases flooded into the site. Social media psychological manipulation/addiction mechanisms had a field day on those unsuspecting doomscrollers.

You old timers ever notice how reddit's demise is a perpetually sliding window? You can tell when someone started using reddit based on when they think it was good and when it went bad.

Most users today talk about relaunch/redesign era as the good times. They think only relatively recently has it turned bad. None them have any clue about the pre-2020 era because they had no clue about reddit before.

All that being said. I don't think it's only commercialization that killed it. The type of users killed it too. That isn't mutually exclusive from userbase size.

Commercialization relies on engagement tricks like ragebait. That requires users who will engage with that too. The old reddit userbase was more skeptical and cognizant of commercialization tactics. The userbase today doesn't hate it. Some even seem to relish in it.

They like the tabloid posts. They like the emotional clickbait. They like to gossip. They like the drama.

Even if you block the ads and ignore them the site is so heavily botted with these bots pushing all sorts of products.

One of the most useful aspects of reddit used to be getting other perspectives on products you were interested in. This is no longer useful because of the massive networks of bot farms. You simply can no longer tell what's real on that site and what isn't.

In the attention economy, you don't need ads to have ads. As long as you're paying attention to someone, someone could be getting paid because of that.

I think it's a mix of both. Commercialization is why the admin staff sucks. The popularity and size of the site is why many users suck. It's hit with both capitalist enshittification and Eternal September.

Size definitely played a role. It attracted bots, corporate, and political manipulation.

Reddit was always shitty from when

• The only reason the jailbait sub came down was do to main stream media pressure - if you missed jailbait was a "SFW" sub for posting reveling photos of other people's children to be gooned over. It was voted "Subreddit of the year" in 2008

• the mod who ran jailbait was an ICON on reddit for years and he also modded dozens of other equally questionable subs

• The insane redditor backlash to them banning FatPeopleHate sub - which for those who missed it was a sub dedicated to posting photos of overweight people without their knowledge so the internet could mock them. This was mostly made up of - yes you guessed it - mostly photos of fat women getting mocked.

• Leaving up the BeatingWomen sub that is specifically for posting videos of women getting beat up for 10+ more years after jailbait came down.

• leaving up the Creepshots sub, a sub dedicated to upskirt and down-shirt photos of unsuspecting women, for YEARS and only taking it down due to to it hitting the main stream news and forcing their hand. This sub was also modded by the Jailbait mod.

• the RAMPANT sexism and racism as thinly veiled intellectualism that has gone on for DECADES

• ~~Ghislaine Maxwell was a moderator on worldnews~~ - I cannot back this claim up so I am removing it.

The API thing and forced logins is probably one of the least shitty things this site has done.