I was just browsing a thread on c/nfl looking for new mods. There were multiple 12+ year Redditors there offering to help.
Got me wondering. There are 14,000 of us in this community. How many of us are ten year plus users who have just had enough?
Edit: I didn’t expect this post to be as poignant as it became. There are so many of you… I can’t reply to everyone. I’m an 11 year user and have modded something like 150 subs over the years. I’m really sad too, but I’m finding that lemmy has most of the content I’m looking for, just needs more comments.
The API was a big blow, but removing awards on past posts and deleting coin balances is really dumb.
I was there since 2010, then I got banned for getting into spats with fascists. Fuck’em all. Reddit sucks. Free speech my ass.
I was 2006 adopter when Paul Graham dropped a link to it on his website. I was there before the original programming subdomain Reddit and even before they supported picture thumbnails. I’ve seen its wild mutations over the years. Bacon, narwhal, Mr Splashypants, Colbert name dropping, the original video IAMAs, the jailbait fiasco, spacedicks, random celebrity users, the redesign from hell, etc etc.
I left.
It was a good site for a long time but after being on Lemmy for a while I can see a clear difference in experience and now I realize Reddit has been bad for a while. Terrible discourse, lowest common denominator posts, and falling into the trap of continuous engagement just to get the next hit of dopamine. Honestly, spez ruining the site has been good for me personally.
I’m proud of our rejection of a commercial online experience. This is the thoughtful community I want to be a part of. This feels like the Internet of the late 90s in terms of authenticity. With its revival with the Fediverse I’m hopeful that these types of communities will forever be part of our digital experience.
16+ years. Learned about it from Joel Spolsky’s blog.
I pretty much agree 100% with your characterization of the decline and your overall experience.
I also hadn’t realized how dysfunctional Reddit had become or how much I’d tried to adapt to that dysfunction.
14 years with an account. A year or so of lurking before that.
Sites come and go.
I like telling stories of the olden days of the internet. Like being user #132 on mp3.com and having chats with people like Darude (before sandstorm) and Dido (before Eminem). It was an amazing place. Now it isn’t.
Reddit will follow.
As they all do
Edit: I also had the comment of the day on Reddit once.
It had 500 upvotes.
I was also a beta tester for duckduckgo. Not the app, the site/engine. When everyone else was putting him down, I believed.
That’s how long I was on there.
Yeah, I was never a fan of Scrubs, but several years into the show I heard Lazlo Bane’s “Superman” in the show titles and I was like… huh, they got that from MP3.com? Turns out Zach Braff was friends with the band members.
I still have lots of MP3.com stuff in my music archive, including folks who never made the transition to Youtube and pretty much don’t exist on the Internet at all anymore.
Jolly Rancher
3 shells?
Gargh!
Swamps of Dagobah
My greatest internet achievement: I came up with the name for that story!
Okay, not quite, I came up with calling it “The Dagobah Story”, but close enough! :D
Once had a front page rage comic… man I was flying high that day!
13 or 14 years here. I didn’t delete my account but I don’t even want to give them the traffic from going back to see my join date.
Same
Same. I just refuse to click on Reddit links. Been on it for atrium 12 years.
Me too
Same here. Started on Reddit around 2010. Haven’t been back since Apollo shutdown.
Ah found my spirit animal.
I would imagine the 10+ demographic has the highest rates of attrition. Those people will have witnessed most of the transition from niche to lowest common denominator. Everyone knows the adage that 100k is the subreddit limit after which the community breaks down. It would happen here too. The discourse here is uncannily like the 2009 Reddit I remember. People are polite and well informed. I hope the localised and open nature of the service keeps it that way.
Prediction: Reddit will become a cesspit of advertising and data harvesting, a la Facebook. It’s most of the way there already.
Been on Reddit for about 8 years, but I’ve seen enough. Once a company starts treating you like trash, it’s time to go. These things have happened with other platforms too, and I’ve always found a better alternative somewhere.
Same reason here. Even tho I’m quite a recent user to be honest of Reddit (only got in 2020)
You remember when Reddiquette was a thing? I remember when Reddiquette was a thing.
16yrs My account was older than my kid. It feels like some weird breakup. At times I miss it but I feel better for moving on. Lemmy feels like early reddit did so I’m hopeful that the community will continue to grow.
Would have been 12 years this month. I left when they pulled that crap with Christian (Apollo), he’s a friend IRL and I support him 100%.
I’m loosely friendly with Lawrence from Sync. Same boat here
I’m not friends with either of them, never even met them, but I left for the same reason: it doesn’t have to be happening to me personally for me to realize I want no part of that shit. (That, and gleefully fucking over the accessibility users at the same time. Pick one.)
Either way,
“This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass.” – Walter Sobchak
I’m a simple man. I see Lebowski references, i upvote
Man, when I wrote that I was SO close to going with “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps” (because that was the censors fucking the script in the ass) but then I thought, nah, too meta. Reading your comment makes me think I should have gone with it, lol. I too upvote Little Lebowski-isms in the wild.
Sadly I still have to visit reddit for various things. Mostly just for niche questions I have for Google that are best answered on Reddit. Which is a lot.
16
14 year account
Welcome here!
12 years here. The day apollo died is the day I stopped logging into reddit.
And it is really hard. That was my default go to free time app. I spent AT LEAST 4 hours A DAY on reddit for most of those 12 years.
Its hard. But on the other hand that site disgusses me now.
I deleted my 11yr high karma account on 1st July. I had another before that which was a couple of years or so old.
I did it in protest but as an interesting side effect, my mental health has improved slightly. Guess actively engaging with toxicity does have an effect.
12 years, left when Apollo stopped working and went to Lemmy.world… left to another instance today when they started blocking certain communities
Bacon it was my jam. Spent 11 years there. Only slightly miss it to be honest.
13 years on Reddit. I was part of the Great Digg Exodus… now the Great Reddit Exodus.
I deleted all my comments on Reddit, all of my posts, and then toasted my user account just before the API deadline. Not looking back.
I deleted all my comments on Reddit, all of my posts, and then toasted my user account
Are you sure about that? There were some reported cases of Reddit bringing back the content. They only listen to GDPR complaints (or that one Californian equivalent).
Son-of-a-bitch. I just searched with Google… and almost ALL my old comments are back. The user attribution is [deleted], but almost all the content of 13 or 14 years of comments has been restored. In a few cases, a top-level comment has not been restored, but everywhere in sub-comment conversations, I see my old content… content I know I explicitly deleted.
So, even though I explicitly deleted my contributions, they ignored and restored it. What an asshole move by the Reddit admins. And of course, now that my account has been deleted there’s no way to follow up and re-remove all my contributions.
I wonder. Considering that the vast majority of my comments on Reddit were done while I lived in Europe if I can use GPRD and insist they remove it all.
