Reddit is the perfect metaphor for America. What was once a beautiful and accessible tapestry of independent contributions, has been gated and monetized. Now it is a place for slop, misinformation, and vitriol.
That it receives support in this form speaks to the mental health of its participants.
What was once a beautiful and accessible tapestry of independent contributions
Reddit has been flooded with bots for decades. Bot engagement was a strategy the firm used to outcompetes Digg, as admins discovered any kind of engagement in comments juiced human participation.
The site’s had quality contributions in the past. I’d argue it still does, in the more neglected and low pop corners of the site. But it’s central thesis of stack-ranked engagement and search optimized meta-tagging fueled the worst kind of online participation straight back to the early days.
Reddit’s last ten years of decline has more to do with the overall decline of the Internet as a service than anything the admins have done directly. Humans have been crowded out by automated promotion tools and AI Slop everywhere. Reddit’s just a big popular spot that got hit hardest.
It was never a good site.
what’s next? Geocities?
Myspace
It would be hilarious if Tom came back from his vacation and absolutely destroyed everyone by making an actually good website.
No idea. I’ll have to Ask Jeeves.
Isn’t NeoCities exactly that ?
Encarta it
I’m getting all Angelfire’d up at this prospect!
I used angelfire to start my password stealing mission. People are stupid as fuck with security. They would login to a fake aol login with a Yahoo account 🤣
Within 24 hours had 1500 usernames and passwords, I shut that shit down reallll quick.
For context, one year:

And that’s without the full vertical axis. There’s like $100 of empty space beneath what’s showing.
Not to mention it already bounced back…

The image shows a line that goes up and down, ending about the same value as it started
Who needs AI when you can answer your own prompts!
Blind people need image transcriptions.
Terrible UI. I have no idea why people put up with those fake divs that take forever to load in.
Will digg federate?
Love this!
That looks overvalued by about $228.495
Way to flex on all of us peasants with your .05c
Checks the P/E
106
Still absurdly overvalued. Let me know when it gets under 20
Well, I guess the diggers pushed it down this time. Still not joining, but I’m glad for the impact.
Wow, not a lot of engagement going on.
These things have value out if nothing
The value comes from expected value, hype. Yes, no real value, but the expectations inflate numbers. How tech companies are valued insanely high right now. Also quite a bit of Melon Husk’s wealth is that, numbers out of thin air.
I know and I am ever amazed that the current modern economy is made out of hype. That shit made sense when we were kids trading Pokémon cards
I envy your amazement, I am just disgusted this is running our world. By how it works it should be a playground for infantile idiots.
it’s not down because of digg, literally no investor cares about digg. It’s down because ad spending is down. Ad networks are spending steady on places like google and meta but they’re spending less on reddit.
Apparently this is because reddit sucks at the targeted ad game part and the advertisers feel they get a better return by just building a presence on the platform (eg bots that go “oh that’s cool. By the way have you tried the new Taco Bell™ PepsiCo™ Shitbowl®, now with 10% less petroleum byproducts?”).
This likely means they will become more aggressive about data collection and backend analysis of that data to get conversions up but they’ve been doing this for ages already. Reddits staff ballooned up long before the API fiasco and most of the hires were related to analytics. It only works if they can shift the culture away from nerd haven (aka people with adblockers who despise being advertised to and won’t click through) to facebook grandmas and ig normies that apparently love clicking ads.
They’re at least somewhat successful: while I and most of the people on this platform have shifted away from reddit they aren’t bleeding users like you want to believe. They’re not seeing exponential growth either, but they are seeing shifts to some of those populations. Anecdotally I have several family members in their 40s and 50s who were known for facebook drama and they are adopting tiktok and reddit nowadays. They eat up the obviously fake shit on relationshipadvice and places like that bc they’re primed from spending all day scrolling ig and youtube shorts to just digest content without any questioning of veracity and they ultimately love the outrage cycle.
All you said is probably accurate, but this one little dip was probably unrelated. It’s already back up to where it was.
Has ICE been advertising on /r/donald ?
Bring as many good Reddit users to Lemmy or Piefed and make it go down to zero.
good reddit users
You have a contradiction
Everyone who left before me is a pinko troll.
Everyone who left after me is a bad idiot.
diggs front page is more appealing than piefed or lemmys ever is (I prefer piefed/lemmy) But if I didn’t join these and just got banned off reddit, id be all over digg and not considering piefed or lemmy because of the perceived barrrier, might not even hear about them because of no advertising
Diggnation on revision 3 before YouTube existed
Totally forgot about digg, did not even know it was making a comeback. It even has the old logo on it, holy nostalgia















