I came late to Reddit myself but even I noticed that happening during the pandemic. The decline was rather speedy, sharp, and extensive (affecting all subs).

And we could even track some of those to specific implementations or lack thereof of features by Reddit. Like how their search feature sucked so bad, thereby encouraging people to write a (still yet another) post to ask rather than look up an existing highly crafted and well-researched answer that even if posted a mere week prior still would not show up in the algorithmic feed pushing all the latest noise to the absolute tippy-top. And mods were forbidden from pinning more than two posts. And even those only showed up when sorting by Hot. And maybe not even then in some apps. And you couldn't consolidate ones bc the moderation tools sucked so damn hard, e.g. posts made by Auto Mod could not be edited later by the very same mod team who requested that the post be made. Every damnable one of these things increases apparent engagement metrics like "number of posts", but at the expense of actually connecting people with the information that they wanted to receive. :-(

To which we can say "fuck spez", but it's deeper than that bc of the chasing after profits to the expense of all else that led to that, as in if it wasn't him that did it then it would have merely been someone else instead.

[–] actually@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It always amazed me that Reddit stopped adding new stuff to make it easier ; instead the only changes in years was all the stuff making commotions and scandals.

It’s like they purposefully exist in a frozen tech made years ago and innovation is not something helpful to their business model.

The enshitification and out of touch culture came from a deeply entrenched mindset in the Reddit offices years ago

[–] JoYo@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 weeks ago

i get the same "frozen" tech feeling from google products. like, there's issues that any dev that actually uses their own product would want to fix.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yes but... while they are greedy MFers, part of the problem is that they did need to find a way to make the whole affair profitable, not only for that goal by itself but also so that it could be sustainable. A lot of the controversy is in how he tried to accomplish that goal, not that he needed to do so - bc any company needs to be sustainable.

Reddit is likewise far from the only tech product that has been enshittified by chasing after profits to the exclusion of all else, so there's that too. And I'm not even going to go down the rabbit hole of how much of this chases back to some changes in USA governmental policies at the time (Republicans were in charge of basically everything in ~2019).

Ultimately, Huffman has set himself up as the fall guy - the effigy to hold our attention and hate despite how he merely carried out the will of his masters, the venture capitalist bros behind him. So fuck spez, but also... not just him.

Though his ideas and execution of them were really fucking spectacularly BAD, so yeah, maybe him more than capitalism even. e.g. the Musk is really dumb, but then along comes Huffman who worships at the guy's feet, thereby making himself somehow even dumber!?!?

So yeah, all their changes were designed to get profits. They didn't work bc again they are REALLY dumb, and did not understand the slightest thing about ~~humanity~~ their userbase, but that didn't stop them from trying to fleece people of as much money as they could. i.e., their stupidity was only outpaced by their greed. 😞