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Relationships with products are worth thinking about. Reddit, other people's content was the product. Reddit was just the gatekeeper. Most social media sites are like this. They want to be able to control what we see so that they can sell that access. Then once they have control they can really ratchet up the costs. Facebook's walled garden is an example. You might remember the video content apocalypse several years ago. That was one of their attempts to control what everyone saw and it turned out all their watch time data was bullshit and their ad rev fell out the bottom and ruined 100s of great shows and stifled careers. After Hours on Cracked even mentions it in their own show, rip. Not that they're good otherwise, but Reddit saw chatGPT just make a fuckzillion dollars off of Reddit data and realized they were being too generous with their gatekeeping.

I'm not at all sad about walking away from that kind of relationship.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

I'll still be browsing it with Reeder 5. When they shut off RSS then I'll be completely gone.

I've been mourning Reddit since the r/all porn ban. Content quality overall went downhill, and there were no distractions to the decline left.

For me, this past week or so has just been watching the death throes, and finally looking for something else to move to.

Truthfully? Mixed feelings.

I've mainly been a lurker on Reddit on account of the Reddit userbase being...well, rude sometimes. I disliked using it as a user ever since this time I asked a question and had to reply to like, 5 different comments apologizing for the way I phrased things. I wasn't even being offensive. It was a innocent request for books! I just apparently had to specify "mainstream" instead of phrasing it as "likely to be found at a library".

However, I won't lie when I say it has valuable resources that people put a lot of effort into. For example, I really appreciated /r/EOOD and /r/Fantasy. One is a small community dedicated to exercising more to help with depression, and many people are nice there. The other is a community dedicated to fantasy books, and the resources there are immense. Loved it.

I was introduced to Reddit thanks to CGPgrey and have been using it since high school, It's definitely sad to see it dying but I'll just treat it as the end of yet another phase of the internet. Such is the will of the sands of time.

I would probably say mourn is a strong word, but it is probably appropriate. I used to use reddit to keep up to date with various topics and to share in the community with some niche circles. Unfortunately, the writing is on the wall and it's time to stop reminiscing on better times. I'm here now, looking forward to learn this site.

I've never been too sentimental about anything dying or changing into something else. Especially with Reddit since the CEO is so hell bent on converting it into your typical social media.

But no, I'm not too sad about it. Everything has it's time. Things come and go but the memories you make there certainly aren't invalidated by things going to shit.

Not really, This seems just as good, plus its a smaller community so not as many assholes.

for me its going to be very melancholic to see something I've (unfortunately) spent years on. I will actually be sad to see it go, not the app itself but all the smaller communities and the wiki's and all the knowledge that was shared. It was inevitable but I didn't think it would be so soon or so quick.

At the same time, good riddance.

I think this is one of the first pushes where convivences don't mesh with security. We have been taken advantage of for a very long time, and very easily. This type of diversification I feel will ultimately be healthy.

Personally, I've moved past that stage to the urinating on its grave stage.

I didn't mourn Digg, I won't mourn Reddit.

It's normal to grieve. If reddit were a spouse, I'd have one hell of a marriage (in a good way). Eleven years and multiple hours of interaction each day?

I've grown concerned how reddit has such a monopoly on message boards. (As I am still concerned at the monopoly Twitter has had). Like, it's to a point where I was googling the word "reddit" next to my question to get good answers. This is a testament to the community there.

The nice thing here is that Lemmy demonstrates that some competition exists. I can still have a fun chat online without relying solely on one company.

i’m mourning it a bit, but to be honest i think it’s going to be a bit difficult for me to get off for a while until other places (aside from facebook, which i’d much prefer to avoid over the current iteration of reddit) have the same amount of niche communities. for example, i’m in a private pregnancy subreddit with other people with my same due date and it’s reallllly useful in comparing notes and feeling like i’m not going insane at any given symptom and i think it’ll take a while for a place like lemmy to have an audience big enough to build niche communities like that.

Sentimental in the sense that I have been a Reddit user for 16 years and this makes me feel really really old. And in internet years Reddit is even older, I would have excepted it to die already years ago and it seems exceptional that it has kept going for this long.

Back when Reddit was starting to get popular I was mildly annoyed and suspicious of it and all these other new fangled web2.0 things but slowly it replaced random forums, news groups, irc and other old school platforms for me. To me Reddit sits somewhere between those and the more modern and "social" web platforms and as such it feels like a relic from the early 2000s that probably has no place in the modern internet. Bit like me myself actually ("Hey, you should post that on Reddit!" is the usual ironic response that I get from my kids whenever I say something really funny or insightful...)

And like others here I'm worried about all the niche communities and losing the vast source of content that Reddit has accumulated. Sure, most of it is low effort shit as usual but especially with how bad Google has become Reddit is now my first choice when I need to get an overview of some new topic.

That said I have been planning to delete my Reddit account for a while now. After all these years it has got stale, the hive mind is predictable and it feels like I have seen all the same conversations and topics already too many times. I don't need to read any threads on more popular subs since I already know what the most upvoted opinions, memes and jokes are going to be. And it seems like every few years they piss off their userbase in some way, who then threaten to quit and find something better and surely this the end of Reddit, and then nothing happens.

It's old. I think it's time to let it go now.

@Showervagina that's too bad. It sucks when the community in your country is picking up steam (i.e. local subs on specific topic springing up, other existing communities getting more active etc.) - as the world is not only the US and not only English speaking even.

I know I might be going against the stream, but I think I will stay on Reddit until it fills with spam and shit or until Reddit goes along Musks's oh-we-love-free-speech-but-we-must-comply-with-countries-laws-that-don't-bussiness-is-bussiness-bro and starts deleting posts at the request of governments.

I actually liked silly shitposts/memes that reach the top of /r/funny and the like. The good ones were far and in between but there was just so many people posting that you’d see a good one per day

I don't plan to stop using it. I'm annoyed by the changes but it is what it is. I doubt Lemmy will be the same level of resource that Reddit is. Lemmy is still great, don't get me wrong, but to think that entire communities might migrate over is a bit farfetched. Most people are still very confused about how federation exactly works.

I made a post this morning that I didn't quite realize until afterwards was a "goodbye" post. I did get misty-eyed towards the end of writing it. :(

I would probably be more upset if I hadn't been permanently banned for saying 2 people harassing a disabled person in a video should be found out and held accountable.

Investment usually ultimately ruins everything. In reddit's case it's an even tighter needle to thread because the platform itself produces little value. To be attractive to investors and to produce returns on that investment (perpetually), they have to make operational decisions that prioritize monetization (like all public companies).

u/spez wants his big exit and he'll burn some of it to the ground to get it. But he'll probably get rich, so good for him.

Not really. Reddit has been an addiction for me at best, and a thorn in my side at worst.

What ruined Reddit for me was the community moderation. Not gonna name specific users but some of them are real assholes who will ban you because you violated some hidden rule not advertised on their subreddit, because you participated in another subreddit they don't like, or because they just had a bad day and felt like screwing with you.

Reddit has become this partisan mess where the right view you as a Commie if your beliefs are anywhere further left than Donald Trump, and where the left view you as a Nazi if your beliefs are further right than Bernie Sanders. Participate in the wrong community and you end up having a bot ban you from dozens of other subs. This goes entirely against the ethos that Reddit was originally founded on.

The worst part is that I cannot even use words like 'trump', 'incel', 'cuck', 'snowflake' etc on Reddit because most of the moderators have shadowbanned people from using such terminology.

I've been a Reddit user since 2010, shortly before the Digg-exodus, and I have never seen the website in such a bad state before. Only wish there was an alternative that wasn't a right-wing cesspool. Lemmy may be it.

I thought I would be more sad deleting all 10 years of content today. It's been cathartic. The place I joined is long gone, and there is not much left to mourn.

Personally I'm glad to let it go. The site has been a source of frustration for me (not all the time but there's just some uniquely reddit things that get tiresome to run into constantly) for many reasons and having a reason to step away from it has made me realize I will only miss the one community on there I was active in.

The rest, I will let fade away from my memory and let it be.

Not really? Reddit has been on the downhill slide for ages now. I made this account two years ago, but there hasn't been enough content here to really do anything with until now. For me, it's like "eh, eff em," and has been for awhile, even before the API changes.

Nope they did this to themselves. They are just trying to squeeze more profits before they probably sell.

It honestly feels more like leaving a bad relationship. I didn't realize how bad things had gotten until I left.

I'm going to miss it for sure. I keep finding myself starting to go to reddit when I'm bored. Its going to take some time to get used to the nuances of Lemmy.

In a way, I mourned for reddit a long time ago. I stumbled (literally, stumbleUpon'd) reddit way back before the great Digg migration, when it was still mostly a haven for techies. The site went through a great many changes. Some good, some bad, some just... different.

At some point it got a little much. I've known for a number of years that I was growing increasingly alienated from it. Part of it was the Nazis and Reddit's inability or unwillingness to deal with any of the hate and bots. Part of it was the pervasive meme / low effort image culture. Those things were always there, but there was a time it'd get you the stink eye and an annoyed upvote.

Besides Hackernews (which has always been full of a certain Silicon Valley type), there wasn't really too many places to go. I've just been kinda waiting in the funeral parlor, hoping a ride to something else would come while I mostly browse the niche subreddits.

It's my hope that this incident starts the seeds of old forum culture as expressed through multiple lemmys. That's a pretty ambitious hope, but still. It's well past the time for the big social media networks to break up.