I joined lemmy.ml because the join-lemmy site gave me extremely little to go on. It was a coin toss between this and beehaw.org once I realized how few instances were established and not right-wing.
That was only 2 weeks ago and already I've seen the site force 2 server upgrades, even as the admins have strongly encouraged new users to join elsewhere to prevent centralization.
The instance list desperately needs a few columns added, including whether new signups are encouraged or discouraged.
No, my subscription to [email protected]. I've been able to sub to other instance's communities fine in general. In this case I wondered if it required approval because I see this:
How do I move my subscription past the pending status?
What do we need to do to move forward?
Accept that much or most of reddit will look normal tomorrow. Reddit will proceed by projecting that everything is normal, whether true or not. Lemmy will continue to be an alternative with FOSS benefits and much smaller communities. Your own habits have to reflect what you want and there's no wrong answer.
I'm personally elated to find the smaller communities with higher-quality content. Thoughtful comments aren't buried under piles of karma-seeking horse-beating jokes.
At the same time, reddit continues to offer historical reference that won't be matched elsewhere anytime soon. I'm not going to rant as if the place has no value, or as if it can be replaced in a few weeks.
Lots to consider.
Are we defining failure by their standards, or ours?
When my favorite communities were wrecked by being moved to front page, default-for-new-users and flooded with low effort content that may as well have been bot spam, it failed me.
When they made an API policy that ostensibly allowed profitability (despite charging far beyond what they might make from ads on the official mobile app) and avoided training by AI (despite refusing to grandfather in known 3PA and offering to approve new ones), it failed me again.
If I'm soon unable to access the site via the old.reddit interface to avoid intrusive ads, it will fail me yet again.
I won't be surprised if others add more failures to this list.
Maybe reddit makes money hand-over-fist from these changes without me, you, nsfw content creators, licensing / API fees from all current popular 3PA apps, and whoever else. I'm not eager to characterize this as success because VC's get their money back.
There are sorts by hot and top, yes. I don't know the details of voting and/or replies that score comment order.
We waited for our images to load one line at a time and we were grateful, dammit!
There are actually some legit anti-spam reasons that reddit has been obfuscating vote counts and totals for a long time now. Even if this wasn't a known phenomenon, I don't think I'd trust the API call results anyway.
There's no accumulated karma score though. People should be less sensitive about downvotes and I'm hoping it will mitigate low effort karma-seeking content, at least somewhat.
Pffffft maybe you, but I don't have cognitive biases! Anchor pricing doesn't work on me either because, raises nose, I know all about it.
Reddit is already ashes of what it once was.
I think reddit peaked around the time it started changing which subs were front page (8-10 years ago now?). One place I was very active at the time moved from being a medium size, great community to being overwhelmed by people who had no sincere interest in the topic but were happy to karma removed.
The sub became larger than ever by capitalizing on the community that built it but its value about its topic evaporated. Reddit has been making similar moves ever since. Karma-removed dominates pretty much every non-niche sub now.
*The removed that caught the filter refers to the act of getting something in exchange for performing an act eyeroll
The very minor and surmountable technical barrier of joining the fediverse will do wonders to screen out users capable only of the lowest effort.