I felt this way about Twitter early on because Twitter for me was the third social media platform I ever experienced growing up, only with MySpace and Facebook before it.

It's sad to see Reddit go this way, but my solace is that the communities that make Reddit will survive one way or another. I'm just hoping Lemmy sees a better adoption than Mastodon has so far. I want both to thrive but I'm especially hoping for Lemmy since I spend/spent more of my time on Reddit.

Remember that legendary times when reddit was new?

That's what's happening now in the fediverse with Lemmy and kbin, I am to excited being a part of it as to mourn about reedit.

Nope, not at all. All products and services inevitably kill themselves when they prioritize growth against providing a high-quality service. Infinite growth is impossible and when the service's growth hits its natural limit, it will introduce quality setbacks to reach the profit goals. I'll miss the contributors on Reddit who made its communities great, but I also know these communities and their users will survive without Reddit. As for Reddit the corporation itself...

I’m mostly just upset about the fact that healthy niche communities that existed on Reddit are likely to die rather than migrate in earnest. Reddit itself has been feeling downhill pretty much from the moment I joined, but it was the only service that managed to have not only very specific niche communities, but a wealth of active ones with quality contributors.

I just joined here and haven’t lurked too much, but the format here looks nice to foster that type of growth over time. I just hope it can be rebuilt to even a portion of what I’m leaving behind.

Yes, absolutely. I love(d) Reddit! All the niche communities, all the subs that I enjoyed so much, like r/whowouldwin and r/tiktokcringe and r/askhistorians and so many more :(

I admit, I have sentimentality attached there. It sucks. It does feel almost like the loss of a friend.

I'm still expecting a relatively slow death for Reddit, perhaps even not a total one like with Digg's quick and complete collapse. I'll be sticking around Reddit past the June 30 horizon, I'll just be doing it entirely via my desktop browser. I'll probably only stop going once they get rid of Old Reddit.

This means that there'll be a gradual winding down of the communities I pay attention to, accompanied by a gradual migration to places like here. Hopefully little will be lost in the process.

Yes and no, as a 12 year vet.

Reddit is not what it was when I joined. Back in the early 2010's reddit really felt like the internet's evolution from forums. Not going to pretend it was the first, but it really did feel like something was special about it. The community aspect was really important back then. All of the sudden, it felt like you could literally build a community around anything, with little effort, and the "Build it and they will come" factor would kick in.

But things have spoiled since then. We have over a decade worth of "Eternal Septembers", and being a redditor turned into "being a redditor" has turned into, we'll it's just another part of social media infrastructure. Pretty much everybody I know who has use the site has basically sectioned themselves off from using the site as a a whole and just have their specific subs that they browse. I'm a programmer so I basically just use it for the programming subs and different games I play like OSRS, Factorio, etc.

And I guess, a last thought, I don't think reddit is going to die from this. I would wager the vast majority of the userbase really doesn't give a shit, and to be honest, that is fine. Like I said, reddit is part of internet social infrastructure at this point. It's probably still going to be useful to prefix google searches with "reddit some product" to find the best human reviews of that product. But for me, I don't really feel the need to keep using it day to day. I'm looking for a community and I can find it elsewhere.

@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.

Been on Reddit for 15 years. Will probably hang on to a few communities that only exist there for a while longer.

I was sad and sentimental about it when it started dying years ago. The desperate "must grow until implode" path that all corporate owned platforms follow, is inevitable. At some point it'll suck too much for you to tolerate.

Make a first-party mobile app for a site that would be fine on web. Sell premium subscriptions. Sell microtransactions. Insert ads. Insert more ads. Insert ads inbetween content. Make the ads look like content. Put usability features behind Premium subscription and forbid integrations that do similar things. Try to be tiktok? Try to be a social network. Short videos! Try to be Youtube? Try to be Twitch!

I made the decision to leave Reddit after Apollo was announced to be shutting down. I'll hang around until Apollo dies, but I'm already mourning the loss of niche communities. I can only hope that they'll be replicated here.

On the bright side, this place being smaller in terms of userbase makes it less intimidating for me to comment more often.

Thing is, it already has a mainstream audience with the majority of its users on the official app and using the garbage redesigned website.

Just wondering if the mods and people actually making content are part of that audience or not.

I'm hoping no, and that reddit will fail like Digg given its horrible decision making the last few days. May that IPO crash and burn.

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.

Can we also have a moment of silence for all the other great link sites that have died?

Stumbleupon, kuro5hin, digg, fark (still exists technically but as a shell of its former self)

What was your favorite before reddit?

Reddit in general was never really a good place in my opinion. There are some really great subreddits with a nice community and good moderation. But Reddit in general? There’s far too much racism and misogyny covered up or even encouraged by the admins.

I’m going to miss what it could have and me leaving the site has begun years ago when I left all default subreddits. All this now is part of the enshittification of the internet and most people don’t seem to care. They still use Twitter, they continue using Instagram and they will continue using Reddit because they prefer what the companies tell them is a good user experience. They now prefer ads and an easy onboarding process to enhanced privacy and some missing features.

Yes and no, I loved reddit's simplicity and compatibility with third-party applications. There was basically a subreddit for everything.

My feelings about reddit started to change when they implemented the new reddit frontend. Another change was that some big subreddits have mods who are on a power trip - so a simple discussion was impossible. Now they have taken away my favorite application - Apollo.

I'm pretty sure reddit will survive, but with worse content anyway, because reddit as a business doesn't care about quality of content, they only care about engagement.

On the other hand, I'm "happy" reddit did what they did, and because such a decision to limit the API or introduce nonsense only promotes the development of a federated and decentralized social internet. It reminds me of the "old internet", which I miss a lot, and I'm very happy to see its revival and people using it.

I'm going to miss the Star Trek sub but I am hoping the Lemmy one will pick up.

Overall, Reddit has suffered over the years allowing blatant right wing build ups to take root. My old local sub was seeing dog whistles pop up and general quality of the sub sufferes, even more so when the local football people came over and brought their 'banter' with them along with shit posts. The mods didn't really do anything to guide the quality of the sub and I left it last year. Today I deleted my account. No regrets.

I know how you feel, reddit felt different from other sites for me because it had so much info nested in a fairly accessible way, there's so many communities with so much personal lore, discussion and knowledge of such particular things and hobbies.

I'm not sure the direction they're trying to take reddit will manage to keep that vibrant part of the site alive.

I've checked out for a couple years ago.

In many ecosystems, wildfires are nature's way of regenerating the earth,