Why is this subreddit now just askreddit for movies?
Some time in the last few months, r/movies has been entirely consumed by askreddit-style questions like "What's your favorite hidden gem??" or "What actor fell off the map??"
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What is now causing all these unique, seemingly-non-bot posters to suddenly start flooding this particular subreddit with their discussion posts, instead of going to askreddit? Did the whole reddit protest shit change the moderation rules? Has the subreddit been infiltrated by a secret Buzzfeed content farming cabal? I unsubscribed from r/askreddit because I got sick of this shit, but now it's back on r/movies!
What is going on??
I think the comments are most interesting though
Because the audience for reddit has dwindled since July. Reddits offial site and app push controversial posts over just well yovkted ones. Most controversial posts asks inane questions. Then there's bots reposting those questions for karma and then websites juicing social media for content to get crammed down your throat via SEO.
They should make a second internet just for people
This all started with the boycott.
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I’d assumed things would go back to “normal” after the boycott, but it looks like a lot of power users really did take their ball and go home. (I wonder what they’re doing with their time instead? Hopefully some new hobbies? Time with friends?) Maybe reddit will regret removing the 3rd party apps, after all? Maybe we’ll just accept a future where niche subs become little more than BuzzFeed polls, but we get paid if our poll does well, so users won’t care?
It's because Reddit is trying to drive engagement. I don't know if you noticed, but since the purge of third-party apps, the comment sections have been kind of meager, and things don't get as many upvotes as they used to. Heck, half the comments act like bots anyway. It seems like reddit has been distilled down to those most addicted to it and has taken a hard lean into all the most extreme views.
When Reddit killed third party apps, the quality fell off all over the place. It took me about a month to realize the timing and why r/all had so much AITA rage bait stories and celebrity gossip and stuff now. I think a lot of the quality posters and people who liked more high brow discussions just left Reddit.
I think the issue here is that there's a sweet spot where quantity and quality are in equilibrium. You NEED a certain quantity before you have a high chance of finding insightful comments on a given topic -- to simplify things, if there's a 1% chance a given comment is going to be from an expert with great insight, you have a ~9.6% chance of finding that on a post with 10 comments and a ~63% chance of finding that on a post with 100 comments. The threadiverse just hasn't hit that threshold yet.
Of course, there's a tipping point which reddit is long past, where higher and higher quantities start to drown out the insightful posts with memes and quips, or downvote and mock them with a confidently wrong counter-opinion the mob wants to hear more.
I hope the barriers to entry with decentralized services that the masses find "confusing" are such that we eventually manage to reach equilibirum and not tip too terribly far past it.
Oh I agree completely (and thought about going off on a tangent about "critical mass" myself but decided against it). It's a rough path towards reaching that point, though, if we can't have enough discussions to draw those kinds of people in and keep them around in the first place. I agree, also, about the "signal-to-noise ratio" on reddit being too low in general nowadays - especially post-third-party apps controversy - although I think that's preferable to there simply not being enough quality content in the first place; good moderation (not that reddit has much of that nowadays...) can deal with the noise, whereas it can't make up for lack of substantial comments.
I'm not sure what the best way to address the barriers to entry to the fediverse might be, but I've thought that the various apps either hosting their own instances or partnering with other instances to funnel users towards them and streamline the signup process would probably be a good first step. I think having some barrier to entry is a good thing, though - so we don't tip too far past that equilibrium.
I'd like to see more outreach initiatives in posting Lemmy content to Reddit. Nobody not specifically looking for Lemmy is going to even be aware that it exists. Think about how many times the same posts hits #1 on /r/all. The API protest was massive and I would still guess that less than one percent of Redditors have even considered alternatives like kbin/lemmy exist.
I'm personally not worried about growing too much because instances can only get so big and still afford to be online. There's no incentive to grow an instance beyond sustainability.
I thought I might leave Reddit entirely, but then I realized this as well. So I have taken to posting some things exclusively here, some very few things also there, and when I do post there I post here first then just share the link.
On the other hand, keeping in mind that my "here" is Kbin not Lemmy, I've more or less ceased most of my encouragement to try to get people to join b/c of all the bugs that have been present - some of which seem fixed now but overall the set of features present in Kbin is very much behind Lemmy, which is itself enormously behind Reddit still. It makes sense: people were "hopeful" about Kbin/Lemmy, but to actually realize that hope has been slow going. And that too makes sense: Ernst has had family issues that MUST take priority, although it has greatly slowed down integrations of fixes that others have offered into the main code, for a time. And too there is the fact that Kbin, like many Lemmy instances, has been under DDOS attack. These things take time to develop even under the most ideal circumstances, and all the more so in the face of such challenges. Overall, Kbin is still alpha version software at this point.
And even Lemmy is still just a beta version. e.g. just to name one example: you still cannot migrate from one instance to another across the Fediverse, so whatever instance you choose to join is basically a permanent decision - like if you ask all your friends to come with you from Reddit and then jump ship yet again, you risk alienating them by leaving them behind as you hop around looking for the greenest grass. Joining instances here is nothing at all like casually joining subs on Reddit - they will need to learn all about that, and what it means, and how to curate their experiences here, etc.
In comparison, for now at least old-reddit or even new-reddit on a mobile browser with ad-blocking meets many people's needs, especially with "everyone" more or less remaining behind on Reddit, and it is a tough sell to try to tell them to give all that up for an objectively worse UI/UX experience (the cost-to-benefit tradeoff is worthwhile to us, but is it to them?). At this point, those with the "early adopter" mindset are already here, and more importantly the content creators have already made their choices too. (Though if Reddit kills off old-reddit, that could change things in a BIG way)
I am not saying that there would be no value in such outreach initiatives, just that they have already happened and yet here we are. At this point it may be worth looking into the reasons why people who already know about Lemmy/Kbin have not chosen to come here. And on some level we just need to be okay with the fact that we are likely going to be small for a long time, especially as the code continues to be developed to help it catch up.
Unless Threads causes things to change much more quickly... which it very well could.
(edit: added UI/UX)