I was just browsing a thread on c/nfl looking for new mods. There were multiple 12+ year Redditors there offering to help.
Got me wondering. There are 14,000 of us in this community. How many of us are ten year plus users who have just had enough?
Edit: I didn’t expect this post to be as poignant as it became. There are so many of you… I can’t reply to everyone. I’m an 11 year user and have modded something like 150 subs over the years. I’m really sad too, but I’m finding that lemmy has most of the content I’m looking for, just needs more comments.
The API was a big blow, but removing awards on past posts and deleting coin balances is really dumb.
13 or 14 years here. I didn’t delete my account but I don’t even want to give them the traffic from going back to see my join date.
Same
Me too
Same. I just refuse to click on Reddit links. Been on it for atrium 12 years.
Same here. Started on Reddit around 2010. Haven’t been back since Apollo shutdown.
Ah found my spirit animal.
16yrs My account was older than my kid. It feels like some weird breakup. At times I miss it but I feel better for moving on. Lemmy feels like early reddit did so I’m hopeful that the community will continue to grow.
I would imagine the 10+ demographic has the highest rates of attrition. Those people will have witnessed most of the transition from niche to lowest common denominator. Everyone knows the adage that 100k is the subreddit limit after which the community breaks down. It would happen here too. The discourse here is uncannily like the 2009 Reddit I remember. People are polite and well informed. I hope the localised and open nature of the service keeps it that way.
Prediction: Reddit will become a cesspit of advertising and data harvesting, a la Facebook. It’s most of the way there already.
You remember when Reddiquette was a thing? I remember when Reddiquette was a thing.
Been on Reddit for about 8 years, but I’ve seen enough. Once a company starts treating you like trash, it’s time to go. These things have happened with other platforms too, and I’ve always found a better alternative somewhere.
Same reason here. Even tho I’m quite a recent user to be honest of Reddit (only got in 2020)
Would have been 12 years this month. I left when they pulled that crap with Christian (Apollo), he’s a friend IRL and I support him 100%.
I’m loosely friendly with Lawrence from Sync. Same boat here
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I’m a simple man. I see Lebowski references, i upvote
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I was 2006 adopter when Paul Graham dropped a link to it on his website. I was there before the original programming subdomain Reddit and even before they supported picture thumbnails. I’ve seen its wild mutations over the years. Bacon, narwhal, Mr Splashypants, Colbert name dropping, the original video IAMAs, the jailbait fiasco, spacedicks, random celebrity users, the redesign from hell, etc etc.
I left.
It was a good site for a long time but after being on Lemmy for a while I can see a clear difference in experience and now I realize Reddit has been bad for a while. Terrible discourse, lowest common denominator posts, and falling into the trap of continuous engagement just to get the next hit of dopamine. Honestly, spez ruining the site has been good for me personally.
I’m proud of our rejection of a commercial online experience. This is the thoughtful community I want to be a part of. This feels like the Internet of the late 90s in terms of authenticity. With its revival with the Fediverse I’m hopeful that these types of communities will forever be part of our digital experience.
16+ years. Learned about it from Joel Spolsky’s blog.
I pretty much agree 100% with your characterization of the decline and your overall experience.
I also hadn’t realized how dysfunctional Reddit had become or how much I’d tried to adapt to that dysfunction.
Sadly I still have to visit reddit for various things. Mostly just for niche questions I have for Google that are best answered on Reddit. Which is a lot.
16
I was there since 2010, then I got banned for getting into spats with fascists. Fuck’em all. Reddit sucks. Free speech my ass.
14 years with an account. A year or so of lurking before that.
Sites come and go.
I like telling stories of the olden days of the internet. Like being user #132 on mp3.com and having chats with people like Darude (before sandstorm) and Dido (before Eminem). It was an amazing place. Now it isn’t.
Reddit will follow.
As they all do
Edit: I also had the comment of the day on Reddit once.
It had 500 upvotes.
I was also a beta tester for duckduckgo. Not the app, the site/engine. When everyone else was putting him down, I believed.
That’s how long I was on there.
Once had a front page rage comic… man I was flying high that day!
Yeah, I was never a fan of Scrubs, but several years into the show I heard Lazlo Bane’s “Superman” in the show titles and I was like… huh, they got that from MP3.com? Turns out Zach Braff was friends with the band members.
I still have lots of MP3.com stuff in my music archive, including folks who never made the transition to Youtube and pretty much don’t exist on the Internet at all anymore.
Jolly Rancher
3 shells?
Gargh!
Swamps of Dagobah
My greatest internet achievement: I came up with the name for that story!
Okay, not quite, I came up with calling it “The Dagobah Story”, but close enough! :D
13 years one account, 9 years the other.
After the API enshittification clarion, I sat down for hours and munged every. single. damn. comment with a complaint about this.
THEN I deleted the accounts.
For now, Lemmy is merely potential, but shaping up. Mastodon is microblogging and is built around individuals promoting themselves, so it feels egotistical, but it’s more mature than Lemmy so I lurk there for now too.
Ultimately I am a forum user, as a participant in a conversation. Looking forward to that again.
Don’t know my exact age and can’t check as I post this because I refuse to visit reddit on my phone via anything but Apollo. But I’m pretty sure I’m 10+.
I do miss it. Once a month or so I’ll go peek at a couple smaller communities/game communities I was in that don’t have a Lemmy equivalent yet.
But I don’t comment anymore. I canceled my reddit premium the moment Apollo mentioned shut down. And I learned how to use the stronger mode of uBlock Origin to ensure they get as little from me as possible.
The site as I see it os shattered and barely functional. I can let what I’m used to shine through when I really want to by enabling certain domains to pass through uBlock Origin and NoScript. But tbh the shattered state is kind of fittingly metaphorical.
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12 years, deleted my account and overwrote all posts and comments I could before I did so.
I don’t really want to think about it being that long, considering how quickly I up and left as soon as RiF was supposed to shut down. Not relying on Reddit for Google results is practically impossible for me.
Bacon it was my jam. Spent 11 years there. Only slightly miss it to be honest.