Reddit delivered strong earnings, but the numbers beneath the surface tell a different story. Slowing logged-in user growth and AI-powered search could threaten the platform's long-term value.
I was a Reddit user since 2006. It was my place to be. Endless posts on everything, every niche hobby you can think of, global and often even local news, learning about cool new things… I loved it. It was always crazy to me to decide to read a news paper and find that pretty much everything in it I’d already knew from Reddit, often finding out days or weeks earlier.
It started out an amazing place, it really did seem like a global town square where we could all get together and talk about everything and anything. But like all the cool online and tech companies the focus became more and more on money, which meant controlling what people say and see and harvesting as much data as possible from them. Large companies need income, and if you aren’t the one paying then you always end up the product. So they started pushing more and more ads and fake posts and instead of being controlled by the people it became controlled by whoever throw the most money at any and every topic. Since going public they’ve ramped up the user fucking big time.
Trying to force mobile users to use their app so they can harvest more data? It’s a fucking website. The program you use to look at websites is a web browser. Having 1,000 apps on a phone that are virtually all to use websites is not ease of use, or user friendly, or sane. They seem to have toned this down due to backlash, but for a while you literally weren’t allowed to browse Reddit using mobile mode. If you tried it had a popup telling you to get the app and that was all. But if you switched the same browser window on the same device to desktop mode everything worked just fine. That’s nothing but saying “fuck you” so your user base.
Getting rid of /r/all so that everything everyone sees on their home page is controlled entirely by the algorithms instead of having any potential of it by being what was most interesting or talked about (even though the insane amount of bot up/down votes and comments was already wrecking that? Fuck you. I’ve seen people say you can still see /r/all if you use old reddit… but it’s fake. It’s not actually /r/all as it used to be. When you can click through a handful of pages and get told that there’s nothing else that’s very definitely not “all.” As a formerly socially awkward fat kid I’m certain I’ve gone hundreds of pages of deep before.
For years we had genuine news reports on different groups and companies using giant cell phone farms to spam up/down votes on the posts they’re paid to boost or kill off and actually paying rooms of people to work to control the public opinion/narrative on their product/company/political party/country/etc. Shilling went from mostly a conspiracy to something warping everything on the place.
AI has only made it worse since along with corporate/govt approved or disliked posts notably having thousands of up/down votes with only a handful of comments they can now spam comments as well. Humans are a social species. There is always pressure to fit in. When we see that pretty much everyone is saying a certain thing or has a certain opinion we’re far more likely to decide the same.
If someone makes a post saying “Israel killing tons of kids seems bad” it can be well thought out and link tons of evidence, but if it quickly has several comments about Israel having the right to defend itself and the constant child murder being fake news propaganda and antisemitism and making fun of the OP then the people who open it and check the comments will be more inclined to feel that way.
A post on “It’s crazy that the US did all this awful stuff to Iran” with lots of links to blowing up lots of little girls in school and sending a delayed second hit so anyone trying to help them dies too, actively causing a shortage of USD there to destroy the value of their currency and push people to protest, etc, and it quickly has many replies are all calling the OP a conspiracy nut and saying the US was trying to bring justice and freedom 'cause the evil Iranian leaders killed 100 million protestors… then most people who read glancingly without checking and considering all the evidence (most people) and who don’t have strong opinions on the matter already will be likely to jump in making fun of OP for supporting middle eastern governments 'cause they’re all terrorists.
It’s something pretty much all big companies and governments do now. They nearly all have large ‘social media’ or ‘PR’ departments that focus on controlling the public opinion on topics. For a lot of companies it started out as customer service, helping people out and trying to convince the public they’re awesome by doing cool shit. But it warped over time into more like just trying to convince everyone that shitty things about them don’t really exist. Loads of subs main mods or full mod teams are employees, and in a lot of places dissent and complaints are quickly deleted.
And finally… the site-wide AI powered “moderation.” Posts/comments can be near instantly automatically deleted and the user banned for a while for pretty much anything. It’s not something the sub mods can control or do anything about even though the threshold for causing it changes based on the sub and the topic. You can be auto deleted and banned for posting a dark joke in a sub dedicated to doing that. You can spend a month talking about guillotines everywhere with no issues, but be deleted and banned for simply using the word in a post about US politics. Saying that you hope people in the US are exercising their 2nd amendment rights so they can defend themselves if the worst happens or suggesting capital punishment for federal agents who murder innocent civilians is “threatening violence.”
Reddit is no longer a social platform for people to communicate with each other. That Reddit died a long, slow death, but it’s gone now. Reddit today exists to collect user data, train AI, sell products, and control public opinion and narratives, and it does that by selling out every topic to the highest bidder.
Sadly most people keep using it instead of coming here because it’s what they know and they miss what it was. I miss the days when I could browse endless new things just refreshing /r/all there too. It sucks that Lemmy moves so much slower, and the decentralized concept does make it more work to use and more difficult to navigate. But Reddit moves way slower now too. If you try to use their default “home” feed or the new /r/all you typically see mostly the same shit all day. Instead of constantly fresh it’s always stale. Hopefully more people notice that and get tired of the bullshit, and we can make Lemmy the new place where conversation is always fresh and there’s a home for every niche you can think of.
You know what else Reddit used to have? More comments like yours. You got it all nailed down in your observations. With intent, thought, and personality.
Same way you wrote a ridiculous yet thoroughly engaging “Elden Ring Journal” here on Lemmy (made my night lol).
That capacity for real people to have both the spaces and freedom to display themselves, whether that was them at their most intent focused in one community, or them at their most relaxed and silly in another, was one of the meta-qualities that their system didn’t intend by design but which became hands down the emergent quality that allowed them to even get to being what they became post 2005 and pre-July 1, 2023.
The moment they started doing all the fuckery you rightly noted, they killed the conditions in which that emergent property could thrive.
Reddit doesn’t just no longer feel the same because the system’s changed, but because the changes were done with no regards for what it did to the organization’s spirit, which for a web related property, has always been something defined by its users, and not the creators, all the way back to the first BBS.
I am one of the 90%. I have lurked in online spaces before and since Reddit, watching, and only occasionally sharing any thoughts.
Not because I’m antisocial (ok, maybe a little bit), but because there was always enough spirit to absorb, enough humanity to just bask in the display of shared thoughts between other people, that enough satisfaction was derived just reading, nodding along, and whispering opinions I had no intention to post.
That spirit, that humanity, is utterly dead in Reddit (and most of social media these days), and it behooves us all who care to not see it forever gone, to not see it driven away completely in the face of a dead Internet, to do something about it.
I guess I need to post more on Lemmy until I can return to invisibility, ugh.
Anyhow, great “rant”, greater comments, and even greater silly posting, @[email protected], thank you for your time and thoughts!
Damn, thank you. It’s generally heartbreaking to be a very long winded writer in 2026. It used to be different, but it’s like everyone’s so used to tiny text messages or tweets that that’s become the default post and message length everywhere. Most of us made fun of twitter for the insanely tiny 140 character limit trying to limit online conversation to the length of a single SMS text message… now that’s become the bulk of human interaction.
It’s awesome to get a lengthy reply back, and even better to hear my nonsense has made you laugh. That’s the point. No better way to waste time than trying to make random other humans laugh and feel better for a bit. :)
Lemmy isn’t perfect, but it is more honest than Reddit.
Lemmy’s problems stem mostly from tribalism, as different instance admins ban and censor anyone they don’t like. That makes the environment hostile to users who came here expecting to be able to speak their minds like they did in the old days of the internet.
The tribalism causes the niche communities of Reddit to generally steer clear of Lemmy because, even if you have the technical knowledge to get here, you may find that your fandom or interest is fractured between six or more instances, with three of them being defederated from the other three or being moderated with such heavy bias that the community is almost unusable. You can be shadow banned, silenced, or just plain banned from an instance at the whims of a bad admin, which is really disheartening. Reddit is a mess, but it’s all in one place still. With Lemmy, you honestly need multiple accounts on different instances, or else you have to choose between your favorite crochet communities or your favorite tech communities. Say one wrong thing, and suddenly you are robbed of interaction.
I love Lemmy. It reminds me of the Reddit of old. It’s also broken and sick. I had to be in five different Star Trek communities because my instance got targeted by vindictive admins. I have to have multiple accounts because some fandoms are locked into highly toxic communities. Some of the best queer memes I’ve laughed at were in a community that is outright pro-Russia and pro-fascism.
Reddit felt like a grand bazaar for a long time. You could find a community for everything, and it would be active. While there was drama, it usually boiled down to you having a new sub added to your list to interact with. Lemmy is more like the high school cafeteria. Everyone is cliquish, and even if you have something to add to the discussion about Stargate or TTRPGs, if you voiced the wrong opinion in a completely different space, then you can find yourself a digital pariah.
At least with old Reddit, the Reddit of 2010, that didn’t happen. We were still a community trying to run things the way Aaron Swartz envisioned. Even if you said something that upset people, the upvote system often allowed that comment to be judged by the community and not one person with an agenda. That’s what I miss. Being able to say something or share something and have the community decide its worth rather than a minority voice deciding what people should see and think. It happens on Reddit, and it happens here on Lemmy, just for different reasons.
Ya, I ditched when the api thing went down. Coming to lemmy was a breath of fresh air tho. I hadn’t realized just how much capitalism had creeped into reddit.
Trying to force mobile users to use their app so they can harvest more data? It’s a fucking website. The program you use to look at websites is a web browser.
Even worse, there were plenty of apps that had better UI than the website and incorporated a bunch of quality of life improvements over the base user experience. Then they forcibly killed all those apps to try and funnel everyone into their little data harvesting abomination, and the stupid thing didn’t have even a fraction of the polish of the many third party clients that were just killed off by Reddit’s greed for that sweet AI money.
I agree with your passion and thought process. In a nutshell, Reddit was the shit, until venture capital got them…
I just learned about the nightclub like takeover of bowling in the US. No wonder it cost me so much last time I took the kids. Venture capital ruins everything it touches.
For sure, private equity groups are ruining everything. Nursing homes, veterinarians, bakeries, housing, healthcare, and I guess now bowling and pretty much every form of human social connection or recreation that can possibly involve money.
A few weeks ago I read a long article about a sudden surge in venture capital buying up local utility companies.
They saw the price people get charged for electricity and water jumping a lot and figured that if they bought the utility companies and added in an extra 30% that was pure profit to them it would just seem part of the data center bullshit already happening.
My bad, I’d have told you something weird and dumb like it’s because we’re stalking you or something but I was busy writing another comment longer than anything anyone else seems to make. :P
I don’t know why I bother other than habit. Writing is kind of my thing. I’m verbose. I will spend an hour trying to write an honest, thoughtful (in my opinion), response to something that goes against the current internet socially expected replies even knowing it’s just going to be downvoted to oblivion.
I know most people see lots of words, decide it looks too tuff, and move on, but there have to be some people on text based discussion forums who still read words and exchange ideas. Nice to see this huge rant got so many thumbs up and replies. :)
If all we wanted were short quips without any substance, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be on Xitter or something. As a fellow long-post writer, who thinks reading rants and writing essays is fun, I’d say we’re in the right place. Keep doing what you do - we’re here for it!
Oh ya, rant time.
I was a Reddit user since 2006. It was my place to be. Endless posts on everything, every niche hobby you can think of, global and often even local news, learning about cool new things… I loved it. It was always crazy to me to decide to read a news paper and find that pretty much everything in it I’d already knew from Reddit, often finding out days or weeks earlier.
It started out an amazing place, it really did seem like a global town square where we could all get together and talk about everything and anything. But like all the cool online and tech companies the focus became more and more on money, which meant controlling what people say and see and harvesting as much data as possible from them. Large companies need income, and if you aren’t the one paying then you always end up the product. So they started pushing more and more ads and fake posts and instead of being controlled by the people it became controlled by whoever throw the most money at any and every topic. Since going public they’ve ramped up the user fucking big time.
Trying to force mobile users to use their app so they can harvest more data? It’s a fucking website. The program you use to look at websites is a web browser. Having 1,000 apps on a phone that are virtually all to use websites is not ease of use, or user friendly, or sane. They seem to have toned this down due to backlash, but for a while you literally weren’t allowed to browse Reddit using mobile mode. If you tried it had a popup telling you to get the app and that was all. But if you switched the same browser window on the same device to desktop mode everything worked just fine. That’s nothing but saying “fuck you” so your user base.
Getting rid of /r/all so that everything everyone sees on their home page is controlled entirely by the algorithms instead of having any potential of it by being what was most interesting or talked about (even though the insane amount of bot up/down votes and comments was already wrecking that? Fuck you. I’ve seen people say you can still see /r/all if you use old reddit… but it’s fake. It’s not actually /r/all as it used to be. When you can click through a handful of pages and get told that there’s nothing else that’s very definitely not “all.” As a formerly socially awkward fat kid I’m certain I’ve gone hundreds of pages of deep before.
For years we had genuine news reports on different groups and companies using giant cell phone farms to spam up/down votes on the posts they’re paid to boost or kill off and actually paying rooms of people to work to control the public opinion/narrative on their product/company/political party/country/etc. Shilling went from mostly a conspiracy to something warping everything on the place.
AI has only made it worse since along with corporate/govt approved or disliked posts notably having thousands of up/down votes with only a handful of comments they can now spam comments as well. Humans are a social species. There is always pressure to fit in. When we see that pretty much everyone is saying a certain thing or has a certain opinion we’re far more likely to decide the same.
If someone makes a post saying “Israel killing tons of kids seems bad” it can be well thought out and link tons of evidence, but if it quickly has several comments about Israel having the right to defend itself and the constant child murder being fake news propaganda and antisemitism and making fun of the OP then the people who open it and check the comments will be more inclined to feel that way.
A post on “It’s crazy that the US did all this awful stuff to Iran” with lots of links to blowing up lots of little girls in school and sending a delayed second hit so anyone trying to help them dies too, actively causing a shortage of USD there to destroy the value of their currency and push people to protest, etc, and it quickly has many replies are all calling the OP a conspiracy nut and saying the US was trying to bring justice and freedom 'cause the evil Iranian leaders killed 100 million protestors… then most people who read glancingly without checking and considering all the evidence (most people) and who don’t have strong opinions on the matter already will be likely to jump in making fun of OP for supporting middle eastern governments 'cause they’re all terrorists.
It’s something pretty much all big companies and governments do now. They nearly all have large ‘social media’ or ‘PR’ departments that focus on controlling the public opinion on topics. For a lot of companies it started out as customer service, helping people out and trying to convince the public they’re awesome by doing cool shit. But it warped over time into more like just trying to convince everyone that shitty things about them don’t really exist. Loads of subs main mods or full mod teams are employees, and in a lot of places dissent and complaints are quickly deleted.
And finally… the site-wide AI powered “moderation.” Posts/comments can be near instantly automatically deleted and the user banned for a while for pretty much anything. It’s not something the sub mods can control or do anything about even though the threshold for causing it changes based on the sub and the topic. You can be auto deleted and banned for posting a dark joke in a sub dedicated to doing that. You can spend a month talking about guillotines everywhere with no issues, but be deleted and banned for simply using the word in a post about US politics. Saying that you hope people in the US are exercising their 2nd amendment rights so they can defend themselves if the worst happens or suggesting capital punishment for federal agents who murder innocent civilians is “threatening violence.”
Reddit is no longer a social platform for people to communicate with each other. That Reddit died a long, slow death, but it’s gone now. Reddit today exists to collect user data, train AI, sell products, and control public opinion and narratives, and it does that by selling out every topic to the highest bidder.
Sadly most people keep using it instead of coming here because it’s what they know and they miss what it was. I miss the days when I could browse endless new things just refreshing /r/all there too. It sucks that Lemmy moves so much slower, and the decentralized concept does make it more work to use and more difficult to navigate. But Reddit moves way slower now too. If you try to use their default “home” feed or the new /r/all you typically see mostly the same shit all day. Instead of constantly fresh it’s always stale. Hopefully more people notice that and get tired of the bullshit, and we can make Lemmy the new place where conversation is always fresh and there’s a home for every niche you can think of.
… Enclosure Of The Commons…
You know what else Reddit used to have? More comments like yours. You got it all nailed down in your observations. With intent, thought, and personality.
Same way you wrote a ridiculous yet thoroughly engaging “Elden Ring Journal” here on Lemmy (made my night lol).
That capacity for real people to have both the spaces and freedom to display themselves, whether that was them at their most intent focused in one community, or them at their most relaxed and silly in another, was one of the meta-qualities that their system didn’t intend by design but which became hands down the emergent quality that allowed them to even get to being what they became post 2005 and pre-July 1, 2023.
The moment they started doing all the fuckery you rightly noted, they killed the conditions in which that emergent property could thrive.
Reddit doesn’t just no longer feel the same because the system’s changed, but because the changes were done with no regards for what it did to the organization’s spirit, which for a web related property, has always been something defined by its users, and not the creators, all the way back to the first BBS.
I am one of the 90%. I have lurked in online spaces before and since Reddit, watching, and only occasionally sharing any thoughts.
Not because I’m antisocial (ok, maybe a little bit), but because there was always enough spirit to absorb, enough humanity to just bask in the display of shared thoughts between other people, that enough satisfaction was derived just reading, nodding along, and whispering opinions I had no intention to post.
That spirit, that humanity, is utterly dead in Reddit (and most of social media these days), and it behooves us all who care to not see it forever gone, to not see it driven away completely in the face of a dead Internet, to do something about it.
I guess I need to post more on Lemmy until I can return to invisibility, ugh.
Anyhow, great “rant”, greater comments, and even greater silly posting, @[email protected], thank you for your time and thoughts!
Damn, thank you. It’s generally heartbreaking to be a very long winded writer in 2026. It used to be different, but it’s like everyone’s so used to tiny text messages or tweets that that’s become the default post and message length everywhere. Most of us made fun of twitter for the insanely tiny 140 character limit trying to limit online conversation to the length of a single SMS text message… now that’s become the bulk of human interaction.
It’s awesome to get a lengthy reply back, and even better to hear my nonsense has made you laugh. That’s the point. No better way to waste time than trying to make random other humans laugh and feel better for a bit. :)
Lemmy isn’t perfect, but it is more honest than Reddit.
Lemmy’s problems stem mostly from tribalism, as different instance admins ban and censor anyone they don’t like. That makes the environment hostile to users who came here expecting to be able to speak their minds like they did in the old days of the internet.
The tribalism causes the niche communities of Reddit to generally steer clear of Lemmy because, even if you have the technical knowledge to get here, you may find that your fandom or interest is fractured between six or more instances, with three of them being defederated from the other three or being moderated with such heavy bias that the community is almost unusable. You can be shadow banned, silenced, or just plain banned from an instance at the whims of a bad admin, which is really disheartening. Reddit is a mess, but it’s all in one place still. With Lemmy, you honestly need multiple accounts on different instances, or else you have to choose between your favorite crochet communities or your favorite tech communities. Say one wrong thing, and suddenly you are robbed of interaction.
I love Lemmy. It reminds me of the Reddit of old. It’s also broken and sick. I had to be in five different Star Trek communities because my instance got targeted by vindictive admins. I have to have multiple accounts because some fandoms are locked into highly toxic communities. Some of the best queer memes I’ve laughed at were in a community that is outright pro-Russia and pro-fascism.
Reddit felt like a grand bazaar for a long time. You could find a community for everything, and it would be active. While there was drama, it usually boiled down to you having a new sub added to your list to interact with. Lemmy is more like the high school cafeteria. Everyone is cliquish, and even if you have something to add to the discussion about Stargate or TTRPGs, if you voiced the wrong opinion in a completely different space, then you can find yourself a digital pariah.
At least with old Reddit, the Reddit of 2010, that didn’t happen. We were still a community trying to run things the way Aaron Swartz envisioned. Even if you said something that upset people, the upvote system often allowed that comment to be judged by the community and not one person with an agenda. That’s what I miss. Being able to say something or share something and have the community decide its worth rather than a minority voice deciding what people should see and think. It happens on Reddit, and it happens here on Lemmy, just for different reasons.
Ya, I ditched when the api thing went down. Coming to lemmy was a breath of fresh air tho. I hadn’t realized just how much capitalism had creeped into reddit.
Even worse, there were plenty of apps that had better UI than the website and incorporated a bunch of quality of life improvements over the base user experience. Then they forcibly killed all those apps to try and funnel everyone into their little data harvesting abomination, and the stupid thing didn’t have even a fraction of the polish of the many third party clients that were just killed off by Reddit’s greed for that sweet AI money.
I agree with your passion and thought process. In a nutshell, Reddit was the shit, until venture capital got them…
I just learned about the nightclub like takeover of bowling in the US. No wonder it cost me so much last time I took the kids. Venture capital ruins everything it touches.
For sure, private equity groups are ruining everything. Nursing homes, veterinarians, bakeries, housing, healthcare, and I guess now bowling and pretty much every form of human social connection or recreation that can possibly involve money.
A few weeks ago I read a long article about a sudden surge in venture capital buying up local utility companies.
They saw the price people get charged for electricity and water jumping a lot and figured that if they bought the utility companies and added in an extra 30% that was pure profit to them it would just seem part of the data center bullshit already happening.
They’re leeches.
Reddit was the shit, now it is just shit
lol, in an even smaller nutshell :)
I keep getting surprised by how quickly some users respond to my comments…
My bad, I’d have told you something weird and dumb like it’s because we’re stalking you or something but I was busy writing another comment longer than anything anyone else seems to make. :P
How about you reply to this comment with another long essay about stalking me or something? I’ll measure how much time you take :D
(Just kidding)
I don’t know why I bother other than habit. Writing is kind of my thing. I’m verbose. I will spend an hour trying to write an honest, thoughtful (in my opinion), response to something that goes against the current internet socially expected replies even knowing it’s just going to be downvoted to oblivion.
I know most people see lots of words, decide it looks too tuff, and move on, but there have to be some people on text based discussion forums who still read words and exchange ideas. Nice to see this huge rant got so many thumbs up and replies. :)
If all we wanted were short quips without any substance, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be on Xitter or something. As a fellow long-post writer, who thinks reading rants and writing essays is fun, I’d say we’re in the right place. Keep doing what you do - we’re here for it!