Ok I know the title is weirdly said but I will explain more here. I tried using reddit but all of the subs and topics I wanted to speak on were gated by Karma, so I searched reddit for no karma sub so I just posted on ask reddit,nostupid questions and I made one post on r/advice which I cross posted to relationship advice after which my account glitched. Turned out I had been shadow banned and I have no clue how. My theory is I posted to much and copy and pasting a post tripped the alarm but the post was a bit different on relationship advice and I did it once, I saw reddit from like youtube videos and tiktok and people cross post to subs all the time why is that an issue ?
But to get to the main ponint of this, why is reddit run the way it is ? In the sense why do they ask so much of their users hurting both the user expirience and the site’s ability to grow. The Karma system forces you into a position where to get to the content you want you have to interact with and post content you don’t care about.So you have a ton of disengaged user’s just punching their time card to get to what they actually care about. Imagine if other social media sites did this, imagine if you wanted to listen to sabrina carpenter on spotify but to do that you had to listen to 100 hours of Conway Twitty, what sense does that make ?
Reddit’s karma and age gate systems resemble a mobile game and while annoying when it’s done there you understand why it’s designed to get you to pay to skip it, but reddit doesn’t let you pay to skip it at east not directly.
Every other social media site wants to get users the content they want as easy as possible. TikTok is the best example the reason it’s popular is because it’s the best at getting you what you want with as little work required on your part as possible. The for you page fetches you videos your interested in, if your a creator the format of the app increases your chance of being seen and going viral.
Reddit on the other hand leaves so much of the user experience up to weather or not your post on ask reddt go gets upvotes or if you happen to know if a good sub with a karma limit since subs do not disclose their karma limit
Again for the last time, why ? Even from a selfish business standpoint this seemingly makes no sense so what am I missing
Reddit is a platform that was plagued by its success for the longest time. It’s not really a platform looking for new information. It’s profiting off of the information it already has. Due to the influx of bot accounts that are on the platform, they have a bit of protection on major subs
Basically to answer your question, it’s a combination of they’re trying to make the platform look decent for an IPO that they’ve already missed their window for. And now they’re desperately trying to claw every little bit of information they want and bot accounts that are just spam or don’t add interest to the platform such as a lot of copy-pasting are generally automated out of the service. This is exponentially increased if you’re adding competitor links or links that Reddit has decided are malicious.
Sadly, they’re trying to get something which will never happen. But, because they’re trying so hard to appeal to advertisers and that IPO,
This issue was multiplied about a year and a half ago when reddit decided to remove free use of their API and then had massive blowback on it they doubled down, claimed their volunteer moderators were entitled and not needed which caused a mass exodus from the platform that it never recovered from. Why does this matter? well when any labor leaves, they also take experience with them which never fully recovered. Subs in order to lessen on that locked their requirements down using karma.
these issues are dampening the future Reddit experience. So if you’re not established, You end up leaving the platform again before you start trying to actually add content to it.
as a TLDR: Reddit is actively chasing financial value that no longer exists, and the users are punished for it.
Was there really a massive exodus? If so, where to? It definitely wasn’t Lemmy / Fediverse and I don’t know of any Reddit/Lemmy-like site.
Investors understand what it looks like when the early adopters have left, and the early adopters have left Reddit.
Some came to Lemmy. Many were already on Discord.
There was a pretty large exodus yea, especially among people who created content and the moderators who were insulted during the event.
Being said, many didn’t have a suitable replacement to go to. Lemmy became the replacement for a chunk of them but, if you can find where the rest went, you have gotten further than I did. I assume they either went to discord like Pinball said, or just stopped posting in general. It’s a big reason that a lot of the more niche subs stopped having posts, and the reason that reddit as a whole is so much more toxic(interaction wise) now.