I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I'm curious, how it's better?
Reddit is owned and controlled by a corporation (Condé Nast.) They disabled 3rd party Reddit apps to force people onto the official Reddit app which also broke many third party moderation tools. This disproportionately impacted power users, frequent posters, and mods-- in other words, the people who made Reddit the important community it was.
They showed an unwillingness to listen to their community or work with the unpaid volunteer moderators, instead banning the moderators who took part in the Reddit Blackout and replacing them with mods willing to cooperate with the enshittification of the site.
They've been mangling the web interface to be uglier and less usable (old.reddit.com is still up, but the mobile version of old.reddit.com is gone). They've been experimenting with ways to show more ads and subtler ads.
Lemmy is open source and federated so it can't get bought up by a company and cored out for shareholder value. You can use different instances, or a variety of apps. You can use (or create your own) third party tools for accessibility and moderation.
Lemmy is currently a smaller universe than Reddit was, but it has a high ratio of good posters and moderators who care personally about their own communities, so hopefully it continues to grow.
Advance Publications (30%)
Tencent (11%)
Sam Altman (9%)
Conde hasn't owned reddit in a while. I assume the remaining percent is the parent company Reddit Inc or stock options or something. Let's see what that's worth:
Operating income −US$140 million
Net income −US$90.8 million
Total equity −US$413 million
Yes those are all negative numbers. Why anyone with at least two functioning brain cells who isn't also a greedy little pigboy would touch reddit stock with a ten foot pole is baffling.
Advance Publications, Inc. is a privately held American media company owned by the families of Donald Newhouse and Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., the sons of company founder Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. It owns publishing-relating companies including American City Business Journals, MLive Media Group, and Condé Nast, and is a major shareholder in Charter Communications (13% ownership), Reddit (42 million shares), and Warner Bros. Discovery (8% ownership.)
I keep hoping to see Reddit's stock tank. I think eventually it will. For now, it just highlights how much the stock market is perception / bullshit / glorified gambling. I know savvy experienced investors care about actual value and do careful analysis. But there are a lot of suckers out there who will just buy any cool-sounding "tech stock".