Reddit Ramps Up Its Threats To Protesting Mods, As Ad Buyers Leave

For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.

I'm glad Reddit is feeling something from this, however, at the same time. I kinda don't care. It's a shame it went the way that it did. But spez can't take back his terrible attitude and decision making on what happened. Most people were sympathetic and wanting Reddit to be profitable and rooting for Reddit. However, spez just decided to come out swinging from nowhere hitting his allies in the face.

Yeh I’m in the same boat. The day the internal memo came out about how everything will blow over, I deleted Apollo. I haven’t been back to reddit since and after the first week, I don’t even miss it now.
I wish lemmy was a bit busier, but outside of that the general atmosphere and quality here is better. Even if everything was reversed and Spez was booted, I won’t return now.
- Just wait till the third party apps shut down tomorrow, loads of people will be rolling in here. Then when the RIF and Sync developers release their Lemmy apps (with the same names) even more people will come. If you want there to be content right now though just keep contributing to posts you see. The more content we make right now, the more likely it is for new users to stay,
- While I want to it be a little bit busier, I'm pleased that we're not at the low-effort comment point e.g. every other comment being a pun or a shitpost or "this"
- Actually, I like the small community vibe of Lemmy. It’s the dead sub vibe I have a problem with. There are lots of really interesting communities, but you don’t see people posting anything yet.
- I was apprehensive of moving over to Lemmy, but I'm starting to get the feel of the fediverse and finally made the switch over.
  I think the community can grow over time. It honestly feels like early Reddit, I'm quite enjoying Lemmy!
It’s worth mentioning the article said prior to the blackout ads saw ~14,500 clicks so they’re currently down 40-50%
- It'll be interesting to see which advertisers are the ones which think the current state of affairs provides a good ad platform for their orgs.
- That's significant, and it doesn't surprise me. Even if I wanted to keep using reddit, the content has taken a nose-dive and the mood sucks now, so I bet people have cut their usage down.
The only thing reddit can do is improve the first party app and mod tools. The rest is lost.
That being said I doubt the protests are reddits biggest priority. Even if reddit ipo's perfectly and gets a injection of capitol (which might itself be difficult since investors don't seem to care about userbase growth anymore) they are going to need to find ways to increase profits each year (like every other publicly traded tech company).
Advertising revenue is also limited given trend to cut "unnecessary expenses".

I am glad that this happened because Lemmy is very interesting platform.

I’ve barely been back to Reddit recently and with Apollo gone, I’ll only ever duck my head in when I really have to. I find it a lot easier to leave Reddit behind than Facebook. On FB I’m connected to real world relatives and friends who I just would lose contact with otherwise. On Reddit I converse with strangers and that’s easy to replace. Lemmy has already done it. Is there anything unique about the hobby forums on Reddit? No. They can be reassembled or restarted elsewhere. In some ways it’s probably good to dump the old structures and shake things up. Some subs were better managed and some really just coasted on their name.
- I totally agree. I'm on Android and never used Apollo, but I'm using the wefwef web app and it's fantastic. People are saying it feels like Apollo!
- Same, I just miss some of the interest based communities I was in, but they're growing well on Lemmy right now. Optimistic for the future.
- I was an early adopter of Reddit back during the digg days and I had over a decade of post history there and to see that go.... I couldn't care less. It was all ephemeral bullshit.
- The only thing that had me back on Reddit was searching for something on DDG and getting 99% Reddit results. I see why they are un-deleting people's comments and posts when they close their accounts. Hopefully other forums take those spots.
- Well said. Couldn't agree more.

At the end of the day, Reddit is just a message board. The absolute hubris to think that one could seriously go public with a message board website... It's baffling.

Honestly, Reddit missed the ship to IPO. They should have done it a decade ago if at all.

Without mods, Reddit will become overrun with bots, rendering the precious data Reddit so desparately tries to monetize practically useless.

I mod a small/mid size sub that is still blacked out. Should I leave it private or just let it get overrun with spam?
- Sell promoted posts directly, admins have made it abundantly clear they're in it for money over community, get your cheddar too.
- You don't owe reddit anything.
- Burn it
- Shift the community to lemmy and write a pinned post on reddit about the change.
  Request members to delete their reddit post.
- I’m a mod over on r/NoahGetTheBoat and I haven’t even opened reddit more than a couple times since Apollo died.

Imagine that once upon a time (5-15 years ago), I actually had addblocker disabled on reddit, because I considered it worth supporting. lol

Proof that people will gladly support a good product.
- These guys aren't happy with some support. They want all the support i.e. money. Feels like no tech corporation thinks about its products long term anymore. Just the most readily available cash grabs possible, even if it means possibly losing future revenue.
- Same curve with Netflix. Pirating went down when they started. They themselves, but all the other Streamers as well have gone so greedy that the good product is no longer supported. Reputation ruined, war with customers ensues.
I was a paying premium member with ads enabled until recently.
Dude, I paid for Reddit Premium or Gold or whatever the fuck it's called for 5+ years just to support. I wish I could claw it all back.
We even used to run "thanks for not using adblock" ads in rotation, when there were no other ads to run. I had a picture of a squirrel that was in rotation there
- Yes, that was funny and kind of endearing. Back then it also seemed like the goal was more to stay as kind of a community service, but of course the servers needed to be paid. Now it seems like they want it to return huge profits like Facebook and YouTube. It seems like a completely different mentality, where the ideals have vanished. And this is very clearly reflected in the userbase IMO.
11 year account...makes it pretty easy to imagine. It was a very different site back then.

I literally made a reddit account a few days before the hullabaloo started, specifically to buy advertising on reddit.

The ad interface is terrible. Most of my experience is with Google Ads, but in general, platforms try to be super-nice to their advertisers and give them a good experience. Not reddit. The same overall shittiness the infests the rest of the site is also in their ad portal.
Most of the clicks were fairly poor quality (high bounce rate).
Whatever I tried to configure to limit geographic reach to US+Canada either wasn't set up right or was just ignored. I got plenty of clicks from all over world.

I stopped advertising on blackout day for moral reasons regardless, but it also seemed like it just overall wasn't worth it in general. And, my observation of the ads I see as a user has been that they aren't at all tuned to what I would be likely to want, or constructed so I'd be likely to click on them. Some platforms I have to consciously avoid clicking on ads or scroll past them deliberately when my natural tendency is to click on them. On reddit it's just weird nonsense that I want to scroll past anyway.

In short, my brief experience with reddit ads made me conclude that it's probably a waste of money anyway.

Too many people ad block everything on Reddit in any decent category that you might want to target.
The real way to do it is an army of paid shills making posts and comments by a third party.
- I agree with your comment while I enjoy this piping hot Dominos Cheesey-Cheese Delux Pizza, delivered hot and fresh right to my door.
Personally the redditbusiness page marketing to advertisers reads like wishful thinking or something straight from /r/boringdystopia.
"Look there's places where people come to discuss flashlight options and other users/google results trust them! Pay us money to look like you're part of that! It's not creepy to try and co-opt at all!"
I'm not surprised that their interface isn't great, they haven't paid for developers to do anything other than try to look more like twitter/facebook in a long time.
- I had no idea about this. This is the weirdest goddamned thing. I found so much that I made a whole separate post. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I had no idea.
- Hey, I loved watching people nerd out on their flashlights! Actually, I was there to get insight on how they were building their own awesome lights, and trying to understand what the difference between lights was.
I would assume that almost all clicks are from people on the mobile app accidentally tapping ads while they try to scroll past them, because they're in the main feed. So click quality being garbage doesn't surprise me.
- Holy smokes -- I think you're right. I've definitely done that. That would explain this mystifying thing I saw in ad traffic from Facebook and reddit specifically, where 90+% of people stay for literally just a few seconds. If it's pretty much all accidental clicks and then people hitting "back" right away (which is exactly what I do when I do that), then that makes it make perfect sense.
- This was my experience. Almost every ad I clicked on was a mistake; either I thought it was a real post and wasn't paying close attention, only to navigate away in disgust, or I clicked on it purely by accident. I had like 50k+ karma (to give you some idea of much I used reddit) and might have honestly clicked an ad once.
What're you selling? You seem genuine enough that I'll at least listen to your ad pitch.
- Sure! I'm selling RPG tokens. If you play DND or any tabletop game, they are to me way superior to (a) minis and (b) just using pennies or something.

Sure is funny how reddit wasn't concerned with with mods having to much power or enforcing any code till it affected the snowflake admin

Not just "not concerned", it was literally their formal position that mods owned the subs that they modded. You couldn't remove a mod for anything except breaking TOS or for being inactive. If the mod was active and not actively breaking TOS then reddits response has ALWAYS been "if you don't like the way the sub is being handled, make your own sub and let the free market sort out whether yours or theirs is better".
They held that position since the founding of reddit and it was as fundamental to the platform as the ability to create your own instance with your own rules is here on Lemmy. Right up until it was starting to get in the way of the CEOs big IPO payday.
- And that is exactly why I am here now. I didn't care that much for the API protests at all. Thought they were pointless. But this behavior meant that they were violating the very thing the made reddit, reddit. If subs weren't spaces that anyone could use to try to carve out their own communities, then what is the point?
  Furthermore, they aren't even violating the code of conduct they are using to do this, so clearly all of Reddit's promises are now worthless.
This is why all the "fuck the mods I'm with the admins" folks are so short sighted. The only reason bad mods can exist is because the admins won't remove them. They're fine with bigotry and power abuse. The current mods are just a sacrificial lamb

Agreed. I deleted my 15 year account. Mods should just leave.

Reddit can’t exist without the free labor.

Other side is I don’t know what the mods that stick it out get. I’m guessing there is some monetary benefit to the bigger community mods I don’t know about.

It's too late for you, but I'd suggest anybody who wants to delete their account consider first editing all of their comments to overwrite the data, there are lots of reports of deleted comments being restored, I've not heard of reverted edits though. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
- Did this nearly a month ago. Just went back and checked and it has not been reverted. Hooray!
- A few weeks ago I used PDS to edit my comments - using the fork with the 5 second delay. Random pockets of older comments started reappearing after few days. I've been checking all 45 pages of my history every few days and editing the random comments that have reverted from the edited message. It seems like it has mostly stuck now.
  I guessing there's probably some broken code/process somewhere that isn't always able to commit changes and once caches expire the comment returns.
- I manually overwrote my post about 2 weeks ago and have been checking as subs came back online. a few reverted but most didnt. I deleted my 9 year old account last night and checked and its stills gone
- PowerDeleteSuite screwed me over around 6 months ago. I got 2 replies to comments it was supposed to delete but they were still there, user name, content and all, they were just not linked to my account. If I search my username + reddit I still get results. My name is not attached anymore because I deleted my account.
  Thankfully I started manually editing and deleting my comments after using PowerDeleteSuite, and those remain gone as far as I know.
- Been telling everyone to purge their old content. You can always view Reddit just to lurk, there's no need to let them monetize your old content. Into the bin it goes
- I heard they revert to the original data? Didnyou check?
- I just tried Power Delete Suite about an hour ago. I beleive reddit has slowed down the allowable edit rate, something like one every 5 seconds. PDS runs through as fast as it can, meaning it's a 1 in 10 success at best. I tried Redact as well, but that just blanks out white after giving it permission. I'm not having much success. But Shreddit seems to work OK? Though that doesn't address the undeletion possobility
I was a mod, deleted my 14 year old account after having rewritten all my comments and posts

WE made the content. The community. No doubt the majority of level-headed folk would have accepted ad requirements in 3rd party apps. Hosting isn't free, something needs to be monetized.

But that's not what it's about. It's about locking down content from the new wave of AI models and charging for it. Charging for content we created freely to be shared.

Ads? No, I would not accept ads. What I would have accepted was a subscription payment. Hell, I went so far as to purchase Apollo lifetime ultimate.
I am more than willing to support things I use. I am not willing to deal with ads though. Especially when they sneak in like they are posts, and take up entire scroll widths.
- I don’t get how people put up with that either. My wife said that we were being over dramatic about the 3rd Party Apps protests, but will agree that the ads are annoying. Hopefully she’ll convert over here before to long and get a taste for how a message board should be.
Yeah and it's not like you wouldn't understand that Reddit would 2-tier its API so that paying Reddit users can get served ad-less experiences while non-paying need to see ads for your app to use the API. That's not even that uncommon from what I interact with at work.

However, Similarweb told Gizmodo traffic to the ads.reddit.com portal, where advertisers can buy ads and measure their impact, has dipped. Before the first blackout began, the ads site averaged about 14,900 visits per day. Beginning on June 13, though, the ads site averaged about 11,800 visits per day, a 20% decrease.

For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.

This is the only metric that matters to Reddit, so it's nice to see!

So they really are following Twitter's example. Twitter's lost 59% of ad revenue since Elon took over, now Reddit ad revenue is plummetting. It's stunning how stupid companies can be.
- Just noticed today that Twitter requires one to log-in to read posts. It's like these two platforms are competing on which one can destroy their reputation first.
- Here's hoping spez keeps following in his idol Elon's footsteps!

yIlop! wa’IeS chaq maHegh!
Outnerd me! I dare you!
- 01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110010 01100100 01100101 01100100 00100001
I think moderation and community will be much better on Lemmy. On Reddit you got some power tripping mods because they'd control the only sub with a clean name that got all the subscribers. There's no such monopoly on Lemmy so it will be the best communities that win. Monopolies corrupt in all their forms.
Let them die.

I don't understand why the CEO thinks this is some 4D business move. This is not the first time most of us have transitioned like this regarding social outlets. There must be records and archives proving that it is unwise to treat a community as negatively as it has ...... because it's too easy for internet folk to just up and move to a new place of interest. Time is wrought with soo many examples:

For those of you who are ancient, there were the bad days of AOL and Yahoo, and then time moved on with ideas like social networks and board systems like 4chan. But how did they not know? Just look at what is in store for future Reddit by heading to the front page of Digg.

For one, I mean, look at this sad, sad, sad thing! Further, have you wandered to see Myspace...... not sure who that audience is, but hey, to each their own. Hell, I can assure you that most of us only keep FB to keep some contact with family and old friends. I suppose the root of what I am saying is

I doubt spez cares about reddit. He cares about money. If he has to throw the site under a bus to make some more money he will gladly do it
- If investors have any memory at all though, they aren’t going to give him tons of money, because he triggered the Reddit collapse before he sold out.
I worked at reddit during the Digg transition. We all were amazed at how utterly tone-deaf Digg was, how they had already taken some of their problematic features (higher karma users votes being stronger, votes being public, etc) to the extreme (letting companies literally purchase front-page space that wasn't marked as an ad, etc).
Fast forward 12 years and reddit is somehow upping the ante and being even worse. At least Digg 4 ran well on the browsers of the time. new.reddit can kick up the CPU on an M2 Max fully loaded with RAM
This is not the first time most of us have transitioned like this regarding social outlets.
Some of us were there when Digg died, ended up on Reddit. This whole scenario is not feeling too different. I think it'll take a little longer, the IPO might be the real catalyst, or the monetisation and cannibalisation of the platform that comes from new owners afterwards. But it's going to come.
Reddit sat for a very long time in the shadow of Digg until it made its final blunder. Lemmy's communities will do the same, a dual-power in the wings waiting for a catalyst to come.
- I was there and felt the same way about digg. My accounts on these platforms are not connected to my real life so I don't care about abandoning them.
  But I'm really excited about Lemmy because it's not just a new site, it's a protocol and standard so no one instance can control it all and you can switch instances without being locked out of the platform.
Out of all the platforms to leave, leaving Reddit was ridiculously easy. There's zero lock in. I don't care about preserving my post history. My account is not connected to my real life. My conversations were with strangers. Deleting my account meant nothing to me and I was using Reddit since the very beginning.
It's not like Facebook where some events are only there and there are some people I can only contact there, and it's not like email where I have all my accounts connected to it and all my contacts have that address. Reddit had literally zero lock in for me. I'm not missing it one bit. Lemmy has fulfilled everything I got from Reddit. Only issues is that it's unstable from all the new load but so was Reddit when I first switched to that.
- The hardest part of leaving reddit is the niche communities it fostered. If you could think of a topic there’s probably a fairly active subreddit (or two) following it. But that existed before reddit in the form of BBBs and lemmy looks to have a great path to recreate that.
  The only thing reddit has ATM is users. Losing them is a huge blow to their value.
Omg I just popped into dig for 10 seconds and it's so bad.
I was an avid user of yahoo chats. Those were my peak 'get influenced by strangers' period. Was 10 or something in those and on basic neopets. Yup we move on.

The beatings aren't improving morale, you say? I guess we just need to increase the beatings then.

It is basically "if you refuse to work for free, then we won't let you work for free. Ha, that'll teach them"
- You can't quit! YOU'RE FIRED!!

I came from days of dialup and gone through yahoo groups, Myspace, tons of geocity sites, ask jeevs, LiveJournal, and so on. Sites will only be an attraction tell something comes that offers more. With federation and decentralized systems coming up, the hold on people and corporations trying to use you as a commodity will only tarnish the shine that it once was. When companies hold a noose around your neck thinking there isn't another option, telling you to go ahaid and jump, thinking no one will and when something comes by that makes the jump just a step down and you can take off the noose, there is nothing that they can hold onto anymore. They cannot say you have nowhere else to go. With the choice around in a federated system, you cannot be held hostage by a single entity. When people have the freedom of choice, the people win.

I’ve got a similar history and agree. Platforms may seem to big to fail, but they really aren’t. Sometimes growth is slow, but once a platform hits a critical mass it’ll explode. I’m new to Lemmy, but Reddit has done the platform a favor, it’s got some great ideas. And with wefwef it feels great to use already. Reddit just payed forward the favor digg did for them ;)
They had no lockin. Other social networks are connected to your real identity and real life friends and connections. Or they have content creators that you could only find on their platform. Reddit had neither. Leaving it was the easiest thing ever.
Of the places I've been, there are a great many more networks I have not been part of arguably because they failed to achieve critical mass. Writing good software is hard. Getting people to use it is even harder in the case of social networks where the value isn't just in the software but also in the community.
Many subreddits have fled to Discord which I think is a terrible format for their content. I suspect a great many users are still adrift. I hope more will find this island so it can achieve critical mass and really develop the communities that it needs to sustain itself in the long term. I usually lurk only, but I'm trying to be more active just to help promote its growth.
The software is merely the crucible. We are the iron. Reddit continues to make it hot by striking.

It isn’t even about the API drive out anymore of why I’m not going back to Reddit. It’s the CEO though and though

Because the goal was never to get some kind of fair price for using the API. That's why they priced it at "Fuck You."
Ultimately what they want is for people to stop using 3rd party apps entirely because 3rd party apps either don't show advertisements, or they show advertisements that give ad revenue to the developer.
They want everyone using their app because the valuation of tech companies directly correlates to the number of eyeballs they can serve ads to. Old.reddit will be next, and I bet they'll try to start blocking ad blockers after that.
- The only thing stopping 3rd party apps from showing reddits adds though was reddit never including them into the api. They actually HAD an agreememt with the rif author to take a cut of rif's ad revenue but as soon as spez took over as ceo he quietly axed that.
  Investors wanted to see "app growth" for multiple quarters not underatanding that the app isn't what maked reddit, and so ~~spez~~ spaz is doing what he is in a desperate and stupid attempt to claw up some numbers so he can cash out when the ipo hits.
  Reddit app use DID see some grown during the pandemic, but can't sustain that because its app is shit. They haven't improved it ever. It began as a 3rd party app and they purchased it from the original dev. The only changes were to add that pathic coin shop and some sticker/avatar crap to sell you.
Yeah I was trying to convey this feeling to my wife the other night. It's not just that I won't be able to use my favorite app (rif) anymore, it's that the CEO has been lying and gaslighting about what they've said. In that AMA thread where he said they want to work with devs who want to work with them and like three devs were like "hey we're fine with paying but you haven't answered our attempts to contact you" (not to even mention Apollo's Dev's bombshell recordings lol) really shows they don't give a shit.
I feel like they want that AI money and are furious all these models scraped their content. I get it but it's not even their content. Regardless of how you feel about artists being mad about their art being used to train models I think we can all agree that a site that merely hosts content being mad that the content was used is laughable.
- And the NY Times article that among other silly things just forgot to mention Aaron Swartz as a primary founder of the site, who would be right there at the gates telling us all to fight this bullshit. Guarantee spez specifically told them not to mention him as the optics here would be completely terrible.
  Reddit used to have values, but it's been turned on its head.
thoroughly agree that the api stuff is just one symptom of a broader underlying issue
Absolutely. I was waiting it out to see how it would pan out, but after spez's AMA I dropped Reddit immediately. That was before I even found Lemmy as a replacement. Now that I'm here I'm not missing Reddit in the slightest.

Well we’re here basically figuring it out. Time to show them they aren’t needed anymore.

reddit is just a frame. it always was and will always be, despite the efforts of a few dumb cunts.
the content is the people. that's the secret sauce. just provide people with a framework, and they'll fill the empty space. try to monetize that, and you're just a dick.
i have faith in defederisation. my autocorrect says that isn't a word. let's make it a word.
- The thing is, they COULD’VE monetized it and still kept it alive. What they’re doing instead is killing the golden goose for a quick cash-out.
  Edit: I hate your username. A lot of trauma associated with that failed tongue-twister.
- It’s not defederated it’s federated and decentralized
- I've hoped for decentralizing a lot of stuff over the years and every time the clunky nature prevented them from taking off.
  Sadly, until there were centralized spaces the average person didn't really get into the internet when it was IRC chats and disconnected forums.

why did it have to be aaron swartz

why couldn't it have been huffman...

Good people do good things and get punished by bad people.
Bad people do bad things and get rewarded.
I have an article Aaron wrote about the Freemont GM plant business case that I read every few months to remind me of the point he was making. And every time I read it, I am reminded of the ridiculous sequence of events that took him away. Sometimes, it really does seem like only the good die young.
- " A policeman beats up a protestor and we think "what an awful person," not "what terrible training."
  Yeah... that aged like milk.
oof. Kinda dark and morbid. But I get it.
Conspiracy theory time. Huffman murdered Aaron and made it look like a suicide because he didn't want Reddit to sell out.

"Oh yeah Plebbit? What are you gonna do next, hack my PC and force me to read nothing else than random reddit content for the rest of my life?"

Steve: "Uh... hey Elon, I have an idea for your new Neuralink thing, can we talk about it? I'm positive it's gonna be a great success..."
- Elon: Do I know you?

lol spez literally killed the platform with draconian policies. this is going to be something that is mentioned in college courses for decades.

probably not how he wanted to leave his mark on history...

It's unprecedented for a major link aggregator that's basically king of its niche to make such a boneheaded self-destructive decision and drive its userbase to a newer competitor like this. Definitely one for the history books.
- Um, Digg?

Just wait for July 1st! Once millions of people find their apps not working anymore and their porn gone there's no way going back for Reddit.

It's that last part that's going to break their knees, lol
- Better than their arms, though, right?
- Then they'll be disappointed becaus some instances has a no porn policy (because of lack of mod tools).
  Personally I can do with no porn. There's lemmynsfw and other sites I can visit if ever I get the urge.
Make sure to point everyone to wefwef.app and Sync for Lemmy!
Also Lemmynsfw.com 🤨
(Mandatory plug: !animemidriff@lemmynsfw.com)
Edit: Fyi nsfw content isn't visible without an account
- Lemmy NSFW is mostly just full of accounts posting non-NSFW images of celebrities in a way that looks like they are all run by the same person. Other than that it's basically dead.

I feel like old af now that I’ve watched two huge sites implode due to mismanagement. I was a Digg refuge way back, and now here I am on lemmy…

3 sites if you include Twitter . Twitter and Reddit seem to be in a mismanagement competition right now. Not sure who's winning
- We're all losing, sadly.
- Tumblr also kind of got ruined a few years ago too for some people if you were into that platform.
Heh, I go back to Usenet. Architecturally, Lemmy is closer to Usenet, but Usenet did not have an authentication mechanism.
I went Slashdot -> Digg -> Newsvine -> Reddit -> Lemmy
I spent the most time on Reddit, but I think I had the "best" time on Newsvine. Their website was extremely slick, and the fact that they encouraged long-form articles from their users was awesome
Yes. At the end of the day it is always corporate greed and shortsightedness that does them in.
- Crazy that even Google seems to be realizing that it's search really leaned on Reddit for decent results nowadays... I'm curious to see if a bunch more things start to implode over time
Myspace, digg, tumblr, reddit, twitch, could maybe count 9gag and places like gfycat
Same.
That's how I got my username....
I remember the day that Slashdot sold out.
- What happened to Slashdot? There wasn't really one particular event that made me stop using that site, I just sort of drifted away. Was there an "enshittification" moment there, too?
- Now this is the real nerd cred here lol. Yea. Same. We're old now. Has its benefits and disadvantages.
- I rarely go to slashdot anymore, but still do occasionally. What did they do?

The enshtification of reddit has reached a head.

They're trying hard to make it like this is some issue about moderators, but they're just the most vocal group complaining about reddit trying to lock down its entire service for monetization and harming all users (and especially vulnerable users) in the process. Always be mindful of people trying to shift the focus like that.

They're ramping up bots to cover the loss of users.
Very very few people actually post, and a little more comment. But as bot posts became the majority, lurkers are going to start leaving as quality dips.
- Maybe just me, but I totally want to see a Reddit where everyone actually is a bot.

You can't monetize sincerity. Once you monetize it, sincerity and the trust that comes with it evaporate.

So traffic is back to normal but ad clicking is way down? Have they not figured out how to make their bots click the ads?

Traffic to the page for people to buy ads is down. This has been the trend for the past week or so. People are still using reddit, but companies aren't looking to advertise on it.