Reddit Got Rid of Their World Buffs

It really broke my heart. I loved Reddit, I was on it on RiF one my phone when I didn't use my computer. It was great for finding all sorts of new stuff and it was genuinely fun. I'd had a few accounts for like a decade or something, but when they killed the alternate programs I just left and never looked back.
- I miss RIF, but it's for the better. Lemmy moves too slow for me to doomscroll it forever, so I've started putting my phone down more.
  I've started reading books again, even in public, when I'm waiting for someone or something. My mind is slowing down and getting more peaceful.
  
  This is the way.
- Yeah, i didn't realize how much i relied in Reddit to keep me informed on sports. I barely know what's going in with my favorite teams, let alone the leagues anymore. But i couldn't use anything other than RiF to browse Reddit, so i was done as soon as they axed the third party apps.
  
  This is me on many topics. I am so uninformed over the last year.
  I love Lemmy, but I’m in a smaller bubble than I was before too. There are a lot less political opinions on here. People are outright hostile to anything that doesn’t fit in a narrow window, and though I mostly agree with what passes through that window, my idea of the world is off because of it. (Example, my wife uses Facebook. We both voted for Harris, but she was certain Trump would win. She was seeing what everyone was saying and I wasn’t. Imagine my surprise when she lost the election so terribly. My little bubble had me convinced he didn’t stand a chance.)
  I try occasionally to open Reddit. I know that Lemmy hates stock traders, but Reddit is where you get the best info on that. I’m a stay at home dad who contributes entirely by trading so I need to look at what people are researching from time to time.
  I just can’t stand the Reddit app. I can’t stand clicking on ads without realizing it because of how they blend it in.
  I can’t stand the kind of greed that led to the decision that killed third party apps.
  I miss it, but not bad enough to have a subpar experience on there. That, and I believe in a federated social media future. Tech companies are garbage.
  
  You can use rdx for reddit browsing without interacting.

I miss RiF sometimes :[
- The writing was on the wall when reddit restricted buying awards in anything but the official app. For some reason, I even have a vivid recollection of where I was in the world when that went down.
  
  Back in 2014 RIF was $2 one time purchase for a completely ad free experience. I knew that couldn’t last forever, but I enjoyed the 9 years I did have.
  
  On the toilet?
- I still have the app on my phone
  Just in case
  
  Right after S2 of Firefly
  
  Me too. I click a reddit link, and the app opens to remind me
  
  Oh man, I'm jealous. I uninstalled the app, but I'm pretty sure you can look up workarounds to make the app still work if you have it on your phone.
- I miss Apollo. Voyager is nearly as great and is open source so it's not all bad. Still miss it though...
  
  Yeah Voyager needs more polish. I have found Mlem to be more spiritual of the successor in terms of ui design.
- RIP RiF.
- Jerboa is similar enough in my head. Though, if I could time travel and get the 2023 experience then I might see that I'm misremembering.
  I was hoping RiF's dev would make an app for Lemmy. They did make one for Tildes though called three cheers for Tildes. I believe their username is talklittle.
  
  Jerboa was real bad back then. Like, bad enough that I shelled out cash money to purchase Sync for Lemmy, which was another different old reddit front-end that now pivoted to Lemmy.
  Overall though I'm now actually a big fan of Sync. It's a good app. Does all that it needs to and not much more.
- Big RIP. Used to go on that site quite a lot back when it still had good clients
- Same... Sync is my life now
- I'm lucky, Boost was my app of choice. Now I just use it for Lemmy instead.
  
  Which is how I learned about Lemmy. I opened Boost one day and was like... Wait, something's off. : )

apollo was so nice to use
- I got great news for you!
  Apollo exists for the fediverse!
  Just look up „voyager“ app for iOS!
  I currently just use the webapp (no difference to the app). To „install“ the webapp (iOS) just go to the website and create a shortcut on homescreen.
  I love it and probably wouldn’t use lemmy without it!
  Edit: I’m not affiliated
  Edit2: source code on GitHub
  Edit3: it should be available for Android too. Unintentionally made it seem like it’s iOS exclusive
  
  FWIW the native app of Voyager definitely has more features than the PWA. Probably most notably haptics… PWA is a good options for those that want it though
  
  oh wow, i had no idea! thanks for the info!
  
  I have to ask, what's up with those quotation marks?
- 😭 Gone but not forgotten.
  
  Forever on my home screen RIP
- Good news! You can now sideload it

For a lot of the OGs on Reddit it got worse after the whole AMA Victoria thing. That was really when Reddit went downhill. Before that Reddit was amazing with AMAs that kept you refreshing constantly to be live in the chat, and posts that were funny and discussion that felt a bit more meaningful.
- Yes! That was when it was so blatent to any die-hard users.
- We can look at a million things over the years and say this is when it went wrong. It's all hindsight 20/20. The reality is that we're here now, and, at least for me, I enjoy it here. 💜
- what happened?
  
  I’m pulling all of this from memory, so YMMV… Victoria was a paid person from Reddit who worked on the AMA subreddit only. Her job was to basically go around and get celebrities and other interesting people to do AMAs and then would help schedule them and coordinate the whole thing. In some cases even helping to type out answers. If I’m recalling correctly Reddit just got too corporate and decided to terminate her out of the blue. The community fought back, but nothing big ever changed or happened. After she went away AMA basically turned into a shitshow of no one actually doing anything. She was legitimately a powerful tool at Reddit but they just got rid of her.

hi every1 ive got new logo!!!!!!! puts banana peel on head my name is steve but u can call me t3h Sp3zZi of sn00!!!!!!!! lol…as u can see im very random!!!! thats why i want u to come here, 2 meet random ppl like me ^\_… im 40½ years old (im not immature 4 my age tho!!) i like 2 rd elon musk x posts w/ a pic of my ex-wifie (im over it tho deal w/it) its our favorite thing!!! bcuz shes SOOOO random!!!! hes random 2 of course but i want 2 meet more random ppl =) like they say the more the merrier!!!! lol…neways i hope 2 find alot of rubes here so give me lots of monies!!!!
SNOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!~ <--- me bein random again ^\_ hehe…toodles!!!!!
love and waffles,
t3h Sp3zZi of sn00
- This comment just gave me a little bit of PTSD
- We are all forked !!
- Reminds me of Boxxy for some reason.
  
  The original meme has the person's name as "katy", and Boxxy's real name is Catie, so whoever wrote the original might well have been parodying her.
  Edit: After a bit more research, there's the tiniest sliver of a chance it might have been based on her pre-Boxxy online activity, because it pre-dates her use of the name, but it's probably nothing to do with her.

For me it's not the app ecosystem. Reddit used to feel like it was a platform run by its community now its very company run and controlled.

Thankfully, Boost is just as nice for Lemmy as it was for Reddit.
- And eternity is just as nice as Infinity :)

rif gang
- Now: RedditIsFucked
- Reddit made it unusable on mobile again.
  I use Firefox + unlock, but naturally it's just slower and less convenient than rif.
  I use reddit a lot less now. Practically don't use it on mobile as I noticed.
  
  Apart from going there through a search engine I've never used Reddit again since they killed the API.
  
  I use reddit for special interests. There are some subreddits which are unmatched sources in terms of expertise. Be it a game I am currently obsessed by or serious job related discussions about the newest embedded tech...
  
  I miss Apollo. It was just so good.
  I still use it to follow the war in Ukraine, but that's it. It can burn once the Russians are defeated.
  
  Oldreddit + Oldlander extension is way more convenient on mobile browser.
- Represent. I do miss it sometimes, but it's probably better that I don't spend as much time online.
- Relay for Reddit will always be my favorite. It had a nice tablet mode and the "swipe to do everything" interface was nice.
  I have yet to find a decent replacement for it. Voyager is alright but I swear that it was designed to maximize unintentional button presses. It's so easy to accidentally go to the community or the user's profile when I just wanted to click on the post. And I can't even count the number of times I accidentally collapsed a comment when I was trying to edit or upvote it instead.
  I miss Relay so much, but unfortunately the developer decided to play by Reddit's rules and start charging people to use the app. So it's never coming to Lemmy.
  
  Oh God yes, I feel you on the Miss-clicks
  Oh let's look at the comments, downvote, ohh shit I need to, collapse, fuuuuck, uncollapse, inadvertently scrolls up now that it expanded, Hunt down the exact right one, swipe to upvote, miss, back to zero, sigh, carefully swipe over to upvote, tap for comments, end up in user's profile....... It's not really an app that you can surf until you've had your coffee.
  
  Have you tried Thunder? I've been using it since I finally got around to moving over here (admittedly not very long) and I've found that Thunder gets a lot right. It's open source, ad-free, cross-platform, and nice to use. It doesn't have quite as much polish as Relay but the design language is similar enough that it doesn't feel like a huge departure.
- I still have it on my phone n open it's corpse all the time out of habit when looking for sync. I should uninstall it.
  
  I have the client for animelab which hasn't existed since they got absorbed into crunchyroll. Maybe I'm just holding a grudge but I think there's value in remembering what they took from you.

I pay the yearly subscription for Sync Pro, and I consider it a donation more than anything. I've gotten so many years out of that app, and the developer choosing to repurpose it to Lemmy made my transition here almost seamless from reddit.
- Wait, Sync for Lemmy is a subscription and not a one time purchase? Boost's dev did a similar transition but only standard one time purchase there.
  
  There's a one time purchase to remove ads and a subscription for features like machine translation or importing/exporting your communities. It's $17 yearly or $100 lifetime
- I'm the same, and had paid for it during the Reddit days of the app. I'm hesitant to pay a subscription this time around, though, since the creator has always left for months and come back with a flurry of updates - which is entirely up to them, but a turn-off for something I'll pay for periodically.
  Sync is still my daily driver, and IMO few Lemmy clients come close.
- Hadn't seen the variation of pasta before. Feels like the perfect X years later of the original

These days if I wanna check reddit on my phone I just navigate to old.reddit on my phone's browser.
- redlib is also a pretty good front end: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
  safereddit.com is one i used from time to time. there’s a bunch of other instances, as well
  
  Wow this is fucking cool! Thanks man!
  
  I use SearxNG's redirect functionality to redirect all reddit links in the search results to a Redlib instance. It won't affect URL bar links but that's okay, I don't directly go to Reddit anymore.
- They’re starting to break functionality though. Sometimes old Reddit doesn’t load comments or work at all on specific subreddits.
- I use Stealth for any niche groups over there that I still follow, and then if I really want to comment, I'll login with old.reddit on my browser.
  https://gitlab.com/cosmosapps/stealth
  
  RIP I have an iPhone so I don't get to use anything cool

reddit was not great after like 2015. It just completely shit the bed in 2023

Why has the reddit mascot got chips on its head now?
- He's a wild and crazy guy!! Click on this wild and crazy guy for a coupon at McDonald's! Post three reddit posts telling us how great your McDonald's experience was for another chance to win! Woo hoo!
- It's supposed to be a weird 3D voxel banana for some reason.
  
  But why did they blend a very hi-poly reddit alien with a super corny looking voxel banana?? It neither fits nor looks good?
  
  Ah it’s not a heavily oxygenated Mohawk from an 80s bad guy, I’m disappointed
  
  They went back to skeuomorphic?

I haven't looked at the front page of Reddit since the exodus. I have used it to deshittify Google search results but that's it. I imagine it's absolute garbage by now.
- Same. Unfortunately I still need to visit smaller subreddits to get answers on niche topics, but that's my only use for it now. In and out; 10 minute adventure. Not spending all day on the front page like I used to. Any more time than that on the website, and I'll just end up getting into an argument with some Gen Alpha idiot who feels the need to butt in and say something ignorant. 10-15 years ago you'd only see that kind of behavior during summer break. Now /r/SummerReddit is all of reddit.
  I hope that one day I can finally abandon that shithole for good.
  
  Even the smaller subreddits on niche topics seem to be dying. I suppose the lost good will (and loss of third party mod tools, or course) caused many of the superusers to leave.
  
  I went and looked last night out of curiosity, and found absolutely vile racism on r/Canada talking about immigration. It was just shy of "deport them all' in the comments.
  
  Holy fuck, you're right. They are all adults ish now. U nailed it with the /r/summerreddit take
- I rarely touched that shithole called the front page. Mainly in Redditplanet for Windows Mobile, since you can't login there.

My gosh that Reddit app icon is horrible. It looks like a terrible meme NFT or something. ...Which was probably the aesthetic they were going for, to be clear.
- ik reddit has nfts,which makes sense.

Wtf is on the things head?
- A pixelated banana. It looks horrible.
  
  I bet it was AI generated.
  
  Is it a c/bananaforscale banana? Because it's not a good one

I think the true cutoff for me with Reddit was when they perma banned me for commenting that I should in fact be allowed to punch nazis (pretty sure it was a mass report thing going on)
- I was temp banned from all Reddit when I messaged the mods in a subreddit to complain about a post.
  I think thousands of people did the same thing that day, it was a really obnoxious comment section that ticked off many ; but someone had connections and they issued everyone who complained a three day ban site wide.
  
  Reddit mods can be such shitstains about... Well, pick a topic! They don't like what you did, banned, asking about your ban? Banned from communicating with them for a month.
- Hey, same!
- Banned for attacking the user base.

Why the fuck are they using a 3D voxel banana as a hat for Snoo?
And why does Snoo look AI generated?
- reddit recap logo. and because for some reason they want to do the exact opposite of what every other company does with their logos. (I'm a lemmy and reddit dual user)

Anyone remember The Button or r/place? That was peak reddit for me since it brought together the entire community. When they stopped doing stuff like that despite the community's love for it is around when I started seeing the writing on the wall that they were ultimately there to make money and couldn't waste engineering hours on "frivolous" community engagement.
- I have a hard time not personally blaming this on spez, tbh. After he lied about Apollo's dev's (I don't remember which app) phone conversation then they showed up with the damn recording to prove it wrong.
  Like, for real, the conversation was something like
  dev: Or you could just buy me out for $X ha
  spez: Are you threatening us?
  dev: What? No, it was just a joke, because you said it costs $X for my app to hit your server
  spez: oh, okay, I understand you now, I'm sorry.
  Later...
  spez: This dev threatened us.

So, did Reddit lose a considerable amount of user base since then or not?
- Not really. They're sort of succeeding. They just became profitable, I think, for the first period ever.
  Got more users on Lemmy though, including me, so that's a win in my book.
  
  Yes, Reddit is way more mainstream now than ever. My grandparents talk about it.
- From a statistics standpoint, definitely not.
  As of Q4 of 2023, reddit claimed 36.4 million logged-in 'daily active' users. An increase from Q3 of 2023 with a count of 34.7 million. Not sure of the accuracy of user counts for lemmy, but good estimate is about 450,000 total users over it's entire lifespan, if every single one of those was a reddit convert, we'd still be a minor blip. I don't know if we have 2024 numbers that are comparable, but most stats indicate that reddit is likely still growing.
  Spez predicted what would happen in that protest with almost 100% accuracy and most mods involved didn't follow through and backed down. Some are trying to build something new and that's worth pursuing but we lost that fight.
  
  Lemmy has 45.1 thousand logged-in daily active users.
  
  I do have to wonder how many of those millions of users are bots. Browsing /r/all, you can find plenty of weird pseudopornographic subreddits like /r/ReallyGorgeous, which are populated by literally thousands of bots upvoting and commenting on fake selfies posted by the most obviously stolen accounts. Report these accounts all you want, the admins don't care.
  
  Lol, I blacked out my sub and then never returned. Not sure what happened to it, but reddit is so god awful I don't even bother trying to check.
- Are you counting the 14 of us that came over to Lemmy and stayed considerable?
- Depends on what you mean by that. A small fraction left but it was sizable enough for Lemmy to become my home.
- No. Too many users were used to the trash official app because that’s how many of them came to find Reddit because of the app’s release.
  Can’t know what you’re missing if you never experienced it.
  But honestly that’s partly why Reddit was going down the tubes when all these Facebook folk started coming to “that new app Reddit” and treating it like Fb 2.0 so it was for the best for the rest of us to leave and find alternatives.
- Despite it seemingly not having a significant impact on the "user" numbers the overall quality has gotten considerably and quite noticeably worse so it's not unreasonable to think that bot activity has been continually increasing.

I wish someone would patch sync for reddit
- Sync for Lemmy is amazing.
- It's been patched for ages. I've certainly been using it daily since around August or September of 2023 including all day today.
  Revanced is your friend
- I've been using it since the purge just fine. Revanced. Just make sure to get the 2nd last sync version, as the latest one has a nag that you can't disable.
- I know about sync for Lemmy, just wondering if anyone figured out how to reuse the old app

I miss bacon reader =[
- I miss bacon reader too ... sobs

I don't really understand why reddit pretty much succeeded in killing off all other forums. People love the format of reddit so much that even after killing off all the supporting apps it hasn't really done much at all to cause people to go back to traditional forums. I've personally always found reddit far worse than a traditional forum because of the like system. This place has it as well, although I'm not sure how it compares to reddit's in terms of algorithm.
Traditional forums did not have it. You just saw posts sequentially. There was also no character limit. This meant on traditional forums everyone's position was not only presented equally but you could also go into as much detail as you wanted. If the topic is complex you could write basically an essay if you wanted, which in reddit you have to break up into multiple posts. Reddit's like system also tends to facilitate echo chambers because popular opinions show up first while unpopular opinions show up last and can even be hidden, and it encourages people to misrepresent you and not act in good faith because they're looking for an "own" to farm likes rather than a real discussion.
Sure, there might be sometimes when a person's opinion is so out there and disingenuous you don't even want to take it seriously and have a real discussion, but I've never once in my entire history of using reddit had a decent conversation with someone. Even things as benign as like /r/nintendo, I say I enjoyed a game and I got a bunch of people shitting on me calling me a bad person for liking a particular game. No matter how benign and non-serious the topic is, people always find ways to turn it into an attack to "own" you to farm upvotes.
- If a forum gets too popular finding all the posts you like in sequential order like that gets hard. I remember during the height of Wil Wheaton's forum days in '04-'05 or my Fark days of '08-'13 I had a hard time keeping up with it due to the limitations of the platform. If it could give me them ranked based on interactions I could find the ones that most of my friends were posting in, and then make sure to participate. Instead I had to go to every new thread just to see if there was something interesting posted.
- I agree with your point about the vote system. The single change Lemmy made that I think makes it much healthier is that you have no profile total up or down votes. There is no reason to chase imaginary internet points, while giving the court of public opinion the tools to tell you your wrong.
  For example, Youtube became a much more unreliable place when it removed the dislike button. So much so that third party plugins now are what people have to use to decide, at a glance, if something is worthy of other peoples time.
- The subreddits like sewing were pretty fab.
  I recently received a reddit warning (and was threatened with a ban if it repeated) for "language" in a private message that was not reported. The message said AI identified it and a human reviewed it. The message was not reported to them.
  Which I guess I knew could happen but you typically don't assume mods are reading PMs. Anywho I haven't been back but still need to delete my shit.
  
  sewing is pretty fab eh?
- tbh forums are annoying af. Perhaps I'm too used to modern day intuitive UI but they all seem to assume you know your way around. Btw if you want that 'community' feeling join a discord server. They're great! I've been particularly interested in a twitch streamer/YouTuber "dougdoug"s server for about a year but it gets a tad too fast sometimes haha
- This meant on traditional forums everyone's position was not only presented equally
  No, the earlier web forums based on phpbb or vbulletin or whatever prioritized the most recent posts. That means that plenty of good content was drowned out by fast moving threads, and threads were sorted by most recent activity, which would allow some threads to fall off quickly unless "bumped."
  It was inherently limited in scale. The votes made such a difference for the forums that implemented it (slashdot, hacker news, eventually reddit) that it could make the more popular stuff more visible, rather than the most recent stuff more visible. And whatever the local site culture was could prioritize the characteristics that were popular in that particular place. That's why tech support almost entirely switched to reddit or similar places, because the helpfulness of a comment was generally what drove its popularity.
  And the biggest problem with the older forums was that they didn't allow for threading. Any particular comment can spawn its own discussion without taking the rest of the thread off on that tangent.
- https://dbzer0.com/blog/how-did-we-move-from-forums-to-reddit-facebook-groups-and-discord/

2023? I was thinking 2013.

I found a loop hole in the reddit-verse and am able to use bacon reader like its early 2023. I mourn the day this glitch in the matrix is removed from my devices. Until then, carry on!

Former Slide user here 🙋

Makes me 'member these informative graphics on 4chan ~2008 that categorized users into oldfags, newfags and cancer. Anyone else 'member?
- Ah yes the elderfags. What a time.
  Eternal September just won't stop.

What I used before leaving: copypasta
(A bot allowed to replace all comments with an edit to avoid being farmed by reddit or sold to AI)
- I edited all my comments, then deleted all of my comments, then deleted my account and two-factor. Then Reddit restored my account and all it's comments and I can't remove them again cause no two-factor 🙃
  
  Hence, the copy-pasta~

Nowadays I barely use Reddit, but sometimes you end up forced to use an app, so I use Infinity with a custom API key
- That works until reddit.old is killed. That will be next thing to go
- I still use reddit alot, but I use sync. Unfortunately there are still many useful subreddits in reddit that have never moved to Lemmy. For example Usenet subreddit or Fan sub Reddit for tv show and games, and let us not forget anime_titties.

I'm still using boost. Both for lemmy and reddit.
- Wow, just tried opening boost (for reddit) and it actually loaded
  
  You have to have admin on a subreddit i believe. I just made my own and then it works.

Never used any of that clients always used offical New Reddit web client even on mobile. I moved to Lemmy because it's FOSS. That's all ¯_(ツ)/¯

Its so shit even Elon won't buy it.

Reddit is now run by people ugly 🫏 faces. 🤣
- what
  
  The comment you are replying has “ass” censored with a 🫏.
  This is the first time I am seeing ass being censored in such manner. The more I ponder why the commenter did it, the funnier it gets – regardless of their intention.

to play devil's advocate, from reddit's view those third party apps were just using server resources and making them no money.
- Except you could post and comment through that medium, increasing their traffic, content and engagement without costing them a cent in development. Then they waited ten years beyond necessary to realise an app was indeed a good idea and fucked every user and developer to get theirs out and in front of people.
  
  That's a good point, i didn't consider the value of the content it creates