AI moderation and the complete inability to send an appeal to a human.

Censorship — So many subs have extremely odd restrictions on posts and comments; special rules to be able to comment; a list of words or phrases that shadow-remove your comments, etc. This sometimes doesn’t matter with day-to-day stuff. It inhibits the capacity to explore controversial topics or have hard conversations. “Can’t meta-refer to another thread or sub,” “We want good content, but don’t post lengthy sourced write-ups!,” You find after dissecting why your comment was shadow-removed that “genocide” or “apartheid” trigger removal. No Ellipsis use on one sub, lol. I have a list of censored words by sub. Can’t explore tough issues without legitimate adherence to free speech. It’s one thing not to enable bigotry and incivility, but we need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable sometimes in order to yield breakthrough progress across echo-chambers.

Power-tripping mods — It has become worse in recent years. Subs that used to have respectable mods and a true appeals process just comes down to them blindly reaffirming whatever judgement there is absent of reason or ethics. Ultimately they aren’t arbiters of civil discourse but more often than not blatantly attempt to shape discourse relative to their own agenda; r/news and r/worldnews are notorious for this, particularly.

Blocking — The hit-and-run of users throwing out weak arguments then running away by blocking is itself disappointing; but that when a user blocks it nukes the rest of the thread, disallowing you to respond to anyone else who independently replies to you makes ZERO sense.

(Bonus: bots, but that’s a given).

In the end I’ll go wherever the people are. I’ll use reddit, lemmy, and I’m hopeful that the new old Digg returning with Kevin Rose and Ohanian will work out.

The platform is apparently run by people who are pro-nazis so that’s fun. They pulled the trigger on Banning me for an incredibly flimsy reason.

deleted by creator

The admins
The top mods
The redesigns constantly making it more shit as it goes

the aggressive permabanning that began around the time musk complained about not “moderating the site enough” to SPEZ the fan. and then aggressive shadowbanning as of late.

the astroturfing by right wingers allowed on the site, to suppress any opposing arguments, which includes immense of botting.

Total bans for upvoting anti-nazi posts.

I don’t really think about reddit anymore.

I stopped using it entirely but the top 3 reasons for doing so are:

1. The admin staff had been increasingly showing signs of Nazi sympathizing if not outright bigoted bullshit of their own.

2. They killed 3rd party apps, which was the only way to really use the site on a phone in my opinion as the official app sucks and the mobile layout also sucks.

3. A bit of Eternal September. The more mainstream it became, the more watered down and samey everything became. Niche communities were active, but often filled with the same 3 fucking things posted ad infinitum. In addition to the bigger a sub grew, the more restrictive it became in what was allowed to the point that only a few special users (often the mods) were the only ones posting that were ever approved to post by their automod deletion system.

Shitty app.
Shitty web interface.
Corpo policies.

I’m fully onboard with all the critique listed here, but I’m afraid I do still use R on a daily basis. Why? Because of sheer (and original / non-bot) traffic, I guess.

This tends to mean that highly-useful, knowledgeable, expert-level commentary is still produced there in significant quantities, even if it does mean sifting hard through the dreck to find it. And that stuff can be hugely useful to me.

That said, I feel like Lemmy has a significantly higher signal-to-noise ratio, so it doesn’t have to be remotely as big as R in order to achieve the same level of usefulness, and indeed, L is certainly useful right here and right now.

But I guess the other thing is that most of the smaller and niche communities here could really use a membership boost. Maybe with the next reddit screw-up, that will happen, hehe.