Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
Because the most active contributing users left. I used to comment a lot on reddit, but I’ve been exclusively on Lemmy since my 3rd party app was axed.
And I’ve been very active here. Like, even on this alt account that I made 16 days ago, my app says my post “karma” is already higher than my reddit comment karma was from over a decade.
I feel more willing to contribute because there’s a sense of community, and I’m not just providing free entertainment for a company to profit off of.
I’ve commented more on lemmy in 3 months than the last 10 years on Reddit
Glad you’re here, nutbiggums!
Shit. I think it took me 5 years on reddit to comment once. Now I have alts! Alts!
I used to comment a lot on reddit
Same. I had a 15 year account with a couple hundred thousand karma and commented and posted a lot. If you piss off the people who actually use the site you will reap what you sow. Reddit should have known that since the exact scenario happened fir Digg when everyone migrated to reddit.
They looked at the leaves, and failed to see the forest, thinking that simply not killing old.reddit was enough to avoid Digg-ing the grave. Because from their view that’s how Digg died - v4 happened, users couldn’t go back, they got pissy, and they left.
@megane_kun@lemm.ee is also right when he says that they compared Reddit with other social media platforms and took the wrong conclusions. What keeps people in Facebook aren’t “content creators” or what have you, but their relatives and friends; in Reddit there’s no such thing, people weren’t there because of more people but because of the content that those people created, so their connection with the platform is considerably weaker.
I also think that the trust thermocline played a role. It wasn’t the first time that the platform pissed its own users.
Agreed on the reasons why FB stayed relatively strong despite its reputation going down the drain. What kept many people from leaving FB for good is actually network effects: that one’s friends and family, coworkers and colleagues, are more likely to be in FB than not in it. Huffman’s site? Not so much. I don’t care if someone I know IRL is in it, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want them to know I used it.
The platform formerly known as Twitter is a more apt comparison, to be honest, but it’s still way too early to tell if it has actually weathered the storm, or has become so rotten on the inside that it’d spectacularly fail in the near future.
Perhaps Twitter is a third can of worms, it’s neither about content (as Reddit) nor the users’ social circles (as FB), more like a few anchor people keeping the others there. Due to that Musk’s idea (to pay creators to stay there) might actually help.
I still think that it’ll fail due to other decisions Musk took, but less spectacularly than Reddit. Musk is at least trying to think by himself, Spez is simply following others.
I think Steve Huffman is only after the possible profits he’d make on the IPO. He doesn’t care if his reputation would be sullied amongst the proles like us, nor does he care if he’s being original and ground-breaking. He just cares about the money.
Will it work though? I want to bet on the possibility that his IPO will fail due to all the bad news about his site as of recent, but given that the world in general has been disappointing recently, I’ll just keep my money to myself, lol!
He is after the IPO money but Dunning-Kruger is the hell of a drug, Spez is simply not a good CEO and he doesn’t know how to maximise pre-IPO numbers. So odds are that he thought “who’s in the same situation as me? Ah, The Iron Man¹! He’s a cool guy, has lots of money and a platform like mine. I assume that he knows what he is doing², so I’ll ape what he did!”. Musk killed 3PAs and got rid of the people criticising his platform, so did Spez.
And killing 3PAs pre-IPO does actually have some merit. They created value³ for Reddit, but detracted from the immediate profit; but if you’re selling the company you don’t care about the value, you care about the immediate profit to show your potential buyers “see? This company is profitable, gib lotsa moni”. However odds are that things happened faster than Spez predicted, odds are that he assumed that the protests would last a bit and die, not that people would say “enough of this shit”. And now odds are that he lost that “magical” window of opportunity to maximise Reddit’s price to the potential new buyers.
- I cringed writing this.
- Spoilers: Musk does not know what he’s doing.
- By “value” here I mean the potential of a company to generate profit over time.
Hahahaha~ If it’s any consolation to you, I also cringed reading the part that made you cringe while writing it. More than enough cringe for all of us to share around!
Yeah, you actually said out loud what I was just thinking to myself when I wrote my previous reply. Not exactly what you wrote, but I was thinking that if it worked for others, it’s good enough for himself. Why think of a good idea when you can just copy others’? Something along those lines. However, copying ideas actually does take some work as well. It’s not enough to just copy what they did and apply it to your situation. You’ve also got to think about whether or not what you’re copying is a good fit for your circumstances.
About the third point though, the way I see it is that Huffman tried his best (the key word is ‘tried’) to increase the profitability of his site to entice potential buyers, which even though it’d detract from immediate profitability, would add to the money he’d cash out at the IPO in the end—or so he imagines. Agreed with how things didn’t happen according to how Steve anticipated them though. And in fairness to Huffman, other flareups have ended in a similar way. What he didn’t anticipate is how these changes (the API changes) will affect how a lot of people (and the ones that contribute a lot of content) would interact with his site. So, yeah!
I’m always happy to see a Teft post pop up in my feed.
It’s easy to argue why they thought it’s not going to happen to them. They saw Facebook shrug off all of its scandals, and thought that being in a similar position, network effects are going to help them weather any storm. And it can be argued that Steve Huffman and his site did weather this particular storm. But like Facebook, trust in Huffman’s site have taken a blow, and in the demographic that they would ill afford to antagonize.
That we’re starting to see its effects as early as now should scare any sane person in Huffman Inc.
I’ve been noticing your username a lot lately. Solid memes, thank you for your service🫡
🫡
I’ve definitely seen you around a lot lately. 😁 Thanks for the joy and memes.
I was never famous on Reddit but I was a prolific commenter for six years. I gradually phased out from Reddit as I got into Lemmy until July, when I pledged not to comment or vote on Reddit ever again. I’ve since kept my word.
Thanks!
And yeah, I’ve checked reddit a few times for niche things, but it would just feel dirty to contribute there now.
how do you know how much karma you have in total?
For Lemmy?
Some apps add it up for you. One of the apps I use frequently is Voyager (on Android), and it shows it on the profile page.
For example, here’s yours: (I assume I can’t see 100% of the votes though, in case your instance is federated with any that mine’s not"
I wrote an extension for firefox that shows your collective karma so I was wondering if you were using it, this is cool as well
Oh that’s cool. I may have to check that out on desktop.
I’m going to update it to show youe comment/post karma separately when I get my computer fixed
Well definitely make a post when you do! I bet a lot of people would be interested in it.
I made a post, they hated it man 😭 I got like the same number of downvotes as upvotes
I never thought it would be so easy to stop going on Reddit, but this place is good enough
good enough
IMO the users here are way more pleasant to spend time with than those on Reddit. The level of hostility in some areas of Reddit was off the charts and it seems the trolls are staying put. This definitely /mademesmile.
I really avoided unpleasant subreddits. There were many smaller subreddits that were genuinely fun to be in. I miss those communities here. One that comes to mind is r/gintama. That sub was a great source of joy for me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one here.
If you build it they will come…
Can you create your own?
There is a bit of a hiccup with hexbear and lemmygrad but besides that, I feel it’s a very welcoming place here
Yeah I’ve had some really good conversations here, I had a lot of great little friend groups on Reddit over the years but being here made me realise I haven’t had a really good chat with someone that I genuinely enjoy talking to on there for about five years. I’d honestly just assumed it was me but here I’ve had so many great conversations, I don’t know why but possibly it’s that the good interesting people aren’t drowned out and beaten down by a sea of hostility.
Totally agree. And I’m now using more of my time to relearn all the Spanish I’ve forgotten over the last 20 years and even improve beyond my previous level.
I also made the decision to try to use my social media/YouTube/web-browsing time on learning new things. When I’m in the mood for more mindless activities, I generally opt for watching videos where people bring positivity into the world in some way or another.
I pop on here once a day or every couple of days to fart around a very short while and then I’m back to doing my thing.
I occasionally end up on Reddit because a web search had results from there that were intriguing for whatever I was looking up. I never go in as a registered user anymore and those few times I do end up there, I’m in and out without going any farther than the thread that came up in the search results.
Thanks, Spez, for helping me take back my life!
Good enough, that’s our motto.
🤣
We’re a pretty darn good minor league baseball team if you ask me
We have a saying im German that encapsulates that notion: Ein gutes Pferd springt nur so hoch, wie es muss (A good horse only jumps as high as it has to.)
Agreed, and it seems to be evolving over time.
I was on reddit for 11 or 12 years. Commented several times a day. Voted 100 times or more per day. Left mid June and haven’t been back once. Now I do that shit here instead.
Turns out that Reddit is a lot easier to quit than most people claim or realize. I still end up there from web searches occasionally, because some communities just don’t exist in lemmy (also lemmy frankly sucks as a place for finding niche communities due to fragmentation and shitty search tools). But besides that, there’s nothing particularly compelling about reddit anymore.
I wonder where people are going though? They’re definitely not coming here unless they’re an adult male technology/linux nerd.
I’m a woman who has never used linux
Still post here. Gotta get those niche communities some use.
I know I’ve won when my fetish communities are here
Yes, fetish good.
I’m a bit lost there too.
I need my body swap, fat fur, and breast expansion instances
Um excuse me we also have knitters .
I’m still looking to recreate the atmosphere of r/WitchesVsPatriarchy here on Lemmy. It’s what I miss most from Reddit.
I’ll be the first to say that if they rolled back the changes I’d return in a heartbeat.
I miss reddit a lot, but I decided to leave if they went through with the API changes and I stand by that decision. But I definitely miss it and Tildes and Lemmy simply don’t replace it.
I’ll never return, regardless of what Reddit does, but I don’t blame you for your position.
I’d just say don’t give up yet, I think we have a pretty large chunk of people sitting on the sidelines temporarily, waiting to see if Lemmy actually becomes what it aspires to be.
Also I don’t mean to be rude, but it would be nice if Tildes users just came to Lemmy and helped us build here. I’m sure many Tildes users use Lemmy anyways. Tildes is just way too small (like 10% the size of Lemmy) and even if it did take off, it would probably turn out the same way as reddit. But that’s just like, my opinion, man.
The only reason I ever see reddit anymore is for archived info. It’s only a matter of time before that’s all here anyway
I wanted to call bullshit
but they’re entirely right.* Comments per day took a nosedive. Now if only more hobby communities would lift off, I’d be able to abandon Reddit entirely. I’m up to my tits in Linux and privacy guides but I still know nothing of mushroom picking. Nothing!Edit: *some users pointed out that subredditstats is no longer capable of accurately tracking comment numbers. I was wrong.
And that’s exactly why lemmy needs to grow its userbase significantly before it can ever become mainstream.
grow sounded nice until you said mainstream.
I’m up to my tits in Linux and privacy guides
omg I’m seriously loling rn 😆 there’s so much fucking linux on this site. ive been using linux for ~14 years (exclusively for 2), and i have no idea what most linux posts are going on about, nor do i know anyone with a linux pc in my real life. us on lemmy have somehow managed to find each other.
i give it a few months until i have my own instance, a pi hole (whatever tf that is), and completely blocked google from tracking me in any way.
I still love seeing them despite lying outside my interests. Seeing someone’s passion project or troubleshooting session from the outside is interesting, if only thanks to their enthusiasm inspiring novel approaches and clever workarounds.
yeah, it’s engaging and entertaining. i spent half an hour yesterday going through a thread where OP argued for the use of linux in business settings and the comments were reaming OP for his arguments. i was like, “jeez. dont make a mistake on this site. people will let you have it.” OP should wait a few weeks, make an alternate account, and argue for the use of Win over linux in business settings to get the other end covered. 😆
Pi hole is brilliant
whats pi hole
You set it up to be your local DNS server and it will support all devices on your network.
Pi-hole isn’t a complicated tech thing!
It’s just a raspberry pi with a piece of software that you attach to your router and set up block lists that…
Well shit, maybe it is.
I like a good project. Pi-Hole actually frustrated me with how easy and straightforward it was to set up. Maybe like- ten minutes total. You won’t regret it.
see‽ im already getting sucked in
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We have mycology and a few shrooms communities. Just browse my history for the exact links and some neeto grow pics.
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Personally, since it isn’t Reddit, yes.
The communities here are small, unfortunately. Once more people migrate over here, it has the potential to be much better. Without a doubt, the communities aren’t large enough to have a ton of accurate knowledge sharing.
Until then, we should just keep contributing! While I am likely a “top poster” on the shroom communities, I do have some good conversations in the comments. Many people are just lurking and that is totally cool!
I have actually learned a bit about growing here, but I’m infinitely more interested in foraging and identifying. It’s like geotagging, but edible.
Yeah, the myco communities are coming to life for sure.
!fungusid@mander.xyz needs some love… pick random mushrooms you find, say you’re thinking of eating it and wait for a lot of "NONOONOOOOOO"s in the comments. Next step is ???, then profit!
You could always try some of the AI content:
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Honestly, I’ve enjoyed Lemmy far more since joining than I had been enjoying reddit for at least a couple years.
If you open Reddit without an account on a browser, it will automatically create a username for you when you are on site now. Hopped on to look at a post on a semi active subreddit and saw I was somehow logged in, but it was an auto generated account name. Wonder if they are trying to boost numbers that way as well
Just tried it and that did not happen. There was a pop-up asking me to sign in via Google though so I’m going to guess you accidentally clicked yes on that at some point.
It was actually on a work computer using chrome that absolutely no one uses, I’m not even logged in on that machine nor is chrome. This happened a few days ago now, let me see if it will do it again.
Here’s what popped up
Is this where all those auto-generated-ass names were coming from when I was arguing with anti-protesters?
Can you replicate this using fully fresh Chrome and Firefox user profiles over a fresh IP address, like that of a paid VPN? It will be breaking news material if true.
That seems like a GDPR and CCPA nightmare.
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Fuck reddit. Bitches shoulda let me keep my Apollo.
All my homies hate Reddit.
I never participated on Reddit, but I used it to check in on tech stuff and other various interests. I didn’t spend a lotta time on it, but it was definitely the platform that I spent time on the most.
When all the third-party stuff started happening, I decided to take the principled stand and quit using it, but I was worried it was gonna be difficult.
I was wrong. It was super easy ditching it.
Even though it was the “social” platform I was spending the most time on, it also felt like the easiest to replace—mostly because that content could be found elsewhere. This kinda made me realize that Reddit doesn’t have a moat, and it confirmed what I knew all along—the value of the platform is derived from its users. So when there’s enough collective will to do something (in this case, fight against network effects), it’s incredibly powerful.
So I used this free tool I built called Reddit Account Manager to gather all my subscriptions, bookmarks, etc., and then Power Delete Suite to delete all my accounts.
I noticed that my time spent online in general had also decreased.
10/10 would recommend.
I missed browsing reddit for about a week after almost a decade of using it multiple times a day. They made the decision to leave very easy for me with how they handled the protests.
This might make some people mad, but I’m actually glad they didn’t change anything. I don’t like the enshittification of things, but I do like that the worse things get, the more motivated people are to organize, move, and enact change (like migrating to the Fediverse).
Unfortunately, things often have to get much worse before they get better. Humans have a tendency to do that, oftentimes when it’s too late. Of course with some things, it matters more than others.
Regarding Power Delete Suite, this fork (from deestan) is recommended over j0be’s (the one that you linked), if you’re editing the content before/instead of removing it. That’s because Reddit added a timer between comment editions (to be fair spammers were using it).
Nice, thanks for sharing.
Unless it’s changed PDS only grabs comments from your profile. But with a little know how you can delete EVERYTHING using your data-export as a map to all your comments.
Eg. Google NightAuthor site:Reddit.com There are a few listings but none of the content is actually live anymore.
I’ve found there are still useful chunks of information on niche topics I follow only found on Reddit. I’ll poke in see what I need to and drop out. No browsing, no posting, upvotes or account logins.
I’ve got more time for other things since ditching reddit, Lemmy is cool and all but I’ve lost that itch. The memes are pretty stale here and the communities I can browse every couple of days and keep up-to-date.
Overall it’s been a good change for me, thanks reddit for shooting yourselves in the foot.
I would probably still post on reddit if I could do it from my phone in an app that actually works instead of being a glorified ad platform. They killed 3rd party apps to bully users to switch to the official app to boost the usage stats to have a better angle to haggle for their IPO. Problem is that the official app is just excruciatingly painful to use if you are accustomed to a proper reddit browsing tool.
The backhanded, sneaky way they did it with all the denial and lies was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Instead of being upfront and calling a spade a spade, they commited to a hostile takeover and removed all doubt that reddit is going to stay a platform for the people.
If they would have been honest from the get-go I might have continued posting.
I feel like spez just wildly overestimated the level of love/addiction the average user has for Reddit.
Clearly he figured that people were so attached to the platform that they could be coerced into using the official app.
In a beautiful miscalculation, it appears that many, many users would rather just leave entirely than to use it.
The app which, by the way, they also bought out (somewhat forcibly if I am remembering correctly) from a third party then ran it into the ground.
Couldn’t have said it better.
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I used to use reddit everyday. Now it’s like once a week, same as lemmy too. Now I just surf FB MP in my spare time and watch YouTube…
A lot more tiktok for me. Say what you will of the platform, it’s at the beginning of the enshittification spectrum and has a ton of original and interesting content.
I do use Lemmy every day too tho.
I feel like the vast majority of tiktok haters never tried it. The algorithm works really well, and it’s no where near as addictive as people claim. Could it be bad for children, sure. But you could say the same for a lot of other social media.
It’s also the only major platform that has limiting features built into it, if you do have a social media problem.
A large chunk of the core 1% contributor base dropped Reddit.
- I was behind migrating few of the biggest heavyweights, like datahoarder, piracy and so on.
- I also helped cause critical damage to Reddit by being the first official subreddit, privatelife, to have migrated to Lemmy many years ago, and to have voiced against spez and reddit’s CIA political agendas in plenty capacity.
- also have been probably the only subreddit to have closed it on Reddit and made Lemmy the only official place for it.
- I have also been one of the few core Lemmy builders during the past 3 years, doing almost everything other than software development.
My privacy community on Reddit had a staggering 12K users with an activity of 100-150 active users all the time. I sacrificed it, and about 1.3K of those moved to Lemmy. It was the only authentic privacy community on reddit, with none to replace it. r/privacy and r/privacyguides are full of bullshitters, donation stealers and harassers.
I for the first time saw a reddit alternative that was not run by right wing nutjobs or was not infested with rightwingers/freezepeachers/nazis/pedos, and had potential to make it the true reddit alternative close to what I imagined. Thanks to OG fellow comrades (you all know who you are), and thanks to the one who told me to go help Lemmy (you da goat), Lemmy is kind of what I wanted it to be. It has a good foundation.
Shortcoming of content other than memes and political bickering needs to be fixed. And people need to stop being consoomers and playing musical chairs with this problem. Try to put in some effort instead of making Lemmy yet another toilet scrolling app.
Man, if I could blow my own horn as well as you blow yours I too would need a whole lot of privacy!
Who stops you? I can help you achieve as much privacy as you want, at the cost of convenience.
Woooosh
I wasn’t one of the 1% on Reddit, not even remotely close, but I suspect I might be close on lemmy (excluding repost/mirror/auto bots). I really wanted lemmy to succeed and knew that some people, almost any people, had to step up and help get the ball rolling initially. So I started 5 Reddit subs I missed, posted content every day for a few weeks and they’ve been reasonably successful. !badrealestate has 5k subscribers and that feels like a decent contribution.
I say that’s good, you are not playing musical chairs. Almost all people are capable of posting or generating content in some capacity.
Yeah I went to subredditstats.com and checked out a few of the subreddits with a lot of subscribers. They all show a huge drop both in number of comments and number of posts per day. This is the first time I saw some hard evidence that people have moved away, and it’s a lot more than I thought.
Where did they go?
r/AskReddit posts or day
https://i.imgur.com/sNJEHHQ.jpeg
What’s going on there? Really the api change did this?
Really the api change did this?
Kind of. It wasn’t just the change itself, but also how it was done.
Reddit showed complete lack of care about its own userbase (specially blind people and moderators) and that it’s an extremely scummy company, even for company standards. It could’ve pulled the unreasonable API prices to kill off 3PA but it would need smarter people in charge of the decision than the ones who did it.
I’m no business expert, but the thing is I was a heavy user. Had they made the API changes reasonable and worked with the devs, I would have been happy to pay for the service i used so much (I already paid for the app, what’s a few more bucks a month?)
But them to charge such exorbitant fees, be dicks to users and creators, then treat those who were upset like the bad guy? That’s a spectacularly bad approach to business.
Had they made it part of the original Reddit Gold subscription, or worked that into a new subscription for roughly the same price (~$60 a year) I would have been all over that, no questions asked.
You would have kept most of the power users/mods/whatever and had them be a revenue stream in the process.
Instead they lost both the potential for earnings and the contributions they brought to the site. How stupid did they have to be?
Their official app is utter garbage, if it weren’t I may have stayed. People like me have decided that if the Reddit experience has to be so bad, it’s better not to be on reddit at all.
Imagine your favourite burger joint from now on only allowed you to enter from the back alley where it smells like piss and walls are mouldy - then once you get in all burgers have an added layer of spam and Nutella that you can’t opt out of.
Damn! If I remember right, that’s always been one of their most active subs.
They sold out their core product for a short term gain, and I hope it’s biting them in the ass now.
That and spez was a total ass about the whole thing, lying to app devs & just being a fucking jerk.
He did an AMA & fucked that up with either answering no questions or copying & pasting canned responses to obvious plants.
Then the admins started forcefully removing & replacing mods who were protesting by making their subs private and not reverting them. So yeah, you can imagine how well that went over when the new mods had no prior mod experience and/or knew nothing about the topic of the sub they were now modding.
It was a shitshow all around.
We did it Lemmy!
Well, they did say that about only the 10% of users were the ones who make comments and engage with the communities, and guess what, that 10% did use more likely than not, the third party apps. I’ve been a redditor for more than 16 years with a lot of karma, I deleted all my accounts but one, the oldest I had. I’ve been back for a couple of niche communities but I haven’t commented nor upvoted anything.
Another factor that they probably didn’t consider is that those 10% were, on average, more informed about what was happening and what happened in the past (see spoiler for examples). So for a lot of those people in the 10%, even if they didn’t use the 3PAs (I predict that a lot of them were desktop users), it was the straw breaking the camel’s back - I bet that some people felt outright disgusted for contributing with the profits of a disgusting company like Reddit Inc.
List of examples:
- A Reddit admin defending a paedophile. People being banned left and right for highlighting this.
- The above showing that Reddit has tools to prevent harassment, but won’t use them to protect users.
- The whole “we’ll quarantine TD to shut protesters up, but we still want its posters to feel at home here, so we won’t ban the sub until it’s inactive”.
- Spoiling the “Reddit silver” joke for profit.
- Using Ellen Pao as a scapegoat.
- Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, it’s almost like Reddit Inc. says “Reddit users are those stupid things, of course if you throw any bullshit on their snouts they’ll happily swallow it”. Every fucking announcement smelled like bullshit, specially coming from that sociopath called Steve Huffman.
How was Ellen Pao a scapegoat? It’s been a while. Ive been a 13 year redditor somibr pretty much seen everything including the Pao bullshit but I don’t recall her being a scapegoat so much as her saying a lot of stupid stuff.
Then again, it’s been a while
Here’s a link for further info. Accordingly to the previous CEO (Yishan Wong), u/kn0thing forced Pao to fire the communication director Victoria Taylor, also known as the person who organised the AMAs (a big deal for Reddit back then, and largely responsible for its popularity). u/kn0thing eventually admitted to be responsible for firing Taylor, but Pao was the one that took the userbase’s backslash.
And while this is conjecture, I’m led to believe that she was also a scapegoat on creating the precedent for banning subreddits. The userbase hated her, as that was seen as “going too far”, and yet this would become necessary as the site grew (and the subreddits in question were harassing people IRL). Then the following CEO (Huffman) would use and abuse subreddit bans, but since the precedent was already there, users didn’t blame him for that.
Accordingly to the previous CEO (Yishan Wong), u/kn0thing forced Pao to fire the communication director Victoria Taylor
TIL!
I remember the Victoria debacle. Seriously WHY did they fire her anyway? Its like… “Here we have liquid gold… Lets throw it in the trash!” but I thought that Pao was responsible for that, yeah.
I haven’t used app and accessed via browser. Reason why i left was arrogance of the management and it help me realize that reddit became time-waster for me. Quality of discussion was often poor, softly said.
