https://www.theverge.com/23779477/reddit-protest-blackouts-crushed
Users were outraged, but Reddit mostly won.
How is reddit post protest, did it really win over protesters? Did the ones who left make a dent? Or like all things before, did it ultimately do nothing?
I'm here now and not there. So I guess it at least did a little something πββοΈ
Here and not there too. I saw my last post when Apollo got cut off.
It was difficult to figure out how this works at first and wait for the Memmy TestFlight, but now Iβm happy.
Yep, happily testing out Liftoff on iOS. I still find myself using Memmy more often but itβs close. Pretty nice to have a bunch of options to explore developing at such a high rate.
Both are on test flight (beta prerelease) for iOS. I canβt log in on Liftoff, so memmy is my current go-to.
Just started lemmy and Memmy today. Itβs been a great experience so far. The learning curve isnβt nearly as large as has been reported
A big part of that smooth experience is all the progress thatβs been made in the past month, on both Lemmy and Memmy.
The Memmy app only started out as a beta in TestFlight ~4 weeks ago, and was limited to 10k users. The developer has made a truly inhuman amount of progress in that time - he was (and still is) pushing updates more than once a day. Itβs only been in the regular App Store for a few days now.
Additionally, the largest Lemmy instance (lemmy.world) was having stability issues with the massive influx of users. But just a few days ago they figured out what was causing the problems, and the latest version of Lemmy has those fixes.
Wow, when you put it like that, it really highlights how much work got put into this because the experience, especially for a brand new app, is very reminiscent of Apollo. Theyβve done a great job so far. Obviously not near where Apollo was, but that was over 9 years of development. Memmy looking great* so far
So far the issue that Iβve been having with Memmy is that dictation doesnβt work properly: it will delete a dictated comment when you stop/finish dictation. οΏΌ Thereβs a lot to like about it but until thatβs fixed Iβll be using Mlem. οΏΌ
I have been using liftoff also but it is very difficult to find new communities not on your instance or on lemmy.world through the app I couldn't figure it out at first glance so I add them through a web browser and then can access them on the app
I've been adding and blocking communities through the browser since I joined. None of the apps currently seem to be able to add or block communities from other instances flawlessly just yet. I am enjoying watching this whole work in progress that is Lemmy though.
Yeah it does seem the apps are currently limited in that regard, hopefully development pace will continue and we'll be up to a point where we can do that in the next few weeks.
Once the apps are in a good state we can see how viable this will be long term.
That's what I am having to do too and thought I was just missing something, but that makes sense since everything is in flux and that might not be the greatest priority since the exodus is ongoing and stability/keeping up with updates is way more important.
My dude, it's ok to shill Lemmy/Fediverse. I've been doing it to people I know IRL that use R3dd!t.
I have stuff all idea how half of this works and how I'm doing it, I saw a post recommending liftoff and it's been easy enough to blunder through. I've tried using the mobile web interface for Reddit and it's like pulling teeth.
I checked it a few times on a web browser but only a handful. Pretty much done after apollo was killed while I was browsing. It was weird watching the app die in real time
Same here. The day boost went down I moved here. And so far, even though I miss some communities, the overall quality of the posts is much higher. I can't wait for boost lemmy app to come out.
Replace Boost with BaconReader, and that was me except I saw rumblings of it before the API change and went ahead and made the move because fuck unfettered capitalism. Even if this doesn't last, we tried and made a stand and can enjoy the results while it lasts.
Here and unfortunately there too. Because movie and tv series discussions don't exist yet in here so i have to use reddit for that. But now i only use it for like 20 Minutes a day instead of 1-2 hours + now i block ads. So yeah it did something
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !moviesandtv@lemmy.film
That's just movie news. What i want is discussions. You know like there are subreddits like r/blackmirror and they post a 'black mirror Season 6 ep 1 discussion.' and everyone post there opinions after watching it
Not much comments there, but that's fine.
But I'll have to wait a bit till fully depending on lemmy. For example now I'm watching Euphoria and there isn't a lemmy community for that. Despite it being a popular series
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !blackmirror@lemmy.world
Do you really need to? I could understand for like mental health or financial advice, but I don't think like entertainment is that essential to keep using and participating on reddit. Which is the worst since participating is content creation that increases engagement from other users who then respond to the comment.
Anyways I recommend a reddit front end if you must like libreddit or teddit. And Stealth for Android which is an app that lets you use a teddit front end. No account and use of front ends for less data for Reddit to collect is the ideal way to go if lurking must be done.
I do really need sometimes. You know some movies/episodes hit so hard that impossible to not talk to others about it, but i have nobody irl that watch that type of stuff so i have to talk with internet strangers.
Also yeah for mental health too.
I miss imdb and rotten tomatoes having forums. It used to be nice when there were many different avenues for discussion wherever you went online.
I did a search for tv and movie forum so came across this place
https://www.avforums.com/forums/tv-show-forum.55/
So there are places to discuss out there. Just have to break the habit of the one stop shop we got used to which has proved to be very problematic with how it has led to growth of companies like Facebook going from a social media company until it becomes so entrenched and hard to quit their influence started expanding beyond the startup that began without ads and treated users well, and stated gobbling up competitors and getting into new sectors.
It all just seems like a simple social media, but it's scary how that can quickly turn and next thing you know it's another billion dollar corporation. Who knows how the growth people like us contributed to reddit will turn out. Might be we created another future Facebook type entity.
I still circle back because there's still just way more discussion on Reddit. I'm still using RiF though, so I can't post or vote
Here and not there too. I saw my last post when Apollo got cut off.
It was difficult to figure out how this works at first and wait for the Memmy TestFlight, but now Iβm happy.
Still looking for a RIF lemmy clone for android. Started with jeroba, on connect now. But nothing like rif yet.
It really really hope Lemmy takes off. For me, thereβs enough here that Iβm set. I look forward to the apps getting better and the platform getting more stable.
If you're still having issues with apps, try wefwef.app. I have no complaints since I started using it.
Iβm actually on the TestFlight for Memmy and itβs getting much better very quickly.
But I was an Apollo addict and that is a very high bar.
Wefwef reversing the colors on upvotes and downvotes triggers me, and at least on iOS it has a pretty annoying WebKit related bug where it stops scrolling until you tap something.
Memmy is quite good though, the functionality is there and the polish will come!
The main thing that got me on Memmy over wefwef is probably stupid, but itβs the haptic feedback on swiping to upvote.
Itβs like a comfort blanket after Apollo was shut down
I was using Mlem more but this latest update to Memmy really looks great, and afaik itβs the first of what I have to add the ability to hide posts (at least on iOS), which was an essential feature for me on Apollo. Now I just want to be able to change my browsing swipe controls to hide and save swiping right like I did on Apollo! Aesthetically itβs looking really good too. I like the Apollo-esque themes.
Only issue I've had with wefwef is that I can't seem to subscribe to communities using it? Like if I go to a sidebar, there is just no subscribe button. But if I go to the same sidebar in my browser, I can subscribe just fine.
Anyone else have this issue?
edit: Just tried again after posting this, and it seems to be working ok now. I've updated it like 3 times in the past 2 days so maybe they fixed it. Neat.
I donβt want it to absolutely explode in popularity to the point all the drama follows with it. Iβm kinda liking being with a lot of savvy app users who contribute right now.
Agreed. Lemmy is very nearly active enough for me, so once the big apps like Sync start rolling in it defo will. Beyond that I don't really care if Lemmy never gets as big as reddit.
This feels short-sighted. The odds of the protest having a major and immediate impact were always low. It's not like the suits were going to have a sudden change of heart and realize they were alienating their users. The majority of Reddit's userbase weren't going to suddenly leave the site forever. But that wasn't the point.
Here's what's changed since the API changes were announced:
We now have an established alternative to Reddit that has reached a critical mass for growth. A lot more people are now working on making the fediverse better, and communities are forming that will attract new users on their own. From now on, every time Reddit makes another move like this, more people will move over (or get closer to moving over) and Reddit will drop in quality even more as a result. If there's ever a Digg V4 moment (maybe when they kill old.reddit), the fediverse will be much more prepared to take on the mass exodus that results.
It's remarkable to me that Reddit could have let one of their PR drones write a post that essentially took seven paragraphs to say, "Sorry but we have to" and it probably would have mostly blown over.
But Huffman's ego took the wheel and he had to make it personal. Instead of just leaving, people are actively cheering for Reddit's downfall.
It always amazes me that these idiots don't have a think tank which has great ideas for them and can tell them when their own ideas are shit.
If I was rich. Absolutely 100% would do this. It would be like cheating at life.
It seems like everyone who runs a large social media platform believes we live in a meritocracy and they're somehow geniuses.
Naw, cheating at life is if your Daddy owns an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa, then you get smart people to do the thinking and PR for you.
There's a risk that you'll start to believe your own PR and try to do it yourself, though. I can't imagine that going well.
Saying that it's over and the Reddit won is a bit naive. The majority of the subs that I used to frequent have come back online, but they are definitely still protesting. ProgrammerHumor is making new troll rules based on majority vote every week. Madlads made everyone a mod. Many subs are posting John Oliver or troll versions of their original purpose.
It's not over. Will they succeed? Who knows. But Reddit is currently a completely different place than it was a month ago because of the ongoing protests.
Yup. I haven't logged in since Boost went down and don't intend to. Except when a link takes me there and auto-opens the app.
That said, while it's fun and informative to talk about how bad Reddit has become, I hope Lemmy can move on soon and just start being something different rather than constantly being smug about Reddit.
I thought the same as you until I checked and saw that /r/programming is back. That is a professional resource whose merits outweigh the ideological ramifications
It's mostly blogspam and gpt generated "articles" and has been for years. Some of the language specific subs were good though.
I started spending more time at reddit slightly before the digg exodus, and yeah. The masses aren't the ones to worry about, it's the people that have been creating content and moderating it for the last 15 years. Reddit has no value past that, it's just forum software (see also: digg.) Not sure how it's going to shake out, but I know that I went viewing daily and commenting often to... nothing. The official app is not getting added to my phone, the mobile website is outright hostile, and it honestly just feels gross to launch the main website. I'd rather just search for gems on lemmy or kbin or mastodon and engage on that.
The subs I have witnessed (although it is difficult because I did delete my account in protest of the API changes), are all full of Astroturf and Ads and are no longer usable.
The big reveal on the impact from this will be in the aftermath from the future IPO. I believe the damage on the brand certainly had a big impact on the target price Reddit can ask.
Also, it showed how fragile its ecosystem is to a bunch of unpaid volunteers which may not have the shareholders interest at heart.
It did a lot of things already. Their valuation was halved (maybe not that bad, but itβs wasnβt good) after it was already not that great.
It made the βimportantβ people take a step back and question whether they should spend their advertising dollars on Reddit. At least a handful of the bigger advertising companies paused their ads on Reddit.
It put a bug in investors ears. The last thing you want, from a newly acquired asset, is shit tons of bad press and drama, along with a public devaluation.
Google publicly commenting on Reddit protests screwing up search results got into the minds of people that may have never even paid attention.
During the blackouts user time spent on Reddit decreased, and overall traffic decreased slightly. The first matters more. If less people are engaging with the site, for less time each use, thatβs less ads they will see. I havenβt seen too many stats about usage a month later.
The user side is what will take time to see what happens. As content quality goes down, some people will be less interested. Then again, look at the rest of social media. Most people donβt really seem to care much about actual content, so maybe Iβm wrong on that one.
And I was referring to the one that I linked, which took place after that one, and after the protests started.
I don't see it. The Gizmodo article sources this TechCrunch article, which says (emphasis mine):
Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund valued its holdings in Reddit at $15.4 million as of May 31, according to the fundβs monthly disclosure released Friday. Thatβs down 7.36% from the $16.6 million mark at Aprilβs closure and altogether a slide of 45.4% since its investment in August 2021. The updated share value suggests a $5.5 billion valuation for Reddit
Yeah Giz is reporting that the valuation has been sliced after the protests, but their own source disagrees with them
Oh, that last bit about volunteers not being beholden to shareholders is not something that had occurred to me before. That definitely raises the risk of this asset.
No, it didn't get crushed. The goal was never to move everyone off reddit, it is to trigger the death spiral by having the people who cared about and actively contributes to abandon reddit and being redditors.
If this trend continues, reddit will get Facebook'd as their algorithms will make contents there get louder and dumber and angrier than ever before and cause more people to leave.
Remember, reddit is cynicism and despair, and despair is the enemy of progress.
I have nothing to back this up and I haven't spent any significant amount of time browsing Reddit since the end of June. Yesterday, a search result took me to a section of Reddit and eyebrowsed through a bit. I feel like the people that left were the people that contributed and a lot of the remaining traffic is the people that just browse. Social media and the internet are not like real world businesses that just tank. Online social media is made up of the people who view it and the people who contribute to it. Facebook became boomers, memes that aren't as clever as people who post them think they are, You're great and posting pictures of a family reunion you didn't know existed, and a substitute for craigslist. It didn't used to be that way, but I think overall they would say their numbers are solid. Social media evolves, and Reddit is evolving in a direction, that a core group of users who I speculate were some of the more useful contributors, don't want to participate in. We're not going to wake up tomorrow and find Reddit gone. But will it ever truly be the front page of the internet again? Will it ever be where I'm glad my search took me for a specific tech problem? Will information that used to be on individual bulletin boards scattered throughout the net which had centralized on Reddit remain on Reddit? Reddit will probably cash out in some way and we'll be left with the Facebook equivalent of Reddit. If that's something that quality contributors don't want to participate in, then it will be even more akin to Facebook. So is it going to go away? Probably not. Could you argue that it's basically already gone? I would say it's at least headed that way.
On some of the subs that I still frequent, the content has swiftly deteriorated, and it's not just due to the still on-going protests anymore. I'm subscribed to something like 50 subs or so, and it's always a handful of these that show up on my subscribed feed. If I want to find the other subs (some of which I don't fully recall why I subbed to them) I have to browse down past a lot of crap content, or look at my list and click them individually. In short, the experience has been awful, not to mention that I no longer browse it on my phone when bored.
Reddit is still there as a resource, mostly for Google searches that take me there, but otherwise it feels "dead" to me, in ruins. It will not go away, like you said, it'll definitely stick around but I think people will gradually move away to other platforms and its content will evolve to something that won't be relevant to us one day.
My personal predictions:
Reddit will continue to exist, but become an increasingly zombified dumping ground for screenshots from other platforms, videos of people being injured/humiliated in public, and lowest-common-denominator "discussion" of culture war topics. It may also to continue supporting small niche communities like r/HVACadvice where you can get a quick answer about something specific from a domain expert, but will largely just become a firehose of diarrhea.
Large Lemmy instances like lemmy.world will pick up the slack for the mostly good-natured people turned off by the advertising and shitshow at reddit and other corpo social medias. It'll be better than current reddit, but increasingly enlightenened centrist, and importing braindead redditisms (shit like "and my axe" etc.)
Smaller Lemmy instances that care more about the kindness and quality of discussion will pour more grassroots efforts into strict moderation, and defederating from mainstream instances. They will tradeoff a wider userbase for a more kind and nurturing atmosphere.
Reddit went from the 5th most visited website in the world to the 20th. That's not nothing.
Lemme put on my tin foil hat for a second and say that this degrading of reddit was just in time for it to go public. It could only go up from here.
I can't predict the future, but I think this whole federating thing is good. The internet and its traffic was too localized. The people don't want to keep being sold.
Now if we could somehow get everyone that uses a site like this to actually PAY - say - $1 a YEAR, the internet would be better for it.
I'm hoping this is the direction we go, and I think it will be, though if the Fediverse ever overtook private social media, I'm pretty certain the tech companies would lobby to regulate social media, try to regulate who's allowed to host web servers, or lobby ISP's to raise bandwidth costs for people who do host web servers.
Eh, I kinda hope that happens to be honest. I've finally got to the point where I just deeply refuse to use any of the large corporation stuff, and if they somehow kill community run social networks, then I'll finally be free of my addiction that I don't have the willpower to deal with as long as there's an ok-enough tempting alternative . Which I know is selfish, but I'd probably help me a lot :D
Interesting. Maybe it's my lack of imagination, but I don't see how tech companies stamp us out by lobbying, or how web hosting and cloud services can be restricted based on use case. Seems like the genie is out of the bottle on this thing.
I find myself not too creative with imagining what are they(corporations) gonna make money off. I like not know what Meta is planning with Threads or what's next with tech companies. I just have the distrust and reminder to not underestimate corporate greed.
Your comments and other lemming comments tells me how corporate greed is gonna fuck us next.
Back in the '90s, ISPs would provide subscribers with Email (POP3/SMTP) access, NNTP access and even basic web hosting of static pages. They also used to provide FTP mirrors of most large software repositories. This saved them wholesale bandwidth and also a faster connection for their users. Maybe modern independent ISPs can reimplement this Service for their subscribers. For instance (pun not intended) Telstra and iiNet (in Australia) could offer access to a Lemmy instance, or a consortium of independent ISPs could sponsor a regional Lemmy instance.
This is a really interesting point, because at least in the UK, we're seeing a rise in regional ISPs again as companies rush to beat BT/Openreach to offering 1gbps fibre internet in areas they're not yet prioritising.
I could completely see bundling a local-focussed set of fediverse services with the subscription to be a no brainer that people might actually get some decent value out of. Also would have the benefit of the services having a steady stream of income from the subscription fees.
The person who runs lemm.ee has a sponsor option on their github page. Idk if that's standard practice, some pin the info at the top of their instance.
The data is not back yet, but some of the power users left. Itβs said only 1% of users submit posts, and if they leave the rest of the community stagnates. Many mods left, which means spam and reposts and low quality content will fill the site. Itβs going downhill, how fast is up for debate.
True. I donβt think itβs going to plummet tomorrow but I think youβll see steady downturn all starting around July 1.
I have to be honest, the fact we have an active alternative(s) to reddit at last makes this a complete success for me. I've lowkey despised reddit for years. Particularly from 2016 on when bots kind of overran the website and the front page was just filled with toxic garbage that never really went away to this day. I actually did use the revanced patch to get my RIF app working again (though I can't get my ad-less premium back unfortunately), but I've been on here far more than there. I think im just having more fun on Lemmy than I have been on reddit in years. The only reasons I hop back are for sports team specific communities (and really the game threads because I like interacting with other people watching when im watching alone). On the instance i'm on currently there are generated game threads but it hasn't got the users to make them particularly active as of yet. If that ever happens i'll happily cut off reddit for good
If the only people who leave Reddit are the ones who understand what a federated FOSS link aggregator is, I think I'd be cool with that. Lemmy's share of the 3% who have moved on is already pretty impressive, at least in terms of where it was a couple months ago. And the quality of the discourse has been significantly better.
I dunno if Reddit won, but I certainly did.
I'm really liking the lack of bots as well. Im hoping the sports stuff takes off here but I guess that just takes time. I'll check out that instance though. When football and hockey start up again I'd love to have gameday threads back
So, I'm new here, but I'm still struggling to see the advantage of smaller and more focused instances. I mean, Lemmy.World was pretty sluggish in the first days of the Great Migration, but it got better fairly quickly.
I can imagine smaller instances can do a better job of screening new sign-ups, and they tend to be a little faster than (some) larger instances. Is that it? I've also noticed that they tend to have more lag on content updates on the communities I am most interested in, and the front page seems a bit more static.
I created an account on a smaller instance when perfomance here on .world were at its worst, but now I find myself using this account more and more. Maybe more instances is good for Lemmy, but I'm not yet sure if ti's good for me.
My home instance, Lemmy.sdf.org, is full of geeky/retro communities that tickle my fancy. I like setting my view to "local" to see what pops up locally, even in communities I'm not a member of.
I'm also a member of feddit.uk, which focuses on UK stuff. That's handy for folks in the UK because it's easier to find locally-relevant stuff.
I would imagine that instances would really compete on channels/communities/magazines and the mods/admins running those. At a certain point, then, the instances would also tend to have some kind of home field advantage on new users who sign up specifically for that instance's sports communities. Users from other instances can still interact with the most popular communities, but that's what I imagine when people talk about instances that focus on a particular niche.
So, Iβm new here, but Iβm still struggling to see the advantage of smaller and more focused instances.
One benefit of focused instances is that we can sort of insulate ourselves from de-federation conflicts amongst the larger, user-focused instances. I'm not sure if you we around for the beehaw.org defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works but those were 3/4 of the biggest instances and those users can no longer interact. Users from lemmy.world were basically blocked from all new content on the communities they were subscribed to on beehaw.org and vice versa.
I host a sports-focused instance fanaticus.social where all we talk about is sports. It's a non-controversial topic (most of the time) and because we're focused on that one topic, users from all the instances like beehaw, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, can still interact with and create content for sports without worrying about losing access to the communities they're a part of. That's the major advantage as far as I see it.
I don't care about user registration counts because most of our content comes from users on general instances. In the future we will probably disable registration altogether. I have only left it open for now to reduce the friction for new fediverse users if they happen to find our instance first and want to make fanaticus their home instance.
We're out here! I'm an admin at fanaticus.social. We're a sports-only instance. We're the instance /u/Garrathian was talking about.
If you miss your sports and want to discuss them, come on over and check us out. We have all the major sports and their teams' communities set up and have ported the game bot (for baseball right now) over. We're planning on having the game bots ported over before the start of the other major sports' seasons.
We've only ported over the MLB game bots over to lemmy right now (because it's the only sport in season) but we'll be porting the other major sports bots over before the season starts! One of our users created communities for all the major sports teams in preparation for this. If you'd like to mod any let me know!
Check out realgm forums for sports. Was hard cutting off sports community on reddit, but realgm is active and been around for years.
Inertia will carry them pretty far, and I'm sure they'll find some way to increase profits β most likely by changing the rules to the point where the site and community is unrecognizable. It will take a while before anyone really notices, and many people probably never will. Reddit will continue boiling the frog indefinitely in search of profits, the same way most social media corps do. Today's YouTube is nothing like what it was when it became popular. Same with Facebook, same with Twitter.
Reddit just needs to pivot before they fall. They probably are in good position to do so, tbh.
There's more money in passive, less-savvy users. The ones who don't use ad blockers, don't use third-party apps, and just consume the feed.
I shouldn't be surprised that Reddit is actively alienating people like me, because people like me do not bring them ad revenue. We DO bring them users, in theory, because we contribute to conversations and make original posts β you know, the things people go to Reddit too see β but what does that really mean for the bottom line? Possibly nothing. There's no shortage of posts on Reddit, many of which never see the light of day because they never get the upvotes. If the top contributors leave, it will just create more room at the top. The feed will remain full, and the subjective quality of that feed probably won't affect the bottom line very much.
I agree for the most part, but the one thing that I think they'll have trouble with is bots. I think they truly underestimate the work that mods and contributors did for free in raising the quality of content, and now they have to build the plane while it's flying after having booted the ones building it off, and now it's just pilots and passengers. Those uniquely impactful few that have been brushed away will hurt the most in a brain-drain kind of way.
Are there less bots here for any specific reason? Or will bots start to run rampant here as soon as the Fediverse becomes more popular?
Bots on Reddit for example did farm karma to later sell those accounts (more karma makes accounts look more legit) or circumnavigate karma thresholds to spam. There is no karma here so that's (hopefully) not going to become a thing.
I see no reason why they couldn't. There's even built-in support for bots in the user settings, at least in Lemmy.
Like on Reddit, it will take some moderation to keep the more malicious bots under control in the Fediverse.
I'm not informed on the topic by any means, but my take is reddit should be less susceptible because they have the resources to combat bots and spam -- or at least empower mods to do so -- but they choose not to. It's pretty surprising to me that they cut support for critical mod tools like Pushshift without having a replacement ready to go. The mod support posts only spoke of tools/capabilities they were planning or committing to, or links to "we want to help" pages. Lemmy is probably more susceptible to bots, especially now, but I think a lot of that up-to-date expertise of how to spot bots is coming over with the new wave of membership. Plus, I don't know if or how bots would be worth it here aside from trolling.
tl;dr I have no idea
Sorry if I have to go on a tangent here but reading your posts reminds me of the Imperium of Man from warhammer. Reddit has grown so big that it probably wonβt matter if entire subreddits disappear, as some would replace it eventually.
Though how long they can sustain this remains to be seem.
In the grim darkness of the 21st century, there is only advertising. For more than a hundred centuries Spez has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Reddit by the will of the gods, and master of a million subreddits by the might of his admins. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand moderators are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
As he sat on his golden throne, his empire growing and diminishing in its own weight, new gods and empires rise and fall, his very legacy cast to the forces of chaos as the sons and daughters of his mighty but rotting Imperium fought amongst themselves. And as he watched satisfied from his divine city, the hungering investors, devourer of worlds and empires, crept ever closer, waiting for the most opportune moment to strike, to feed its never ending hunger for profit.
He's a product of the digital landscape that we live in today.
Reddit has improved considerably over the years.
As much as I personally don't want to use their app, they've done a reasonable amount to actually clean up the site.
The old Reddit had a lot of garbage and a lot of garbage people. This will help to prevent that from being an issue in the future.
There's probably always going to be some kind of groupthink circlejerk happening in the background; it's annoying and gives reddit a bad name, but it's usually harmless.
I'm sorry but no, reddit has consistently gotten worse over the years, to the point that I can't possibly imagine what you mean when you say it got better.
The userbase has become more of a PC mob that continues to regurgitate the same stale words, but that's my only real gripe with it.
The moderation has improved
The only reason I'm still on youtube is because there is no real alternative. They have the monopoly for an invaluable service. Facebook (meta) on the other hand has a (not so)monopoly on a superfluous service. I don't use facebook and such (twitter, instagram). Reddit also had a monopoly, but due to reddit's own acyions, there now is a valid contender in town, one that isn't a bully, so I'm stoked. Once there is a valid contender for youtube, I'm switching to that as well.
Reddit certainly has changed and I don't think it will bounce back so easily. It feels like the Mall you used to love that slowly fell from grace where all of your favorite stores slowly closed up shop and you found yourself going elsewhere instead. One day someone brings up the old mall in passing and someone else chimes in that it's now a flea market. It feels like that's where Reddit is heading... it feels like Reddit is turning into the Dirt-Mall.
Lol, digg is owned by a company literally called BuySellAdsdotcom, Inc. Like, hey I wonder what that company's north star is?
That is a type of transition that's more exponential than linear. As time goes forward the decline gets faster and more noticable. I think you're right about where Reddit is headed.
Bounce back? Reddit is growing and 99% of users will keep using it.
It's a completely different place from 10 or even 5 years ago, and it will never change back.
I wanna say 20th is still pretty high, but quality of posts here are astronomically higher than reddit at the moment and if that continues to be the case, new visitors in general are gonna be signing up for both and will frequent the ones they most frequent. Same way we got on reddit, same way we got off reddit.
Everything that reddit has that is of any value is the contributions of it's users. Disrespecting those users will make them leave the platform, if not today, someday soon. Redditors! Choose to delete all your content NOW and let Spez IPO the ashes.
Before you delete, do transfer your content to lemmy or kbin or any fediverse instance. It can only benefit the community the more content we have :)
I've seen a few users mentioning their comments have been "undeleted" after a few attempts to remove them, and I've also seen comments by [deleted] accounts that still have their comments visible. This was right after the 48hr shutdown period, so it might not be a thing anymore.
Ya they were rolling back mass deleted/edited comments. That was a huge red flag for me, along with censoring info about lemmy etc. I don't need that in my life.
The fact that the Reddit API scandal has now been spun into some 'battle' of salty users vs Reddit is, in microcosm, a win for Reddit. By all appearances, when viewed under that lens, they 'won'.
It was never a struggle, it was a statement of intent. And that statement of intent has, in my opinion, been actioned because here we are now, with a promising alternative.
Reddit will probably flourish under its new guise, accepting that isn't a sort of capitulation. Just move on.
How much of those 3% are comprised of the 1% who are active posters and the 10% who contribute commenting instead of the ~90% lurkers?
I'm willing to bet more than 20% of the people who left Reddit are frequent contributors instead of lurkers. Those are the users that drive traffic in the long run.
I was definitely a Reddit power user. To the point that people who wanted to dig at me thought "look at all the time you spend on Reddit" would insult me for some reason. They lost me last week and I don't plan on coming back. I pinned a "Reddit sucks, come to Lemmy" post on my profile and logged out.
I won't say that I was keeping any decently-large subreddits alive singlehandedly, I didn't have that ability or power, but I was definitely a major contributor.
Yup, that's the point. Most of the people who moved away from Reddit are the people who spent the most time there interacting and contributing to content, and those are the most affected by Huffman's crap. (edit) Most of the people who remained are lurkers, and if a platform only has lurkers, then who's producing the content? It's obviously an hyperbole, but it skews the userbase even more towards having more lurkers than posters, and it sets a trend.(/edit)
To be honest, I didn't even use any 3rd party Reddit apps (even though I was a serial commenter on things I had interest) before coming to Lemmy at the beginning of the protests. I only did so out of my own "moral" choice and because I'm a FOSS enthusiast.
Reddit is too big to die quickly (unless they suffer a catastrophic failure), but it's easy to see that it was an inflection point for them, that it's downhill from here. Remember: at one point, it looked like Yahoo Directory and Internet Explorer would be around forever too.
They all died due to competitive market pressure. Reddit and Twitter are dying due to managerial incompetence. I believe that Threads will be stillborn due to managerial incompetence, but we are yet to see.
For that very same reason Tom said fuck all this, SOLD the whole thing and now lives his life doing whatever the f he wants. No way our boy Tom is about to come back with the whiteboard lmao he's got it good
I don't blame them.
Join Myspace: Hi, I'm Tom! I'm your friend!
Join Twitter: TUCKER CARLSON SAYS THE LIBERAL UFOS ARE GOING TO STEAL DONALD TRUMP'S HAIR!!!!!
Hahaha, it's an interesting point. Myspace does still exist. But it's a shell of it's former self. We can only hope that someday reddit will be too.
It's still massive and wasn't going to die over the period of a month. People are looking elsewhere but currently have no good alternatives. Lemmy/kbin is awesome, but still not ready for the entire Reddit community. We'll get there eventually!
Yep, it's on us to help move the content and people over to Lemmy. People and search engine will continue to default to Reddit. Eventually so much content will be on Lemmy/Kbin that reddit becomes a thing of the past, hopefully.
we'll never get there if users keep gatekeeping
I see many people arguing against improving the ux "its not that hard just learn it"
even defederating meta is bad imo, I think people will be more likely to switch over to alternatives if thread is federated, but if we defederate it then everyone will just stay on threads. Defederating only hurts us, not meta
Maybe I'm biased but I feel like the soul of Reddit as a social media site is much more dependent on its users than other sites. Reddit will continue on but if the company keeps undervaluing its users and moderators (and everything points to that), it will end up being as vapid and pointless as people are saying Threads is now.
Yeah, like your experience with Facebook is largely dependent on your IRL contacts using it. If your friends and family still use it, you might not even notice that it sucks, cuz you are by default more likely to be interested in their normal life shit. But individual connections aren't really relevant on Reddit. I don't even know if any of my IRL friends use it. My experience with it depends entirely on strangers posting good content. If those strangers stop, then Reddit sucks for everyone.
No, it definitely sucks, because although I have a lot of IRL ppl using it, I get literally 20 advertisement posts in a row in between posts from my IRL people. It it absolutely hideous. It frequently just... breaks and refuses to load my news feed, or it will suddenly load 5-10 advertisement fake posts as I am scrolling down the feed, making a sudden huge jump up or down the page, and meaning I must scroll a ton to find the post from a real human that I had just started to look at. Half the time, I only find out about something because someone IRL tells me "did you see X that so-and-so posted?" and I go specifically to their profile page and then see it. I think they keep making their website worse on purpose to drive more people to their apps, and I am simply not installing such a data syphon for Meta onto my phone.
Precisely. This is why Reddit antagonizing its user resulted in many cheering for its downfall (me included), instead of just simply walking away silently.
It's too early to say I think. We all think the most active posters have left but only time will tell if the content left on reddit is sufficient.
Yep, it's going to take a few months for the spam bots to really take control of the default subs. There's still several subs' mod teams who are in active standoffs with the admins about the NSFW tag, and I believe there's still a large amount of lesser known/popular subs that are either still completely inaccessible or in read only mode.
And time for the Lemmy apps to mature, which is happening at a staggering rate.
The people here now are most willing to deal with the friction but as the ecosystem matures and the content grows, I would expect word of mouth to help maintain some steady growth even with no additional Reddit drama.
Yeah I took a bunch of my subs private again on July 1st and haven't had any more messages from the admins.
Iβm going back to Reddit from time to time to check the situation and read some micro-communities that i follow and that did not jump the ship.
I gotta say that my previous feed was deeply tailored between interesting discussions, tech and gaming news and some meme and futile discussion (like askmen or aita).
right now, that fine calibrated feed has become an uninteresting mess of memes, reposts and low-quality content. I see that users are still there because upvotes are still high, but itβs not as interesting as it was before.
this might very well be my own perception based on who i followed, but I got the feeling that reddit got taken over by people who only enjoy low-quality content, kind of like facebook, where I used to enjoy discussions with my friends and now itβs just ads and influencers.
There are a lot of people who find Reddit useful and aren't really interested in the politics of it. As the site fills up with spam and hate because mods are gone, more of the people who just enjoy the site will leave. Unfortunately by then the the IPO will have happened, people will cash out and start the next thing. I don't think the leaders at Reddit really care about anything except the money.
If they do care they are really going about things the wrong way. For me, I really hope we can switch to things like Lemmy and Mastodon that are not controlled by corporations or advertising.
The real mystery is how any company will look at the current situation of reddit and think "Yes, this looks like it'll be fully fixed within 6 months, tops, and profitable during 2024"
I don't see how Reddit ever becomes consistently profitable. I don't think they can do it with ads and I can't see a future where a significant number of redditors pay for a premium version of the service.