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 🙋♂️
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.
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.
As a digg refugee I can say that I am done with reddit, too much dejavu here.
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.
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.
My corners of Reddit – the apolitical, narrowly to very narrowly focused subs – never protested or gave up. Some are trying to move to various platforms: one to Lemmy, another to Squabbles, a third thinking about Tildes. The one that posted about moving to Lemmy appears to be a moderate success; the others not.
Joke’s on them. I set one of my communities to NSFW and then unmodded myself.
I do the same with two subs I moderate. Fuck those guys.
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.
Didn’t they set server donation goals at one stage and the community of reddit were more than happy to contribute money?
There was this bar for years that said how much more donations they needed per month.
I think more and more will make the switch once they experience more and more ads on the official app. Those who used 3rd party apps and are now using the official one will likely give up and switch after a little while.
The switch to where? Here, where there is almost no content except for discussions about how bad reddit, meta, threads, bluesky etc. are?
Now, if only /r/NoSleep would move here, I wouldn’t have to keep visiting Reddit. But I am just too addicted to the stories there
I looked around and we have a nosleep here as well though. Admittedly there’s not much in it yet. It would be nice if more people will post here, but it’s only been week 1 of the great migration. I’m staying positive that overtime, communities will move or not, crosspost here. :)
I missed a niche community of mine. It’s a ghost town, but I talk to myself and I see the lurkers lol one can hope. Post and the will come.
If you have friends from other social media, you can always invite them over, if you have a forum account or facebook, you can also link lemmy.world in the website or signature. :) or just work on posting interesting things to communities here in the hopes that it will get the ball rolling.
Inertia will carry them pretty far, and I’m sure they’ll find some way to increase profits — 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 — you know, the things people go to Reddit too see — 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.
Reddit didnt crush the protest, redditors and mods did. Mods acted like mods (their stereotypes mostly deserved) and users were so addicted to the site that they lost their shit that their favorite sub went dark for 2 days. The mods never had leverage and 99% of the users have no desire to lift a finger to meaningfully protest.
Reddit doesnt have any real competition (yet… hopefully lemmy does well) so they dont really care if what theyre doing pisses off users. The site is thoroughly in the enshittening phase of its life cycle and the apathy of its users ensure that reddit has no incentive to reverse this.
The mods never had leverage
Of course the mods had leverage: they could have just walked away.
The reality is that there’s no difference between mods and users: everyone is just too addicted to their routines and habits and mindless opening of Reddit and doomscrolling that the vast, vast, vast majority of people just wanted to go back to how things were.
Or, maybe, the “vast, vast, vast majority of people” just don’t share the same concerns that brought you to lemmy.
Just because people don’t what you want doesn’t make them wrong.
