It's getting there... The Reddit wave should be enough to get us there if the servers hold up semidecently
Even if the servers don't. I'd rather deal with downtime (aka forced detoxđ ) than the ads, the negative trolls, the dumb UI that constantly pushes their app, and so on. Reddit only works because it has so much fresh content. If that breaks down than so will it.
I just came in from Reddit. Much easier than going from Twitter to Mastodon.
I've said it (with a different wording) on some post on reddit, I'm saying it again here: I want history to repeat itself. Not because I have a sadistic need to see reddit fail, but because this will ultimately be better for the users.
All of these protests are a nice sentiment, but I can't help but think the take I've read from some people is right: this is all a "door in the face" technique from Reddit to get people to accept a more reasonable compromise on pricing that they were going for all along, but without taking as much of a PR hit. So people will be relatively happy, and meanwhile reddit will have squeezed redditors just a little more, as they have been doing little by little in the last years. It's a boiling frog scenario.
So this protest may well "reverse" this specific situation, but it won't reverse the general trend on governance on Reddit that has been slowly going on for a few years already, mostly around the time that Victoria got canned.
So, to that end, I really want to stop using reddit regardless of the outcome of this debacle. Lemmy seems promising, although it does have its own set of problems. But it's still on its infancy, I'm sure it'll grow and at least some of these problems will be fixed.
I don't want to sound like an elitist, but I guess I will regardless: the most important number of people simply don't care.
I think it's safe to say that the people who will be affected by the new API pricing and other decisions, as well as the people who want to protest at least some of it at least somehow (be it boycotting for a few days or migrating to fediverse in any capacity) are simply not the demographic that the Reddit board really cares about. Not necessarily because they're evil, anti-privacy, Machiavellian moneybags (they still are), but because Reddit is a business, a big one, and big businesses care about money more than anything else.
I'm not really optimistic about the boycott and any other aftermath. I think the best we'll see is influx of users on lemmy and other instances, which is good, but that's about it, and I'm fine with it.
Part of me thinks that while a majority of folks will remain on reddit, the most active, engaged members will leave. ...the mods, the people posting original content, the people posting the most replies.
Over time, the content on reddit could become even more stale, repetitive, and low quality.
Big agree. Supposedly I was in the top 1% of reddit commenters last year. Now I'm here, dipping my toes in the Lemmy waters. I'm sure I'm not the only one. The comments section makes reddit for me, and if all the commenters and moderators leave it, then it will be an even bigger cesspool.
Oh, I agree with you. Whatever happens here, it won't mean an exodus en masse from Reddit to Lemmy ( or to any other platform for that matter) on the immediate future. Reddit will bleed users, only in a long timescale.
I'm not as sure as you are about how things will play out exactly, so for now I'm just watching the situation with curiosity. But I'll say this: while the majority of users don't care, those who DO care I (want to) believe are also the ones that generally tend to generate higher-quality content, while those who don't care (again, I want to believe) tend to be either lurkers or generate lower quality content, although the split here might be closer to 50/50 - we don't know. But in that case, one likely scenario is that in one or a few years Reddit will have so much low-effort and low-quality content that it will just naturally lose any appeal, and people will move on to something else.
although the split here might be closer to 50/50 - we don't know
I'm sure reddit knows where the majority of their content comes from(API pull or not) and they seem to think it's worth losing them.
3rd Party mobile apps will make people think a bit. once moderation goes to crap and everything gets worse, that will make a dent, but a slower one.
I think the minute they get rid of old.reddit.com they will see a giant loss of people.
Then all thats left are the people who like reddit looking like facebook
One thing I've realized is that people use reddit in all sorts of different ways. I never look at the memes / pic subs, I 99% only care about conversation subs. And pretty specific ones at that, I guess /r/movies and /r/tv might be the most generic, followed by /r/anime - but I also don't spend much time in those subs either.
The subs I spend a lot of time in I can either get the same elsewhere /r/news isn't exactly special for a news feed lol...
And for like /r/askphotography or /r/photography there's discord already, with some mastodon thrown in I guess (though I think thats more like /r/itap).
The ones I hope sort of migrate over are /r/sysadmin but somehow as a work thing I'll just go there on old.reddit.com till that dies, at which point I'll just do without. I expect by then either there'll be other options I'll re-find / find, or maybe GPT replaces it lol.
Yeah, reddit I see is different from the one other people see on /r/all since I have so much stuff blocked on my third party app and through RES on browser. Without it reddit is filled with memes or tiktok and twitter videos and content, which makes sense as the demographic has changed and stuff like following accounts started happening.
I think the new users of Reddit are happy with it, and it's more the long time users who don't make a majority of reddit that are starting to feel pushed out.
And for like /r/askphotography or /r/photography there's discord already, with some mastodon thrown in I guess
There's also stuff like pixelfed for this kinda thing, it's very Instagram like
Though I concede that that isn't necessarily going to give you that same sorta interaction as a forum like Lemmy
What would they be migrating to? Neither Lemmy nor Tildes seems to want to take on a mass exodus. Both have said they are not Reddit replacements and they donât want to be either. Iâve been trying to figure out where people are actually headed to. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, outside?
Hard to say. I used "hoping" because I still have an irking feeling that this won't ultimately result in much change. I think a small amount of reddit's base will be upset and may migrate to a different platform (like lemmy, beehaw, kbin, etc.), but the vast majority of reddit's base won't actually understand or care about these changes. The group of users that does decide the leave the platform will have multiple options though and I don't suspect the number of users to truely be unmanageable for any of these places. This is just my opinion though.
Alexis Ohanian, founder of rival site Reddit, said in an open letter to Rose (of Digg):
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."
Sisko : [on the image of his dead wife] I don't know if you can understand. I see her like this, every time I close my eyes. In the darkness, in the blink of an eye, I see her... like this.
Prophet : None of your past experiences helped prepare you for this consequence.
Sisko : And I have never figured out how to live without her.
Prophet : So, you choose to exist here.
[Sisko nods]
Prophet : It is not linear.
Sisko : [sobs] No. It's not linear.
VC meddling
In this case, Advance Publications is the group pulling the strings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
Initial Public Offer. Basically, the company going public on the stock market. They tend to try and look "shiny" before going public to make them attractive to buyers who want to make money from investing into the company.
In my experience (from working a place that has done this) they will do some waves of layoffs and make some operational budget cuts, as well as sometimes freeze some capex spending so the books look juicier. This includes things that may cause long-term harm, for short ish (under a year) gain.
Script is pretty similar with most companies that do this in tech, with predictable results.
Firstly I want to really thank you for taking time to write up this response.
Anyways it definitely makes sense what reddit it doing, although it's no excuse for being such a little bitch. So in other words, let them burn lol
To be fair, most tech companies had layoffs in the last six months and it seems that most were bigger cuts. Also, my best guess is that Reddit has been unprofitable/burning cash from the beginning (~18 years) - that can't and won't last forever.
Agreed. I think the post-IPO layoffs will be aggressive in Reddit's case.
It's not clear to me how reddit could possibly "grow". They've hit peek influence, and ad-revenues haven't really been a growth factor that has excited investors. They're not really a technology powerhouse like Facebook or Google - all they have is their central product. So, when the IPO drops, all I can see for reddit is a future of aggressive layoffs and strong enshittification of Reddit as they seek capitalistic eternal increasing growth.
Yeah Reddit would make an excellent private company with the right owner and likely some re-structuring, but as a public company ooh boy.
Outside some niche subs I'm not on there more than once a day just to see if my lemmy subs missed something, and it's my last form of social media outside discord/matrix, so if lemmy does take off enough I'll probably only be there for the odd technical search, which I suspect lemmy will take care of in time.
Oh no! Anyway...
Sympathies to them, yes.
The âEnshittificationâ of TikTok (not just about TikTok)
Ah yes pre-IPO wallstreet pleasing. If I remember correctly wework also pulled this, and so did a few others.
The fucked up thing is that it kind of is...layoffs of this kind almost always have a positive impact on stock prices, which is why they do them. Gotta love capitalism!
They're not doing this because they are struggling. Its a common tactic for shitty corporations to do so it looks like they made a shit ton more money and can claim losses on their taxes
Does Reddit have the power to un-blackout the subreddits? I.e. Overrule the mods and open things up? I feel like, as in most cases, there are a modest sized group of high caring individuals that will reject/boycott/cancel reddit, but the majority of users, casual and the ones that make reddit their life, will just continue on, only slightly inconvenienced.
I saw somewhere (can't remember if it was here or not) that they think Reddit might not be too worried about the 3rd party apps because it makes up such a small user base. So it could potentially be a vocal minority who are actually being affected. Then again what do I know about running a website with millions of daily users, so it could be way off.
If that's true, it's even more asinine. A small number of users make numerous API calls from third-party apps, and in doing so, create all the content that the majority of users are perusing with ads? The quest for short-term gains so often harms long-term viability in corporate America, and I truly just don't understand how we keep hiring C-level people that keep making the same mistakes over and over
Go go capitalism!
All this has me wondering. Lemmy and other fediverse sites should be resistant to enshittification. But how could American corporations screw that up? Could they start their own servers and instances, and somehow make them dominant? Or would that not be worth it to them?
It seems to me that capitalism has pretty much been trying to take over everything, with a lot of success. So I find myself wondering if it could happen here.
Theoretically some large company could use the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model to take over "open" standards. Microsoft was famous back then for using this strategy. It would look something like this:
Embrace: large company creates a really stable and well moderated instance that federates with almost everything to attract users
Extend: large company adds custom features to the instance that are incompatible with other instances
Extinguish: people stop using other instances as incompatibilities start impacting user experience. Big instance might also stop federating with other instances, so users are forced to use their instance to see content. After this, big company starts making the platform shittier to make more money.
Could go the same way as Gmail. A lot of people just use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of control in the email space because of that. Even though "Email" is an open standard/protocol Gmail has control through the spam filter. Its really hard to setup your own email server without getting a lot of spam so it isn't that open anymore. These are some challenges for open standards as well.
Why is mastodon.social so bad?
I was thinking about experimenting mastodon too. What server so you recommend?
Mastodon had to pick a default instance because so many people complained about the server picking process. People are used to "one service, one app" and backed out when they had to make a choice.
And, as any social network has shown, if you gather enough people on a platform, your platform will turn to shit. It's an unfortunate side effect of a relatively small yet vocal part of humanity being absolute assholes.
Reddit has attracted plenty of moderators but on the fediverse those moderators are often lacking in my experience. Some servers have strict moderation (which I'm a big fan of) but there are many people who consider their abuse being removed an infringement of their freedom of speech.
With the fediverse working across servers, every server needs moderators or you'll have trolls or general shitheads moving from server to server, ruining the experience for everyone. I've set up an instance just for myself and I'm already considering writing a script that syncs up the blacklists of various Lemmy servers because I don't want to deal with that crap every time I open a thread.
Google Chat and Facebook Messenger used to do XMPP. You could message each other cross platform, as well as host your own service. Then when they got big enough, they pulled their interoperability and messaging only worked inside their platform. With the European DMA coming into effect soon it'll be harder for big companies to fuck up such networks (in fact, they will have to allow external access if they're of sufficient size) but it has happened before and it will happen again.
WhatsApp started as an isolated XMPP server as well. It was the best protocol to base a new app upon and even today it's a good place to start (if you implement the hundreds of optional extensions).
I think XMPP's protocol and federation design is better than Matrix's, but XMPP suffers from many clients not implementing all the necessary extensions to provide a decent experience. I don't really care about JSON vs XML.
The IETF is working with several services on a cross-platform protocol, probably in part because the DMA will force companies to open up their networks anyway. I think the Matrix project is working on implementing MLS as well.
It could absolutely happen here! But the nice part is that people can choose to engage with it. Whereas with reddit, you're forced to engage with capitalism. Don't want ads here? Switch servers and donate to a smaller one.
They really want that IPO money
đż let it burn đĽ
Probably because I just deleted my account over there and deleted all posts and comments I ever made
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
I'm hopeful that lemmy reaches critical mass because of Reddit's absurd policies.
save