How reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history: Did it, though?
3 years ago by Frost Wolf to c/technology
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?
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 I’m happy.
I haven’t used liftoff but Memmy is also quite nice!
Liftoff is on android and Memmy is on IOS
So far the issue that I’ve been having with Memmy is that dictation doesn’t work properly: it will delete a dictated comment when you stop/finish dictation.  There’s a lot to like about it but until that’s fixed I’ll be using Mlem. 
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.
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.
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
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
You might want to have a look at !moviesandtv@lemmy.film https://lemmy.film/c/moviesandtv
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
There's this then: https://lemmy.world/c/blackmirror
A thread per episode
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.
It's not perfect but I'm quite happy with wefwef.app
It really really hope Lemmy takes off. For me, there’s enough here that I’m 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.
I’m actually on the TestFlight for Memmy and it’s 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 it’s the haptic feedback on swiping to upvote.
It’s 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 it’s 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 it’s 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.
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:
- Reddit's responses to user concerns and protests have alienated even more users than the initial changes themselves, showing users exactly how Reddit's administration sees them.
- A whole bunch of mods, devs, and contributors who put in a lot hard work improving Reddit for free are now much less motivated to do so (if they're still willing to do it at all).
- The protest raised awareness of federated Reddit alternatives, which have grown substantially as a result. A lot of those people who helped improve Reddit for free are now turning their attention to kbin and Lemmy instead.
- Reddit is on a clear trajectory. They've shown they will continue making user-hostile decisions and antagonizing their userbase in pursuit of further growth.
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.
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 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 it’s wasn’t good) after it was already not that great.
It made the “important” 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, that’s less ads they will see. I haven’t 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 don’t really seem to care much about actual content, so maybe I’m wrong on that one.
This says after to protest. Unless I’m reading it wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit ex-pat. I don’t think they crushed it. A lot of people definitely left.
The data is not back yet, but some of the power users left. It’s 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. It’s going downhill, how fast is up for debate.
True. I don’t think it’s going to plummet tomorrow but I think you’ll 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
I bet an instance geared specifically towards sports would be a relatively popular one
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.
It's federated, so yeah - you can interact with the fediverse from any federated node
The node you call home matters though. You'll run into your local users more, you'll come across certain communities more.
The experience is very different. Use multiple accounts, but find a home
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, I’m new here, but I’m 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!
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.
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 won’t 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.
TTS emps would wipe the floor with ad-emperor spez no question
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.
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.
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.
"You owe me like a dollar!" "Youll have to kill me for it!"
And yet it dropped all the way to 20th most visited site…
Cope
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.
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.
I wish I saw this sooner. I deleted my comments yesterday (12+ year reddit account).
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.
Reddit is now DIGG
Their traffic went down 3% so not really
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.
Web traffic, not total traffic, and only for the month of June
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
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.
Same for myspace. When was the last time that was relevant?
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!!!!!
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.
I’m 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 it’s 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 it’s just ads and influencers.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes it feels Lemmy community cares a bit too much about what happens on Reddit.
Let's be honest, it is unlikely Reddit is going to die or change policy. And who cares.
I'm just happy there is much better alternative and I'm not looking back.
I spent over 10 years on that site. I’ll need a little longer than 8 days to get over how quickly it became a shitshow.
Thing is, it’s not really the site I care about, it was Apollo, my most-used and treasured app. WefWef is a great replacement but it’s not the same.
This is honestly my sentiment as well. I spent over a decade on Reddit practically every single day. Apollo was my first “pick up” app every morning and I’d average like 14 hours on it every week. I’d even set limits for how long I could be on it because I would spend so much time on Reddit. It’s going to take a while to fully break the addiction.
With Apollo gone, wedwef is a lovely replacement for Lemmy, but you’re right; it’s not the same, and I do still creep over to Reddit (via Safari, f—k their app) from time to time to check on the state of things and the smaller communities that will be slower to become “Lemmified”.
I'd been on Reddit for 15 years, predating the Digg exodus. Actually, I find that my memories of the early days makes moving to Lemmy easier. Present-day Lemmy is already ahead of Reddit back when I started, both in terms of content and features/availability.
Maybe because I just left it 5 days ago or because I was embittered with everything that went down that I personally want reddit to fail. But maybe that too is unrealistic and with time, I may be able to care less and less, until I won’t anymore.
Its natural in the start, in a few months I think no one will talk about reddit
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.
They may have quashed the protest, but at what ultimate cost? The reputation damage has happened and people have definitely left. Lemmy saw some significant growth. I'm new to Lemmy but so far it definitely feels like what I enjoyed about reddit without all of the corporate bullshit. It's nice not seeing shit-take ads either.
The reputation damage has been pretty bad for Reddit in my view. They've handled things really badly and in the process lost a lot of good will and positive sentiment to their brand. They had good will by the bucket load, that Meta and Microsoft would kill for, and have spent a lot of it in return for very little.
All they had to do was a quick 'sorry, we have listened', act like they're addressing some of the concerns and everyone walks away looking good.
Oh it the way it was handled was positively a dumpster fire!
I used to use Boost all the time, and browsed the site when I was on my computer. Now that I can't access it from my phone (the first party app isn't happening lmao) I don't feel much like using it on desktop either. Tumblr, of all things, has absorbed much of my traffic, and I've paid to remove ads on it because I've used it so much over the last ten years that I know it'll be worth it, plus I'm hoping that if enough people pay for it they won't go down the monetization rabbit hole as much as other sites have recently.
Lemmy is okay, but the hot/active post sorting is far worse than Reddit was (I'm still seeing days- old posts even when set to All) and the user base just isn't large enough yet to have a consistent feed of stuff I find interesting. Both of those can easily change over the coming days/weeks of course.
All social media platforms' viability come down to userbase and how fun they are to hang out on, and reddit has absolutely damaged both. It's unclear to me what impact that will have for it long-term, but its time as the problematic but scrappy underdog in the space is over.
The impact is already noticeable, especially on subs where the mods remain in conflict with the admins. Regardless of how that pans out, I’m thankful to have discovered Lemmy along the way.
If you compare r/all to what it was pre-protest it is fairly obvious that there's a huge difference. Besides the subs that are outright still protesting, there's a lot less comments on front-page posts. It's pretty easy now to get to posts with essentially 0 comments on the front page (that aren't locked) compared to before.
It only cost them the trust of those who trusted them most.
Trust is like a mirror. When broken, you can put it back together but you will ALWAYS see the cracks.
You’ve got to remember that these are just simple shit posters. These are people of the internet. The common clay of the new corporate social media. You know… morons
You're never going to get everyone to switch. You get some people to start a community somewhere else, it starts to grow and become self sustaining, then there are options, and eventually the one without intrusive ads wins.
Yeah. I put a bug in my subreddit's users ear and made a community over here. That's about all I feel I ought to do. The subreddit had to move subreddits 4 years ago due to a bad moderator and it would be a bad look to push a move after the poll I made said most wanted to stay.
They'll be fine without me (there's 2 other mods, and honestly I at least do minimal modding. I marked something as a spoiler last month. Jazzhands.)
Which sub?
Ah yeah it must be even more difficult to convince people to switch if you have a big churn of users every year, less of a consistent subreddit 'culture'
Hard to say. Mant of us reading this are reddit deserters though.
Without the shit show that's the Reddit exodus I wouldn't of found kbin and wouldn't of had a fun new side project to work on. Super keen on all the fancy things we've been able to improve kbin.social over the last few weeks :)
That's one of the most important things about this in my opinion. Enough people moved over to Lemmy/kbin from this incident to kind of pave the way and help improve the platforms so that the next time reddit screws something up and a huge influx of people get a new first impression of the fediverse it will be a more positive experience for them.
Corporation sacrificed user trust, but isn't completely gone yet. More at 11, stay tuned!
What does the article say?
yadda yadda, anger, protest, retaliation, back down, bad vibe.
Minimalism is an artform all its own.
Wasn't hard to win when you threaten to remove power from power trippers.
The fediverse got a nice boost and there's enough people here to make it worthwhile to scroll and interact. Much nicer than reddit, they can keep the masses honestly.
I think people really exaggerated this thing of "power trippers", and that really only served to turn users to Reddit's side. While there are a few mods who get too full of themselves, mods don't actually get to command anyone or any sort of payment. Mods don't hold a fraction of the power that admins do. And what do mods get to lose? The "privilege" to do volunteer work sifting through the worst things people can post? Is the power to ban someone really that enticing?
And it's not like the Fediverse doesn't need mods too.
Really it played out a lot like other kinds of protests. The ones in charge who are depriving people of something pointing fingers at the protesters temporarily inconveniencing them and saying "look what awful selfish people they are". Which is ultimately what pressures protesters to give in the most.
Some of that definitely exists, if even karma score is something that gets some egos inflated, but I think this is a very cynical and uncharitable way to describe it when care for a community plays at least as much of a role.
At the end of the day, even being the mod of a big sub is not much to brag about, nevermind the smaller ones. They are not celebrities, not even to the extent social media influencers are. Most users might not even recognize their usernames without that little tag or looking up the mod list. It's most of all, voluntary work.
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.
There is no shortage of people that are willing to moderate and Reddit doesnt really care if they do the job well by the community's standards so long as those new mods do what reddit wants. And at this point, the mods walking away in protest is the equivalent of saying "you cant lay me off! I quit!" Redditors do not understand at all who is in control on that site.
/r/interestingasfuck suggests there is a shortage of people willing to moderate -- or that Reddit is willing to let large, popular subs die if they protested.
Reddit has literally kicked mods out of a sub then banned that same sub shortly after for being unmoderated. That sort of stupidity cant be intimidated or reasoned with.
Spez more or less said point blank that he views Musk's management of Twitter as inspiration for how he intends the site to be run. That should have been enough on its own to let people know what level of insane they were dealing with.
Keep in mind that those users who do not want to lift a finger in protest are usually the ones who do not want to lift a finger to contribute. Not a speedy death, but with our new content those lazy viewers will grow bored and find another source. I don't think Reddit has a plan to replace the content. No new content and it will spiral down the tubes. But as some pointed out, the IPO will be done by then and the current administration will be out on their yachts when it does finally implode.
Users that do want to protest can edit all of their posts and delete them. Reddit will undelete them currently, but they pull back the edited posts. If people do this in small batches it won't set off any alerts and the site stops having any relevant content.
To be honest the cost of their decisions was the creation of a now viable competitor. Lemmy is still small, has less users and less content but importantly creates a destination for mass migration in the future. Reddit used to just be a crappy offshoot of Digg right up until the major Digg redesign that everyone hated…and overnight Digg was toast. History tends to repeat.
Yeah, the thing about screwing over Redditors is that Reddit started because Digg did something similar. Fucking off to another website is where it all started, and will be where it ends.
Reddit and Digg have less than 6 months age difference. Both were started in 2005. Kevin Rose used his position on TechTV to push Digg early on, which gave it inertia reddit lacked
t. was a reddit admin before and during digg v4
Lemmy now has enough early adopters to be sustainable. And that's the only thing that matters. As to Reddit, my account there is 17+ years old but I was there since the beginning. The early years were amazing but in the last half decade or so it was a visibly dying platform. We should be thankful that its current leadership has now put it out of its misery.
I just don't understand why mods form big, popular subreddits don't switch over to lemmy/kbin/whatever? If it is sunk cost fallacy that is irrational. They have a big following, all they have to do is say "hey guys, we are moving to another site. Go to sign up." If it is because (as some people suggest, not me) they are power-hungry mods and fear losing that power, it is also irrelevant since they can host their own instance and have all the power they want. If they could organize a blackout, surely they can organize an exodus? What am I missing?
The Star Trek subreddit did this, it's what brought me here.
I think it’s really simple. People are just naturally resistant to change.
In the early days of lemmy.world (literally 1 month ago), the instance was getting flooded with new sign ups, posts, and comments. Performance took a massive nosedive and thus impacting user experience and adoption.
But other the past few weeks, stability has improved significantly. As long as the communities begin to rebuild and contribute useful content, I think over time it will be better than Reddit.
If not the fear of losing power, maybe the fear of losing followers. After all there’s no guarantee that the ordinary reddit user will go through the trouble of creating another account. The fear of starting over might be a deterrent into leaving. Just look at the mods who ended their protest because they will be replaced by reddit.
I get that, but it is irrational. They can plan such a thing, esp. when they do it in concord consort. Just prepopulate the new lemmy communities with some content, ask some regulars/power-posters to become active first. Then setup a site that simplifies the signing-up tot lemmy/kbin and make a big announcement before you abandon reddit. Sure, at first the amount of people will decline. But as Reddit will have problems assigning new mods to all those big subreddits the quality over there will go down further. It won't be an easy or even fast switch, but sometimes it's best to just start over.
Too many want a 1 for 1 replacement at this moment. They can't see that it will take some time to grow.
Or they want/hope things to go back to normal. Change is hard for many. But more and more intrusive ads are coming.
I think when the IPO happens and mods hear about how many tens of millions spez made off their unpaid labor, more mods will question why they are doing it.
Also have to contend with the overall laziness / apathy of people. Moving somewhere new is an effort that a heap of people seem to averse to. I get it, they've been on Reddit for years, but with the way Reddit has been negatively interacting with the community you'd think they'd see the writings on the wall and move
Upon my most recent browse, I have noticed a drop in engagement for sure, and my attention has been brought to many "how do you feel about X" comments that are poorly hidden bots driving discourse. Maybe I'm just more aware of it now though. I've definitely noticed a change though.
Platforms get arrogant and eventually overstep the bounds. It already happened since a long time with FB and Twitter, and now it's Reddit's turn. You can only take your user base for granted for so long. The problem is that economic conditions are changing rapidly right now and all these Silicon Valley firms are trying to find new ways to make money in a much more hostile climate. This has led them to some desperate moves that are alienating their users. I think it will be a slow war of attrition from here on, just like what happened to most of the other platforms that made this same mistake over time.
I thought that there would be no difference with this drama event, like the big boohoo when they fired various people and the time it spearheaded the creation of the toxic dumpster fire Voat, but I have to say that I can see a noticeable difference at Reddit.
I still read Reddit daily on my computer as I use RES on my computer, and I like the layout and ZERO ads and notice that the volume of new posts is WAY down. I read a bit last night, and when I viewed it this morning, the posts were almost all the same, with hardly any new content.
On the flip side, I have noticed a HUGE influx of quality posts here this past week. If a few more of my favorite subs from Reddit move here, I'll be set. I just wish there was a browser extension like RES here for Lemmy.
Completely anecdotal, but when I had a look at r/all, it looked way less busy and lower quality, full of subs I'd never heard of, and generally...not that great.
There are so many potentially NSFW posts showing up in the main feed because of all the odd subs it is probably a good idea to report them so there are no issues with the advertisers.
A lot more Ai generated posts too. It's to the point to where you see the same phrasings, same idioms and same jokes word for word from different accounts. Or they're just typical redditors and its hard to tell anymore.
In tech subreddits there's a ton of deleted posts. And noticeable less responses.
Reddit just became less relevant for tech troubleshooting, specially on Linux or foss communities. That they lost.
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. :)
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: !nosleep@lemmy.world
I imagine apps and frontends should implement a hook to prevent this. It'll be a lot easier to enforce that way.
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.
That's a great idea to link to Lemmy.world, I could make like a little intro welcome card with the tips we picked up to get used to this world
I miss the entire catalogue of posts in fansubs like rdr2. My comfort activity was to just read randomly through those.
The second is that when I need answers my go to search is +reddit on google. I think I'll continue visiting reddit for all of the query stuff
Left on June 30th and never went back. Meanwhile, I’ve posted more comments on lemmy than during 11 years on Reddit. Really hoping lemmy takes off (but without becoming a new Reddit, trolls and all…)
They won the battle, but they haven’t won the war. What u/spez’s actions have fomented, much like Elon Musk with Twitter is to create an opening for other platforms that would have never really had a chance at growing and competing with them.
It’s one of the reasons facebook moved quickly with threads(yes I know we dislike the likes of facebook), but Elon gave Zuck a freaking wonderful gift.
Hopefully, Lemmy picks up some serious steam.
Never. Maybe occasionally they'll reshare some shit from another platform, typically tiktok or Instagram, which is usually fairly crap and used to break sub rules in a lot of cases. Or they'll comment some room temperature (in Celsius) iq take, like calling reddit an app, not realizing it's a website. But they aren't the ones who make comments worth reading. They aren't the ones who bring in decent oc.
I know this is really anecdotal, but it does feel a little different over there now, and not for the better. I can't really put my finger on what it is, but it does
My experience is the opposite. Apart from the subs still protesting (like /r/videos), it seems like nothing has changed. We have been reminded that Reddit management are pieces of shit, but we knew that since the days of Ellen Pao. Some communities lost some individuals, but all in all it's business as usual.
Reddit already had other issues (bots, spam, etc.), so leaving wasn't a big effort on my part.
The quality of posts on Reddit have dropped off in my eyes. I still go there during the work day, just don't have it on mobile because the app is so bad.
What I see during the work day on the top of /r/all just isn't that interesting.
Funny thing is I actually got a weeklong ban after I left reddit. I held out until infinity stopped working and then fully switched over to here.
I honestly wished I switched sooner, I always had an interest in Lemmy but never went full on until now. I can't speak for the popularity it will gain because of the nature of FOSS in relation to the general public, but it is definitely a better system overall.
The conflict has demonstrated how crucial Reddit’s community is to the site and also revealed the limits of that community’s power.
Power is irrelevant. Only power-tripping egomaniacs even notice an "issue" like that. The only significance of this event is that the voice of the community was heard, and the response from spez was a shameless attempt to shout us down.
Nothing great was ever built in a single night or even a month. Things take time to grow, and die. Give it time.
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?
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.
I'm there with ya!
"Feeling the pressure, many subreddits did reopen", what pressure? just abandon the sub then but no they want to keep their power. they owe reddit nothing
The choice was reopen in protest or get kicked off the mod team, Reddit reopens it, and there's no protest.
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I'm here now and not there. So I guess it at least did a little something 🙋♂️
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