I pretty much agree with this. If you look at the accounts of the people complaining, how many of them have posts hitting the frontpage? I'm not saying I have any data, I'm just speculating that most people who are power users, whether they use 3rd party apps or not, can recognize how shitty reddit went about this and won't complain about the protest.
Helps that to a certain extent a fairly large portion are going to be at least moderately tech savvy (probably less so than 5+ years ago), so switching to the fediverse is a lot less daunting to them than to the average user.
I don't think it's hard unless they end up somewhere where signup is difficult. And even then is browsing as a guest difficult? I've only been on kbin.social and lemmy.world and it seems dead simple.
I mean your not lying. On Mastodon I saw posts about people deleting accounts with thousands of karma, lot's of people with positive reputation in their communities left, and the people who remained either are not active posters or don't really care.
I'm in the process of deleting all my comments but it's taking a while.
I've got probably 100k karma over a few accounts.
I feel kinda bad about taking away all the technical help and collaborative type stuff I've done over the years, but... Reddit wants to use all that data to cash out on it's users, so it has to go.
I visited Reddit for years when Google searches led me there. About 2 years ago I got into some niche hobbies/interests, and that motivated me to sign up. I almost always used the official app. I was doomscrolling and posting lots of comments ever since.
It takes me a long ass time to commit to a new technology. But I also heard and understood with the API issue that mods need the proper tools to do their job, and if you take away their tools, they cannot do their job. And once they can't, they will leave and the entire experience of Reddit will change. I also understood that there are 3PA that the heaviest users and commenters use, and once those apps die, those people will not.come back, and with them will go their expertise and all of their posts and comments.
That told scaredy cat me that I needed to find.aome new place(s) for chat and entertainment. I like it here at kbin. I'm also enjoying Tildes, and I've been visiting Mastodon and Substack (I set those accounts up when Twitter went haywire), Hacker News, Fark and Metafilter. I'm enjoying the diversity.
Just mentioned all this to say that relatively new /official app using Redditors might also be making the jump.prior to Doomsday.
I mean most posts on the fediverse have way less votes. But I see similarly many comments as I used to see on reddit. It just feels like reddit is here now.
Stronger evidence: there's documented cases of people's deleted comments being restored. Whether or not that's intentional by reddit, I can't say for certain, but if I were a betting woman, you bet I'd bet on them doing it on purpose. And if they are, then we're talking about reddit losing a substantial enough amount of content just from people deleting their accounts in protest, substantial enough to impact their bottom line. And that's just those of us who are deleting our content - I'm not among them since I still need to occasionally look at my saved posts since there's important and useful information in there. They'll stop getting content from way more people. That's gotta terrify them.
Obviously the fediverse lacks a lot of the polish that reddit had. Mostly by virtue of reddit being around longer and having more developers - lemmy's had like 2 developers for 4 years, kbin came out a few months ago, and I'm not sure about mastodon. But with time, that'll change. A lot of reddit power users are programmers, and now that they can touch the code of the site they care about, I bet we'll see a lot more polish in the coming months. I've certainly gotta get off my ass and dig into the code a little bit.
I wouldn't call myself a power user, or even an especially good programmer, but I have my moments, and I feel more at home here than I've felt on reddit in years.
Same. I've been redditing since 2012 and have tailor made a select group of subs I follow for all of my hobbies. I was an avid commenter, with reply's as long as your own. It was definitely my most visited site. It was as much for stupid pictures when I was going to bed as it was discussing things with fellow collectors or getting advice or tech support. Old.Reddit on my Desktop, RIF on my phone. I am one of the people this hooplah affects. And it makes me mad.
I know a lot of people who reddit in real life, but most of them might use it for 10 minutes a day on the toilet or while on the bus. They primarily lurk and stick to a lot of the easily accessible and fun subs. They also just use the official App, or they just look at it in their phone browser. Like you said, this whole thing doesn't affect most of them.
I'm now spending a lot of time trying to find new communities in kbin and lemmy. But I have to admit the specialty subs I follow either don't have a community here (like Moon Knight stuff) or very small communities (functional print, comic book collecting, etc). I'm sticking to the protest as long as makes sense to me (it still does). But I have a feeling reddit might die before these niche communities find purchase elsewhere.
Almost exactly same situation as you. I'm mad, it hurts, I've already purged my Reddit account of all content on it, multiple times since the most recent posts kept getting restored. The account itself isn't deleted yet, I still think I'll keep coming back for some stuff that just isn't here on Lemmy or kbin yet... But as for participating in discussions and communities, I'm now 100% here.
It's just sad. I've met the majority of my current online friend group that I chat with everyday on Discord, through Reddit. I hope at some point that becomes a real possibility in the Fediverse too. That we gather enough weirdos that are way too much into niche things that you can select which of them you'd like to be friends with.
I wouldn't be surprised if discord ended up having a lot of them, but the topic and comment idea of reddit feels like it's here. Discord is like a chatroom, and to analogize further chatrooms feel like where communities gather, but forums feel like where communities live.
Yeah a couple of neiches are yet to be filled. There are some forums for my ttrpg like enworld and RPG net it's like going back to 2009. I am missing some of the Reddit about specific shows I watch though
Even if I'm not totally off of Reddit, recent events got me out of a rut for a bit and that's good. Already, the threads on Reddit/all seem stale and even in the past 24 hours what I see on kbin and lemmy.world is starting to give me the tingle I hadn't felt since the early Reddit days or even the period before when I used to browse multiple sites so in a way this is going back to my Internet roots, surfing across multiple sites for nuggets and truly browsing and not doom scrolling a single website aggregator. It's a breath of fresh air.
It's like having gotten used to a favorite diner with a massive menu but when the classic joint starts going off the rails, one decides to explore, finding new culinary niches, pop ups, and little shops with unique offerings. It's no longer as convenient, but then again, maybe it shouldn't be.
I've hard avoided Reddit this week to break the habit and help keep traffic numbers down for their metrics. Will I return to some of my small subs later? Maybe. Kbin and Lemmy have already done a great job at providing more content than I can really engage with already, so there's not a huge need for me to go back. The only time it's a struggle is when the Kbin servers are hugged to death, but I've been lurking squabbles during those dark times.
Yep this is the truth. The vast majority of users just go there and scroll and click through stuff. They don't really care. They were inconvenienced by the blackout and want it back to normal.
The real consequences are that a significant chunk of the active and power users have left the site now.
I haven't deleted my reddit account either. I have definitely noticed that my feed on reddit has less interesting content now.
Spez will get openai to make an llm moderator and he can control the weights. An army of spez moulded ai's let loose on the Internet.
She’s not a monster, she just doesn’t reddit like I do.
The way you need to precise she’s not a monster make me doubt it. Does she live by night, avoid the sun at all cost during daytime and drink children blood for dinner ? If so I have bad news.
on a more serious note, I agree that most people come on reddit for a little giggle or to spend time but don't know that much about the backend of it. Eventually they find out after some time and then decide if they care or not about the api price change, in the meantime no one can blame them for just living their life without caring about reddit.
Exactly. Love the vibe here, discussions with ppl of similar stlye and interests (exactly how my forums were a long time ago, also reddit used to be years ago, and how it still was in some communities)
It's well known that most social media, and very much so for Reddit, are primarily consumed by lurkers. There's loads of daily users that don't even have an account because it's not necessary. The lurkers may be good for ad revenue, but they don't make the content. You need the active community there to produce the content that lurkers consume. Without the community, the lurkers aren't going to step in and do it themselves, they'll just stop visiting Reddit. So yes, I'm sure the balance looks like 95% lurkers and 5% community.
think of it this way - back in 2008 100% of the users had accounts made on or before 2008
reddit has doubled something like 8 times since that point. after 1 doubling, that 2008 or earlier becomes 50%. after 2 doublings, 25%... etc
at this point it's below 1~2% depending on where you get your figures
majority of people (and an increasing majority) will only know reddit through new.reddit or the app. my gf just joined reddit because of me a few months ago.. and she only know the official app. that is "reddit" to her.
reddit has moved on past us, the original users. they've decided that we are such a small minority that we essentially do not matter anymore and therefore are sacrificing us to raise IPO price
It's not only the original users that are against all these changes. I only started on Reddit <10 years ago and I'm here. But I'm sure the portion of new users embracing "the old ways" over "the new ways" has still decreased over time, yeah.
I honestly think this is shining a massive light on the core issue of freedom. It shouldn't be "sure, you can use [the app] or not." But that is how the majority of people think. It's disheartening. I hate to bring politics into this, but it's like people saying "don't like what [party X] is doing in this country? Then leave!" Binary decisions suck in real life.
I think 99% to 1% is probably closer to reality even.
I think so too, the users who care enough to even consider 3rd party apps are the ones who commented and posted the most imo.
While it’s possible that Reddit could be rigging the scales, I think the simplest answer is that the people most critical of Reddit have already left Reddit. Vice versa, everyone here is clearly in favor of boycotting Reddit because well… we’re here now.
Its a classic case of people having no fucking clue about scale, bias, the vocal majority and silent minority.
For every loud reddit dissident, there is 100 people who just heard about reddit and grabbed the official app from the store. They dont comment, they dont post, they dont give a shit. If reddit went down they wouldnt question it, they would just grab a 9gag app or something and continue on consuming content. They dont block ads, they dont get invested in net neutrality or anything else the EFF are involved in, they dont mod the UX, they dont dig into dodgy shit going on behind the scenes. They dont give a shit.
In other words, they are the perfect community for a corporate social media.
I'm interested to see what happens when the third party apps actually die. And old.reddit.com obviously
I read somewhere that a shim was being developed to allow reddit apps to join a lemmy instance. Not sure how practical it would be, or how far off it is, but its an interesting idea. Would obviously need to be implemented by the original reddit app dev, or a forked version if open source.
I imagine at least a couple of developers will migrate over here. If they update their app to the fediverse, join in on other open source projects, or just leave the scene is yet to be seen though.
If Sync ever did that, I would be over the moon. That app made browsing a genuine joy with how good the UI is and how customizable it is. I really hope the devs for the existing third party apps repurpose them or make a version for the fediverse.
I read somewhere that a shim was being developed to allow reddit apps to join a lemmy instance
I assume you're talking about this project?
My partner still hasn’t left Reddit yet, but because it’s a habit for her now AND Apollo still works… once Apollo is gone she’s already signaled she is moving on.
I wonder how many others are just waiting for the third party’s to be killed before moving on?
RIP Apollo my beloved
i use RIF and old.reddit with RES and have been doing so for almost a decade at this point. if RIF is gone, I'm not using reddit on my phone anymore. maybe i continue using the website... i'm not sure. but i think they will eventually kill old.reddit and RES just like they are killing RIF
essentially it's probably gonna be my last 2 weeks on reddit
My wife hasn't left either but she's a once a week lurker anyway. Just hits up the drama subs for a quick hit of bullshit and then moves back to Facebook for some more drama dosing. She knows about all of this, but the drama subs like TIFU are already fully populated over there with content, so there's no desire to see cat pics on Lemmy.
I mean the truth is 95% of redditors didn't use apps and don't care about this at all.
It's like if your local street had a protest for sheep shearing, preventing you from going to the park or movies. It's irrelevant to you and the large majority would want it over.
No it's not like that.
It's like the people keeping your city clean can no longer use tools and have to use their bare hands unless they pay a bunch of money. That's what it's like. Sure for a while it will be ok, but the shit will build up, it will get worse and worse, and the city you once loved will be a shit hole of trash. The workers are literally protesting to have better tools and access to keep your city clean, and you're saying it doesn't matter. OH BY THE WAY THE WORKERS DON'T GET PAID.
Yes this is a good analogy. Rome was neither built in a day nor destroyed Ina day.
We are thinking Reddit will turn out to be like MySpace or digg but it will be more like Facebook. It will exist but filled with clueless people consuming garbage.
I would have thought most people would be using an app. Most people access the Internet through their phone.
Yeah, I'm not buying Reddit's statistics. 90%+ of mod actions on desktop web and official app? I can see plenty of use for old Reddit, but they have locked quite a few mod actions behind the new interface recently. Likewise the more and more spez feels the need to mention that there was no real consequence from the blackout makes me question the validity of that statement. We're all aware what a lying jackass he is.
I'm sure that the majority of people will continue to use Reddit regardless. I'm just not sure that the majority is as major as they are presenting it to be.
Honestly, I mostly used desktop and the official app sometimes (mostly while I was watching TV, like right now). I don't think I'd realized there were third party apps, otherwise I would have been using one before all this mess.
I discovered reddit on desktop, switched over to RIF and one day I created a burner account on desk top (2021 ish) and was shocked at what I saw.
The actual content was in like 10 point font with ads and an instant messenger function taking up a quarter of the screen.
If people only ever used the desk top or official app, they have no idea the experience other people were getting. Essentially only the all page had ads, they were the same size as posts, they were more clearly delineated as ads, there was less of them.
While I moved over to the fediverse on the principle of it all, I've never used an app myself. Only old.reddit on both PC and mobile. Just got too used to it before any app came up.
As a moderator of a small subreddit, when I checked roughly 75% of our traffic was from mobile. It doesn't distinguish beyond that but the mobile browser experience is so shockingly bad I think it's safe to say that is almost entirely app usage. Since there is only official app & Apollo on iOS, that means it's one of those two... but the way Huffman tells it, Apollo has less than 5% of the install base of the official app on iOS. If that's the case I don't really understand his argument that they're bleeding Reddit dry. But that's a separate issue.
But, based on the responses we had before the blackout and the responses we got in the last few days "after" in the discussions around opening back up, I can say he appears to be right. Most people just want to use the main app, don't want to learn anything about third party apps, don't care why they exist, just want everyone to shut up and move on.
I did find the total 180 very odd. Vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the protest beforehand. Overwhelmingly in favor of going back to normal after. But it was different people. And it wasn't just random one-week-old accounts that had never posted on the sub before, it was regulars, old accounts, or both, both times.
I'm proud of the properly big subs for continuing their protests. Our community was not strong enough.
Can back up those splits, top 5% sub. Majority is on mobile, but stats on platform are difficult to estimate. It would seem that at least 10% of Android is on 3rd party apps. The downloads don't give accurate estimates at the top end (10 mil downloads, then it won't change until 100mil downloads, so you could be off by tens of millions), it doesn't count side loaded apks, and it doesn't specify usage time. There could be a ton of people who downloaded the official app, then moved to 3rd party, and they would count for official download.
but the way Huffman tells it, Apollo has less than 5% of the install base of the official app on iOS. If that's the case I don't really understand his argument that they're bleeding Reddit dry.
I saw this as an explanation, and it’s so stupid it makes perfect sense
Reddit doesn't have to guess though. API usage has clientID information. They could easily keep a tally of requests per client and get exact numbers.
Yeah but they are probably using the original reddit app. The people that used sync, Apollo or reddit is fun were mad.
They also bought Alien blue, which was a 3pa. And then drove it into the ground to replace it with what they have now. fuck Spez
either way, I moved because there is 0 reason to be doing this but money, and because without sync I'm not interested!
I would agree but many sub reddits had polls before locking and the majority were always in favor.
One thing to keep in mind is that there is an active minority of users who are content generators who are much more likely to vote on stuff like that. Then there are a ton of mostly silent read-only users (most of whom don't even have accounts). If you inconvenience the mostly silent users who are just there for cat pics on their lunch break, some of them will suddenly put in the effort to complain. But they'll never build a community, you need the active users for that.
I think the only people left heavily skew as the people who didn't care. Case in point, the discord for my kebble sub saw a LOT of new members as those who didn't like the way reddit was handling it prepared other ways to contact each other. That was and still is very much in favor of the protest and they're still working out a platform to move everyone to.
The actual reddit sub for the kebble has turned on a DIME about it and is now infighting between the people who do care and are only using reddit so they can speak in that particular sub, and the ones that never cared in the first place and think the act of protesting anything in general is, and I quote, "childish." Were an outsider to scroll through it, they would think we never supported it in the first place.
Before this, we were uncommonly civil towards each other, took as much text as we wanted to eplain our viewpoints properly, and usage of the downvote button was both frowned upon and extremely rare to even see. Now I'm seeing downvotes. The whole thing is causing a schism that doesn't bode well for the site in general. This will be reddit's main userbase going forward.
Quite disappointing isn't it, I kinda wish that in preparation for the blackout an alternative forum was opened for popular subs (on the federation for example) so the community had somewhere to go instead of being annoyed at the lack of interaction
Unfortunately it's a fairly common pattern among humans, people don't prepare ahead of time for disasters that have "never happened before." Or that haven't happened in their lifetime. Especially when those preparations cost them something, be it time or money or effort.
It's been long enough since Digg that this generation didn't believe that it would happen to Reddit too. Maybe someday it might happen to the Fediverse, somehow - there's only so much you can do with protocol design alone to proof against centralization, we're already seeing some interesting cracks around the Beehaw defederation mess.
That would have made any kind of sense. They wouldn't have gone a route that threatened immediate mutiny, I think, because the initial point was to get Spez's attention, not to leave. For all the good anyone thought that was going to do in the face of an OpenAI amount of money.
From what I hear, all attempts to decide on a destination on the mod discord have fractured into a billion pieces. Which I guess isn't surprising. If you know about anywhere else at all, you already probably have something set up there and would be averse to abandoning it in favor of someone else's idea
Same here to say exactly this.
I assume it's just a biased sample size? The people left on Reddit are the people that don't support the blackout. The people that do care are here instead.
That's my story. I won't go back unless spez is removed and rif stays alive.
I'm just posting about lemmy and kbin on reddit and linking the lemmy.world get started page. Try and evangelise a bit before the end of the month then it's goodbye.
I think there is probably a mix of things going on.
First, the angriest people already did leave.
Second, people suck at protesting. I mean, the entire reason it was a 2-day protest instead of defaulting to indefinite is because the idea of sacrificing your own habits in a protest blows people's minds. There is a reason "slacktivism" is a thing.
Third, there is probably a segment of the user base who basically got their addiction checked. Social media is addicting, and reddit is not exception, I mean, even I've kept habitually opening the site this whole week just cause that has been my browsing habit for over a decade. It's just how I've check ed news.
And then lastly, the protest reached the more casual core of people who may have not even known about the protest before hand or understood the extent of it, and they are angry that this thing that didn't affect them took away all their content.
The protests aren't working because they didn't consult the gays. We have our shit organized, color coded, and labeled.
I tell people at work all the time the reasons stuff like this doesn't work is because they've not got a gay advisor. Lol
You want a protest? We can stonewall this bitch. You want a dating/hookup app for no string fun? We can refer to grindr. You want a little anonymous rendezvous on the go? I can take you cruising. Want to just piss people off for no reason? Just exist.
You should see how well we are organized on gay cruises. We have dry erase boards outside our cabin doors with dick schedules. Penciling in ass. It's the new meta.
Never give in, never give up.
We have David Sedaris posting here and reddit thinks our protest isn't working.
I don't know but there are already enough people here to make it interesting
True for general stuff, but I'm missing my more niche subreddits and there's basically no sports here because apparently we're too techie over here.
Indeed, I'm expecting a slow transition over from Reddit myself. And that's fine. There's really not that much difference between a community of 100,000 and a community of 10 million, but there's a big difference between a community of 1000 and 100,000. So let the big interests show up here first and establish themselves with some nice thriving communities, and the smaller stuff will develop once there are enough people around to support it.
There's m/chess ;-)
Terminally online redditors who realized they are hopelessly addicted to their subs
I can't imagine anyone more hopelessly addicted to reddit than me, I'd check my stats, but I don't want to visit the site was just a lurker with a lot of comment karma over the 10+ years I was there. I have plenty other addictions I can just increase instead, and kbin and lemmy are good replacements I can see replacing the time reddit took up completely within a year. The people who are there are just people who don't care enough to leave. Just the mental arithmetic, it's what everything comes down to. They probably care, just not enough to cross that line.
And here's where I'm fighting that same old delete this post what you said is stupid feeling.
exactly this. Been using a third-party app for years, and I can't see myself switching back. So these past days I've been on tiktok for longer than I would like to admit, and just a few hours ago I've finally made the jump here. Still don't know fuckshit about how this all works, but I'd rather feel like a 90-year-old experiencing the internet for the first time than go back to reddit and feel bad the entire time while using it
Don't forget that reddit has the ability to astroturf themselves. Some of those are sock puppets. Others are a coordinated effort by accounts that have never used the subs they're bitching on before.
Check the user history of some of those. They fit the standard bot pattern
I already got several accounts piping up that they want to moderate, but it's their first comment on the sub...
This is a perfect opportunity for shills, state actors, political think-tanks and others to gain more control.
I created a community on KBin for one of my favorite niche sub Reddits, which just came back from going dark. I shared it with them this morning and my post is getting downvoted to oblivion.
The inertia of the average Redditor.
Thing is, we need the power users who create content to be early adopters. The rest will eventually follow.
Seems shady. Maybe there is a legit army of reddit protectors out there. It definitely wouldn't surprise me if reddit employees or software was down voting.
Exactly. I just.. Stopped using it. Everyone else like me wouldn't be part of the conversation.
I could certainly see them gaming the algorithm a bit too, to make it look more active. I think we'll just have to wait and see, if advertisers/investors pull out.
@Liontigerwings: There's always been an undercurrent of "mods just want power and control because they can't get it themselves in their lives" that goes against my experience as a moderator.
Personally, my response to people calling for moderators to put their money where their mouth is, to step down as a moderator and leave the site was, "OK, will do".
Back when it was first becoming known that Facebook was passively allowing human trafficking groups and was generating revenue from those groups, I asked around different anti-human trafficking collectives whether or not they would continue to use the platform given ad revenue from their users goes towards creating safe spaces for those bad actors. I received silence from every single one of them. They ignored that question and continued to post how we all need to fight for trafficking victims (very marketing style posts if that makes sense).
Some people are just so engrained in platforms that it doesn't matter what a platform does. When faced with a choice between comfort and ethics, they choose comfort at the expense of all else.
When faced with a choice between comfort and ethics, they choose comfort at the expense of all else.
There is a lot of that going around, and it's my opinion that anti-intellectualism and that form of apathy normally go hand in hand. We see it with with every sort of cause that you could name, and nearly every sector of the market.
It's an unfair situation the charities and organizations are put into. They have to spread awareness using the platforms that give them access to people. They can't control what the platform does.
Do you think it feels good for them to get that email from you and knowing they have no response to give to somebody telling them the ethical thing to do is to not spread their message to the most people.
Ah, but that's point. What is more important: anti-human trafficking or the message of anti-human trafficking? They don't get to decide what a platform does, but they do get to decide their use of that platform.
Probably the latter. Most users likely didn't care about any of it enough to vote or participate in conversations leading up to blackouts, but got annoyed when they couldn't use reddit the same way. The rest of us probably started minimizing usage and/or deleting accounts.
I think this is mainly it. The people who care enough to be oppositional about it are eyeing the door. The people who are left either don't see the problem or are determined to just make it work anyways.
Reddit will fuck something else up in the future and hemorrhage more users.
I'm not too concerned, they'll figure it out. I'm enjoying learning this platform at the moment.
I think I've contributing factor that's likely is that the users that care already bailed and aren't on there anymore
The truth is, most people will stay on Reddit, at least in the short and medium terms. But with each migration wave, there is a group that will stick around and make things just a little bit more active and interesting, and make it that much more appealing for the next wave.
I predict the next wave is when Reddit inevitably announces the shutdown of old.reddit. Now there will be a more viable alternative for that migration wave, and so on, until we hit critical mass.
That's the hope, anyway.
I'd estimate that the next wave will be sooner, at the end of the month when the 3rd party apps shut down and a lot of people suddenly realise they have to use the official app and go "oh wait, is this what that protest thingy was all about?" It probably won't be the critical-mass point (at a guess that would happen around the time old.reddit is closed), but it will likely make some big waves
I wonder how long it takes for them to get rid of old.reddit. Seems like success at eliminating third party apps will embolden them.
Many news outlets paint the protest as "mods dont like change, thats why they are protesting" which is missinformation and someone that is lazy to do some research doesnt see the importance of it
I'm suspecting bot activity, iirc there was a screenshot of a new account that just spammed how much the protest sucked
Of the four subs I moderate, two are restricted (i.e. read-only) with links to places off-Reddit. One support sub I handed over to my co-mod who wants to keep it going as long as possible, tho he understands Reddit is likely going down, slowly but certainly.
There's only one of my subs that's a bit problematic, with ~45% of voting users wanting to rejoin the blackout, but ~55% wanting it to remain open. There are some people really critical of my proposal to move to kbin.social, but they are largely people with very little prior activity on the sub.
Either way, unless Reddit reverses course and fires spez, I am leaving that platform.
Those of us that cared left. All that's left there are bots and people who didn't care to begin with.
In that nfl thread, is it an old mod or a new one who re-opened it? Reddit is replacing the mods who shut down their subreddits with people who will re-open them.
There was always a substantial number of people who didn't care about the API. They probably only used the official app and are newer Reddit users. They were also probably not around for other mass migrations, such as from Digg to Reddit, so they don't treat Reddit any different than Facebook, where they put up with whatever bad changes are made because they see it as the only option, as if it will always be the internet's main news aggregator.
Anyone who's been around for a long time knows that Internet communities are ephemeral, so what's really popular today won't be in 10 years. It's more than people moving from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit. Search engines used to aggregate news on their home page, and lots of people used RSS feeds or StumbleUpon. The history of the Internet is splashed with sites like Reddit, and every time one dies, another pops up that is more popular.
I'm amazed that Reddit has lasted as long as it has. Whether this is its death or not, I cannot tell, but it seems clear that its days of dominance are waning.
There is some hope though. I think those naysayers were simply the loudest because when I go to some subs like r/pics, r/askmen, r/apple, people are supporting the strike. On r/apple, people are even made and saying yes, reddit’s threat to remove mods is mostly a bluff as they can not replace what was 5000 subreddits of mods in a timely manner. On r/askmen (which I usually dislike but today I’m happy with them) people are wanting them to extend the blackout. On r/adhdmemes, their poll is showing overwhelmingly indefinite blackout.
On r/pics most people love the new mod rule put in place to only post pictures of this one public figure
I wouldn't doubt that the majority of users that supported the protest are probably bating their time. They're periodically lurking to see if there has been an impact, not posting, and/or deciding to quit. So what's left are users that didn't support the blackout, and they're pissed and very vocal, and upvoted by the rest of the community that supports u/spez.
I went on there the other day and I wasn't really surprised. Getting the people to turn on eachother is the golden rule, and fairly easy. Most people just don't care. Fair enough. I personally like it better here.
Let's be honest here, if they're willing to charge third party apps 20 million a year then they're willing to pay bot farms to write bullshit comments to talk bad about the competition. I've left reddit altogether, I'm pretty happy so far.
I think this will be a 4-6 week process where people stop using their old Reddit apps and either migrate to the official app, old.reddit or to that federated sites.
I don't think it'll ever get as big as Reddit overall but so long as a good number of people come across to sites like Lemmy or kbin and are engaged, it'll be a vibrant place in no time.
Simply, there's not people I like anymore on Reddit or content I need. It's not a place for me now. I don't care what happens to it, I'll never go on it again. Thankfully I don't have mega niche hobbies so there's a lot of alternatives for me (forums or discords or kbin)
I think there is some pro-spez astroturfing as well as some users are just sick of it and want their subs back.
My take: The people who were in support of the protest were mostly the 3rd party client users and a lot of them left after the protest, leaving normal users, like myself, who are there for the content only, to vote for the sub to remain open in order to view the content again
Yup, that's me. I'm trying to make lemmy my new home and limit my access to Reddit (vote with your feet). I still check Reddit for the polls and a few nitch communities that don't exist on Lemmy (yet)
Yeah that's my take too. Many who supported it have left.
there's a degree of contrarianism but here's the other thing
a lot of people using reddit...really hated redditors. it's completely ironic and irrational but it's not an uncommon type of group think within a group. a lot of the "smaller" subreddits in general, and I mean smaller as in millions of users as opposed to tens of millions like the giant /r/pics or whatever. those people will probably celebrate what they see as the migration of the "bad" redditors and are against the protest because they see it as representing general/"bad" reddit
Those who have an issue are leaving and not commenting or upvoting each other anymore either. This creates a sort of feedback loop where people critical of Reddit get less positive feedback and either they adjust their opinion to fit the majority or get downvoted. Thus minority opinions are pushed into small communities or off the site entirely.
It‘s always kinda been that way tbh, I could still tolerate it cause who wants to hear Nazi or tankie opinions for example, but now I‘m thinking I‘d rather be uncomfortable with them than comfortable with this hivemind.
Most of us, the "chronically online" have a lot of voting power and are up to date with reddit and other options to use it. Now, most "left, AKA the majority of reddit users, are just casual users using reddit like any other social media. And most are the kind of people that browse without any form of adblocking
Beehaw defederated, I lost access to the communities I cared about, I started going back to reddit unfortunately.
Honestly learning how defederation works turned me off the plataform entirely, not only can it kill budding communities, the fact it can disable communications among users everywhere means its also incredible censoring power given to the instance admins and you as an user hoping they dont abuse it. I understand how its necessary for extreme cases, but having it exist just means it gets used trivially over reasons that dont deserve it.
I think the biggest problem with de-federalization is that transferring your account to another instance is impossible (or at least obtuse enough that I can't figure it out). Being able to have your account hosted on an instance that matches your moderation views is good--a lot of beehaw users like the more curated approach--but there needs to be a painless way to migrate to a new instance if the one you're currently on makes changes that you don't agree with.
From what I've read, transferring account is current not implemented. It is possible on Mastodon, so it may one day be implemented on Lemmy nor kbin, certainly many people have asked for it.
Fuck, they really defederated from at least lemmy.world. Why? Are they trying to kill the platform? Lots of the bigger tech communities were over there, now I'm bummed out. Low-key hope this kills their instance or restricts new users joining over there because I don't want to have to make another account over there just to view the three communities I liked, and no one else should have to either, having a couple of mods silo themselves off from the rest of the network defeats the entire purpose of the fediverse.
Edit: read through the beehaw mods post explaining why they did it. I still vehemently disagree, but I understand why now, and it was premature to say I hope their instance dies
defeats the entire purpose of the fediverse.
I dunno, this seems like really backward thinking to me.
It only "defeats" the point of the fediverse if the point of the fediverse is to be replacement-Reddit. The fediverse is unique from other such platforms in that it has the ability for instances to defederate. If anything, being able to defederate is the point of the Fediverse. If a bigger instance starts to cannibalise a smaller instance's communities and cultures, they only have a defense at all because of federalisation.
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
I've been on reddit for 13 years. My wife finally got an account last year. She cannot understand any of the fuss. She didn't know there were apps outside the official app. She never used RES. She just scrolls and never comments or posts. I would be surprised if she even upvotes or downvotes. She's not a monster, she just doesn't reddit like I do.
95% of users are like my wife. 5% of users are like me. I haven't even tried to explain this whole Lemmy/Kbin experiment to her yet.
But the thing is, if 50% of the 5% of us who are active posters (e.g., 2.5% of total users) are now over here on Kbin/Lemmy, the 95% who are left are going to notice a huge difference in the experience of the site. Conversations will be dull. New posts will be more ad-focused. They may not be able to explain what happened, but they will notice that Reddit is not as fun as it used to be.
Will this stop spez from getting stupid rich? Probably not. Will my wife switch to Lemmy or Kbin? Never gonna happen. But the people who want to be part of the old culture will find their way here. The stuff that made reddit great is already happening over here. Reddint will not die anytime soon, but it will cease to be relevant. Think of how long yahoo lasted even though no one cared about it. Reddit is going to be like that.
I haven't yet deleted my reddit account. It will probably happen. But I also haven't missed it. I've actually been excited to come over and see what's happening every day in the fediverse! I'm posting more, and considering modding for the first time.
save