The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
3 years ago by AbaixoDeCao to c/reddit
Yeah, I agree with this suspiciously named man. Whether it happens sooner or later, Reddit’s death is on the horizon, as it will keep making the wrong choices and so steadily lose those communities and content that built it in the first place.
Have you been to digg recently? It's a buzzfeed clone. Just because the brand is still around doesn't mean it's the same product at all
It's like if I bought Nike and then killed off all their product lines and only sold high viscosity lithium grease. Yeah Nike would be around, but it would be meaningless beyond that
That's what Decoy said.
Reddit won't die, but it will not be what it was.
I think that's his point.
I agree. I don’t think we’re there yet, but next time the they give people another reason to leave the Lemmy/kbin ecosystem will be even more appealing. Simply the app and dev community here is really exploding.
"I like the way 'namffuH' thinks!"
I agree with you. Actually, Lemmy woke me up to how much reddit had already been enshitified. I didn't realize that I had stopped commenting altogether because the subs were so big that either no one saw your stuff, or there was always some one pissed off who felt the need to respond. Lemmy reminds me of reddit the way it was when I joined 12 years ago.
Or subs like gaming having posts with 4 comments and 7,000 up votes "I was recently diagnosed with stage 7 cancer and my dog died, but I created this game as my final contribution to humanity, here's a trailer."
2D Hollow Knight rip off video
Comments: "Wow amazing graphics!" "Is it on steam?!" "Looks amazing!" "I neeeeeed this!!"
Any attempt to call the ad out is -200
Not sure if you only posted on the mainsubs or what but Reddit really did hit that "hyper specific topic conversation" for me. Like up to the protests I could make a meme about a topic or reply to a post and have good discussions. When I deleted all my posts I deleted some of the top of all time posts off some subs lol.
Lemmy still hasnt hit that for me, I'm another in a swarm of people saying Lemmy doesn't fulfill my topic based sub needs. Like I'm currently obsessed with Marvel Snap and loved the subreddit. The lemmy version is dead af. And I try to converse and interact but none of the lemmy filters for posts seem to show the posts reliably to me and I have to remember to go check it. The Spider-Man PS4 sub was another favorite of mine to interact with and I ended up having to make it for Lemmy and it's got like 80 subscribers and I make a point to comment on every post but it's still not getting much conversation going 😞
do you really need a forum to talk about marvel snap? lol. just saying that card game is pretty fun but easy. what is there to talk about? (tongue in cheek)
How dare you? I feel the need to respond. \s
No it doesn’t.
Yea tbh Lemmy is kinda crap and definitely feels like only a short stop on the next major platform after reddit.
Not enough of reddit left the site so Lemmy is still very slow for content in comparison and lacks the more granular content that made reddit so good.
Lemmy is better then Reddit has ever been in my option.
Don’t like a community? Make your own.
Don’t like the admins? Make your own instance.
I blame that on too few users thus far. things are improving
It won't die. It will just hollow out. Same as Digg. Same as Facebook, Twitter, and every other shitty part of the internet. The power users are what make the internet the magical place it is. Without those people, the sites will still work... but they won't be as great as they were before their respective turning points. It's a cycle it seems.
It won’t die. It will just hollow out.
The result is still basically the same IMHO. It's like saying "it won't die, it will just turn into a zombie" ... sure it'll still move, but it's dead inside and rotting on the outside either way, devoid of the life and soul it once had.
It might not even kill it. Facebook is still kicking, after all, for all its enshittification. It's just... idk, some of us were freed to move on to a more satisfying experience. That's all. Life continues here, life continues there
Facebook (the page) is dead in the sense that its parent company changed their name to not be the same as their (once powerhouse) product. Facebook trademark is so unbelievably cursed due to what it became that they're pretending that it does not exist.
Meta is focusing on Instagram for now. They could've launched Threads within Facebook (I think it was at some point) but they choose not to. Instagram is how they reach out to the people.
This means that Facebook was enshittified successfully. It does not serve any purpose now.
I don't think Reddit has the same choice as they don't really have means to pivot to something else. It will just cease to be... Or not.
I understand why the didn't do threads in Facebook incase they need to shut it down. Kinda like how they have Messenger then purchased WhatsApp but never integrated it if they want to shut one down.
Maybe Facebook got so big and their search is so good that people just stopped using Google search for it, but I have a hard time believing that can be responsible for a drop of this magnitude.
I would say you're probably right. Remember this old gem?
Honestly if all the buttmunches stay there and all the cool people come here, I think that's the ideal scenario.
facebook's on the decline, meta's betting on instagram since that's what the kids use. facebook is for boomers to looking at family vacation photos and nazi radicalising and is a legacy service at this point.
do you know what a 'boomer' is? it's slang for 'baby boomer' and it's a specific age range of people born at specific times. plenty of people younger than that are on FB every day. just saying, if you didn't know what 'boomer' was, it doesn't just mean 'old person'.
Yeah, I feel like I hit the jackpot by finding out about the fediverse/non-corporate social media.
I’ll grab some popcorn when it happens
There won't be a day when reddit goes away, it will be a gradual decline, digg still exist.
Meanwhile here, I find most engagements thoughtful and written because people want to engage. Sure, a few assholes post stupid shit or try to be mean, but most are just trying to participate in good faith.
I doubt it. Only few people left and they'll just get a bunch of new people in to replace the lost ones. It's just a little dent in their statistics.
That‘s right. Without the protests, i probably would nit have been aware of the fediverse existence
Lemmy is open-source software. If the project root starts doing something stupid or gets abandoned, it can just be forked by someone else and it will live on.
Idk if it will ever go away. Digg is still around.
Good thing you reality deniers have no reason to be here then. Byyyeeee!
Geez, you trolls are so pathetic.
That title is a bit misleading. Reddit mods might have stopped protesting, but the news of the implosion was quite significant. The existence of Lemmy is a testament to this. I don’t think their IPO is going to be as strong as they had hoped. That financial impact is quite opposite of the victory they claim to have achieved.
Also, the posts on Reddit and the responses have declined in quality in my opinion.
the post quality sincerely feels reminiscent of when I started using reddit a decade ago, might as well be posting rage comics again. so much vile shit is making it to the front page too.
glad I finally got the kick I needed to jump ship, i'm really enjoying what I've seen on lemmy and hexbear
Ah, if that was what you're after, it's too bad you missed the wave of old memes that happened on !memes@lemmy.ml.
oh no, I appreciate the ironic 'wow look at this cringe old posts', I couldn't hack reliving 2013
So what you’re saying is spez will be richer than 80% of people instead of 90%
That can't possibly be true. I'm not saying you're lying, just... holy shit I though it'd be way more than that. This is for US citizens?
The number was $1,212,000 to be in the 90th percentile in the US in 2017 according to https://www.census.gov/...
But worldwide, it was indeed about $93,000. https://www.cnbc.com/...
I mean, wouldn’t be too out-there. How many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck with some sort of massive debt? How many can’t afford to have any assets? How many more accrue even greater debt to either survive, or drop money they don’t have on shit they don’t need (like that latest BMW) just so they can keep up with the Joneses?
On the bright side, people like him are unlikely to be happy with what they have. He’ll spend the rest of his life dreaming about the billions he ‘lost’, rather than being satisfied with the obscene amount of wealth he already has.
They pissed off a lot of their quality submitters, who either moved somewhere else or decided the hell with it, and they're doing other things now entirely.
When I upped stakes and left, I did indeed up my stakes. I torched all of my posts and comments, which means that, yes, all of my typical reddit bickering is lost to time now. But so is all the specialty knowledge about specific topics I'd put into posts and comments which are now gone from their platform entirely. Outside of the usual cats/porn/vidya/political bickering cycle on reddit, a large portion of what made it valuable to people was (were?) all the niche subs full of knowledgeable people posting information and answering questions about whatever the topic was. The reddit administration didn't just piss off the power mods, it pissed off all the people contributing to those subs as well.
The question is, numbers-wise, how many of us actually left reddit?
I think I won. I found a place I like more than reddit. Maybe we won even. We all got this place right here now. It's nice.
Maybe reddit won. Maybe they wanted to get rid of us and succeeded. Could be easier to milk the platform for shareholders after getting rid of anyone who would protest beforehand.
Maybe it doesn't matter because neither side needs the other anymore. Both sides changed and don't fit back together anymore.
Certainly declaring a winner in this situation is dumb.
I agree. If Reddit won, the victory was pyrrhic if anything. Their whole plan to end 3rd party app support could have been just a small road bump if they had just done it transparently and planned it with reasonably thought out timelines. They instead chose to do a whole front flip over it and get everyone mad, tanking their brand while trying to make it look like nothing happened.
Anyways, congratulations on your victory. Here's your prize: ❤
Ex-Apollo/Reddit 10+ years here. I really can’t understand why they didn’t offer API users the ability to pay for the add-free access they were afforded by their apps (if that’s what it was supposed to be about). Did they really think that they could force people to use the dumpster-fire that is the official Reddit app? ..at the cost of losing a significant, or at least active, percentage of their user base? That’s insane. I haven’t logged in to my Reddit account since and I no longer visit old.reddit.com. Appreciate going cold turkey isn’t for everyone, but … fuck it. When social media companies stop allowing you to view their content in the way you enjoy, it should tell you how valued you are by them.
It's fairly simple: a social media platform's value isn't just a matter of income but also of potential income and how well it can control its users behavior. Preventing users from curating their experience creates more potential avenues for advertising.
What advertisers want are eyeballs (and user data to better their strategies). The API being open means Reddit can't control where all the eyeballs on their platform are looking, which reduces the value of Reddit.
What advertisers want from reddit, and what will increase reddit's valuation, is for reddit to say "We can control where 100% of our user's eyeballs are and what they're looking at 100% of the time". For example, that's why the Facebook feed straight up ignores your settings and shows you whatever it wants.
The API access could make them money but not nearly as much as as they'll make by demonstrating to advertisers how much control over the user experience they have.
I think we won Lemmy.
We lost reddit though, not the current reddit, but the one that was.
I hope we all win. I miss Reddit. There was a more diverse range of communities that matched my interests. My list is subscribed communities here is growing but some are dead.
That will grow over time and many are. I'm finding there is increasing engagement and comments on many posts and this engagement should breed more engagement.
I think all the mobile apps for lemmy becoming available helps a lot too. Even from several weeks ago the experience is way way better.
Also all of the major instabilities I saw at first are getting worked out very fast
I'm seeing the increasing engagement too
Imo it is dumb that media always frames anything happening like a sports event. This binary win or lose narrative rarely if ever captures the complexity of a situation. It's the strongest in the US where sensationalism is striving to become an art form due to the two party system. When there are only two competing sites politics can quickly feel like a sports event. And democracy dies to lack of actual discussion and lack of options.
At least personally i have not been on reddit for more than 10 minutes total since the middle of June. I am but one person, but i dont see how they can declare themselves the winners.
They think that the people who are left are more valuable than we were. At least in terms of data collection and ad views, they are probably right.
In the long run, chasing away the power users will probably harm the platform, but it's not immediately clear.
I haven't been back at all.
I still check in on niche reddits but my use dropped by like 95%. Used to reddit for like an hour before bed every single night. Been reading books before bed more since the API changed and it's been super nice!
I still go to two niche subreddits. And while there go to the country sub for a glance. But even there things have slowed down.
The reddit protest caused thousands of power users and some of the best content creators to leave the site.
The reddit protest caused lemmy to grow exponentially for weeks on end.
The reddit protest caused well known third party app developers to leave reddit and retool for lemmy.
Next time reddit fucks up, and it will, when everyone is over there circlejerking about "well are there any good reddit alternatives?"
The answer will be "there is now, and it's called lemmy." And lemmy will again grow exponentially.
Hardly seems like a win, long term. Sure, reddit beat the remaining mod hold outs. They didn't beat us.
They were always going to win. It's their platform. They can do whatever they want. But... They lost my attention and paid subscription. I now only go to Reddit when I'm looking for something I can't find elsewhere. It used to be my favorite platform.
Reddit's main advantage is the historic number of contents and knowledge posted by their users.
It will take decades for this advantage to shift, if even possible, to similar type like Lemmy or other platforms.
Decades? Nah, but years yeah for sure
Reddit was always going to win that battle. But the fact that Lemmy now has a much larger user base (largely populated by many reddit OGs) is telling. At the very least, the online landscape changed. I for one am happy to be on a new platform away from the old corporate overlords.
If Reddit won, why have Lemmy and Kbin's userbases grown so steeply since June? Why has the quality of Reddit's content plummeted terribly? Why is /r/place just one endless ocean of "fuck spez"?
Reddit only "won" in the same way that Florida "won" against illegal immigrants and is now facing a massive workforce shortage in essential industries.
Reddit may not be dead yet, but it's mortally wounded already. It's bleeding out and will be dead in every way that matters soon.
Unfortunately, steeply here doesn't really capture the size disparity between Lemmy and Reddit. Lemmy has 60k active monthly users. Reddit has 450 million active monthly users. We have a looong way to go before we can really compete. But we just have to keep pushing. Now that we exist and have a sustainable userbase, the next time Reddit does something idiotic we'll be here to attract disgruntled users. Something good that we can be doing is showing up to the threads on Reddit about the terrible things Reddit does and advertising Lemmy to people.
I don't think a competition is necessary. I'm more than happy if this place is better than reddit was, even if it never becomes that big. It's the content and the community what makes it good for me, not the ammount of users.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Lemmy is getting bugger than Reddit. I just wanted to point out that Reddit is bleeding a lot of users. And judging by how Reddit's post quality has dropped, it's bleeding the best ones.
To emphasize this discrepancy, based on these numbers, if one tenth of one percent of reddit's monthly active users switched to lemmy, that would represent more than 600% growth in the lemmy userbase. So yeah. Sharp growth here isn't necessarily a sharp decline there.
But if the tiny minority that leaves is the same group that's willing to spend dozens of hours a week for free keeping the site free of spam and hate and keeping forums on topic, that has a pretty outsized impact on the quality of the site moving forward. So the small number isn't to say that reddit wasn't hurt by the exodus. It's just to say that lemmy growth numbers aren't a good indicator of that impact.
the thing is we need to hit the critical mass where there's enough posts and comments that it's not dead and there's a reason to come back at least daily. I'd say lemmy just hit that point for me very recently and I imagine that if I still had a reddit account I'd be 50/50. I expect exponential growth from here on out, with more users enabling more people to want to join and that further enhances the system
Stop pushing, the server gonna explode 💀
I'd rather we did not complete, thanks. I don't want 450 million people running riot posting right wing extremist crap.
We lost like 15k active users (of not even 140k) over the last couple weeks alone. I wouldn't call that steeply grown...
Again, I'm not comoparing Lemmy to Reddit. I myself am on Kbin.
Same. And those are the combined Lemmy & kbin numbers.
Why are you trying so hard to miss my point? Either that or I really suck at communication.
Be that as it may, the quality of Reddit's content has dropped significantly. The people who left were the heart and soul of the platform. And the ones who didn't leave are still pissed. Bluntly, the site's gone to shit. It will not recover.
Will it shut down? Probably not, but that's why I said "in every way that matters". Digg hasn't shut down either, even after all these years, but it has become completely irrelevant. Just give Reddit time to bleed out and it will be the same.
Such a small amount of users on Reddit submit links or comment. The thing that they "won" was splitting a portion of their community of power users who maintain and create the content on their site from the masses who simply consume and doom scroll the main page. I am happy with the type of discussion that is happening on Lemmy, I don't need a post to have 7000 upvotes or a comment to have 1500 votes and a shit load of coins attached to it to make it valuable or interesting.
The few times I’ve been back since the initial protest I’ve noticed content quality on r/all is considerably worse.
It isn’t dead, but Digg didn’t die overnight either. Reddit is absolutely dying.
When I've checked the front page it's like 15 year humor has taken over. R/unexpected top post was some dumb "NSFW" gif with a breakup and a girl saying how she loved a dude and him saying she didn't give him pussy, "🤦so cringe. All my subs were borked, not worth the effort to rebuild, I'd rather build new in lemmy.
Reddit might have won, but i definitely did too. It made me finally leave Reddit and got me here. And who knows, perhaps one day Reddit will drown in its enshittification enough for it to vanish into nothing but the great history of the internet. Then, at last, we will still be here.
They still have a lot of traffic. So yeah, they did win.
But you know who else won? The Fediverse. This place feels really active now and has the added benefit of feeling just a bit more wholesome.
And I'm 100% okay with that, my goal in going here wasn't for reddit to die, it was to have an alternative to reddit. And it's fucking amazing, I've almost completely stopped using Reddit thanks to this amazing place. I only use reddit now for niche subs like my ebikes sub.
Winning should not be judged within the span of a single month. Much of Reddit’s power users left, meaning the minority that posts the most content was decimated. Reddit will still have lots of traffic but it means they will decline to something where memes are circulated instead of made, like 9gag. That’s not winning by a lot of metrics.
deleted by creator
Agreed, and Rome wasn't built in a day. Any more crises with any of the major social networks will just continue to build this place up more. I think it's too big now to fade into obscurity and is just going to continue to grow, even if it's not as large as the mainstream stuff.
I really hope Lemmy and the fediverse achieves a certain critical mass, to have enough users for a nice active community. Im perfectly fine for reddit to stay number one though, to attract all the toxic idiots and the cesspool they create in their wake.
I notice no mention of Lemmy userbase expansion...
Not really sure what Gizmodo thinks that Reddit "won". They damaged their reputation, degraded the quality of their site, popularized competition, and embittered a significant portion of their volunteer labor force.
“‘The Hangover Is Over; Smooth Sailing From Here!’ Declares Habitual Drinker, Popping Open Another Bottle In Celebration”.
Did Digg die in days?
Man...it's been years, so I don't remember, but honestly it felt like it at the time. Everyone hated their massive V4 redesign, so people just...left. The Reddit situation is different, because it only really affected third-party app users, not every single user of the site.
Edit: I looked it up, and yeah, there was a "quit Digg day" on August 30, 2010 when pretty much everybody just left for Reddit and didn't look back. It helped that people actively bombed Digg's front page with links to Reddit that day, letting people know where to go. Two days later Digg's CEO was ousted by the board, two months later they laid off 37% of their staff. They basically died overnight. That's not happening to Reddit.
It's worth noting that Reddit has been around a lot longer than Digg had at the time, and has way more traffic than Digg ever did. Unseating Reddit is going to be a lot harder than quitting Digg was.
reddit will also have subreddits that will be fine with very few power users.
sport and politics/news subs will live for a long time for example, content is generated every day, just need to post it.
Also it's worth noting that when Digg died, at that year there's no mobile app to use, so the og reddit design doesn't hinder the transition. On the other hand, when people switch from reddit mobile app to Lemmy browser UI, it just too different and hard to get used to, so people went back to reddit. The wave happened before there's a comparable app available, the people using Digg back then is so different than the people using Reddit today.
For those of us who made the Bigg Digg Exodus, it sure felt like it. Same with those who left reddit when the Apollo dev shed light on the bullshit. It's dead to us who left and will forever only live on for us as an SEO zombie.
I think we all underestimate how much smaller the internet was back then. Flickr, the premier photo sharing site back in the day, was acquired by yahoo for $25MM. Kevin rose of digg was famously on the cover of business week touting a $60MM valuation. In todays big business tech era those are small numbers even factoring for inflation.
Basically back then users were counted in millions and if the let’s say 5-10K power users and a 100k randos moved on that could kill a service. Today Reddit is too big to fail. It would take tens of millions of users in a mass exodus to make a dent.
Look at Twitter right now, which is about the fastest case of enshittification of the modern era. The weird trolls filled the power vacuum that proper power users left and it’s still plugging along. If something like this eventually happens to Reddit it’ll be more like Facebook, a very slow decline but even in its shell state boasting hundreds of millions of users.
Wow, that cover photo gave me nostalgia, and I wasn't even young in 2006. Already seems like a distant era.
I think Reddit and Twitter will just become garbage, zombie platforms like Yahoo - still around but basically irrelevant. We'll see. I was an avid Redditor and quit about two months ago. Honestly I don't miss it at all. It had already become garbage before the whole blow-up.
Facebook didn't die because it also house businesses(pages, marketing, etc), influencer(which in turn support businesses), and there's marketplace that work well enough to support the platform.
Even though i've left fb, i still keep the account, because my family still use it, and i will occasionally open the app and see their update(after scrolling past 10 sponsored post and 20 suggested post). The consequence of leaving fb is me drifting apart from my friend. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Reddit corporate claims victory
LOL, fucking pathetic.
Platforms don't rise and fall in a single day. Reddit used to be obscure. The fewer people go and make content there and instead just post her, the more Reddit dies through attrition. And as more active users are on Lemmy, the more it grows.
If reddit won, then why am I here?
I don't see how reddit "won". They may have gotten their way by raking devs and users over the coals, but they didn't win. They got their way. Now it remains to see if any service will usurp them in the future.
I want to thank Spez for screwing up his platform. Reddit became to toxic for me a couple years ago so I took a break. Last summer Zuckerberg gave me a 30 day ban so instead of using a nerfed account I just went back to Reddit instead. So when the protest happened I had no issues with leaving the site.
Lemmy is fire, I'm enjoying this platform much more, every day it gets better.
IMO, Reddit kept the people who didn't care about third party apps or the things that made Reddit Reddit years ago, before it turned into generic social media. Everyone who did care, left. And that's not really a victory.
Did Spez write this article? Reddit didn't win. Trying to go back there has resulted in literally no answers for anything. It's just shills and that's it. I couldn't get answers to things anymore on some pretty major subreddits. So, glad I'm staying with Lemmy.
I mean, if they say so...
Meanwhile, I'm just going to have good time here on Lemmy.
I dunno about winning. Lemmy user count is through the roof. And Im one of the people who left when they pulled the API nonsense. The way they gaslit and lied to the Apollo dev was just unacceptable. Couldn't participate there after that.
Same. And I don't like to admit it, but I was a "power user". When Bacon Reader went dark, I never went back. Like others have pointed out, Reddit was always going to "win" the protest, even with over 1800 subs still out. But the platform's frontpage quality is in the tank. Google doesn't want to list Reddit at the top of search results anymore. The corporate failure to retain money making accounts made national news. Huffman completely missed the investment boat, and although the site itself is still generating traffic, the raised interest rates and lack of ROI for the unpopular changes spells out nothing but a slow death rattle.
And, lmao, anyone that publicly announces they're following the "Musk Model" for social media platform leadership is clearly a fucking dipshit doomed to drive their site into the ground.
And, lmao, anyone that publicly announces they're following the "Musk Model" for social media platform leadership
Wait is this for real? I found this but that's not quite saying the same thing.
Same, way too much BS, once sync went down I was out. So glad it's here now!
But most of these are small communities, and today only protesting subreddit with over 10 million subscribers is r/fitness.
Even if those subreddits never reopen, relinquishing the John Oliver rule officially brings the Reddit protests to a close.
These sentenences are literally right after each other. I have no idea how a 10+ million subreddit still protesting and many smaller ones means the protests are "officially over". It's died down quite a bit but that doesn't seem like a state to declare "officially over".
Lemmy has taken me back to the birth of the Internet and Pirch. But like everything else when the word gets out???
Yeah, Lemmy has the same fundamental flaws that reddit has: it's anonymous, free and it allows bots to post freely. The more popular it becomes, the more it will resemble reddit.
But what can you do? Facebook isn't anonymous, and it's a bigger shithole than reddit. If you made people pay, then you wouldn't get engagement, and in a site like this with such a wide variety of communities, without huge engagement content is sorely lacking. And how will anyone ever be able to control bots after the LLM revolution?
Yeah, Lemmy has the same fundamental flaws that reddit has: it’s anonymous, free and it allows bots to post freely. The more popular it becomes, the more it will resemble reddit.
To a point, perhaps. There's no need for the toxicity to come from both the top down as well as the bottom up like it did with reddit. I can't imagine most lemmy instances hosting r/jailbait, r/fatpeoplehate, or keeping r/the_donald around for years after they helped organize a nazi rally.
I'm reassured by the open hostility toward bigotry I've seen on lemmy. I hope that in particular persists.
I'm firmly of the opinion that any community that welcomes bigots is truly welcoming only to bigots. Since it is possible to display monstrous inhumanity using only civil language, any moderation policy that focuses heavily on policing language while coddling bigots eventually boils down to a "don't sass the nazis" policy, which was far too common on reddit. I hope lemmy does not go down that road.
I also hope that reddit levels of toxicity are not inevitable for any network with sufficient participation to make it a useful resource for niche subjects.
Imo quality engagement comes from quality moderating. Facebook has a lot of moderators but they don't give a shit about community and their focus is purely monetization. Reddit used to care about community but we know how that went. Lemmy has a chance to get it right. But even if an instance fucks it up the platform is open and gives us options for other communities within the platform.
In all honesty, I can't see any negative impact of reddits hostile behavior towards their userbase on me personally. I can fully admit that I was browsing reddit an unhealthy amount of time. As in spending 4-6 hours a day in mindless scrolling paralasis, only to reward myself with a mild chuckle every 500 posts. I mainly used Boost for Reddit which didn't help to combat this behavior with it's user friendliness. The standard reddit app and website are so bad that I cold turkeyed my bad habit and was finally able to break it. I browse Lemmy to a much smaller extend (maybe 1 hour tops) and refuse to install any frontend app, to not fall back into the same hole as with Reddit.
I also don't get the people that complain. You basically got a free get out of jail card for social media addiction, and you try to immediately backpedal to old habits. This also goes for people that desperately want Lemmy to become exactly like Reddit. The reason why Lemmy in it's current state is in my opinion already better, is because there is basically no FoMo. Post hover on the Popular page for days, comment numbers are low, and if you want to engage in an actual conversation, you won't be drowned out by the 2.7K+ tounge in cheek one liner comments because everybody is a comedian on Reddit.
I try to enjoy it while it lasts, because I know its not going to stay like this forever.
Fuck Reddit.
Nah, Reddit was kinda cool. Fuck u/spez instead.
Nah fuck reddit too, can't have a regular conversation in most subs any more with out some freak being outrageously aggressive.
The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
So say mediocre minds in constant need of a narrative that's final and neat and wrapped in a little bow, all the time.
The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
By some short-term metric here and there, I guess, if you're willing to squint while looking at the panorama. And just how does the hack writer define "winning" - as "not disappearing or sinking into irrelevance overnight"?
Because long-term nobody knows, as places like right here are continuing to develop and grow, are quickly becoming a viable alternative, ever more active, in a positive feedback growth cycle.
They did not win. It’s like Twitter, users stayed and suffered through one poor decision after another. Then, something outlandish would happen and people would migrate to Mastodon in good size numbers. Reddit will do that and Kbin and Lemmy will grow. There are so many cool apps for both. Now when users come over there’s content and various client apps that will make their stay more enjoyable.
There isn't always a victor when there is a loser (and visa versa fwiw). Reddit didn't win here, Redditors lost.
sure they won but i nuked my post history and stopped going in all but a few instances (still checked out a few links when i had to troubleshoot things). i was a regular submitter/commenter/voter. should/will they care? probably not. but i feel better about myself and the situation. so the way i see it, reddit won, the redditors who stayed lost, and everyone who left won.
We did it Reddit!
But wait, really? It does not sound like a real victory here. Lots of quality mods retired, people left for Lemmy, and F--K SPEZ written all over the r/place?
Is that victory?
Reddit’s valuation is down from $15B when they closed their last round of pre-IPO funding. They were hovering in the $5B neighborhood before the APIpocalypse, and I find it hard to imagine that they’ve gained significant value since then. That’s a loss of 2/3 of the investments from their institutional partners and VCs. I hardly think they’re feeling like they deserve a victory lap.
The only reason why you wouldn’t pull an IPO due to a company’s value cratering by 2/3 is because people are looking to get whatever cash they can out of it before it completely collapses. If reddit were a healthy company, the valuation tanking would never have happened. If they were a survivable company, they would have pulled the IPO and made the organizational and policy changes necessary to restore at least some measure of value.
Spez is Musking the site because, like Musk, he is watching his business crash and burn and he has no idea what to do beyond making people pay him to be allowed to create and moderate content he can then resell.
The effects of the decisions being made will not be immediately obvious, especially when reddit doesn’t publish KPIs that show they’re hemorrhaging value. Twitter is notorious for releasing clutching-at-straws metrics in order to not have to address that the company Elon paid $44B for is now worth about $20B and falling.
Firing the mods and replacing them or bringing them to heel is at best a pyrrhic victory because they have not yet figured out how to stem the bleeding, and spez idolizing Musk’s moves at twitter shouldn’t instill a lot of confidence.
"and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people’s attention has shifted to other things"
Reddit pruned its userbase: informed and competent users don't align with enshittification path.
I don’t care, good riddance. Fucking MySpace is still around too, doesn’t mean igaf
Reddit can continue to rot and choke on that CCP dick
Sure, reddit is still standing, but they've been poisoned and will die a slow but certain death. Lemmy however, will survive!
People expect social media services to die and rise in a day. As much as people like to think that is how it works, it isn't—Reddit itself grew slowly overtime, before absorbing Digg and Lemmy will hopefully do the same. We just have to use it, enjoy it, and recommend it to people. Overtime, it will grow, and we have to hope for the best and spearhead that.
The whole reddit thing aligned with other events in my life that pissed my sensibilities off, even more than i can usually stand, and i have learned to stand alot. It made me realize how much of my life was at the whims of greedy fucks who I don't agree with at all. Evolution through revolution I guess. woke me up in a way, a feeling that I've long forgotten tbh with you all. And that's mostly because of all of you and your ideas.
Lemmy is just good for me.
Those out for self interest are shortsighted, and what WE are doing is pushing in the right direction IMHO. Someone's gotta push and here we are.
They always were going to. Redditors have no backbone. Moderators moderate for power trips, which they need subreddits to be open for that. People go back when they want content since Lemmy is still immature to be a full on replacement. Same with the Twitter situation.
The silver lining is that this amount of disdain towards these social medias means it's a better time then ever to push new social media networks. People are eagerly waiting to jump to a viable alternative, so the network issue isn't nearly as big of a deal as it was.
I deleted my 12 year old Reddit account, and I’m here. I still go there, but spend minutes rather that hours. I tried Hacker News, but some posts are really technical. I hope this is a new home.
Reddit won the war because your stereotypical Reddit mod is a spineless narcissist who wields their banhammer as a coping mechanism for their real life issues. It's like being an internet caretaker was the only way they could gain any kind of validation.
They could very easily have overwhelmed the site and brought Reddit's admins to their knees had they collectively disabled automoderator, unbanned every user and just refused to enforce any rules (incl sitewide ones.) But the moment Reddit started threatening to demod people, they caved incredibly quickly, or tried to pull off alternative forms of protest to piss off the admins, but not to the point where they'd be immediately demodded and purged, á la AwkwardTheTurtle.
Anyone could have seen this coming from a mile away the moment we started seeing r/pics and r/videos push dumb rule changes like expletives in titles, text only, sexy pics of John Oliver, etc...
Honestly the only good thing that came out of the API protests were iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle being permabanned from Reddit, and it's bittersweet that the hill Reddit chose to kill them on was over third-party apps.
Reddit doesn't need to fall for lemmy to be a great plattform.
Why are some here so obsessed with Reddit? I'm not here to constantly read about Reddit! I understand that some of you are seriously upset about what happened and it's okay to vent for some time, but please move on for your own good.
I'm not going back
Don't care. I <3 Lemmy. Community's great. If I could filter out Reddit posts here I would, including this one.
I have a userscript for this purpose:
Thanks! I'm unfamiliar with scripts. I've installed Tampermonkey and installed the script in Edge. I've made it to the Settings page and there are several boxes (Original Includes/Excludes, etc.). The only box that allows input is the Comments section at the bottom? I'm probably missing something simple...😅
Nah, they didn't win, the results of these protests are going to be felt for a while and have shone a light on federated social media. Organic growth will always trump corporate growth and greed, that's the advantage of the fediverse.
And yet I'm here. They lost.
This article is b*******. Reddit didn't win, Reddit is a scorched Earth, with most of its useful quality data stripped from it. I for one didn't know what was going on for about a month, and was wondering why all the good posts were gone, it wasn't until someone explained to me what Reddit was doing and how it would cause the rest of the internet to do the same that I finally understood why everyone trashed Reddit on the way out.
Almost every subreddit folded after the management didnt collapse after a 2 days (!!!) protest, and then just went along with it with gritted teeth like Lemmy isn't a perfectly fine alternative???
Just started using lemmy 30 minutes ago, because i realized reddit had become boring and stale since the protests, i guess they actually did do some damage.
Anyway im here to try out lemmy lets see hoq it goes
That's kinda what happens when you say "we're gonna protest for 2 whole days then go back to normal" lol. All Reddit execs and admins had to do was sit on their hands for 2 days and not say anything.
It's hilarious that whoever came up with the 2 day blackout thing thought that would make any bit of difference.
They can’t force me to use that place. calling it a ‘win’ it’s like a dismissive abusive ex saying they won an argument by default if you never talk or see them again. Sounds like the fact they need to make news articles like this is like how MGTOW obsesses talking about how much they are over women still.
Let them have it. We don't need this place turning into that shit hole, just enjoy what we have here. I swear every 10th post is either bitching about reddit or twitter, just move on.
I don't care anymore. I have to thank all those corporate zombies for all the time I'm spending in my workshop making furniture instead of being online . Gotta go now, a kitchen cabinet calls for the final touches.
Fuck reddit, let it burn.
I got suspended for some harsh comments about literal Nazis, and then got banned for circumventing the suspension by using an alt account.
I stayed there up until the API changes meant I could no longer browse with RIF, even while being unable to comment or vote.
I finally opted to pull the plug when RIF finally died, and just a taste of their official app was enough for me to know it was time to move on.
Fuck spez, fuck nazis, and fuck money grabbing, nazi loving execs.
I'm only on day 2 of properly using Lemmy and it's already great.
Lemmy won, because Lemmy users numbered in the hundreds before the fiasco. The software is now growing by leaps and bounds.
Reddit may have won the battle, but not the war, and certainly not without casualties.
What's weird is I now share my time between here and Reddit for my niche subs.
I'm accessing Reddit through a patched 3rd party app and not really commenting or interacting with it as much.
Maybe I'm representative of a few people that have done the same but I have a feeling there are more to follow.
Not sure how that's a victory for Reddit from my POV.
Shit, I knew reddit won when I looked up the porn forums on Lemmy, and the subs measured in the low hundreds lol!
No Empire lasts forever.
I think Lemmy won a bit too.
The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
To make an analogy:
A restaurant decides to go vegan because vegetables are cheap, so they can make better profits they believe. (API Price hike)
But obviously now many dishes can't be made. ( Apps for reddit )
So customers protest because they can't get their favorite dishes anymore. The restaurant doesn't give a shit, and the owner simply walks out to the protesters and say they don't matter, because they will give up anyway.
After enough time passes, people find alternative restaurants nearby but some go vegan, and the protests finally stop. The now vegan restaurant has "won", or have they?
They now have fewer customers, their reputation has taken a serious hit, and nearby restaurants have become more popular, and the restaurant is less attractive to new customers. So they now make less profits than before, and better profits were the whole point of going vegan!
So unless reddit makes more money or is in a better position to do it in the future, they did not win.
Some people will find any opportunity to bash vegans. Stay classy.
Ugh right? You can't just not want to hurt animals.
I'm not vegan. Using analogies as arguments is pointless anyway.
How do you know someone hates vegans? They tell you.
I'm transitioning to lemmy but it's not easy. I can login to my account with an app, but not with any of my desktop browsers. Following users on other instances is unintuitive. Plus there are tons of fake "official" accounts I can't filter away.
MySpace, digg, Yahoo, Mapquest, Hotmail, icanhazcheeseburger, Fark…still exist…possibly still make money even. But just because Reddit still has traffic and activism users doesn’t mean it won’t implode at some point. There are users and traffic because of content. Maybe it will go on fine without us but would not be at all surprised if it went downhill significantly in the next few years and the money dries up and people like Steve Huffman will have to get real jobs
Gizmodo's metric for success is that "The last major holdouts in the massive protest against Reddit’s controversial API pricing have relented, abandoning the so-called 'John Oliver rules' which only allowed posts featuring the beloved TV host in certain dissident subreddits."
This doesn't seem like a good metric to me. I'd like to see monthly revenue and traffic. I'm sure we're not going to see revenue, and the sites I found that report traffic are conflicting. One shows a clear decline (https://www.similarweb.com/...) and the other shows a clear increase (https://ahrefs.com/traffic-checker).
Thanks for posting that here. I would never have seen it otherwise.
I'm still not using Reddit. Let's hope this at least puts a drop in the user count right before the IPO.
I dunno - I'm here and about the only way I've interacted with reddit since they killed RIF is with Hermit using a suspended account (scrolling combatfootage once in a while).
Previously I upvoted and commented? Not anymore. Now I'm not important but I don't imagine I'm completely alone...
Nah, you're not alone. I still lurk from time to time but I dont interact anymore and I'm under the impression the quality is going way down on reddit. Interesting users are leaving the boat. I'm quite happy to be part of the fediverse and I feel like it's definitely more aligned with the future I would like the web to be. My mental health is thanking me for leaving reddit.
What price victory? They've lost user confidence, they've lost the faith and trust of moderators, they've lost apps which made the site easier to use. Spez has abandoned any credibility he had with users and now just looks like another self-serving tech bro, willing to cut his own mother's throat to raise his company's stock price a half point. Whatever Reddit has "won" was not worth the sacrifice.
That's a criminally LONG read for not even having some updated (July) stats counter numbers.
Show me those, then we're talking 👍🏻
Who cares about reddit or the people still on there? Afaic, everyone cool has already moved here, and ya'll have already built a beautiful community. Sometimes its not about destroying a corporate website, but the friends we make along the way.
If they won then why am I here?
I don't think this article is really "pro reddit" tbh. The headline says Reddit won, but the copy adds context to that. Reddit was always going to outlast the protests. I can't imagine anyone was delusional enough to think otherwise. But like the article says, Huffman lost most of the other gambles in terms of post quality, public opinion, and there's still 1800+ subs of varying sizes dark.
Short term ad traffic is the win he needs on paper, but the press hasn't been favorable overall and user engagement is high if you consider edgy teenagers making the front page with nonsense because all the decent mods have quit as consistent engagement.
Lol… the fact that they are saying they “won”.
I think no one expected Reddit to just fold in a month, if that was their terms for “winning” then… congratulations?
For a social media giant such as Reddit, it takes years to come down, just like it took years to get where it was. However, the seeds are sown, and for every decision that only benefits their pockets and not the user, they creep closer to that reality of their own demise.
Cool story, unfortunately
I'm here and I got infinity, dbzer0 and everything reddit offered me
It takes a long time for sites to die completely. Livejournal was wildly popular in its day, but after a couple of changes of owners and becoming a Russian government propaganda machine later, it still exists, but despite me being a staunch LJer I don't know anyone who still posts there. Nobody talks about it as anything but in the past tense. In time I expect Reddit to be another internet graveyard.
Unless we can agree on a definition of a victory, it's pointless to say whether they "won". For example as far as the FB users are concerned, FB might have won with Reddit ages ago.
We are here and I don't know about you but I'm glad to be here with you all.
To be fair, before the reddit crisis I was looking for a decentralised foss alternative but didn't find anything worthwhile. So, imo, the mere fact that this event may have helped put Lemmy in the spotlight and made it grow is in itself the victory to take away from this battle :)
Didn't win me, I'm here now, no signs of leaving, happy to be in the fediverse.Popcorn is my only want for the impending implosion.
And fuck the greedy spez's of the world. Long may they suffer the wrath of the working class.
Not sure they have. No traffic stats yet on July which was when the API changes took effect
The “win” is it will turn into a right wing echo chamber shit show.
Eh, who knows. You can buy a news story now so we'll never really know much of the truth. I know I haven't been back, and I don't even care about API stuff, I just disliked the way the CEO was so dismissive of what the reader/user base wanted.
Lol this has just started. Once they IPO and we learn how many tens of millions spez made off mod's unpaid labor, more and more mods (and power users) will wonder why they are doing unpaid work just so spez can get rich.
How many billions did that one company figure they lost on likely market cap? And they want to say they won.
Yup, reddit never cared about the user. They're not a nonprofit. They're a business. So this wasn't a surprise to me.
Yeah, Reddit managed to suppress the protests, but saying they won is just not knowing the full story. From Reddit's point of view, this has always been about their IPO, but all this mess did nothing to help with it. In fact, we even got that infamous spez quote saying Reddit isn't profitable, which can only make things worse for them.
When they finally decide to push for their IPO and they aren't unable to provide the profits the investors want, then the enshittification will just accelerate and people will start leaving.
Of course Reddit won. Not to diminish the efforts of everyone who participated, but all we’re doing here is sowing the seeds for something that might compete one day. There was never a chance of a full platform shift within the set two days of protest or whatever. Give it time, we’ll see Reddit squeeze every penny it can out of its users after IPO. Then, maybe as time goes on people will be looking for other places to go and Lemmy or some other platform will be a more viable option. It took Reddit over a decade to get to where it is, so of course we shouldn’t expect an equal competitor to pop up in a few weeks.
With all the extra free time I've got from not doom scrolling Reddit, I think I'm actually the winner here, cheers spez
As a former Reddit user, I'd like to think I traded up to the fediverse.
Yea... won is a matter of opinion.
Did their evaluation go up? SERIOUSLY doubt it.
Did they lose a chunk of userbase? Not as much as we would have hoped. However, quality != quantity. And, I am willing to bet they lost a more vocal part of their userbase.
In the end, they will prob still push for IPO. In the end Spez will still be swimming in dollars. But, not nearly as many dollars as he could have had....
Left reddit. Collected my pics, killed my account. I feel much better now. Reddit can die in a fire.
Uninvestable
They "won" short term. Let's see what Reddit is like in a year.
But as other's here have pointed out, those of us that left are the real winners. While Reddit will always be around, it's already going through enshitification. It's only a matter of time of when the majority abandon it.
I guess. I only go back for a couple of niche subreddits that will never make reddit any money. And I canceled my Premium subscription.
So... they won, good for them I guess.
Originally it was "Reddit Gold" -- you could pay $30 a year to get all the benefits of Gold membership, without waiting for somebody to award you Gold.
At some point they renamed it to Premium, but they didn't raise the price for existing subscribers. I've got 13 years on Reddit & I've been paying for Gold/Premium since nearly the moment it was announced.
website
Remember Digg? It’s back, in pog form.
You forgot the underage part
lol to the surprise of literally nobody. Well... maybe some.
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If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
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The way I see it, all of us who migrated here won. Enshitification is eventually going to kill reddit, the only question is when. I’ll grab some popcorn when it happens, but for now won’t worry about it and just enjoy my time here on Lemmy.
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