I think Spez is gambling on the apathy of his website's core audience and on moderators being unwilling to indefinitely lock their subreddits. Relatively few communities have vowed to close their doors indefinitely (/r/videos and /r/iphone are the only two big ones I'm aware of) and I also think a lot of major ones are unwilling to escalate their protests beyond the original planned 48 hour blackout.

At this point I predict that Reddit will survive this, even if they're going to lose a sizeable chunk of their user base by eliminating third-party apps. There are a sizeable number of moderators that are still willing to work with Reddit and they can definitely replace those who shut off their subreddits.

Digg v4 happened because a better alternative already existed in the form of Reddit. At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, while many of its users joked that they were just a vessel for regurgitated content that was posted on Reddit the day before. The damage had already been done, to the point where users jumped ship in droves the moment Kevin Rose dropped the disastrous overhaul of Digg...

Rarely does internet slacktivism work, and there are still some scabs willing to jump the picket line and keep their subs operating as normal. Some of us remember the days of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott when everyone vowed to boycott the game over having no dedicated servers, then went out, purchased it en masse and made Activision Blizzard break sales records.

Whether Reddit make drastic improvements to the official Reddit app remains to be seen. If I've learned anything it's that Reddit's admins are snakes and you cannot trust them.

The only good that's come from this is that Lemmy and Tildes finally have active user bases. Never have I felt a sense of community from a Reddit alternative since the early days of Voat (long before it was commandeered by white supremacists.)

I don't see Lemmy replacing Reddit, since the fediverse is complicated by nature and Lemmy has similar issues to Mastodon, where the discoverability of content outside of your main instance is practically fucking nonexistent.

Beehaw is getting hammered with traffic and is really slow today. I wonder if there's been a mass exodus to Lemmy...

Apparently the head mod of /r/Tumblr has already been forcibly demodded. A bit weird that Tumblr of all places has been the starting point.

I can see a lot of people moving to Lemmy, just because the other alternative that's popping off (Tildes) is a far more serious discussion-driven site.

Here's what I think will happen.

1. Spez will forcibly depose and ban moderators who participate in the blackout and install his own yes-men to reopen these communities. A lot of power users will fold and jump back to Reddit's side, out of fear that they'll lose their foothold on the site.

2. Communities like /r/RedditAlternatives will be banned by the admins, along with the communities of any alternative social media platforms that are in direct competition with Reddit. Some subreddits focused around Lemmy instances have already been purged by the admins and I see them quadrupling down on this.

3. Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don't completely kill the site because now it's pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don't give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc. I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.

4. Porn-focused communities decide to leave the site and start their own website (perhaps a Lemmy instance or a standalone site that aims to compete with places like Fansly or OnlyFans), because they see the exclusion of NSFW material from the API is a precursor to a total porn-ban.

5. Reddit announces its IPO and still raises a lot of capital.

He has serious guts to be doing an AMA.

Unless he's using this opportunity to repeal the API changes or officially resign as CEO and put somebody more competent in charge, I don't see this going well.

Spez should honestly learn to read the room.

Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter seemed more like an extremely elaborate shitpost that went horribly wrong. It's like Musk never intended to buy them in the first place but was legally forced to do so (he tried to back out of the deal beforehand.)

As for Reddit, that place has been going down the shitter since around 2016. Power users have ruined that site, especially the handful of moderators that control hundreds of subreddits between themselves. Spez is a blithering idiot who has done more to censor and subvert the site than Ellen Pao ever did (ironically, everyone accepted it and didn't revolt against him because he wasn't a woman.)

That being said, I really hope Steve Huffman doubles down on the API changes and kills Reddit as a platform. Nothing would make me happier.

Twitch and YouTube literally think they're too big to fall and work actively to fuck over the content creator, when decent competitors like Rumble and Kick are coming along. Mixer could have been decent but Microsoft's strategy was literally to offer two streamers nine-figure contracts and somehow think this would drive people to their Twitch-clone. At least Rumble and Kick are competently run.

The sad thing is... Ellen Pao did nothing wrong. All she really did was ban /r/FatPeopleHate. Victoria's firing was Kn0thing's doing but everybody threw Ellen under the bus for it. Oh, and she was trying to fight for keeping Reddit as a free-speech platform too.

It's amazing how sheepish the Reddit community truly is when everybody came back to Reddit the moment Pao was forced out.

She really didn't deserve the nickname 'Chairman Pao', especially when Spez was the one who pushed far stricter censorship measures, made ban-evasion a site wide offence and gave moderators so much power to abuse.

On the plus side, it's good to see a Reddit alternative that isn't either dead, a closed-garden like Tildes, or a white supremacist hellhole.

Yeah... sorry that I posted something a bit against Beehaw's ethos.

I am a British citizen. I have lived under this circus fiesta of a Conservative government for the past thirteen years and watched them slowly erode my rights. They have taken away so much from me and nothing has made my day more than watching Boris resign.

If anything he and his cronies should be in prison.

This and Boris Johnson resigning makes my dick hard.

If there's something I've learned about fascists, or the right-wing in general, it's that they can't be reasoned with. It's like a cult where people are brainwashed.

I don't think it's wrong for Spez to charge for API access, but the rates he's vowing to charge are excessive and clearly designed to nuke third-party apps from their ecosystem.

As for how I'd make money from Reddit in his shoes, I'd:

1. Add more features for Reddit Premium, like being able to view more than 1,000 items on the front page, video uploads in comments, or enhanced search functionality.
2. Add OnlyFans-style subscriptions or revenue sharing for partnered subreddits/users, with a 90% to 10% cut between content creators and Reddit.
3. Bring back RPAN as a full time streaming platform to compete with the likes of Twitch/Kick.

1. Ban the handful of moderators who run hundreds of subs between themselves, along with those responsible for moderating AgainstHateSubreddits and ShitRedditSays. Both communities in particular have done tonnes of damage to Reddit as a platform.

2. Add clear house rules that make Reddit a better place. Banning things like sexualised content of minors, involuntary/revenge porn, racial hatred, etc shouldn't come as a result of the press generating negative publicity and hurting Reddit's bottom line, they should be basic humanitarian requirements to run a social media platform. I mean look at the reason why they banned /r/NoNewNormal, they quoted some bullshit jargon statistics about vote manipulation and used that as a basis to ban them rather than doing what any sane person would do and forbid medical misinformation.

3. Make the official app actually good. There's a reason why tonnes of people use BaconReader, Apollo, Reddit Is Fun, etc, and why almost every web user prefers Reddit's old minimalistic UI, and it says a lot when a fediverse clone has a better rich text editor than the 'Fancy Pants Editor' of New Reddit...

4. Spez resigns and brings in somebody more like Aaron Swartz in terms of their beliefs on free speech to run the company.

I'm one of those people that would have paid a subscription if Reddit Premium actually gave me any cool features.

I can certainly see Reddit's admins staging a hostile takeover of all large subreddits, banhammering any moderator who takes part in the blackout, and installing their own yes-men.

But can you imagine the PR shitshow that would occur if Reddit suddenly deposed its most powerful users? Imagine if a major content creator like Linus Tech Tips, SomeOrdinaryGamers, Penguinz0 or Asmongold jumped on the 'fuck Reddit' bandwagon. It would be a major PR boost for any competitor.

I've been a lot more active on Beehaw over the past few days than on Reddit. Tried to get into Kbin but the servers have been remarkably unstable and I don't like the fact that you can only view 25 comments at once.

I think a lot of subreddits will fold. Your typical reddit moderator is hungry for power and having that power taken away from them is probably more terrifying to them than losing Apollo/RIF/BaconReader/Sync/Relay.

IIRC it wasn't within days but rather months after Spez took over Reddit and started banning content that promoted racial/religious hatred. Voat nearly died from lack-of-users after Ellen Pao was ousted and everybody pretty much abandoned the site.

Another thing that I recall was Stormfront (a white supremacist/nazi forum) having their hosting provider pull the plug on their service, which may have sparked some of their users to seek refuge on Voat.

There was another Reddit clone that existed two years ago called Ruqqus. It was a decent community, until Voat shut down and all of their bigoted users flocked to it...

I think the Digg v4 moment will be when/if Reddit bans porn. And if they're gunning for an IPO, they're going to do just that.

It's a damn necessity if you want to avoid a situation like Mastodon had with Gab joining the fediverse.

Imagine the absolute shitshow if a white-supremacist Reddit clone like Poal suddenly integrated their site with Lemmy...

https://wegotthiscovered.com/...