Nothing went wrong. We moved to Lemmy, Lemmy has 3rd party apps. Reddit can get fucked.
Nothing went wrong. Reddit knew from minute 1 they weren’t going to negotiate this change (not in good faith, anyways).
Add to that, like everyone else is saying, the fact that they weren’t actually pushed to change thier minds in the slightest by users when push came to shove; because yeah, some of us left, but a lot of us participated, said they weren’t gonna back down…and went right back to Reddit when all was said and done.
(Not saying “the protests were a total bust” because, from what I understand at least, this happened to Digg in the past, and it wasn’t immediately overtaken by Reddit. It happened in waves of users over time until it got eclipsed. Pretty sure it was bad policy change effecting users after bad policy change that made everyone start to pack up too, not just one. Part of me is hopeful that history is repeating).
But to circle back, basically the attempt was doomed to fail because the decision was made absolute long before any talk of protesting it was even a thought in anyone’s mind.
The initial bust happened.
They screwed up with the most critical group. To cite Steve Ballmer: “developers, developers, developers, developers”. Now tools like bot banning are gone.
Some moderators have stepped down or stayed till they were banned but in large they gave in. As nearly all posts in r/modnews have under 20% upvote ratio the mods are still not happy (e.g. 17% upvotes, 83% downvotes for the r/place announcement and comments are by large negative).
Btw. If you want to hurt Reddit: Post good content on Lemmy and cross-reference it on Reddit.
Btw. Lemmy won’t replace Reddit. This might be hard but it’s the truth and it might be the best for Lemmy as a big platform has a different flair compared to how Lemmy is right now.
Yup, that’s the word for it. Initial burst. Definetly not the last.
That’s gonna be fun for the new mods to deal with lol in fact, i think they already are.
Reddit had years to build up its content, and Rome wasn’t built in a day (something i feel a lot of people easily forget, and not just in this case) so in some ways I can’t blame them for not moving. It’s like you said tho, the best way to hurt Reddit is to post good content elsewhere, and IDK, I feel like that could have been better than just bitterly staying.
That’s not for us to decide, i think. Lemmy might be a whole different beast, but if enough people come in and bring the Reddit expierence to Lemmy, it just might. Maybe not a 100% replacement, it’ll never be a 1:1 replacement after all, but just enough.
I prefer it here. The comment sections are few and far between, but the ones that do exist have a higher quality of dialogue. We just need more of the experts to shift over; the only thing I really miss about the other place is when some person who’s an expert on the most random thing starts chiming in on a topic and dropping knowledge.
I like it a lot here too, tho I’m honestly not too bothered if there’s much more activity in the future tho. IDK, i feel like growth is going to happen sooner or later (because it always does), whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.
I think the only thing that could have been done better if for mods to more rapidly migrate to other plate forms and leave a detail message on the locked subreddit about why and how to move to the platform.
I’m not saying that it has to be Lemmy, but it would have been nice if it were.
I’d say what went wrong was nobody did anything meaningfuk or cared. Nobody put their money where their mouth is and deleted their accounts, and staying off the site for 2 days was too much to ask of >80% of the users.
The Mods closed a few subs but didn’t themselves do anything meaningful. They should have let reddit replace them if they actually cared. They should have moved their community to lemmy or kbin. The ones who did sick it out I’m grateful for, the rest cared too much about their own pride to bother trying to keep the admins in check.
Overall the reddit userbase since the pandemic are mostly entitled whiners who don’t really give a shit as long as they get their twitter and TikTok reposts. There’s literally only one piece of OC on the frontpage of reddit right now. There’s not much value to going there anymore.
I’m done with Reddit, and honestly I haven’t missed it. My time is now more full of hobbies and actual reading, I’m better off for deleting it.
I think this post, which is an attempt by mods to continue protesting, and its reception by users speaks for itself: https://np.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/158zf26/reminder_july_26_rworldbuilding_is_shut_down_no/
The hive mind went from “fuck spez we’re staging an internet revolution” to “let it go already, nobody gives a shit, stop inconveniencing us with your real issues” in an instant. Basically, everyone’s attention span has lapsed and if you keep talking about it people think you’re killing their buzz. It’s no longer a relevant problem for the vast majority of the userbase, if it ever even was.
The people who this really affected - third-party app users, people affected by the poor accessibility of the regular app/site and the anti- ‘hail corporate’ types have already migrated or are otherwise disengaged with Reddit, leaving just the bootlickers.
And this was the entire point. Reddit was tired of being the place for over-educated, angst tech bros with lots of free time to be subversive. They want to refocus on the lowest-common denominator Facebook/Instagram/TT crowd who gives themselves over to popular media mind and body.
Actually that’s a really good point!
And how many are that? Are the non bootlickers even a significant number?
Lemmy growth numbers since the whole API thing kicked off might give some indication.
“meaningfuk” is a great typo! I’ll see if I can start using it in real sentences.
More power to you .
This. The protesting subreddits should have been creating alternative communities at Lemmy and elsewhere while they were locked down or hidden for whatever, and then they’d have had real leverage when forced back open.
I’ve been using the Reddit app lately and it’s absolute dogshit. It mostly shows me content that I didn’t ask for. It trying hard to be tiktok or something. Very annoying. It functions differently from how most people use Reddit
So… how do you know what’s on reddit front page again? I actually did leave and have no idea what’s going on over there…
By just going on reddit once to see what’s there, I would guess. Or by using a libreddit instance.
I don’t think anything went wrong. Reddit decided it was time to fully close the garden. And that’s that. You can take it or leave it.
The people in the Lemmy verse decided to leave it. Luckily lemmy is here and we’re here with Lemmy.
I also noticed a significant decrease in quality of content on Reddit on the subs I used to enjoy. The people who used to post and comment on there just simply don’t, and garbage posts get to the top of my front page much more. I consciously decide to use it less (even though my mobile app of choice, Relay, still works for free for now), and it’s not even all that hard.
Everything that has a beginning has an ending (perhaps with a long tail). Perhaps the only wrong thing is that we forgot about that. All of these Internet services tend to have a long tail, most of everything we remember once using is still around in some form barely being used but for a tiny and loyal user base that is still hanging in there for some reason.
None of these things were great in and of themselves, it was always the community.
A limited blackout did nothing to change Reddit’s mind. Periodically asking users if they want to end the Blackout did not help since as dissatisfied users left for Discord or Lemmy, the voters became biased toward ending the Blackout.
In the future, boycotting and demanding that advertisers cancel ad revenue would be far more effective. Lawsuits about Reddit restoring user content involuntarily may still do damage but not quickly enough to help the protest.
What went wrong is simple and clear as day: People did not commit to their protest. Only a fraction of those who took part made the important step of quitting reddit altogether. Because the protest was limited, reddit absorbed the hit.
If you’re not willing to give up your abuser, you’re destined to be battered.
It is important to remember that you owe these platforms nothing. There is life after an endless stream of dopamine hits. Just walk out.
The only thing I can think of was that the mods announced a time limit of 48 hours for the protests, but I’m not sure that making all the protests indefinite would have solved anything.
Spez was determined to copy Elon Musk even though Elon clearly doesn’t know how to run a social media platform. Now both Reddit and Twitter are dying.
I think most people knew it was a protest and nothing more - I doubt a lot of people thought, hey Reddit is totally going to back down.
It was a mass expression of user dissatisfaction which escalated from an initial 2 day blackout into something so much more, and so I’m pretty impressed with what it did, which was stirred up shit for the management and made the CEO say some ridiculous things in the press to boot.
What I am a little disappointed in is that not as many mods walked. I’m not a mod, but I was fed the line ‘it’s going to be impossible to mod my sub without the 3rd party apps’. Given the amount of subs that seem to have been ticking over just nicely since the API switch though I feel like I was fed some bs in that department
They are still struggling, https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/154bp7n/friends_we_are_far_beyond_drowning_in_bots_please/
They should just give up and leave, bless them for trying and all but haven’t they learned anything…
Don’t get me wrong. There’s some support communities on Reddit I still visit. I don’t want to see them burn down in flames. But there’s no help from the admins coming. You might as well ask your cat.
Definitely agree
The other claim is that “reddit doesn’t care about blind people” which is the most ridiculous claim of all. The new site design is WCAG AA compliant. I did both an automated assessment with WAVE and used VoiceOver to confirm. It is useable for blind users with standard screen readers and other ATs.
Is it easier with apps? Sure. But it’s not impossible.
I don’t claim to be familiar with their issues but I thought the problem was that the mod tools were not usable for the blind. I recall posts that they had to get help from sight-capable users to moderate r/blind.
I dunno. I think if the response has been a bit enough threat to their long-term goals they could have easily just walked back a bit by changing the pricing for API access and extending a grace period to developers already using the API.
The fact that Reddit moderators quickly folded the moment Spez threatened to take their “powers” away made the whole thing quickly fail. Very few had the balls to go through with the protests and didn’t care about those imaginary powers (honorable mention to the former r/interestingasfuck mods), but many were too addicted to that fake status symbol to even imagine letting go of it and Spez took advantage of that to kill the protests.
For those of us who left Reddit and mostly only use Lemmy now, I believe the 3rd party apps thing was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I think it’s just that we already hated Reddit so much that when presented with Lemmy we immediately jumped ship.
For many other Redditors however the appocalypse didn’t make any difference, many big subreddits are still very active and the Reddit moderators who folded realized they don’t want to lose their control over those subs and all the potential that control gives them (monetization via partnerships with brands, sponsored AMAs, selling film rights like one former mod of r/wallstreetbets did, shilling your new app, website or crypto like again r/wallstreetbets mods did etc…).
The mistake in these protests was to assume that Reddit mods would align with the interests of 3rd party app users.
I think this places too much blame on mods. Reddit is a corporation and they were going to do what they’re going to do.
Power users cared about 3p apps, the average redditor probably didn’t even know they existed.
It was never going to “succeed” if success was that Reddit backtracked from their position. It would have made spez look too weak.
I think it did cost them a lot more than they suggested in the short term, and I think it’ll cost them more in the long run too.
Lemmy is going to become a real competitor. And it probably never would have previously.
Reddit was goining the way of the other big tech players, removing API for third party apps, maybe will remove old.reddit.com next ? force everyone to sign-up using their phone number, using your real names instead of nicknames, verifying your identity using goverment issued ID.
the sign is on the wall but the majority of people are fine with that, look how facebook hit the record of 3 billion users a month. these corps are too big to fail.
I log onto reddit twice a month or so, but if they get rid of old.reddit.com, I won’t be doing that anymore.
what all is broken, tho?
I can still view without an account on Infinity.
Sometimes I hit rate limits but so do the official frontends.
Infinity didn’t get hit yet for some reason, other than the porn. I assume Apollo was the main target and it will trickle down eventually. My usage has dropped enough that I probably won’t notice when infinity does get the axe
It worked for me, I haven’t really used reddit much since July 1st. That’s good enough for me. It’s not about bringing the whole thing down ad most of society dgaf about shit like it’s been since the beginning of time.
Same here. It would have been nice if reddit changed their mind, but ultimately the whole situation allowed me to break my addiction. I feel much healthier on a daily basis now that I spend maybe an hour on Lemmy, Beehaw, or Tildes vs 5 hours pointlessly arguing with people on reddit. I have a ton more gaming time and reading time now and I feel comfortable checking reddit if I need to reference something (like, it really is the best place to access Destiny 2 community info, for example). It’s honestly really great not checking social as much, I didn’t realize how much life social media was sucking out of me.
Yeah, I rarely load it up these days. I have to admit that this site with the smaller base is much nicer to use. It actually feels like I have conversations with people rather than just throwing comments into a wall of noise.
Ultimately, not enough people had joined the protest, so it didn’t have enough economical power.
The protest wouldn’t have done squat. So long as the protest was finite, spez knew people would forget and move on.
Also he tested everything with kid gloves till recently, when they booted mods. He could have gone that route earlier if there were bigger protests.
The protest was mostly the mods blacking out their subs to bring attention to the issue, but most users didn’t care, and never would have.
Spez is hell bent on that IPO, and nothing would have stopped that.
The way this was pitched internally was almost certainly “we will see a drop in pageviews, but those pageviews will finally be profitable.”
It was quite clear that they primed the relevant stakeholders for some turbulence.
Ot wouldn’t have mattered if every single person had joined the protest. The decision had already been made, nothing was going to change that
This, here. Reddit is going the way of Digg, but trying to be more savvy about it. THey don’t care that the specific group that’s leaving are the content creators because they intend to charge content creators (paid API) who expect to profit from the traffic. They don’t care that it’s lower quality content creators. They want the money both ways, and don’t care what percent of their “high quality” traffic disappears for it.
Since they’re bigger than digg, they still have some high quality traffic. There’s never a 100% protest with something as big as reddit. It’s win/win/win for them.
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