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- cross-posted to:
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How is reddit post protest, did it really win over protesters? Did the ones who left make a dent? Or like all things before, did it ultimately do nothing?
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Maybe I’m biased but I feel like the soul of Reddit as a social media site is much more dependent on its users than other sites. Reddit will continue on but if the company keeps undervaluing its users and moderators (and everything points to that), it will end up being as vapid and pointless as people are saying Threads is now.
Yeah, like your experience with Facebook is largely dependent on your IRL contacts using it. If your friends and family still use it, you might not even notice that it sucks, cuz you are by default more likely to be interested in their normal life shit. But individual connections aren’t really relevant on Reddit. I don’t even know if any of my IRL friends use it. My experience with it depends entirely on strangers posting good content. If those strangers stop, then Reddit sucks for everyone.
Precisely. This is why Reddit antagonizing its user resulted in many cheering for its downfall (me included), instead of just simply walking away silently.
No, it definitely sucks, because although I have a lot of IRL ppl using it, I get literally 20 advertisement posts in a row in between posts from my IRL people. It it absolutely hideous. It frequently just… breaks and refuses to load my news feed, or it will suddenly load 5-10 advertisement fake posts as I am scrolling down the feed, making a sudden huge jump up or down the page, and meaning I must scroll a ton to find the post from a real human that I had just started to look at. Half the time, I only find out about something because someone IRL tells me “did you see X that so-and-so posted?” and I go specifically to their profile page and then see it. I think they keep making their website worse on purpose to drive more people to their apps, and I am simply not installing such a data syphon for Meta onto my phone.
I just don’t understand why mods form big, popular subreddits don’t switch over to lemmy/kbin/whatever? If it is sunk cost fallacy that is irrational. They have a big following, all they have to do is say “hey guys, we are moving to another site. Go <here> to sign up.” If it is because (as some people suggest, not me) they are power-hungry mods and fear losing that power, it is also irrelevant since they can host their own instance and have all the power they want. If they could organize a blackout, surely they can organize an exodus? What am I missing?
The Star Trek subreddit did this, it’s what brought me here.
If not the fear of losing power, maybe the fear of losing followers. After all there’s no guarantee that the ordinary reddit user will go through the trouble of creating another account. The fear of starting over might be a deterrent into leaving. Just look at the mods who ended their protest because they will be replaced by reddit.
I get that, but it is irrational. They can plan such a thing, esp. when they do it in
concordconsort. Just prepopulate the new lemmy communities with some content, ask some regulars/power-posters to become active first. Then setup a site that simplifies the signing-up tot lemmy/kbin and make a big announcement before you abandon reddit. Sure, at first the amount of people will decline. But as Reddit will have problems assigning new mods to all those big subreddits the quality over there will go down further. It won’t be an easy or even fast switch, but sometimes it’s best to just start over.
I think it’s really simple. People are just naturally resistant to change.
In the early days of lemmy.world (literally 1 month ago), the instance was getting flooded with new sign ups, posts, and comments. Performance took a massive nosedive and thus impacting user experience and adoption.
But other the past few weeks, stability has improved significantly. As long as the communities begin to rebuild and contribute useful content, I think over time it will be better than Reddit.
Too many want a 1 for 1 replacement at this moment. They can’t see that it will take some time to grow.
Or they want/hope things to go back to normal. Change is hard for many. But more and more intrusive ads are coming.
I think when the IPO happens and mods hear about how many tens of millions spez made off their unpaid labor, more mods will question why they are doing it.
Also they can’t envision how it could be better
As Henry Ford said, if he asked what people wanted they’d say a faster horse
Also have to contend with the overall laziness / apathy of people. Moving somewhere new is an effort that a heap of people seem to averse to. I get it, they’ve been on Reddit for years, but with the way Reddit has been negatively interacting with the community you’d think they’d see the writings on the wall and move
It’s been hard to get my sub users to switch to my Lemmy. Since they do not really care and are a mainstream Reddit app user you can see the struggle 😅.
You’re never going to get everyone to switch. You get some people to start a community somewhere else, it starts to grow and become self sustaining, then there are options, and eventually the one without intrusive ads wins.
Sadly seems to be the case now. I will eventually stop trying. People who will want to switch will switch either way.
Yeah. I put a bug in my subreddit’s users ear and made a community over here. That’s about all I feel I ought to do. The subreddit had to move subreddits 4 years ago due to a bad moderator and it would be a bad look to push a move after the poll I made said most wanted to stay.
They’ll be fine without me (there’s 2 other mods, and honestly I at least do minimal modding. I marked something as a spoiler last month. Jazzhands.)
You’ve got to remember that these are just simple shit posters. These are people of the internet. The common clay of the new corporate social media. You know… morons
Which sub?
It’s a university subreddit. Called /r/HunterCollege
Ah yeah it must be even more difficult to convince people to switch if you have a big churn of users every year, less of a consistent subreddit ‘culture’
Yea. They mostly post like 1-3 times a year then forget about Reddit. Even though the long time user don’t really care lmao.
They won the battle, but they haven’t won the war. What u/spez’s actions have fomented, much like Elon Musk with Twitter is to create an opening for other platforms that would have never really had a chance at growing and competing with them.
It’s one of the reasons facebook moved quickly with threads(yes I know we dislike the likes of facebook), but Elon gave Zuck a freaking wonderful gift.
Hopefully, Lemmy picks up some serious steam.
It’s still massive and wasn’t going to die over the period of a month. People are looking elsewhere but currently have no good alternatives. Lemmy/kbin is awesome, but still not ready for the entire Reddit community. We’ll get there eventually!
we’ll never get there if users keep gatekeeping
I see many people arguing against improving the ux “its not that hard just learn it”
even defederating meta is bad imo, I think people will be more likely to switch over to alternatives if thread is federated, but if we defederate it then everyone will just stay on threads. Defederating only hurts us, not meta
facts, they’re just taking away user choice to block on their own
Yep, it’s on us to help move the content and people over to Lemmy. People and search engine will continue to default to Reddit. Eventually so much content will be on Lemmy/Kbin that reddit becomes a thing of the past, hopefully.
Nothing great was ever built in a single night or even a month. Things take time to grow, and die. Give it time.
But I want reddit to die quickly :/ Are we there yet?
This feels short-sighted. The odds of the protest having a major and immediate impact were always low. It’s not like the suits were going to have a sudden change of heart and realize they were alienating their users. The majority of Reddit’s userbase weren’t going to suddenly leave the site forever. But that wasn’t the point.
Here’s what’s changed since the API changes were announced:
- Reddit’s responses to user concerns and protests have alienated even more users than the initial changes themselves, showing users exactly how Reddit’s administration sees them.
- A whole bunch of mods, devs, and contributors who put in a lot hard work improving Reddit for free are now much less motivated to do so (if they’re still willing to do it at all).
- The protest raised awareness of federated Reddit alternatives, which have grown substantially as a result. A lot of those people who helped improve Reddit for free are now turning their attention to kbin and Lemmy instead.
- Reddit is on a clear trajectory. They’ve shown they will continue making user-hostile decisions and antagonizing their userbase in pursuit of further growth.
We now have an established alternative to Reddit that has reached a critical mass for growth. A lot more people are now working on making the fediverse better, and communities are forming that will attract new users on their own. From now on, every time Reddit makes another move like this, more people will move over (or get closer to moving over) and Reddit will drop in quality even more as a result. If there’s ever a Digg V4 moment (maybe when they kill old.reddit), the fediverse will be much more prepared to take on the mass exodus that results.
It’s remarkable to me that Reddit could have let one of their PR drones write a post that essentially took seven paragraphs to say, “Sorry but we have to” and it probably would have mostly blown over.
But Huffman’s ego took the wheel and he had to make it personal. Instead of just leaving, people are actively cheering for Reddit’s downfall.
It always amazes me that these idiots don’t have a think tank which has great ideas for them and can tell them when their own ideas are shit.
If I was rich. Absolutely 100% would do this. It would be like cheating at life.
It seems like everyone who runs a large social media platform believes we live in a meritocracy and they’re somehow geniuses.
Naw, cheating at life is if your Daddy owns an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa, then you get smart people to do the thinking and PR for you.
There’s a risk that you’ll start to believe your own PR and try to do it yourself, though. I can’t imagine that going well.
I have to be honest, the fact we have an active alternative(s) to reddit at last makes this a complete success for me. I’ve lowkey despised reddit for years. Particularly from 2016 on when bots kind of overran the website and the front page was just filled with toxic garbage that never really went away to this day. I actually did use the revanced patch to get my RIF app working again (though I can’t get my ad-less premium back unfortunately), but I’ve been on here far more than there. I think im just having more fun on Lemmy than I have been on reddit in years. The only reasons I hop back are for sports team specific communities (and really the game threads because I like interacting with other people watching when im watching alone). On the instance i’m on currently there are generated game threads but it hasn’t got the users to make them particularly active as of yet. If that ever happens i’ll happily cut off reddit for good
Check out realgm forums for sports. Was hard cutting off sports community on reddit, but realgm is active and been around for years.
I’m really liking the lack of bots as well. Im hoping the sports stuff takes off here but I guess that just takes time. I’ll check out that instance though. When football and hockey start up again I’d love to have gameday threads back
We’ve only ported over the MLB game bots over to lemmy right now (because it’s the only sport in season) but we’ll be porting the other major sports bots over before the season starts! One of our users created communities for all the major sports teams in preparation for this. If you’d like to mod any let me know!
I bet an instance geared specifically towards sports would be a relatively popular one
So, I’m new here, but I’m still struggling to see the advantage of smaller and more focused instances. I mean, Lemmy.World was pretty sluggish in the first days of the Great Migration, but it got better fairly quickly.
I can imagine smaller instances can do a better job of screening new sign-ups, and they tend to be a little faster than (some) larger instances. Is that it? I’ve also noticed that they tend to have more lag on content updates on the communities I am most interested in, and the front page seems a bit more static.
I created an account on a smaller instance when perfomance here on .world were at its worst, but now I find myself using this account more and more. Maybe more instances is good for Lemmy, but I’m not yet sure if ti’s good for me.
So, I’m new here, but I’m still struggling to see the advantage of smaller and more focused instances.
One benefit of focused instances is that we can sort of insulate ourselves from de-federation conflicts amongst the larger, user-focused instances. I’m not sure if you we around for the beehaw.org defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works but those were 3/4 of the biggest instances and those users can no longer interact. Users from lemmy.world were basically blocked from all new content on the communities they were subscribed to on beehaw.org and vice versa.
I host a sports-focused instance fanaticus.social where all we talk about is sports. It’s a non-controversial topic (most of the time) and because we’re focused on that one topic, users from all the instances like beehaw, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, can still interact with and create content for sports without worrying about losing access to the communities they’re a part of. That’s the major advantage as far as I see it.
I don’t care about user registration counts because most of our content comes from users on general instances. In the future we will probably disable registration altogether. I have only left it open for now to reduce the friction for new fediverse users if they happen to find our instance first and want to make fanaticus their home instance.
I would imagine that instances would really compete on channels/communities/magazines and the mods/admins running those. At a certain point, then, the instances would also tend to have some kind of home field advantage on new users who sign up specifically for that instance’s sports communities. Users from other instances can still interact with the most popular communities, but that’s what I imagine when people talk about instances that focus on a particular niche.
My home instance, Lemmy.sdf.org, is full of geeky/retro communities that tickle my fancy. I like setting my view to “local” to see what pops up locally, even in communities I’m not a member of.
I’m also a member of feddit.uk, which focuses on UK stuff. That’s handy for folks in the UK because it’s easier to find locally-relevant stuff.
It’s federated, so yeah - you can interact with the fediverse from any federated node
The node you call home matters though. You’ll run into your local users more, you’ll come across certain communities more.
The experience is very different. Use multiple accounts, but find a home
We’re out here! I’m an admin at fanaticus.social. We’re a sports-only instance. We’re the instance /u/Garrathian was talking about.
If you miss your sports and want to discuss them, come on over and check us out. We have all the major sports and their teams’ communities set up and have ported the game bot (for baseball right now) over. We’re planning on having the game bots ported over before the start of the other major sports’ seasons.
If the only people who leave Reddit are the ones who understand what a federated FOSS link aggregator is, I think I’d be cool with that. Lemmy’s share of the 3% who have moved on is already pretty impressive, at least in terms of where it was a couple months ago. And the quality of the discourse has been significantly better.
I dunno if Reddit won, but I certainly did.
To be honest the cost of their decisions was the creation of a now viable competitor. Lemmy is still small, has less users and less content but importantly creates a destination for mass migration in the future. Reddit used to just be a crappy offshoot of Digg right up until the major Digg redesign that everyone hated…and overnight Digg was toast. History tends to repeat.
Yeah, the thing about screwing over Redditors is that Reddit started because Digg did something similar. Fucking off to another website is where it all started, and will be where it ends.
Reddit and Digg have less than 6 months age difference. Both were started in 2005. Kevin Rose used his position on TechTV to push Digg early on, which gave it inertia reddit lacked
t. was a reddit admin before and during digg v4
Reddit is too big to die quickly (unless they suffer a catastrophic failure), but it’s easy to see that it was an inflection point for them, that it’s downhill from here. Remember: at one point, it looked like Yahoo Directory and Internet Explorer would be around forever too.
Same for myspace. When was the last time that was relevant?
apparently people are considering a return to myspace. i’ve seen the posts
I don’t blame them.
Join Myspace: Hi, I’m Tom! I’m your friend!
Join Twitter: TUCKER CARLSON SAYS THE LIBERAL UFOS ARE GOING TO STEAL DONALD TRUMP’S HAIR!!!
In these days of Zuckerberg and Musk, Tom would be a huge win.
For that very same reason Tom said fuck all this, SOLD the whole thing and now lives his life doing whatever the f he wants. No way our boy Tom is about to come back with the whiteboard lmao he’s got it good
Tom was my first Internet friend. I’m glad he’s doing well
Hahaha, it’s an interesting point. Myspace does still exist. But it’s a shell of it’s former self. We can only hope that someday reddit will be too.
They all died due to competitive market pressure. Reddit and Twitter are dying due to managerial incompetence. I believe that Threads will be stillborn due to managerial incompetence, but we are yet to see.
Reddit went from the 5th most visited website in the world to the 20th. That’s not nothing.
Lemme put on my tin foil hat for a second and say that this degrading of reddit was just in time for it to go public. It could only go up from here.
I can’t predict the future, but I think this whole federating thing is good. The internet and its traffic was too localized. The people don’t want to keep being sold.
Now if we could somehow get everyone that uses a site like this to actually PAY - say - $1 a YEAR, the internet would be better for it.
Pay who? Serious question.
Edi: Or where?
Pay your instance to help offset hosting fees.
Back in the '90s, ISPs would provide subscribers with Email (POP3/SMTP) access, NNTP access and even basic web hosting of static pages. They also used to provide FTP mirrors of most large software repositories. This saved them wholesale bandwidth and also a faster connection for their users. Maybe modern independent ISPs can reimplement this Service for their subscribers. For instance (pun not intended) Telstra and iiNet (in Australia) could offer access to a Lemmy instance, or a consortium of independent ISPs could sponsor a regional Lemmy instance.
This is a really interesting point, because at least in the UK, we’re seeing a rise in regional ISPs again as companies rush to beat BT/Openreach to offering 1gbps fibre internet in areas they’re not yet prioritising.
I could completely see bundling a local-focussed set of fediverse services with the subscription to be a no brainer that people might actually get some decent value out of. Also would have the benefit of the services having a steady stream of income from the subscription fees.
That’s a really good idea. ISP email is still a thing in my country.
I’m hoping this is the direction we go, and I think it will be, though if the Fediverse ever overtook private social media, I’m pretty certain the tech companies would lobby to regulate social media, try to regulate who’s allowed to host web servers, or lobby ISP’s to raise bandwidth costs for people who do host web servers.
I find myself not too creative with imagining what are they(corporations) gonna make money off. I like not know what Meta is planning with Threads or what’s next with tech companies. I just have the distrust and reminder to not underestimate corporate greed.
Your comments and other lemming comments tells me how corporate greed is gonna fuck us next.
Eh, I kinda hope that happens to be honest. I’ve finally got to the point where I just deeply refuse to use any of the large corporation stuff, and if they somehow kill community run social networks, then I’ll finally be free of my addiction that I don’t have the willpower to deal with as long as there’s an ok-enough tempting alternative . Which I know is selfish, but I’d probably help me a lot :D
Interesting. Maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but I don’t see how tech companies stamp us out by lobbying, or how web hosting and cloud services can be restricted based on use case. Seems like the genie is out of the bottle on this thing.
I’ll selflessly offer myself up as recipient.
The person who runs lemm.ee has a sponsor option on their github page. Idk if that’s standard practice, some pin the info at the top of their instance.
Didn’t they set server donation goals at one stage and the community of reddit were more than happy to contribute money?
There was this bar for years that said how much more donations they needed per month.
I have nothing to back this up and I haven’t spent any significant amount of time browsing Reddit since the end of June. Yesterday, a search result took me to a section of Reddit and eyebrowsed through a bit. I feel like the people that left were the people that contributed and a lot of the remaining traffic is the people that just browse. Social media and the internet are not like real world businesses that just tank. Online social media is made up of the people who view it and the people who contribute to it. Facebook became boomers, memes that aren’t as clever as people who post them think they are, You’re great and posting pictures of a family reunion you didn’t know existed, and a substitute for craigslist. It didn’t used to be that way, but I think overall they would say their numbers are solid. Social media evolves, and Reddit is evolving in a direction, that a core group of users who I speculate were some of the more useful contributors, don’t want to participate in. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow and find Reddit gone. But will it ever truly be the front page of the internet again? Will it ever be where I’m glad my search took me for a specific tech problem? Will information that used to be on individual bulletin boards scattered throughout the net which had centralized on Reddit remain on Reddit? Reddit will probably cash out in some way and we’ll be left with the Facebook equivalent of Reddit. If that’s something that quality contributors don’t want to participate in, then it will be even more akin to Facebook. So is it going to go away? Probably not. Could you argue that it’s basically already gone? I would say it’s at least headed that way.
On some of the subs that I still frequent, the content has swiftly deteriorated, and it’s not just due to the still on-going protests anymore. I’m subscribed to something like 50 subs or so, and it’s always a handful of these that show up on my subscribed feed. If I want to find the other subs (some of which I don’t fully recall why I subbed to them) I have to browse down past a lot of crap content, or look at my list and click them individually. In short, the experience has been awful, not to mention that I no longer browse it on my phone when bored.
Reddit is still there as a resource, mostly for Google searches that take me there, but otherwise it feels “dead” to me, in ruins. It will not go away, like you said, it’ll definitely stick around but I think people will gradually move away to other platforms and its content will evolve to something that won’t be relevant to us one day.
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No, it didn’t get crushed. The goal was never to move everyone off reddit, it is to trigger the death spiral by having the people who cared about and actively contributes to abandon reddit and being redditors.
If this trend continues, reddit will get Facebook’d as their algorithms will make contents there get louder and dumber and angrier than ever before and cause more people to leave.
Remember, reddit is cynicism and despair, and despair is the enemy of progress.
Lemmy now has enough early adopters to be sustainable. And that’s the only thing that matters. As to Reddit, my account there is 17+ years old but I was there since the beginning. The early years were amazing but in the last half decade or so it was a visibly dying platform. We should be thankful that its current leadership has now put it out of its misery.
My corners of Reddit – the apolitical, narrowly to very narrowly focused subs – never protested or gave up. Some are trying to move to various platforms: one to Lemmy, another to Squabbles, a third thinking about Tildes. The one that posted about moving to Lemmy appears to be a moderate success; the others not.
