I'm here now and not there. So I guess it at least did a little something 🙋♂️
Here and not there too. I saw my last post when Apollo got cut off.
It was difficult to figure out how this works at first and wait for the Memmy TestFlight, but now I’m happy.
It really really hope Lemmy takes off. For me, there’s enough here that I’m set. I look forward to the apps getting better and the platform getting more stable.
If you're still having issues with apps, try wefwef.app. I have no complaints since I started using it.
I’m actually on the TestFlight for Memmy and it’s getting much better very quickly.
But I was an Apollo addict and that is a very high bar.
Wefwef reversing the colors on upvotes and downvotes triggers me, and at least on iOS it has a pretty annoying WebKit related bug where it stops scrolling until you tap something.
Memmy is quite good though, the functionality is there and the polish will come!
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:
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.
Saying that it's over and the Reddit won is a bit naive. The majority of the subs that I used to frequent have come back online, but they are definitely still protesting. ProgrammerHumor is making new troll rules based on majority vote every week. Madlads made everyone a mod. Many subs are posting John Oliver or troll versions of their original purpose.
It's not over. Will they succeed? Who knows. But Reddit is currently a completely different place than it was a month ago because of the ongoing protests.
As a digg refugee I can say that I am done with reddit, too much dejavu here.
Yup. I haven't logged in since Boost went down and don't intend to. Except when a link takes me there and auto-opens the app.
That said, while it's fun and informative to talk about how bad Reddit has become, I hope Lemmy can move on soon and just start being something different rather than constantly being smug about Reddit.
The big reveal on the impact from this will be in the aftermath from the future IPO. I believe the damage on the brand certainly had a big impact on the target price Reddit can ask.
Also, it showed how fragile its ecosystem is to a bunch of unpaid volunteers which may not have the shareholders interest at heart.
It did a lot of things already. Their valuation was halved (maybe not that bad, but it’s wasn’t good) after it was already not that great.
It made the “important” people take a step back and question whether they should spend their advertising dollars on Reddit. At least a handful of the bigger advertising companies paused their ads on Reddit.
It put a bug in investors ears. The last thing you want, from a newly acquired asset, is shit tons of bad press and drama, along with a public devaluation.
Google publicly commenting on Reddit protests screwing up search results got into the minds of people that may have never even paid attention.
During the blackouts user time spent on Reddit decreased, and overall traffic decreased slightly. The first matters more. If less people are engaging with the site, for less time each use, that’s less ads they will see. I haven’t seen too many stats about usage a month later.
The user side is what will take time to see what happens. As content quality goes down, some people will be less interested. Then again, look at the rest of social media. Most people don’t really seem to care much about actual content, so maybe I’m wrong on that one.
Oh, that last bit about volunteers not being beholden to shareholders is not something that had occurred to me before. That definitely raises the risk of this asset.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit ex-pat. I don’t think they crushed it. A lot of people definitely left.
The data is not back yet, but some of the power users left. It’s said only 1% of users submit posts, and if they leave the rest of the community stagnates. Many mods left, which means spam and reposts and low quality content will fill the site. It’s going downhill, how fast is up for debate.
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
Inertia will carry them pretty far, and I'm sure they'll find some way to increase profits — most likely by changing the rules to the point where the site and community is unrecognizable. It will take a while before anyone really notices, and many people probably never will. Reddit will continue boiling the frog indefinitely in search of profits, the same way most social media corps do. Today's YouTube is nothing like what it was when it became popular. Same with Facebook, same with Twitter.
Reddit just needs to pivot before they fall. They probably are in good position to do so, tbh.
There's more money in passive, less-savvy users. The ones who don't use ad blockers, don't use third-party apps, and just consume the feed.
I shouldn't be surprised that Reddit is actively alienating people like me, because people like me do not bring them ad revenue. We DO bring them users, in theory, because we contribute to conversations and make original posts — you know, the things people go to Reddit too see — but what does that really mean for the bottom line? Possibly nothing. There's no shortage of posts on Reddit, many of which never see the light of day because they never get the upvotes. If the top contributors leave, it will just create more room at the top. The feed will remain full, and the subjective quality of that feed probably won't affect the bottom line very much.
I agree for the most part, but the one thing that I think they'll have trouble with is bots. I think they truly underestimate the work that mods and contributors did for free in raising the quality of content, and now they have to build the plane while it's flying after having booted the ones building it off, and now it's just pilots and passengers. Those uniquely impactful few that have been brushed away will hurt the most in a brain-drain kind of way.
Reddit certainly has changed and I don't think it will bounce back so easily. It feels like the Mall you used to love that slowly fell from grace where all of your favorite stores slowly closed up shop and you found yourself going elsewhere instead. One day someone brings up the old mall in passing and someone else chimes in that it's now a flea market. It feels like that's where Reddit is heading... it feels like Reddit is turning into the Dirt-Mall.
Everything that reddit has that is of any value is the contributions of it's users. Disrespecting those users will make them leave the platform, if not today, someday soon. Redditors! Choose to delete all your content NOW and let Spez IPO the ashes.
The fact that the Reddit API scandal has now been spun into some 'battle' of salty users vs Reddit is, in microcosm, a win for Reddit. By all appearances, when viewed under that lens, they 'won'.
It was never a struggle, it was a statement of intent. And that statement of intent has, in my opinion, been actioned because here we are now, with a promising alternative.
Reddit will probably flourish under its new guise, accepting that isn't a sort of capitulation. Just move on.
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.
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!
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.
It's too early to say I think. We all think the most active posters have left but only time will tell if the content left on reddit is sufficient.
Yep, it's going to take a few months for the spam bots to really take control of the default subs. There's still several subs' mod teams who are in active standoffs with the admins about the NSFW tag, and I believe there's still a large amount of lesser known/popular subs that are either still completely inaccessible or in read only mode.
And time for the Lemmy apps to mature, which is happening at a staggering rate.
The people here now are most willing to deal with the friction but as the ecosystem matures and the content grows, I would expect word of mouth to help maintain some steady growth even with no additional Reddit drama.
I’m going back to Reddit from time to time to check the situation and read some micro-communities that i follow and that did not jump the ship.
I gotta say that my previous feed was deeply tailored between interesting discussions, tech and gaming news and some meme and futile discussion (like askmen or aita).
right now, that fine calibrated feed has become an uninteresting mess of memes, reposts and low-quality content. I see that users are still there because upvotes are still high, but it’s not as interesting as it was before.
this might very well be my own perception based on who i followed, but I got the feeling that reddit got taken over by people who only enjoy low-quality content, kind of like facebook, where I used to enjoy discussions with my friends and now it’s just ads and influencers.
There are a lot of people who find Reddit useful and aren't really interested in the politics of it. As the site fills up with spam and hate because mods are gone, more of the people who just enjoy the site will leave. Unfortunately by then the the IPO will have happened, people will cash out and start the next thing. I don't think the leaders at Reddit really care about anything except the money.
If they do care they are really going about things the wrong way. For me, I really hope we can switch to things like Lemmy and Mastodon that are not controlled by corporations or advertising.
The real mystery is how any company will look at the current situation of reddit and think "Yes, this looks like it'll be fully fixed within 6 months, tops, and profitable during 2024"
Sometimes it feels Lemmy community cares a bit too much about what happens on Reddit.
Let's be honest, it is unlikely Reddit is going to die or change policy. And who cares.
I'm just happy there is much better alternative and I'm not looking back.
I spent over 10 years on that site. I’ll need a little longer than 8 days to get over how quickly it became a shitshow.
Thing is, it’s not really the site I care about, it was Apollo, my most-used and treasured app. WefWef is a great replacement but it’s not the same.
Joke's on them. I set one of my communities to NSFW and then unmodded myself.
They may have quashed the protest, but at what ultimate cost? The reputation damage has happened and people have definitely left. Lemmy saw some significant growth. I'm new to Lemmy but so far it definitely feels like what I enjoyed about reddit without all of the corporate bullshit. It's nice not seeing shit-take ads either.
The impact is already noticeable, especially on subs where the mods remain in conflict with the admins. Regardless of how that pans out, I’m thankful to have discovered Lemmy along the way.
It only cost them the trust of those who trusted them most.
Trust is like a mirror. When broken, you can put it back together but you will ALWAYS see the cracks.
For me it's a 100% win
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’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
Hard to say. Mant of us reading this are reddit deserters though.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
