I posted this on a Reddit thread this morning about the effectiveness of the blackouts and what happens next:
Some people have just shut down and will never look back. Some just don’t care and need their Reddit fix. A LOT of comments on these types of threads are Reddit bots/employees trying to run a propaganda campaign to stop the shutdown. Most of the users though (IMO), are probably like me and opened up a Lemmy, Mastodon and Kbin account and are using all of them. Lemmy and Mastodon will continue to grow (2x-3x in the past week) and users will continue to migrate over and spend more time there than here until Reddit feels some pain. Reddit will eventually make some grand gesture like replace the CEO or “compromise” on API pricing, but it will be too late and the glory days of Reddit will officially be over.
The issue is that the momentum to go to other platforms has started. Reddit had their chance to stop it and stay the dominant platform, but the CEO is inexperienced and didn’t know how to handle it. Until a few weeks ago Reddit had no real competition, but Spez fucked up big time and now the blood is in the water. The Fediverse is a great idea and takes social media out of the hands of corporations and puts it back in the hands of the users (does anyone remember IRC?). It didn’t really have a lot of momentum until now, but its got a LOT of press because of Reddit’s fuck up and now it’s going to be a slow juggernaut sweeping not only Reddit’s market, but Twitter (Elon is just as big a fuckup as Spez), and Facebook.
I would bet $20 that this time next year Reddit will be 50% or less of their market, and several other alternatives will be growing faster than we’ve ever seen platforms grow. Alternative platforms already have the formula for a successful project. Reddit did all the experimentation, now the alts just need to copy the look/feel and features to knock Reddit down to the Digg dungeon.
Billionaires seek to control the media and the narrative, but Fediverse is harder to simply buy and control. Profit seeking corporations will always put profit first, and we’ve seen time and time again that it’s the “product people” that make a company great, and the “business people” who kill it. The capitalists will continue to kill long term growth for short term profits, but Fediverse can’t be killed that way. We’ve just seen the beginning of the new internet revolution.
Something this “blackout” caused me to notice as an individual is just how much of my time and attention I was giving away for free for a faceless corporation to monetize. I quit Reddit entirely and, while still visiting Lemmy/a few forums, I’ve noticed my “Doomscrolling” habit is rapidly dying.
I would bet $20 that this time next year Reddit will be 50% or less of their market, and several other alternatives will be growing faster than we’ve ever seen platforms grow.
I fervently hope this prediction comes true, and the internet becomes a little healthier in the process.
Insightful and hopeful.
I’m getting used it here and Kbin and that’s all it took for me to leave Digg back in the day.
That’s the thing that kills me. There was a time when Digg was the king. Also for a while Slashdot. We left before and we can leave again.
I am liking Lemmy so far.
I spent a few hours manually deleting all my posts in my subreddit this morning, and changing the name to Deleted. So no going back for me now ;-)
Apart from the attitude, it is just amazing that there was no option for me to just delete my (their) subreddit, even though I’m the creator/owner. I anyway do believe more in the decentralised federated model of social networking.
I had a small subreddit, I just set it to private, removed all the other mods and then removed myself as mod. fuck reddit
If there are no active mods in a subreddit someone can go to /r/redditrequest and get it back. If you own a subreddit the best thing to do is private it with only you as moderator, and maybe post a comment every two weeks or so, so you count as “active”
Man, it’s sad to see comments about how this isn’t the end of Reddit. I want one of two things: Either to see Reddit straight up die because the communities stayed down, or for them to be forced to relax their API fees. For me personally, Reddit is straight up dead if I cant use old.reddit or Reddit via Apollo / Relay Pro. I need these third party apps. The Reddit app is HORRIBLE in every way, from the layout to the ads.
Reddit isn’t special- it’s just where everyone is at atm. And why are they at reddit to begin with? It’s because of what it was - community focused, and community driven. Now it’s profit driven, and the community is pissed.
If you’re mad now, just wait till they are publicly traded, and are legally obligated to milk every last dime from their user base to satisfy investors.
I’m reserving all my opinions until after the 30th when all the 3rd party clients die. A lot of people dont even know their client is about to reach end of life because they dont check reddit every day or follow the news close enough.
Usage statistics saw a 15-25% hit in traffic during the protest. It’s still around 8% lower than it was pre protest.
My personal opinion though is that reddit doesnt have to die. It just has to lose it’s status as the front page of the internet. That happens when there is an alternative to reddit that has a critical mass of users to be a rival. I think we are close to that right now with lemmy.
Near a billion active users per month, Reddit isn’t going to die. Doesn’t matter to me what other people do, I’ve left.
While I can’t see it dying in anytime soon in how many visitors it receives, the general “vibe” and communities of the site will differ I imagine and that’s what matters to me. The end of Apollo was it for me. Like you said, others can do whatever but I’ve left.
Depends on how you define “Active Users”.
Reddit has shitload of spam, bots, and lurkers. Only a very small slice of users actually contribute anything in the form of posts and comments.
I remember back at Digg and MySpace. Same vibe.
“This will blow over.”
It always blows over until it doesn’t. Only take once.
I think back to this article quite a bit, lately. The basic idea is that social media sites seem, by the numbers, to be doing fine, and then they abruptly collapse. The trick is that when the people who create high engagement - people who make posts that make people super happy or angry or whatever, as long as they are feeling something and therefor getting engaged - when those people start to post less because they’re spending some of their energy on some other new site, the old one gets kinda hollowed out. It’s not obvious it’s dying until it’s dead.
I don’t know if reddit is done for, but I can say that lemmy and mastodon are feeling a lot more fleshed out, lately, compared to past waves of people coming from twitter. It feels like turning a corner, or crossing a critical mass threshold; it’s getting easier to stay engaged and not feel the need to check the old giant sites.
I think the real test will be when these API rules go into effect at the end of the month. Will all these people who showed solidarity the last two days leave the site then, or will they just quietly download the official app and continue on?
I’m curious about the mod tools. Is it possible to moderate a small to medium sized subreddit without those tools? To me, the mods are the glue behind it all. If a subreddit goes off the rails because of bot spam and toxic/hate posts, people will just go elsewhere.
So if mods stop moderating because they don’t have access to their tools, this will likely happen at one point or another.
My guess is, the downhill has already started. The remaining users just aren’t annoyed enough to migrate yet, but when the spam wave hits every sub, they are going to find Lemmy a lot more appealing.
People are ADDICTED to Reddit. So much so that they are using Reddit as their primary resource to talk about how much they hate it.
Once the craziness around the API stuff dies down and it’s time to stop using Reddit for good, I’m willing to bet nearly all of these people cave in some way.
Just look at all the people who claim to hate Musk and everything he stands for, but continue using Twitter like nothing changed.
I think a good portion will do both frankly. Half will go elsewhere or reduce usage. Half will stay like nothing happened.
Add a month to the blackout each time Spez refers to Reddit’s employees as “Snoos”
Can we build an interface for it? And call it a Snoos Button?
This is not the end of reddit. It is just a hiccup for them as they go public. But the protests was a good opportunity for folks to learn about alternatives. I certainly didn’t know alternatives existed. I’m glad to have found fediverse. I fully support the idea and want to see it grow.
This is the gist of it. It will happen again, and again, and again. After they go public, every quarter that they need to come up with some shenanigans to satisfy shareholders, it will happen again. Eventually, either a new thing will come up and start it all over again, or we will be mostly decentralized.
I think on top of that each time we get more and more of the creators. The vast majority of users are lurkers on Reddit, purely consuming content and ads. If content starts moving to new platforms then the users will follow. That’s why power users are important, they’re most of the discussion. We saw it with facebook, they lost the communities that made it fun and over time more and more people left the platform to go where the content was, the slow death of a social media titan.
