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 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 wanted to insult you and swear a bit as a bit of a funny take on driving engagement…but it’s mostly just so darn nice here that I can’t bring myself to roll around in the gutter.
Have an upvote and be happy instead.
What happen next is we move on to this better platform
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.
Once it loses it’s status as “front page of the internet” its the beginning of the end for Reddit (although it has already started, perhaps just the prologue or prequelmeme of the end?).
Still learning lemmy but I’m liking it so far.
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.
Add a month to the blackout each time Spez refers to Reddit’s employees as “Snoos”
I know it’s the actual name of the little alien, and it’s a decidedly cute one, but I’ll never be able to read “Snoo” without thinking of those Amazonians from Futurama.
Can we build an interface for it? And call it a Snoos Button?
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”
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 feel like this thread is a circlejerk. I agree that reddit screwed up bad, but there is a difference between now and the migration from Digg to Reddit. When that migration happened, Reddit was already reasonably sized with active communities. I’m trying to move to Lemmy but I don’t feel that it has the vibrance that Reddit did when Dogg died.
I’d love for this to bring Reddit to heel, but I don’t think Lemmy has the momentum needed just yet. Maybe some other parts of the fedivers does?
I’m going to keep trying to switch to Lemmy but I am skeptical that the momentum is there. Look at how many threads there are per day in the main news community… There isn’t enough buy-in…
Not only lemmy is not as big as reddit back in the migration days. But reddit is also not as small as digg in the migration days.
Were assuming that these migrations follow a set pattern but in reality each iteration has been slower and harder to materialize.
Take also into account that the UX is very different as well and not very casual friendly. Take also into account that in a span of a few hours a gigantic part of the community lost access to some of the biggest communities out of the blue because beehaw defederated world (it’s their right and choice but the UX impact still exists) . So some people might even be like “Yeah fuck this, I’ll just go back to my tried and true subreddit interface” others will be like "Why do I bother posting content in X community if I might lose access to it later on if someone decides to defederate? "
Lemmy is pretty awesome and I’m liking it here. But to think we’re the “silent minority” of reddit is just not true. Vast majority a of casual users are like " why do you use a 3rd party app of there’s a reddit app and it’s OK…? "
What brings your comment into focus is the remark upthread “remember IRC?”
IRC still exists, but the heyday of UnderNet and irc.net is long past. An entire generation has grown up not using it, not experiencing netsplits and the like.
The Fediverse is kind of like the IRC and Usenet of a new generation. Over time, it will rediscover the same issues felt by those early protocols of the Internet. Hopefully it will navigate past them and we won’t just swing back to centralization again.
But in the meantime, Reddit is not going anywhere, and I’m not sure I’d want it to. It attracts certain types of people that I’d be happy to never see on Lemmy, at least not until it is significantly more mature and has tools in place to manage them.
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.
It is truly an addiction platform.
To my credit though I shredded all of my accounts today and deleted them. I’m 100% all in on lemmy and this new and exciting fediverse stuff.
Hey I’m even a mod now for NSFW! I’m a big boy now.
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.
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.
It may not “end” Reddit but I do think this will end Reddit as we know it. It will just be a shell of itself just like Facebook is no longer a place for college friends to connect and share photos.
This is what I’m expecting. A year from now someone will mention “reddit” to me and I’ll be like “that’s still around?” and I’ll check it out and it’s just turned into TikTok challenges.
This I can believe. The only reason I still have facebook is for the precious few friends whom I use messenger with, as well as the group that the rescue I adopted my dog from uses. Every time I scroll through my timeline it’s 90% random garbage, advertisements, and “suggested” bullshit.
You can actually use messenger without a Facebook account which is what I do for the rare occasions I need that
That brought back memories of AOL Instant Messenger for me :)
I’m making my transition a somewhat gradual one. I’ll still be on Reddit, in the more esoteric subs, though I feel dirty every time I go there. As all the cool kids migrate over, I’ll spend less time there and more time here.
As long as you only use on a browser with adblock, and don’t actively support their changes, it isn’t letting them win. Spez is trying to built a wall around his garden of extremely useful information, go nab some tomatoes while they’re not yet rotten.
Reddit wins as long as actual people are posting and commenting. Selling advertising is just a stopgap; the goal is to sell peoples behavior patterns and current trends in communicating about information. He sees the cash cow as being a legitimate AI training corpus to sell subscriptions to.
Of course, this will fail as soon as people deploy chatbots using those same models across the redditverse.
I may be missing something, but the article completely loses the thread when it starts grousing over "why won’t the 3Ps pay up? " Because even if they pay, NSFW content is still not available for users. Reddit is attempting to force third party devs to charge for an inferior product, which is obviously untenable for all parties.
I agree, the Verge’s coverage has been much better on this subject. It isn’t about not paying for use, it’s about a reasonable price that isn’t so exorbitant to essentially bankrupt them and make them go away. Christian has addressed this point several times already.
Regardless of whether or not anything serious happens to Reddit, it’s just not the same for me anymore and I won’t be going back. I can see the vibe and audience further shifting ala Twitter. It’s too big to just fail, Digg, MySpace and other older sites still exist, they’re just shadows of themselves now.
Exactly. There is no winning here, but at a minimum, another corner of the internet grows that isn’t controlled by a singular entity. That should be real goal along with moving away from Reddit.
I replaced all my comments with garbage and deleted my account
I understand why some people would want to do this, but there’s a lot of stuff there that I would hate to be gone forever.
There’s an old game - I always forget which game it is until it happens again - that I play once every few years, but which always gives me problems when installing or starting for the first time. And every time I looked for a solution, I always ended up in the same Reddit thread; one with a solution that always worked. After I landed there a few times, I even left a comment thanking them for it.
I don’t so much want Reddit gone forever, as I just want for there to be more competition and for users to be spread out. Or, maybe even better, for there to be a searchable archive of Reddit.
I thought the exact same, but when their internal mail leaked i was just “fuck this” and got rid of everything.
was that the bit about all of this blowing over or did i miss something?
You may have missed the bit about the Black Cat ransomware gang making off with 80GB of internal data?
yiiiiikes i definitely did miss that!
