hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
This is just my personal opinion. The 2 day blackout for me, never meant for people to pack their bags and leave Reddit entirely. It’s not a very easy task to do, and honestly, there is still lots of contents and friends back in reddit. Reddit can be sure that lots of people will simply come back, and spez will grinning while working his way to his beloved IPO.
However, the 2 day blackout has opened a new world of alternatives to Reddit. Now people know other places and other communities that can replace Reddit as a whole. Yes, Reddit will still be an influential website. Yes, Reddit will still be money driven. Yes, spez will not budge. But we can.
To me, Reddit will not crash, burn and crushed to ash. But rather, it’s either went the FB way, relying to lots of ads and ~~older demographics ~~ low-literacy to sustain, or simply becoming Myspace or Digg, a distant memory that’s only in name.
Just my 1/2 cents.
Edit: changed some inacurrate words
Yeah I wouldn’t have ever signed up for lemmy if this api thing hadn’t come about. This is my first fediverse experience. I was pissed at reddit, but now I don’t care about reddit one way or another. Lemmy has gained enough users to sustain itself even if there is no more mass migration. There is an active community here that will help lemmy grow organically over time.
Mastodon’s story feels pretty similar Starts off as a small project, Twitter becomes worse due to corporate capitalism, mass influx is users some of those stay. Twitter still exists, but mastodon now is known and used interchangeably.
FIFY
Among the “older demographics” there are the most “nerdy” people, those born when personal computers and the internet didn’t exist, those growing up together with technology, used to a world when corporations didn’t destroy the good of sharing knowledge.
Those are the people most likely to rebel to what reddit is doing and find their way out if it, because they know it’s possible, because they’ve seen it before.
Youngest people are used to how the world is nowadays because it’s all they’ve seen, but they can be shown the difference if they’re willing to listen.
Low-literacy masses are those who don’t listen because they don’t care, people of that sort exist in every age “range” and are unfortunately the majority of content “consumers”, that’s why Facebook(/Instagram/WhatsApp) doesn’t die, and Reddit won’t either most probably.
Exactly, I’m ‘older’ but I grew up with the internet in the 90s and know what it was before it turned into a monetized cesspool of corporate trash.
Yep, I kind of forgot the exact word for it, I used “older demographic” because im my local FB community, quite a number of toxics (and teaching people to be toxic) are more often than not, poor role models. I also forgot that outside of my country, there are early internet nerdys that lived throughout basically the age of Internet. So my choice of words are quite incorrrect, but yep they are precisely what you said, low-literacy.
And yes, FB, Twitter and Reddit will most likely thrive and live, by catering to those people instead of the nerdy, hobbyist group of people that once graced Reddit.
I can’t help but shudder at the thought that Reddit will be yet another Twitter or Facebook.
Reddit relies on user generated content, so it if the few users who actually generate entertaining stuff take their business elsewhere it will go the way of Myspace and DIgg. Because there is already a Facebook for old people.
I’m trying to figure out what kind of blackout you’re talking about. I open up (oh my God, I feel like a heretic) Reddit and guess what? Hardly anything has changed on Reddit. My feed is still there. Yes, a grand total of five ever-fronting subs stopped working, ten more subs took a formal vote, and… it’s still the same. Every social network goes the way of monetizing content. I first joined Reddit in 2015, at the time it was an incomprehensible pseudo-social network with an awkward interface. It took almost 18 years before Reddit became usable. But blackout is still a long way off. While kbin/lemmy is consolidated by the thought of blackout, but people can’t stay in suspense for long.
It’s still refreshing to see how many subreddits ended up joining the blackout. Over 8000 joined, including some big ones, and (as of posting) 6800 are still either private or restricted.
I don’t think the monetisation of content is inevitable for social media . It’s inevitable for companies driven by profit who fully control a platform if that company wants to survive - but there are other ways to structure a community that doesn’t rely on centralised platforms run by a business.
I guess we might see if i’m right over the next decade or two. I hope I am.