It’s almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality…
Or they’re just, you know… children. Or people who were never familiar with the site pre-official app. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, but reddit 2014 is not the same as reddit 2023. They feel like entirely different websites to an extent (well, visually they actually are).
I’m willing to bet the average age on there right now is probably mid-to-late teens. They most likely use the official app and don’t see the need to be involved in this because they weren’t on the site when there wasn’t an official app like most of us. I doubt many users are even that familiar with the old design.
The whole target market is different now.
I don’t think they care about points or clout or whatever. Vast majority of reddit users are lurkers or occasional commenters. Doubt many have all that much karma to spare.
I think they simply don’t understand the effects here because to them “third party” isn’t something that they knew existed. “API changes” isn’t something with a lot of meaning to most users.
The majority simply doesn’t care, because in their minds, they don’t need to. It’s “not their fight”. Whether they should care is obviously another story.
We’re in a minority. Mods, third party app users, people who have a history with reddit. How many casual reddit users fall into one of those groups? How many into two? How many into all three? Not a lot.
This is, and always has been, a protest by a minority of reddit’s users. One you, me, and the thousands of people who left reddit for Lemmy/kbin/Fedi support, but not one that a lot of casual users felt any resonance with.
The situation is a lot more nuanced when it comes to reddit users as a whole. It’s not a simple “with us or against us” situation as some like to believe.
Reddit is mostly lurkers. I’m (well, was) one of them. People get thousands of upvotes, but not thousands of replies.
When mods lose the tooling that they need and spam maybe starts slipping through, I expect one of two things (or both) will happen:
A) They blame the mods. Doesn’t matter if it’s new mods or old ones. They’ll say the old ones are doing it on purpose because they “lost the protest” and the new ones “don’t know what they’re doing and only want the power”.
B) Traffic dips slowly. Very slowly. There might be a major drop in a couple of days, but it’ll rise up to similar levels once people are “fuck it” and use the official app. That’s what reddit’s counting on, and they’re not wrong. I’m guessing the amount of people who leave permanently is significantly lower than the amount of people who “just want to use reddit”.
I also expect reddit to fuck up again. Every few years, they do and alienate a bunch of users. I doubt it’ll be a major, site-killing fuck up, but there’s probably going to be “waves” in which a portion ditches the site. They’ll typically gain enough users to make up for it, but quality will probably get worse over time.
It’s funny because I’m guessing a bunch of people who right now are all “don’t know why you’re complaining” will be loudly protesting when reddit does some other shit and suddenly those people will be hearing “don’t know why you’re complaining”. Cycle continues.
I’m not sure. Normally, most users would come back as you describe. But if the lack of mods gets too serious, then most users will begin to get bored or annoyed. If other platforms scale up well, boredom translates into “I heard about…”
Is not just age (like im in my late teens and still gone to kbin) but generally, some people have not really taken action about stuff that doesnt affect them i think you are right about that… For me, i did not use 3rd party apps, really just used mobile site (eww i know. On light mode too can u believe it?) but bc of finding out what was going on it would just be sad to stay there. Especially how they lied about Christian! A fellow Canadian! But some ppl didnt really read much about what happened or just werent concerned cause they did not use those apps, so maybe they found it easy to ignore…
Again, when I said “children” and teenagers, I didn’t mean to offend or anything, so I hope I didn’t offend you.
I was trying to get at the idea that a lot of people who reddit considers their target market now aren’t really the people who helped build it into what it is over the last, man, for some it’s almost two decades. The site has changed a lot over the years. (There used to be a time when there weren’t even comments; it was just links and upvotes/downvotes. It was actually a controversial decision to allow comments, ironically.)
I’d actually hazard a guess that Lemmy/kbin/Fedi probably has a younger userbase as well, so yeah, it’s not really about age. I do wonder if the ratio is closer here than it is on reddit right now, but it might be more or less the same.
To be honest, I’ve also noticed that in a lot of online spaces, younger people (Jesus, I sound fucking old; I’m just a regular millennial) tend to be more passionate about protesting.
Another reason is that this might not have pulled user is is that people do not like mods on reddit. Especially over the last few years. It’s always been kind of a joke (“lol, mods live in mother’s basement” and that kind of shit), but with “power mods” and stuff like that, there’s a pervasive “fuck the mods” attitude which meant that “anything that hurts the mods is good, they need to know their place” or some other nonsense.
(IMO, power mods are, and have always been, bad for reddit. So I think it’s a legitimate complaint, but power mods =/= mods in general, who were the ones mostly participating here. I think the power mods were actually the most quiet on this.)
In two days, when the spam probably starts slipping through the cracks, they’re still going to blame the mods anyway.
But we’ll see. I don’t know. Reddit is chasing a different crowd now.
(By the way, light mode is my jam, so you and I have that in common. My Linux terminal theme would piss off at least 90% of Linux users who spend any time using commands.)
Or they’re just, you know… children. Or people who were never familiar with the site pre-official app. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, but reddit 2014 is not the same as reddit 2023. They feel like entirely different websites to an extent (well, visually they actually are).
I’m willing to bet the average age on there right now is probably mid-to-late teens. They most likely use the official app and don’t see the need to be involved in this because they weren’t on the site when there wasn’t an official app like most of us. I doubt many users are even that familiar with the old design.
The whole target market is different now.
I don’t think they care about points or clout or whatever. Vast majority of reddit users are lurkers or occasional commenters. Doubt many have all that much karma to spare.
I think they simply don’t understand the effects here because to them “third party” isn’t something that they knew existed. “API changes” isn’t something with a lot of meaning to most users.
The majority simply doesn’t care, because in their minds, they don’t need to. It’s “not their fight”. Whether they should care is obviously another story.
We’re in a minority. Mods, third party app users, people who have a history with reddit. How many casual reddit users fall into one of those groups? How many into two? How many into all three? Not a lot.
This is, and always has been, a protest by a minority of reddit’s users. One you, me, and the thousands of people who left reddit for Lemmy/kbin/Fedi support, but not one that a lot of casual users felt any resonance with.
The situation is a lot more nuanced when it comes to reddit users as a whole. It’s not a simple “with us or against us” situation as some like to believe.
Yes. Mods form a very important minority.
I’ve seen statistics showing that most of the traffic returned. I wonder, how long will that last without good mods?
100%.
Reddit is mostly lurkers. I’m (well, was) one of them. People get thousands of upvotes, but not thousands of replies.
When mods lose the tooling that they need and spam maybe starts slipping through, I expect one of two things (or both) will happen:
A) They blame the mods. Doesn’t matter if it’s new mods or old ones. They’ll say the old ones are doing it on purpose because they “lost the protest” and the new ones “don’t know what they’re doing and only want the power”.
B) Traffic dips slowly. Very slowly. There might be a major drop in a couple of days, but it’ll rise up to similar levels once people are “fuck it” and use the official app. That’s what reddit’s counting on, and they’re not wrong. I’m guessing the amount of people who leave permanently is significantly lower than the amount of people who “just want to use reddit”.
I also expect reddit to fuck up again. Every few years, they do and alienate a bunch of users. I doubt it’ll be a major, site-killing fuck up, but there’s probably going to be “waves” in which a portion ditches the site. They’ll typically gain enough users to make up for it, but quality will probably get worse over time.
It’s funny because I’m guessing a bunch of people who right now are all “don’t know why you’re complaining” will be loudly protesting when reddit does some other shit and suddenly those people will be hearing “don’t know why you’re complaining”. Cycle continues.
I’m not sure. Normally, most users would come back as you describe. But if the lack of mods gets too serious, then most users will begin to get bored or annoyed. If other platforms scale up well, boredom translates into “I heard about…”
I miss the days when actual, breaking news would be on the front page almost immediately. It hasn’t been that way for years…
It’s funny, I don’t miss it at all.
Is not just age (like im in my late teens and still gone to kbin) but generally, some people have not really taken action about stuff that doesnt affect them i think you are right about that… For me, i did not use 3rd party apps, really just used mobile site (eww i know. On light mode too can u believe it?) but bc of finding out what was going on it would just be sad to stay there. Especially how they lied about Christian! A fellow Canadian! But some ppl didnt really read much about what happened or just werent concerned cause they did not use those apps, so maybe they found it easy to ignore…
Oh, yeah. Totally.
Again, when I said “children” and teenagers, I didn’t mean to offend or anything, so I hope I didn’t offend you.
I was trying to get at the idea that a lot of people who reddit considers their target market now aren’t really the people who helped build it into what it is over the last, man, for some it’s almost two decades. The site has changed a lot over the years. (There used to be a time when there weren’t even comments; it was just links and upvotes/downvotes. It was actually a controversial decision to allow comments, ironically.)
I’d actually hazard a guess that Lemmy/kbin/Fedi probably has a younger userbase as well, so yeah, it’s not really about age. I do wonder if the ratio is closer here than it is on reddit right now, but it might be more or less the same.
To be honest, I’ve also noticed that in a lot of online spaces, younger people (Jesus, I sound fucking old; I’m just a regular millennial) tend to be more passionate about protesting.
Another reason is that this might not have pulled user is is that people do not like mods on reddit. Especially over the last few years. It’s always been kind of a joke (“lol, mods live in mother’s basement” and that kind of shit), but with “power mods” and stuff like that, there’s a pervasive “fuck the mods” attitude which meant that “anything that hurts the mods is good, they need to know their place” or some other nonsense.
(IMO, power mods are, and have always been, bad for reddit. So I think it’s a legitimate complaint, but power mods =/= mods in general, who were the ones mostly participating here. I think the power mods were actually the most quiet on this.)
In two days, when the spam probably starts slipping through the cracks, they’re still going to blame the mods anyway.
But we’ll see. I don’t know. Reddit is chasing a different crowd now.
(By the way, light mode is my jam, so you and I have that in common. My Linux terminal theme would piss off at least 90% of Linux users who spend any time using commands.)