It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.

I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.

Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.

I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.

I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.

I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.

      • I first started browsing reddit in late 2011 and even by then it felt a little like I was arriving at a party that had already been going a while and people had their in-jokes and cliques (to a way lesser extent than today).

        In the best possible way, Lemmy/kbin feels a lot like we all arrived early and the host is still running around trying to make sure everything’s ready.

        • I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but Reddit can be pretty hostile almost everywhere other than small niche subs with consistent communities. Before posting a comment, I would always have to consider whether I was willing to fight about it with someone likely to snidely dismiss it through the most paper-thin lazy rhetoric. Sometimes the answer would be yes but too often it would be no.

        • For me it’s the same reason I’m more likely to contribute in smaller subreddits and that is noise.

          Kind of pointless in replying to something that has been active for 8 hours and has 2,000+ posts. And god help you if you sorted by rising and got in early then you get 100 of the same reply or irrelevant stuff latching onto your comment for visibility.

          Even if you wanted to discuss on larger subreddits the content of comments would be people falling and tripping overthemselves to make the same low effort shitty joke.

    • Lol true. As it is right now out comments aren’t just a piss in the ocean. I prefer smaller communities and am not sure how I got sucked up into reddit considering I can just get that content from imgur and if I can’t find it here… to think I left imgur for reddit because their app was garbage but it’s nothing compared to the reddit app. And at least blocking ads makes the imgur app usable lol… Anyway, I like this way better lol.

    • I feel the same way. I think it’s a little less intimidating as most postshave less comments so I feel like I’ll be lost in the crowd less. I also feel like if we want to make lemmy the reddit replacement we have to use it so other people thinking of switching will see that it is active.

    •  jay   ( @lunarshot@beehaw.org ) 
      link
      fedilink
      English
      351 year ago

      hey dude, I did this in Friday night and spent all weekend getting in deep with Lemmy. If you are coming over from Apollo, try the beta iOS app, Mlem.

      I really like the communities I found in beehaw but have been steadily exploring.

        • I also feel something similar with their long posts about the ‘philosophy’ of this site that I honestly don’t get. But at the same time, they banned lemmygrad and I haven’t really noticed if they are promoting any view or gatekeeping the site for those who don’t share the same views.

          Also, this place is bound to attract a certain type of political alignment since we are all here trying to escape the capitalist greed that’s consuming other sites.

          It is still too soon, but so far I’m satisfied.

          I’ll be monitoring the new socialism community though, because as soon as I see pro-russian crap or similar, I’m getting the hell out of here.

          • As someone who registered under Beehaw (and thus, a potentially biased party), Beehaw isn’t exactly looking to be a 1-to-1 replacement for Reddit from my understanding. It’s more looking to create an actual community, similar to how online communities were once upon a time. I don’t foresee pro-Russia sentiment taking hold there (especially since they apparently defederated with Lemmygrad, which is where a lot of tankies live), but I understand the concern.

            For what it’s worth, the Socialism community is essentially a transplant of the subreddit /r/LeftWithoutEdge, which I would lurk from time to time while I was still on Reddit, and it was one of the few leftist subreddit where I didn’t feel shunned for being a veteran. A lot of other leftist subreddits would do stuff like pre-emptively ban anyone who posted in a military subreddit, so I think Beehaw’s Socialism community has a great foundation to work off of at the very least.

        • I quite like Beehaw and their Be(e) nice philosophy. Angry online arguments aren’t for me personally and it’s nice to be part of a space that promotes a more chilled out vibe. Plus it seems there are plenty of other instances that are OK with the usual online bickering we’ve all become accustomed to over the years so if I ever want to read another heated argument about what constitutes a grilled cheese I know where to go haha!

    • Yeah, my hope is the small learning curve to join the fediverse means we don’t end up with the bulk of the active posters on reddit.

      My fear is that Lemmy is about to see some attacks the fediverse isn’t ready to defend against.

    • Digg is technically still around even though it doesn’t resemble anything close to the “Digg” I used before the migration. I suspect Reddit will go in the same direction. They will keep pushing ways to monetize it, pushing out a lot of people who just want to chat and argue with strangers on the internet until it basically just becomes a website with a bunch of sponsored links and articles and no real user engagement.

          • Algorithmically directed social medias such as Facebook are repulsive to me, so when I started using Reddit, I chose that place precisely because you could control what’s in your feed. It felt refreshingly different. Now Reddit is trying to become the next Facebook, so it’s pretty clear that it’s no longer the place for me.

            The same thing seems to apply to the history of YouTube as well. Nowadays that site is trying to become just like TV, so perhaps sooner rather than later that site won’t be for me anymore.

            • This is why Apollo was the only thing keeping me on the site. I took advantage of its filters. I had an extensive list of keyword filters, and over the years had filtered probably several thousand subreddits. I could actually browse r/all and find interesting and unique new to me subreddits. It was great.

              • I solved that problem by using multireddits, and never visiting r/all. I had one for uplifting stuff, another one for science stuff and so on. In Narwhal and Slide, and they both made it possible to put multireddits in the center stage. Then I tried the default reddit app, and multireddits were hidden behind so many taps, that they must be about remove that feature soon.

            • Delete your history and be very selective in what you watch, and YouTube is pretty decent… At least for a few months. After that, either you stuck to your preferences and end up looping over the same content, or you branched out and now it keeps trying to feed you rants full of dog whistles

              I use Firefox and containers along with unlock origin - by using the containers strictly for several narrow interests, YouTube acts like ad free tv for me - perfect background noise

              • I’ve also noticed that compartmentalizing my youtube experience has improved it significantly. For instance, science and technology will stay in one container, while scifi, anime, games, movies etc. goes into another container. It used to be possible to do this in Youtube by making dedicated lists of subscriptions. I used to have a list for all the computer stuff so that when I want to see computers, I would go there. When I felt like watching tea related contend, I would go to the tea list instead and I would se no computers at all. It was great… until YouTube decided to get rid of this feature.

                Nowadays it’s just one big bess where the algorithm decides what you should watch today.

        • Yea, similar to Tumblr, they fell hard and now people use it dramatically less than before their NSFW decision to the point that now that they’ve allowed that content again no one really cares. Tumblr will always be seen as “the website that died after banning NSFW content.”

          It’s quite possible Reddit will be seen as “the website that died because they backstabbed third party developers.”

    •  nhgeek   ( @nhgeek@beehaw.org ) 
      link
      fedilink
      English
      121 year ago

      I’m hopeful Lemmy turns into something near what I used to love about Reddit. It needs critical mass for that to happen. FWIW, I kept my Reddit account but I deleted all of my posts and comments.

    • 👍🏻 found out two days ago and it’s only getting livelier here.

      The concept of a decentralized link aggregator fits much more than the centralized Reddit system which brought everything to a fall

      • If you want, you can also use a script like Power Delete Suite to overwrite all your old comments and posts with whatever copypasta you want, or to mass-delete (it does miss a few posts/comments though! be sure to double check), and/or you can use Redact to overwrite them with nonsense and then delete.

        It used to be recommended to edit all comments at least 24 hours before deleting the account so that reddit would only have the edited, useless versions of the comments stored, but I don’t know if that works anymore, they might keep the pre-edited versions anyway now. I’m not sure.

        Anyway, regardless, be aware that when you delete a reddit account they keep all your posts and comments, without the option to delete them after you account is deleted. If you want those deleted, you have to delete them first, then delete the account after. Also, if you want to use one of these deletion scripts, use it by June 30th, before the API change breaks them.

  • Most people will go back to reddit in two day. I just hope the whole ordeal seeds Lemmy with enough of a community to grow so one day, it will have feature parity with reddit and an actual community. This probably won’t be a Digg like migration, but maybe it’s the beginning of a myspace to Facebook like migration.

    Digg seems like it went down overnight lol.

  • I just hope that most of the people who migrated here to Lemmy will stay and not just go back to Reddit like nothing ever happened.

    The huge activity in even small communities is what always kept me on Reddit, and I really look forward to see if Lemmy continues to grow to become what we all hoped Reddit would be for us.

    I’ll be abondoning Reddit completely and deleting everything as soon as RiF stops working.

  • I’m expecting the CEO to push back the date of the API implementation by a month or two (still a bit doubtful) but I don’t see him changing his original stance given his narcissistic attitude.

    • I’m expecting the API change to happen exactly as planned. As a result all 3rd party apps will die by the end of this month, and the user count will take a severe hit. Many essential mod tools will stop working, so those who actually found the default app tolerable, will get to see all subs go downhill since they aren’t really being moderated anymore. As a result, the user count will continue to decline in the following months as people come to terms with Reddit sucking harder than before. Oh, but then it gets even worse when the spam bots and official ads start taking over every sub. Most likely the next year is going to be very rough in terms of user count.

      • Unlike other social media sites, where people stick around because of family and friends, at reddit-like sites, people stick around for the content and discussion. Once the content gets taken over by spam-bots, it’s over.

        • There’s some apps I hate like Instagram and WhatsApp, but stick around because it’s the only way I can contact some friends and family. The network effect is strong and I can’t really leave.

          With Reddit, I don’t care. If there’s enough content somewhere else, even if it’s a fraction of the volume (there was no way I could get through everything on Reddit anyway) then it’s an easy switch.

            • A good chunk of my close family all use iPhones and iMessage to communicate with each other - but they won’t add me to any group conversations because “green bubbles bad”… I spun up a Matrix server, created an account for everyone, pre-joined them to a room with all of us in it and sent everyone their credentials along with a link to Element for iOS so that all they had to do was download an app and copy/paste into two fields.

              This worked great for about two or three months until most of them went back to their group chats over iMessage and I was back to being excluded. Only one of them still uses Element to communicate with me, but I suppose that’s still somewhat a victory since previously we were using Facebook Messenger (bleh) to chat.

              I guess there are some sayings that still ring true, such as “Old habits die hard” or “Humans are creatures of habit”… 😮‍💨

              It sucks, because it’s incredibly difficult for me to not take that personally as “They don’t seem to care about me to try to meet me half way to keep in touch”. I don’t know what more I could do aside from purchasing an iPhone, which is just not going to happen.

              •  Spzi   ( @Spzi@lemmy.click ) 
                link
                fedilink
                English
                21 year ago

                I spun up a Matrix server, created an account for everyone, pre-joined them to a room with all of us in it and sent everyone their credentials along with a link to Element for iOS so that all they had to do was download an app and copy/paste into two fields.

                That’s an exemplary effort, well done! Sad it did not turn out as desired in the long run.

              •  naeap   ( @naeap@sopuli.xyz ) 
                link
                fedilink
                English
                2
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                maybe I’m just very stubborn, but I already let the complete family of my girlfriend switch to Signal, because else I wouldn’t communicate with them.

                I think, I’m just projecting some work frustration into my private life and don’t want to eat shit anymore. so, if I’m not worth enough for them to choose a medium, I’m fine with, I accept, that they don’t want to talk with me. I do have no problem with less communication - it’s their problem, when I don’t show up to happenings.

                But I understand you, I also take it somehow personally, when people tell me “what do you have to hide?”
                As I was part of the founders of a pirate party in my country, I’m maybe more loaded with arguments, but I’m just fed up with this shit and I just don’t take it anymore.

                in situations of being left alone, some lovely Punk music always helps me - and my girlfriend is on my side, so that’s a major influence as well of course

                but hey, if everyone just looks for convenience, I can do too

                • Oh, hey Punk is my favorite type of music as well! I get it though - honestly I feel like I’d be a little more at ease if I could just explain it logically. If there was a feature that iMessage had that no other platform had then as much as I’d still have some disdain for Apple and the situation they’ve created, then I could still explain it. But no, I specifically chose Matrix/Element because it could do what iMessage does (well aside from the weird “apps/games” thing they’ve got, which to my knowledge no one, let alone any of them, use…) and no one pointed out any issues with it. I wouldn’t even mind if they had another preference like Discord or What’sApp - just something cross platform…

                  I just hate it so much. One of my siblings just got married and I was the last to find out because of this. Another one just graduated from high school last month. I also have had so many issues with my health over the last few years and have had a terribly high amount of time spent in the hospital, and during those times it’d certainly be nice to talk to them and let them know I’m okay directly, rather than by proxy of one person.

                  Its so strange just how far we’ve come with tech, and yet still run into such simple roadblocks that should be easily avoided… but no.

            • Just came from reddit after 12 years. Deleted all my comments and then my account.

              Hoping Lemmy can continue to grow and doesn’t grow stale and stagnate. I’m really digging the whole Fediverse thing. Deleted my Twitter after Elon bought it and joined a Mastodon instance as well.

              If we can realize this trend of decentralized social networks it would be huge.

                •  zeldis   ( @zeldis@sh.itjust.works ) 
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  3
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  Honestly, this does seem like the better way to go. Back in the myspace days, we probably should have gone down this route instead of jumping ship to facebook. It would have been really cool to see how things would have turned out if it had been federated between universities from the get-go

              •  Spzi   ( @Spzi@lemmy.click ) 
                link
                fedilink
                English
                11 year ago

                Hoping Lemmy can continue to grow and doesn’t grow stale and stagnate. I’m really digging the whole Fediverse thing.

                Still learning, but as far as I understand, that’s one part of the beauty of it. If Lemmy goes bad for whatever reasons, switching to another part of the fediverse is a much smoother transition than to/from reddit or any other monolithic service. It might be possible to keep your account, or to keep some content.

          • I didn’t reddit will go away for a while. It’s almost too big to fail. The large reddit run subs are still live and active. Users who don’t sub to any subs that went dark may not even know anything happened. I have to imagine reddit knew they would lose users of 3rd party apps so it likely isn’t a large portion of where they make money. I think there will probably be a decline in content for a short time, then we will see new subs emerge with people who don’t care about the API lock down, ads, Chinese investors, bots, and reposts.

            • You’re probably right. Consumers barely care about anything outside of their own media consumption and comfort. After nixing password sharing, a blatant anti-consumer move, Netflix experienced the most signups they’ve seen since keeping track of that data. For a service that’s also jacked up their price and lost a massive portion of their catalogue over the past decade.

              Most people just don’t care lol. It’s pathetic and irresponsible, but it’s the truth. Reddit will probably be fine, sadly.

            •  Spzi   ( @Spzi@lemmy.click ) 
              link
              fedilink
              English
              11 year ago

              then we will see new subs emerge with people who don’t care about the API lock down, ads, Chinese investors, bots, and reposts.

              Let’s regard reddit as a honeypot to keep this crowd away from lemmy :]

        • It’s already happening in the subs that are moderated by the admins, like r/programming. The comment sections are filled with replies generated by ChatGPT. It’s so blatant.

        • Agree, there is very low friction to switching off reddit onto another site offering a similar service with a better experience. Lemmy seems to be offering exactly that, and if we continue to see growth in posts and engagement, it will be very successful.

          • I don’t think we’re at a better experience yet. Reddit experience declining while Lemmy improves might get there, though. Right now, most of the activity on Lemmy is from those of us who are pissed at Reddit.

            As others have been saying, though: Reddit is less “sticky” because you don’t really build connections or followers like on other platforms.

      • I can’t believe that they didn’t do at least some research on how many people use 3rd party apps and account for those losses. The question is really how many will leave vs how many will just switch to the official app. I suspect most will just switch. It’s sad really. Hopefully Infinity for Reddit (and other 3rd party apps) will support Lemmy. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

        • I think they did do research and third party app users make up a small enough portion of their user base that losing them is okay to Reddit.

          Keep in mind how popular Reddit is – for the most part the people left will be content with the karma bots reposting memes for the thirtieth time and there’s always going to be somebody racing to be the first to post some news to a related subreddit.

          I doubt it’ll affect their bottom line too much and in a week it’ll be back to business as usual for most subreddits.

    •  idle   ( @idle@158436977.xyz ) 
      link
      fedilink
      English
      31 year ago

      I think so too. Spez will delay the change to get everyone to calm down, then implement later, or possibly roll it out in smaller chunks to control the outrage.

  • Yeah, the past two days on reddit have been quite barren from my perspective.

    Just switch to lemmy(this is my first comment!) And I’m still figuring it out.

    I used RiF for years, so there’s gonna be a bit of adjustment. But I can say without any doubt it already better than the official reddit app, functionality wise. Would like some more customization options. Hopefully in the near future!

  • So far I haven’t felt any overt political views other than be respectful of other people.

    I used to be pretty extreme on the free speech side (a la Ellen Pao saga), but I think the biggest lesson I learned is that unfettered trolls just drive out solid content and create very toxic communities.

    • Free speech absolutists have nothing to do with free speech.

      These just want to say what they want without having to bear the consequences.

      The right to say what you want is a good thing. But in the end it doesn’t mean that the other side should be accepting of the speech you deem free.

      If one is spouting vitrol/hate/intolerance towards a group of people under the banner “free speech” then don’t look up weird when the affected are not accepting of that speech you deem free.

      For me the whole idea free speech is to express yourself how you want to (within what is reasonable, use your common sense) without the police and/or government knocking at your door.

      At that point my boundary is at spewing or pushing for intolerance. I refuse to be be tolerant towards intolerance.

      • This is exactly it. They don’t want freedom of speech, they want freedom from the consequences of their speech. They don’t like that the people affected by their speech have a voice too, and that the hateful rhetoric they spew into the world is finally being pushed back on. To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.

          • Exactly, which is why it’s so funny seeing people rant about their right to freedom of speech being infringed upon by private companies that don’t want advertisers to abandon them because of hate speech on their platform. They assume it’s because of some agenda being pushed, when the only concern they have is the effect on their bottom line.

      • The most aggressive free speech advocates I know are also some of the most horrible human beings I’ve ever met. They believe horrible shit. They want free speech because they know what they say is horrible, and want to be able to continue to say it with no real consequences other than being socially ostracized.

  •  Rentlar   ( @Rentlar@beehaw.org ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    341 year ago

    I think Reddit will just accelerate its descent into low-quality spam and repost bot hell. Half of it will be Facebook Memes posted to Twitter posted to Reddit. Or Tiktok videos posted to Instagram posted to Reddit.

    Not everyone will leave and many subreddits will return but unless there’s a MAJOR walkback, concession and promise then Reddit will remain as a husk of its past. Every move Reddit has announced since April just sounds like they are trying to wring out every penny from users that care to use their platform.

    I’m weaning off of Reddit mostly, the blackout helps with the transition.

    • You know thinking about it, so much of its content had already become this. Basically half of all posts I’d seen had replies like “this is a karma farming bot, ignore it.” And the other half were just reposts from TikTok.

  • I love how many of the subreddits are going dark for this protest. The community IS reddit. It is NOT the assholes who took VC-backed money to fleece crypto bros out of money. It’s idiotic. I hope everyone understands that you can find quality discussions in the fediverse and leaves reddit accordingly. They’re not the gatekeeper of good conversation online.

    • Crowds of people can be incredibly clueless. Before the blackout, there would be stickied posts explaining the whole situation in plain language, and then dozens of comments like “What’s going on I don’t understand???”

      • I think part of that’s also that stickied posts don’t stick to the top when you sort by new, iirc? And if you only check reddit once a week, or less, I could see missing all of it. Perfectly normal one day, leave, then you come back a week later and it’s a desert. Must feel weird and startling without context.

        And some apps give you a setting to not show stickied posts altogether (which is just dooming yourself to problems like this, but people apparently get annoyed enough by them that they don’t care, I guess?)

  • Even a change in atmosphere with communities from this would be substantial, though - even if there isn’t a day and night change with active users, if enough of the power users have left and discussions don’t really meet the “vibe check”, that’ll just naturally kill off user activity and it’s pretty much the same result