• 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • During the last site-wide protest in 2015 I set up a VOAT account with all the similar subreddits that I had at the time. When people first started suggesting abandoning ship, I thought “Well, at least I still have Voat”. Checks Voat. Turned into a alt-rght haven and then shut down in 2020. Dho!

    •  altz3r0   ( @altz3r0@beehaw.org ) 
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      201 year ago

      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.

        • Death? Facebook is still lumbering with no problem, because there are groups on there that help people make money, which keep them there forever. I manage one such network and have no idea of how to get away from Facebook, because it’s basically like a non-anonymous equivalent to Craigslist jobs, which makes it so much safer and easier to find and post work on. Anything else would require more separate accounts that people probably just don’t care for, etc.

      • I would like to leave Reddit but I don’t know if my favorite communities will migrate or grow here (and I sure don’t have the time to maintain them all, or the know-how to keep generating the content that they do).

        • same. i’d like to spend most of my browsing time here on lemmy rather than reddit if possible, but i doubt i’ll fully leave anytime soon. unless my favourite communities (r/battlejackets, r/visiblemending, r/posthardcore, etc.) migrate, i’ll be going back from time to time for them and their like minded user base

    • Same boat as you, but now we have a new way to connect to other people on the internet. On top of that, lemmy has a bunch of new users now. Far more people can make content to make this engaging and exciting at the same time. I will miss f/nba though.

    •  jarfil   ( @jarfil@lemmy.ml ) 
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      1 year ago

      I just came from a Reddit r/tech thread where all the upvoted comments were people making fun of the title, without realizing the title was descriptive of the linked article.

      Make a website for idiots, and only idiots will stay on it.

    • I deleted RIF on Monday and went to Reddit today via mobile and it was such a pain in the ass as soon as I shut it off I instinctively hit the Jerboa icon (I intentionally put it where RIF was on my homescreen).

      Also the Jerboa app is getting better almost daily.

    • I read that the Sync app was being shut down at the end of the month, then the blackouts started and I just thought Fuck it and set Sync to 0 minutes screen time on my phone while I set up Lemmy. I’m liking it so far just needs more users

      • I installed Jerboa and put it where Sync used to be and so far the transition has been pretty easy.

        I really refuse to use Reddit on my phone using anything other than Sync so it’s an easy decision there. Will probably still browse Reddit on my desktop though since at least there I’ve got old.reddit with RES to make the site useable.

    • Today I logged in on my trash account to see what’s going on. On r/gaming there was a really interesting conversation about the protest. Seems to me that there is no shortage of people who merely see the protest as an inconvenience. Many of them don’t even see any issues with the default reddit app. It’s sad that there are so many people like that.

      Well, they seem to like the ad infested reddit, so let them stay there.

      • This could cause more of a Reddit userbase fork than an actual full exodus which could be a good thing for us.

        Having the ex-reddit users that were willing to stand up and leave/ flip off Reddit all in one place seems like a pretty cool community to be a part of.

        • Just noticed that r/tifu had a pretty good summary too: “ Without effective tools (which Reddit has frequently promised and then failed to deliver), moderators cannot combat spammers, bad actors, or the entities who enable either, and without the freedom to choose how and where they access Reddit, many contributors will simply leave. Rather than hosting creativity and in-depth discourse, the platform will soon feature only recycled content, bot-driven activity, and an ever-dwindling number of well-informed visitors. The very elements which differentiate Reddit – the foundations that draw its audience – will be eliminated, reducing the site to another dead cog in the Ennui Engine.”

          In other words, people who actually create quality content will be gone. I wonder if the remaining people don’t mind the bot spam and reposts. If they really don’t, then Reddit can just milk them for ad money forever, and I guess this is the plan. However, if people do mind, then ad revenue will begin to decline as more and more subs begin to be filled with trash.

    •  timkmz   ( @timkmz@lemmy.world ) 
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      111 year ago

      Yea the past few days I saw posts about the biggest influx is coming today at the start of the blackout, but I gotta say most people are fine with reddit if they get to use their 3PA. I think when some shut down there might be a bit more people comming opposed to the last few days

      • I think you’re spot on. I’m leaving because of the 3PA issue, I’ve been using RiF for ages and this whole ordeal made me aware of how much reddit had changed behind the filters I put up (RiF, RES, etc). I feel like I’m probably in the minority that are already jumping ship, I think there will be a lot more when 3PAs stop working and the effort required to learn a new app is about equivalent to picking up Lemmy casually.

        It took me like 20 min to get up and running, and while I’m still learning I already have an app for it and its generating a feed that honestly feels almost nostalgic. There will be another influx of people unless a more accessible alternative crops up in the next two weeks.

    • Yea I wanna see if any are going to be deleted if its possible. That would be a interesting metric. Because if they arent listening to the black out I think they might start to listen if dubs get permanently deleted and A LOT of their content dissapears

    •  Sev   ( @SevYote@pawb.social ) 
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      1 year ago

      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.

      •  🦘min0nim🦘   ( @min0nim@aussie.zone ) 
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        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.

      •  loops   ( @loops@beehaw.org ) 
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        181 year ago

        I’ve loked at my front page a few times, and man, it’s pathetic. Literally just a bunch of useless askreddit and AITA threads. It’s basically quora lol.

        • The repost bots are becoming a massive problem on the front page as well. Used to just be Gallowboob, now it’s hundreds of bots endlessly reposting TikToks or Twitter screenshots and regurgitating comments. Hoping the application process on this site helps to mitigate that.

        • I feel like that entirely depends on the subreddits you’re subscribed to. For me I have an /r/WTF post at 13, and then not another default sub until… an /r/AdviceAnimals post at 47.

          While I love Lemmy and will continue to contribute to it. My reddit experience feels very much the same as it always has. The key was to abandon most of the large subs a long time ago.

        • I spend about 2 days gathering communities that I want to sub for and make sure they are subbed. Then starting yesterday I just need to click the subscribe tab and switch to “New” and there is usually ~10 new posts every 2 hours. I don’t even visit the “All” or “local” tabs anymore. If I run into something I feel not enough, I will just search for the community instead of waiting for them to pop up in “All”.

    • It’s funny how these social companies get huge and think they are irreplaceable… when all of them started as a replacement for something else.

      Once you think you’re too big to fail? That’s when ya trip.

  •  pvr   ( @pvr@beehaw.org ) 
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    811 year ago

    Honestly, there won’t be a mass exodus and Reddit will live on. I’m sure a bunch of users will flock to other platforms but in the long run Reddit only care about people that are already using their new UI and their new app. And those users won’t be leaving.

    Regardless whether Reddit survives or not I am glad I found this space and excited for the future of Lemmy/Fediverse.

    • The 90-9-1 rule of internet communities applies though. If you’re unfamiliar:

      90% of people lurk, 9% interact, and 1% create content. Reddit has an additional 0.1% snuck in there of people who moderate.

      If you’re in that smaller echelon of users who interact or submit/create content, you’re more than likely a user who these api changes affect. So the 90% doesn’t really matter in the long run if you have no content, and the content that does come in is poorly moderated or not modded at all.

      This kills the reddit.

      •  pvr   ( @pvr@beehaw.org ) 
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        341 year ago

        Yeah, I definitely agree with that rule.

        I have several friends that work at Reddit and from what I gather they ran all the numbers and determined that most mods use old.reddit and not 3P apps. So Reddit did their calculations and they have determined they will make more money in the long run by steering people to their new app. They know Reddit drama always seems bigger than it is and will blow over in a month. They know they will lose some users but they think the majority will stay, including mods and content creators.

        I definitely understand why they made all these decisions from a business perspective but holy shit was this poorly handled by Spez. I think they could’ve given developers a longer shutdown period and they could’ve handled PR way better + the whole Christian (Apollo) debacle also didn’t help.

        • Yeah, I think reddit is going to die (if only due to the process of enshittification and the consequences of going public) but the idea of a mass exodus is a bit of a dream. Anyone who has had a conversation going on in one channel, and then have a mod tell them to move it to a more appropriate channel should know this. The conversation doesn’t move, it just stops 9/10 times.

          But we shouldn’t be preoccupied with reddit as a community. Give what you can to Lemmy and enjoy it for what it is, not wishing it to be reddit.

          • Why not? I honestly loved Reddit as a community. Sure it’s toxic like just about every online space but people actually weighed in with their own actual opinions. Also it was just about the fastest and easiest place to get other peoples experience and opinion on something you’re not sure about yourself.
            I can’t even list the times I googled “<new gadget> worth it reddit” and almost without fail I got a good discussion about pros and and cons, what to watch out for and alternatives. No place on the internet comes even close to that. Youtube, Insta and FB are pushing ads and sponsored content like mofos. Tumbler shot themselves in the foot with the no porn stuff (atleast it seemsto recover a bit). Twitter is just a cesspool of noise and I never joined it. The only places close to Reddit in actual useful and fast human conversation is Stackoverflow and the stackexchange communities.

      •  Icarus   ( @Icarus@beehaw.org ) 
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        1 year ago

        I’m almost always a lurker but I have abandoned Reddit on principal and come here. I’ve replaced the infinity app on my homescreen with Beehaw and It gives me my reddit fix. I’m more likely to comment here too, since It doesn’t feel pointless due to the size of most subreddits. I’ve been leery of Reddit for a long time with ownership changes, the crap websites and apps, and their lack of reaction to toxic and hate riddled subs. This place is a welcome change.

          • I realized today that maybe all I need is something to scroll and some comments to read.

            Sunday, this place felt dead. But each day the traffic seems to pick up and I miss Reddit less and less.

            In a few weeks, I won’t miss Reddit at all (at this pace)

            • Feeling and hoping the same. I never commented on Reddit, so it’s not like I’ll be missed, but I can replace it easily with how much more active Lemmy feels now. I’m getting plenty of new posts vs a few days ago when it felt very stagnant.

    • I don’t want to nitpick, but I used the default reddit app and have switched Lemmy based on principal. I don’t think most or even many people are like me, but there are a few of us out there that just don’t like supporting companies that clearly don’t have users interests in mind, and this has been the wakeup call needed to get us off the platform.

      • The official app is so terrible. I’ve tried it a couple of times. I think once people are forced to use that, we’ll see more folks move away from reddit. Looks like they are already killing browsing on a mobile browser to force you to use the app.

      • I hat an account on reddit since 2006 but only started using it 3 years ago and only ever used the new app and website and I think it was fine. At least I could send my comment by pressing Ctrl+Enter which I can’t here on lemmy. I still am switching (even installed my own one user instance) because I think the internet will be better when more people use the fediverse. But I also half agree that reddit will just keep going even though it will be worse, mostly because there is no clear contender for a successor like reddit itself was back then with digg.

    • His unethical behavior is why I’d want him out as an investor. His decisions are directly harming Reddit’s reputation and damaging the IPO when it happens. The point is to increase value, not damage it. He must really think that the revenue syphoned by third party apps is worth all this.

      • At this point, with the way he has behaved and things he said, I am convinced that this was just an effort to shut Reddit down. There have been a lot of dissenting voices on there, just like on Twitter, and they cannot control this content as easily. So they send in Musk and this other clown to run these companies to the ground and make everyone flee, then they can claim the only people that are left on these platforms are the extreme crazies. Then the general public will no longer take things said on these platforms seriously. We have been watching this systematic effort to silence free voices everywhere, this is just another example. I would not be surprised if they take this time to permanently shut down sub-reddits that doesn’t agree the main narrative we are being given.

        • If you listen to Behind the Bastards, they have a fantastic episode on I think Sam Zell buying and making small town newspapers terrible, right before the 2008 election. The hypothesis is that Elon Musk is doing the same thing, and I find it hard not to include prepperdipshit spez in that sort of ilk.

          Please check out behindthebastards@lemmy.blahaj.zone if you are a listener.

    • Can you elaborate a little more? If I were an investor in reddit, my primary concern would be whether the blackout was actually impacting revenue. If the revenue is flat, then the blackout is just noise and things will return to normal soon.

  • 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?

    • 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.

      •  Kushi   ( @Kushi@lemmy.world ) 
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        81 year ago

        I never realized how much some people rely on Reddit for social interaction. It’s truly fascinating. Also, their unwillingness to even consider using other platforms.

        • I’m sort of one of them? I mean I’m married, got my own place, now got a stable job etc, but I barely ever see my friends (all moved away), and my work friends from an old job I have just lost touch with.

          Trying to replace the online social life with Lemmy, maybe something like IRC? Who knows.

    •  oreo   ( @oreo@lemmy.world ) 
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      211 year ago

      If people have to download a new app to replace apollo, sync, RIF, etc then they should download Jerboa and sign up to Lemmy. If you’re gonna have to get used to a different app interface nows the time!

    • At the start of all this when Christian first posted I figured I would just use some sort of workaround like old.reddit in mobile browser; the official app and new reddit are non-starters for me, it’s just not how I browse.

      However, in the days since I have been increasingly dismayed by Spez and the rest of the leadership response, a lack of interest in even engaging on the subject and outright hostility towards a community that has been dedicated to reddit for years. I can’t see myself going back there, it’s been poisoned for me.

    • 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.

    • Reddit has many people who talk about a topic, and it’s searchable.

      Daily I google/duckduckgo: site:reddit.com [recommendation] and get a discussion of products or software or question, etc.

      Lemmy may have some of that, but obviously doesn’t have as much because it’s ramping. But to make matters worse, searching federated content is more difficult than searching a centralized site.

      On the other hand, Reddits internal search is absolute garbage. I think if lemmy works in making an amazing search within the federation, it’ll help bridge that gap and give lemmy something reddit doesn’t have.

  •  ugo   ( @ugo@feddit.it ) 
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    Rome wasn’t built in a day. But people forget that it also didn’t collapse in a day.

    Reddit higher ups have shown their hand. Will this end reddit? Not in the short term I think, but I believe whatever reddit will be in a year or two will be very different from what reddit was up until now

    • Excellent point. Even if the 2 day blackout doesnt hurt reddit in the short term, long term it could. It convinced many people, myself included, to start using other options. If (and frankly when) reddit makes more stupid choices the other options will have something of a community when more of the masses get outraged

  • 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.

  •  Crow   ( @Crow@lemmy.world ) 
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    611 year ago

    Unfortunately Reddit is almost too big at this point to fail. The fact that official communities exist over there is enough to keep them afloat. But Reddit as we all knew it is dead. I was always worried about Reddit going public effecting it’s quality, and the staff have only confirmed my fears. Luckily Reddit offers nothing anyone else can do, and jumping ship to a competitor had never been easier.

    Long live the Fediverse.

    •  bug   ( @bug@lemmy.one ) 
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      41 year ago

      I saw a comment making the good point that Reddit doesn’t have that thing which locks people into other social software - your friends using it, i.e. it doesn’t matter that some people will still use Reddit, you go for the content not the people. The Reddit management seem to think that they have something special, ignoring that there will likely be a measurable disappearance of content due to these changes. While this won’t “kill” Reddit, in ten years or so when someone’s writing a blog post called “what happened to Reddit?”, this event will probably be noted as one of those turning points that was the beginning of the end. Reddit will live on, but it won’t be the same beast that most of us actually liked using.

  • 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.

    •  Master   ( @Master@beehaw.org ) 
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      401 year ago

      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.

    •  Dandylion   ( @Dandylion@beehaw.org ) 
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      As someone in the advertising industry - I felt overwhelmed by ads and served content. I want a place where my content isn’t driven by a corporation trying to manipulate my spending habits, or monetize my existence… And I want a place where no one is trying to monetize my eyes and brain. That’s why I can’t support reddit. Yeah, I know, companies need money. But back in the olden days, people weren’t the product if that makes sense. Getting everyone on the same app/platform isn’t a mistake. Apps have all sorts of other purposes designed specifically to see what you’re up to, where you are, what else you do when you’re on your phone. Corporate apps watch you. Plain and simple. Getting people off of 3rd party apps and onto a reddit app, while increasing making their users the product, isn’t an accident or coincidence.

    • This is a great resource, thank you! Interesting to like that there was an impact over the past 2 days, but it looks like it’s going back up to normal today. I guess we need to wait until the end of the month to see what happens with apps shutting down and subs continuing/going back to blackouts. Hopefully this wasn’t just a one time, 2-day reduction in traffic.

    •  Troy   ( @troyunrau@lemmy.ca ) 
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      51 year ago

      It also tells you that, depsite all the subs that blacked out, total comments posted dropped by something trivial – like 10%.

      Admittedly, if Lemmy took that 10%, it would be a coup for federated services. But it looks like Lemmy took less than 1% of reddits total traffic during the blackout.

      •  Vorticity   ( @Vorticity@beehaw.org ) 
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        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.