In the last 3 days I’ve been paying attention to r/all, expecting several posts about it and…

Yeah

Wasn’t expecting the website to literally shut down nor to monopolize r/all, because 3rd party users are the minority, but I hoped for more than whatever this was.

At least there’s a silver lining, I discovered new alternatives that have healthier communities

  • Reddit crashed, spez came out of hibernation, 5k subs are still down according to Reddark when initially there were only 2.5k that agreed to the blackout, we also hugged kbin and Lemmy to death 4 times to my count so its not too underwhelming although I get the sentiment though as these sort of things are a slow death particularly this one as moderators use old.reddit and third party apps the absence of moderators wont be felt immediately

  •  Slashzero   ( @slashzero@hakbox.social ) 
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    1 year ago

    But on the other hand, look at how much the lemmy and kbin user base has grown. The blackouts had a significant impact in increasing lemmy adoption and usage.

    Prior to the announced blackouts, I had no idea Lemmy even existed. Now here I am running my own instance.

    Also, advertisers Reddit sells to have halted their campaigns until “next week.”

    I think while on the surface it might feel underwhelming, it had more impact than you think. And now mods are discussing extending the blackout too.

  • I didn’t go and check things out. But I gotta say, before I was an only Reddit user. Now I don’t expect to totally forgo Reddit forever, but I now know there are alternatives and it is a nicer community so far here.

    At least here I’m not getting spammed with bots and “Satan Gets Us” ads.

  • I’m not sure what you were expecting to see? /r/all was never going to look obviously different, there’s just too many people on Reddit. 99.99% of Redditors could leave and the remaining 0.01% would still be enough to churn out a passable couple of pages of content on /r/all.

    Plus the people who care about the situation are exactly the people who aren’t currently participating on Reddit, so it’s hardly surprising that no-one is really taking about it there.

  • There are several points to be made:

    The Old Reddit, whatever it means, is long gone forever. Aaron is gone. Spez does not care. No apologies or retracting will be made and that’s it.

    Reddit must have calculated that there are enough ‘casual’ crowd (not a long timer, does not use or care about 3rd party apps or the old interface, comes for the quick laughs and watches ads) so they could withstand whatever pressure the ‘hard-core’ crowd (long timer, uses and cares about old UI and API changes, does not generate ad views in general, spends long hours in site) generates.

    Reddit must have also considered the possibility of the second crowd simply going away. I suspect Spez or the investors simply does not give a damn about it. Ad revenues are everything and there’s a loud minority that threatens to leave? Why should they care, after all? All they see is a potential for “more” growth.

    What they do and must care is the eventual entrance of a sizeable competition that eats into their revenues - less visitors mean less ad revenues. Lemmy and Fediverse, as much as I love it and will keep using it, is not that threat - yet.

    What will probably happen is that the wider internet will label the riot (as of now) a massive failure, laugh at the “bravery” of slacktivism or whatever the latest meme can be slapped at.

    Despite that, it should mark the emerging of a sustainable group of Reddit-like communities that could, in one day, become the competition Digg never thought they would face.

    No, I don’t think Lemmy is perfect. I do have an issue with the dev’s political stance. But as long as they don’t become the Spez of what was supposed to be the Federation, and the software and the protocol and the community can sustain and rule themselves, things might be alright.

    Reddit will eventually die, like many other internet websites. Perhaps not now. They won’t go out in a spectacular way the Digg v4 happened, but simply wither away like Facebook. But we have another home, and it’s all that matters.

    • The other truth a lot of us don’t want to face is that, in all likelihood, reddit wants the old heads to leave. We are not their demo anymore. Users with accounts in the 10-15 year range are in their thirties and forties generally. We’re not their target demo, and they think our complaining about the good ol’ days is probably keeping away some of their gullible you get demo that don’t care that their data is being mined, don’t realize when they’re talking to bots, and are used to being assaulted by ads because they don’t know any better.

  •  Xuerian   ( @Xuerian@beehaw.org ) 
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    191 year ago

    I think the reaction on the site itself also suffered from the AMA getting hard buried.

    Which was stupid. People should have upvoted the post in the AMA sub which was just a link to the AMA on the Reddit sub. It wasn’t even pinned. And even if you did find it, until they did a summary you couldn’t see his responses because also buried (understandably)

    That said, yes, I agree with you and the adjacent poster - the upside is alternative platforms got a huge boost, and even if a lot of the influx doesn’t stay, it’s still a huge boost.

  • Actually been dramatic for Lemmy. Users went from a little under 50K to a little over 125K total users. I do not know how that is not dramatic. It is not about Reddit really, it is about how many of these users will stay here.

  • I think that it depends a great deal on what subreddits you use. I mean, I normally use only a small number, and they are all presently private or restricted, so it has an impact.

    And if you specifically want information on something coming from Google and are trying to read old posts with information about, say, how to work around some bug, then that is disruptive.

    But if you just hit Reddit looking for something interesting to look at or read, which is a legit use and how many people are going to use the thing, then I think that the impact is probably limited.

  • Have you ever added the word Reddit to a web search so you could find an answer online without a lot of digging?

    Stuff like that I imagine got hit hard. There will always be core communities that either stay up or are easy replicate but I imagine they’ll be losing a lot of smaller communities.

  • I never expected the site to just shut down and be in flames from a 2 day partial shut down. I’m pretty happy with the communities that have popped up and discussion about alternative sites.

    There’s been a heap of discussion on alternatives and without the blackout I wouldn’t of even found great sites like kbin.

    I expect that come the 1st July when third party apps stop working, we’ll get another wave of annoyance and hopefully can use that to help people flee

    I know that come the 1st if nothing has changed I’ll be purging all my old comments and deleting my accounts.

  • Saying you are going on a hunger strike but then announcing you’ll only go on it for two days made it a long shot that other subs would push for longer.

    Any idea how only a 48 hour black out even got started instead of longer? Who proposed only 48 hours to make it catch on as that short of a protest.