Interested in getting a feel for what people may be likely to do IF reddit reverses their decision regarding API access, or reduces access fees to a reasonable level and 3rd party apps remain sustainable.
While I know the chances of this are extreeeemely slim, until 1st July there is an ever so slight chance this could still happen.
From my perspective, the community harm is done, and those who have left prior to July 1 have left due to principles, not because their app stopped working. As such, I’d be inclined to think most of those migrators would stay here in the fediverse.
But would we see a mass exodus back to reddit if the changes were undone? It’s easy to say no, but if it went back to operations as relatively normal, it may be easy to justify going back for some users.
I’d like to think I wouldn’t go back. I’ve deleted content and account from reddit. I’ll be happy here so long as there is enough userbase for some discussion.
Its not like this was the first shitty thing that Reddit have done. Its a platform that has been getting progressively worse for years. I will definitely stay here.
Same here.
I’ve had it with Reddit.
They go all hamfisted in this situation, but when they should do something, they don’t.
Besides that, I’ve been annoyed with the centralization of everything for decades. I grew up in a time BBS and newsgroups ruled the day, before the Internet.
Switching to the Internet then and finding that HALELUJAH, I can access whatever I want without having to rely on the BBS I pay for to pull in the content (same with usenet).
And then in the past 2 decades, motherfuckers started centralizing everything into one place again anyway.
And all this while I’ve been in IT for just as long and saw the possibility for federated systems being here, with the thing holding it back being the interest into interconnecting selfhosted systems was FAR FAR outweighed by everyone wanting to rule the internet.
So I’m glad we’re now at a point most people are seeing what a mistake it was, the Facebooks, the Twitters, the Reddits.
Now lets move to federated systems where you can have some actual control on the content you consume and won’t be forced to have a load of stuff shoved down your throat for every nibble of content you actually want to consume.
I try and take a pragmatic stance.
My desire to find an alternative to Reddit stems in part from a practical aspect. I TRIED using the official app, but it’s as bad as Facebook these days and bombards me with ads. The user experience is terrible.
So if the API changes were reversed, that means I’d probably still use Sync to check some super-specialized subs or to look up answers from time to time.
But on the other hand, the damage’s been done. I will not use Reddit where there’s a viable alternative, and Kbin is not only a viable alternative but actually better for conversation and general discussions. It’s a project I’m excited about instead of just using it by pinching my nose.
So I think a large part of the damage is already done. If Spez 100% reversed his decision, it’d still be too late. It’s like a boyfriend/girlfriend being supremely shitty to you, then realizing their mistakes and apologizing sincerely… Although you might accept their apology, something about the relationship is already broken.
So I think whatever happens, Reddit has reached the Facebook stage for me. I’m still using Facebook for a few things like staying in touch with some friends or joining events, but the days where I’d go there to find interesting content are long gone.
11 year redditor here and this sums up almost exactly how I feel. There are 2-3 small niche communities that I may go back to if reddit reverses their API changes or at the very least commit to a reasonable rollout period like Christian Selig had proposed. But for my main content aggregation? I’m now fully onboard with this federated model, whether it be kbin, lemmy, or some mix of the two/some other great open source solution.
Plus honestly it’s hard to imagine a sincere apology from Spez at this point. The time for that was near the start of this. Maybe when the blackout started.
At this point, it’d be hard to believe any apology to be sincere as opposed to something scripted.
Honestly, the damage is done. I don’t think I’ll ever feel good about going back to Reddit
I wanted to migrate in some past controversies, but there never felt like a feasible alternative. And what alternatives existed were usually overrun by the absolute worst kinds of people. The fact that there’s a half decent alternative this time makes this time different.
That said, I probably will still check reddit for cases where there simply isn’t a Fediverse equivalent (hopefully largely just yet). But I’ll minimize my usage and try to avoid giving them advertising money.
For me, it’s not just that they screwed up the API changes, it’s that they’ve repeatedly kept doubling down since then.
It’s also … I keep thinking back to Ellen Pao. They brought her in knowing that they wanted her to get rid of FPH and Victoria, knowing that at least the FPH thing was going to make her a target of the misogynistic GamerGate haters and bringing in a woman anyway, and they deliberately and repeatedly refused to give her any public support. It was completely reprehensible, and they cheerfully scapegoated her and kicked her to the curb when it was done.
As bad as that was, I also see elements of the same thing happening here, where this is a highly unpopular change, and there’s no one else from reddit speaking up to support spez. I think they’re going to have him force through the changes and then kick him to the curb like they did Ellen. They’re not going to reverse any of the changes - it’s what they want, after all, but they’re going to let spez take all the heat and go on their merry way completely unphased.
To be completely honest, I think spez deserves this: his job as CEO is to have vision, manage public relations, and handle crises, and he’s miserably failed at all of those. He misunderstood reddit’s most valuable assets (it’s commentary and the large group of people contributing and moderating the site for free), and he literally paid the API fees for some very profitable and potentially profitable companies to suck every piece of data from reddit; then he publicly targeted small publishers who enhance reddit instead of presenting them as collateral damage of the AI wars (I suspect to avoid bringing attention to his incredible lack of vision in letting everyone freely harvest data for their own lucrative products). And he’s clearly failing in the PR and managing crises front as well. But I truly believe that everyone at reddit is perfectly happy to let spez do this thing that they want done, and then they’ll throw him away when it’s done in an attempt to appease the users.
Anyway, your question is “what will I do if reddit undoes the API changes”. Given my beliefs, I simply don’t see how I could possibly trust reddit management ever again. And trust is a really big thing with me; I don’t think I could ever go back.
Unless you’re reddit management, here to gauge user temperament, in which case I will totally return if the API changes are undone, yes, of course I will, just trust me!
Yeah, not a healthy working team there exactly.
Well said. The Pao kerfuffle is why I left reddit.
That situation was 100% out of the Glass Cliff playbook, just cowardly.
Nothing will change my decision now. The trust is permanently broken and the damage is irreversible.
They’ve shown that they won’t hesitate to kick out mods at a whim even when it goes against the community’s wishes. Even if the API changes are walked back, Spez resigns and the company apologises, that’s no longer enough to undo what they’ve destroyed. Reddit is done.
I was originally going to simply delete my Reddit account on the 30th. After seeing the farce unravel, I’m also going to nuke all content I’ve created on that platform at the same time. Scorched earth seems to be the only answer now and it’s the least I can do after the continued disrespect they’ve shown to their users, mods and especially the third party app devs. They’re nothing without the communities and the content that they’ve produced.
in case anyone wants to know how to do this
Yall, remember to mass edit your post history at least a couple of times before deleting your account. It will take a while (it took various hours to nuke 8k+ comments from my history) and time is getting shorter as we probably won’t have access to automated tools once July comes.
Remember that Reddit complies with GDPR by anonimising your comments, not deleting them. If you want to nuke your post history, you have to do it now that you have the chance.
PowerDeleteSuite, Redact.dev, shreddit should all do edit+delete.
I personally used this fork, is slower but gets 100% of your comments and you can deselect the delete check to do more rounds of editing to reduce the risk of rollbacks (I’ve been doing a round every few days for a while):
I do not recommend Redact. Reddit cuts it off after rewriting fewer than 20 comments. If I have to manually edit thousands of comments, I will; but I’d rather automate it.
Shreddit doesn’t seem to do mass edits, just deletions. Edits are safer than deletions (which Reddit seems to be restoring) and send a stronger message.
I’m looking into Power Delete Suite now.
EDIT: Ok, so Power Delete Suite gets blocked by Reddit’s rate-limiting. Thankfully, it’s Open Source, so I copied the code into ViolentMonkey and wrapped the pd.children.edit internals in a setTimeout() with a 2000ms delay, and that has been running successfully for hours (I also added a handler to alert me if I got any rate-limit messages in the response text, just-in-case).
let me know about your research. i’m looking to do this in the next couple of days. i found that comment on reddit. i’ve worked with the reddit api before and presumably i could make my own script to do it… but there are probably complications i’m not aware of that these tools have had to deal with
be careful, they are restoring deleted posts and comments. rewrite your comments to nonsense or a protest message with redact or power suite delete
I don’t want to go back. I miss my subreddit - hell let’s be honest, I miss /Reddit/ - but… Seeing how spez has acted and treated… /everyone/…
Like… We used the site, we provided the content, and the conversations, and the knowledge, the info, the jokes, the memes… That was all us. And it’s like… I dunno he wants to eat his cake and have it to. He wants us there both for the content we provide as well as to monetize us and in a way I get it but it’s like… … When reddit was just the background… “the background” you didn’t really think about it so much, you know? But it’s like when Elon took over Twitter suddenly it’s not just “Twitter” in the background it’s now “Elon musks Twitter” and it’s front and center and sleezy and scuzzy and you just want to not be a part of it anymore.
That feels like reddit now. Like how spez has been acting just makes it all feel dirty and horrible.
And I /miss/ reddit, I miss my subreddits. I miss googling any random idea and aphending reddit to the end of it and not even thinking about if it would show up on there because you just knew it would. Like it wasn’t even a question… And I /miss/ that. So much. … But it’s like… /tainted/ now. I hate seeing reddit results from Google searches now.
And learning about how federation works reminds me of reading shadow run back in the day and how the matrix worked there with little nodes of info all talking to each other. In a way, then, the fediverse, to /me/, feels like the future…
So I’m willing to stay here and wait for it to grow and comment a little more than I ever did on reddit. Because I don’t want to go back. And I don’t think we should.
Bring your subs here. I’m sure you’ll find new subscribers in lemmy/kbin. We’re still growing so it might not be immediate, but I’m confident that as the fediverse matures and it gets simpler for people more will come. :)
I’m staying. The community has been nothing short of amazing. I don’t get stressed when commenting or discussing things with people unlike reddit where a lot of interactions (not all, of course) are directly or indirectly motivated by karma.
Hell,I’d never have commented this if I were on reddit for fear of someone coming along and debating what I’ve said. Lol.
That’s something I noticed on Reddit too. Half of everyone’s existence there seems to be just for going fishing for possible arguments to get into.
Yeah. Most of my comments ended with arguing with someone so I started commenting less and less. Ended up a lurker. It’s very different here.
I’ll fight you if it makes you feel nostalgic.
Agree. I’m not even sure if they’re sincere half the time. Sometimes it honestly seems like they’re just trying to start a fight and don’t believe what they’re actually “saying”. On Kbin and Lemmy, it’s a different experience. People engage positively or neutrally, and actually have civil discussions. It’s unusual to say the least, but still very welcome.
- bdonvr ( @bdonvr@thelemmy.club ) 23•1 year ago
Lmao even if it weren’t just no out of principle, after spez’s comments about how Twitter under Elon is a model for Reddit to look to - why would I waste an ounce of energy on such a platform?
Laugh at the fools who believe they won‘t just make the same changes in increments instead. Oh a reasonable level? Let me introduce inflation to you. Now pay more and make us content we can sell serf. That‘s the entire purpose of your existence in the eyes of a corporation.
I think everyone reading this from kbin or lemmy left out of principle, so they should also stay away from reddit out of principle.
To be fair, there are some people who are here because they had their fill of John Oliver’s sexy pictures.
edit: To clarify, I left out of principle just like what @Doll_Tow_Jet-ski said. Doesn’t mean my statement is untrue or that it’s inherently a bad thing that it’s not all idealistic exredditors using lemmy/kbin. It only means the John Oliver stuff is actually working and drove some people out of Reddit.
IT’s to late, if u/spez changes his mind he still has the upper hand. he can turn it off at anytime and this shitshow will start all over again. I cut my loses on the 12th and haven’t looked back and i’m happy about that. i had a 350k account and hit the frontpage 5x in 6 years. yea it was hard letting go but somebody gotta do it
At this point, I’d be more likely to use facebook or geocities. Or start talking with strangers on a train. Sure, I miss some of my niche communities that didn’t make the jump to kbinlemmy - but not enough to go back on my principles.
If a Google search spins out Reddit as a source for a solution, fine. Not making my life harder than I need to. But hanging out, generating data and content? Nope. Done.
There’s nothing stopping them from doing it again, or doing something else just as anti-user. It’s pretty clear that we can never trust Reddit again.
Agreed. Reddit’s owners have made clear both their disrespect & their dislike for reddit’s community & culture. Their treatment of the user community and particularly the mods has been and continues to be despicable.
From my perspective, the community harm is done, and those who have left prior to July 1 have left due to principles, not because their app stopped working.
Exactly this. Spez showed his hand clear as day: he’s just another mildly sociopathic CEO that will gladly fuck anyone over to feed his bottom-line. That’s dangerous as hell and I don’t want my data in his hands.
Unless they fire their CEO and the whole board and make Reddit a non-profit organization I won’t go back. It is absolutely clear that they only care about money and I won’t help them with that if they react like dictators.
I’m completely done with Reddit. The damage is already done. I have been much happier here on Lemmy since the 12th, not planning to leaving anytime soon.
For me personally, I won’t delete my account right away but I will nonetheless try to come more and more to lemmy because the problem on Reddit isn’t just a u/spez one but rather a systematical problem. It can reappear again. They showed their true colors.
Early adapters who has contributed to Reddit would have already emigrated to fediverse the next frontier because they’re early adapters.
