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.
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.
Near a billion active users per month, Reddit isn’t going to die. Doesn’t matter to me what other people do, I’ve left.
While I can’t see it dying in anytime soon in how many visitors it receives, the general “vibe” and communities of the site will differ I imagine and that’s what matters to me. The end of Apollo was it for me. Like you said, others can do whatever but I’ve left.
Depends on how you define “Active Users”.
Reddit has shitload of spam, bots, and lurkers. Only a very small slice of users actually contribute anything in the form of posts and comments.
Once it loses it’s status as “front page of the internet” its the beginning of the end for Reddit (although it has already started, perhaps just the prologue or prequelmeme of the end?).
Still learning lemmy but I’m liking it so far.
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 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.
This is what I’m expecting. A year from now someone will mention “reddit” to me and I’ll be like “that’s still around?” and I’ll check it out and it’s just turned into TikTok challenges.
It’s ironic how I heard from a Facebook employee that the staff members of Facebook have their own internal Facebook network, and it functions a lot more closely like how Facebook was originally supposed to be designed—versus the public model’s cesspool of marketing, ads, privacy violations, and manipulation that is the only one we now all know.
Wow that’s really interesting but not surprising.
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Yes I did the same. I used redact on my 14 year old account and edited all my comments and posts saying “removed due to Reddit’s new api policy”
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If I want to nuke my reddit account. I’ll just do a GDPR request for my data to be deleted.
This I can believe. The only reason I still have facebook is for the precious few friends whom I use messenger with, as well as the group that the rescue I adopted my dog from uses. Every time I scroll through my timeline it’s 90% random garbage, advertisements, and “suggested” bullshit.
You can actually use messenger without a Facebook account which is what I do for the rare occasions I need that
That brought back memories of AOL Instant Messenger for me :)
I bullied my friends into using Telegram. Although, I do use Instagram, so some of them message me there instead.
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!
TIL Voat shut down. Shocker.
I also set up a Voat account then and tried using it for a few days, but it did not take off anywhere near like what Lemmy has with this protest.
Yup. I checked Voat several times and checked out when I saw it was alt right bullshit.
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 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.
This is kind of what I see happening. They’re on their way to making reddit Facebook where it’s only 1. Memes, 2. Hot chick’s, 3. Angry people
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.
What’s that?
sorry, r/nba sub for nba fans. It’s private at the moment so the refugees of the sub are in r/nbacirclejerk
Agree. I don’t plan to leave Reddit but it’s good to look at the alternatives that are available out there.
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
Fluctuation of user numbers should at least impact the value of their stocks when they go public.
I’ve also learnt about several awesome subreddits. That made me double mad, knowing all the things I’m just missing.
I posted this on a Reddit thread this morning about the effectiveness of the blackouts and what happens next:
Some people have just shut down and will never look back. Some just don’t care and need their Reddit fix. A LOT of comments on these types of threads are Reddit bots/employees trying to run a propaganda campaign to stop the shutdown. Most of the users though (IMO), are probably like me and opened up a Lemmy, Mastodon and Kbin account and are using all of them. Lemmy and Mastodon will continue to grow (2x-3x in the past week) and users will continue to migrate over and spend more time there than here until Reddit feels some pain. Reddit will eventually make some grand gesture like replace the CEO or “compromise” on API pricing, but it will be too late and the glory days of Reddit will officially be over.
The issue is that the momentum to go to other platforms has started. Reddit had their chance to stop it and stay the dominant platform, but the CEO is inexperienced and didn’t know how to handle it. Until a few weeks ago Reddit had no real competition, but Spez fucked up big time and now the blood is in the water. The Fediverse is a great idea and takes social media out of the hands of corporations and puts it back in the hands of the users (does anyone remember IRC?). It didn’t really have a lot of momentum until now, but its got a LOT of press because of Reddit’s fuck up and now it’s going to be a slow juggernaut sweeping not only Reddit’s market, but Twitter (Elon is just as big a fuckup as Spez), and Facebook.
I would bet $20 that this time next year Reddit will be 50% or less of their market, and several other alternatives will be growing faster than we’ve ever seen platforms grow. Alternative platforms already have the formula for a successful project. Reddit did all the experimentation, now the alts just need to copy the look/feel and features to knock Reddit down to the Digg dungeon.
Billionaires seek to control the media and the narrative, but Fediverse is harder to simply buy and control. Profit seeking corporations will always put profit first, and we’ve seen time and time again that it’s the “product people” that make a company great, and the “business people” who kill it. The capitalists will continue to kill long term growth for short term profits, but Fediverse can’t be killed that way. We’ve just seen the beginning of the new internet revolution.
Something this “blackout” caused me to notice as an individual is just how much of my time and attention I was giving away for free for a faceless corporation to monetize. I quit Reddit entirely and, while still visiting Lemmy/a few forums, I’ve noticed my “Doomscrolling” habit is rapidly dying.
I would bet $20 that this time next year Reddit will be 50% or less of their market, and several other alternatives will be growing faster than we’ve ever seen platforms grow.
I fervently hope this prediction comes true, and the internet becomes a little healthier in the process.
Insightful and hopeful.
Add a month to the blackout each time Spez refers to Reddit’s employees as “Snoos”
Can we build an interface for it? And call it a Snoos Button?
I know it’s the actual name of the little alien, and it’s a decidedly cute one, but I’ll never be able to read “Snoo” without thinking of those Amazonians from Futurama.
“Femputer sentences them to death… by SNU SNU!”
“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised.”
😦😀😦😀😦😀😦😀
I’m getting used it here and Kbin and that’s all it took for me to leave Digg back in the day.
That’s the thing that kills me. There was a time when Digg was the king. Also for a while Slashdot. We left before and we can leave again.
I am liking Lemmy so far.
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…? "
I remember back at Digg and MySpace. Same vibe.
“This will blow over.”
It always blows over until it doesn’t. Only take once.
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.
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 and regurgitating comments. Hoping the application process on this site helps to mitigate that.
You‘re saying you don’t like seeing the same meme get posted 8 times in the span of an hour every few days?
I bet NSFW fans won’t notice anything.
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”.
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.
I fart in your general direction, your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries! :P
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.
Slammed gate syndrome
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.
It’s just a small multi-time fee of 500 morbillion dollars, jeez, just pay the redditorino CEO a fair price, you 3rd party bullies.
I agree, the Verge’s coverage has been much better on this subject. It isn’t about not paying for use, it’s about a reasonable price that isn’t so exorbitant to essentially bankrupt them and make them go away. Christian has addressed this point several times already.
Regardless of whether or not anything serious happens to Reddit, it’s just not the same for me anymore and I won’t be going back. I can see the vibe and audience further shifting ala Twitter. It’s too big to just fail, Digg, MySpace and other older sites still exist, they’re just shadows of themselves now.
That wont happen I dont think. Louis Rossman explained it quite well. The API pricing is not meant to be fair market price. Its a fuck you price. Basically reddit wants to kill 3PA but doesnt want to outright state it does so it doesnt seem as such a bad guy. Case in point: people who think the blackout might make them rethink their pricing. Now I wont say it 100% wont because everything is possible and no one really knows what will happen in the future, but since the beginning it seems the move was not “lets get some cash for API calls” but “lets kill 3PA without looking like an ass”
Exactly. There is no winning here, but at a minimum, another corner of the internet grows that isn’t controlled by a singular entity. That should be real goal along with moving away from Reddit.
There’s also been a lot of misinformation and misunderstandings going on regarding the blackout, which doesn’t help.
I spent a few hours manually deleting all my posts in my subreddit this morning, and changing the name to Deleted. So no going back for me now ;-)
Apart from the attitude, it is just amazing that there was no option for me to just delete my (their) subreddit, even though I’m the creator/owner. I anyway do believe more in the decentralised federated model of social networking.
I had a small subreddit, I just set it to private, removed all the other mods and then removed myself as mod. fuck reddit
What happen next is we move on to this better platform
Absolutely, even without all the reddit drama a decentralised version clearly seems to be the smartest way to go. Reddit is it’s community and I think the ceo lost sight of that.
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.
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.
Just look at all the people who claim to hate Musk and everything he stands for, but continue using Twitter like nothing changed.
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.
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@wecalledhimmavis @TipRing Once they get rid of old reddit then I’m gone completely. Old reddit makes reddit bareable. I prefer mastodon and lemmy now. Only been on since the 12th and can say both are hands down better then Reddit
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.
My guess is, the downhill has already started. The remaining users just aren’t annoyed enough to migrate yet, but when the spam wave hits every sub, they are going to find Lemmy a lot more appealing.
I think a good portion will do both frankly. Half will go elsewhere or reduce usage. Half will stay like nothing happened.
A 25% loss in overall user traffic would be a low number I think to an extent. This would be enough for the valuation of Reddit to drop. If anything, it would hurt spezs pockets.
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.
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!
I agree, but the whole “instances” and federation stuff can be overwhelming for the average user. As long as enough power users and content creators make the move, then Lemmy has a good shot long-term.
I replaced all my comments with garbage and deleted my account
I understand why some people would want to do this, but there’s a lot of stuff there that I would hate to be gone forever.
There’s an old game - I always forget which game it is until it happens again - that I play once every few years, but which always gives me problems when installing or starting for the first time. And every time I looked for a solution, I always ended up in the same Reddit thread; one with a solution that always worked. After I landed there a few times, I even left a comment thanking them for it.
I don’t so much want Reddit gone forever, as I just want for there to be more competition and for users to be spread out. Or, maybe even better, for there to be a searchable archive of Reddit.
What about just saving that revisited post/comment to a personal stash, like in Google Drive or something? There is definitely more competition now, at any rate!
That’s a good idea! I also saw someone else mention they save some pages locally when they find explanations for something niche, in case it disappears, and I think I might start doing the same!
I’ve been noticing this with YouTube videos, too, even those that have no overt reason to be removed, and it’s been very disappointing. I’m now downloading my faves.
I thought the exact same, but when their internal mail leaked i was just “fuck this” and got rid of everything.
was that the bit about all of this blowing over or did i miss something?
You may have missed the bit about the Black Cat ransomware gang making off with 80GB of internal data?
yiiiiikes i definitely did miss that!
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
All you have to do is follow a link from this page, then drag a bookmark to your bookmarks bar, then go to your reddit user page and click the bookmark. You can even tell it what to replace your stuff with if you want to.
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
Maybe I’m pessimistic but nothing will come from these protests. Most subs did a half-assed useless two day blackout. The subs that have gone indefinitely dark are good, but it’s the users that make a difference. Reddit most likely won’t see a significant drop in users or traffic.
I don’t think Reddit will immediately reverse course, but I think the protest has been an absolute win simply by giving the alternative communities far more growth than they would have otherwise.
Reddit needs competition to feel threatened.
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.
Digg is still around too, after all.
Heck, so are Slashdot, Fark, and Usenet.
Reddit doesn’t need to “die” in order for something better to come along.
Digg’s still around, and still active… One of the posts today had a staggering 5 comments in just 7 hours! Must be the influx of displaced reddit users lol
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.
Tough to disagree, hopefully long term users decide to gtfo before it gets even worse.
12+ years here, deleted my account 2days ago. fuck @spez@reddit.com
Hell yeah! I’m too much of a hoarder to delete mine, but the only interactions I will ever have on that app will be telling people to try lemmy.
Just zeroed mine a few hours ago. I doubt it’ll make a difference in the grand scheme of things but it makes it harder to go back. Now that I don’t have a login I don’t see my own frontpage so that should be a good enough reminder.
Great article and summary but man, whatever happened to editorial review? There are three or four major grammatical errors in that short piece. It’s unfortunate because it’s extremely well written otherwise, and does a great job of reporting objectively which is very rare these days.
editorial review
you have to pay for that
but man, whatever happened to editorial review?
🖐️😲💨 Poof
