It’s going to be hard to get people on board with the fediverse. It’s just not as user friendly. It’ll be a cool niche but it’ll never be a Reddit-size product. Which, maybe that’s totally fine. Maybe we get better conversations here due to that.
I think it has to do with the fact that users there get more engagement through arguing or agreeing with others than contributing to a discussion. It's like how one-liners, chains and jokes dominate the top comments in every post.
Apart from the fact that kbin is already visibly struggling with just a small fraction of redditors coming over, there's just no real alternatives for small niche subreddits, like for instance if you want to discuss a build for a tabletop RPG you're into.
You know what? I just realized I don't give a fuck about Reddit. No loyalty, no love, nothing, despite the fact that I've been there for 12 years.
And I'm trying to figure out why.
Maybe its size?
I mean, it's the same feeling I'd probably have if I were to say "I won't go to that mall again".
On the other hand, at the dawn of the Internet there was a forum I used to hang out in A LOT. I even met many people from the forum IRL, among which my wife.
When it started going down the hill and eventually shut down I was indeed kind of sad. Reddit? It can burn for all I care.
My account has 23k+ post karma and 152k comment karma and.... it literally amounts to nothing.
I'm kind of liking the smaller size of these subs, and the feeling that there's no Eye in the Sky watching over all we say.
I agree with the many who say we should avoid trying to turn this into "the new reddit".
The IPO is really the only thing that matters to reddit right now. Their entire decision making system is based around how to increase value and profitability as quickly as possible so that the IPO is successful (my guess is that this is in hopes of leaving investors holding the bag.)
Although they don't care to do anything about it, this current behavior is exactly what will make them unstable in the long-term. Having better organization, and a better business acumen, and being better to their community will net better profitability. But none of that matters as long as short-term, the IPO pays for the sins of the past.
I'm sad that spez took such a adversarial attack on 3rd party apps. I wish he had been very straightforward, because we all know the story any way. The way he did it now makes us hate him. He could have had us rally around Reddit instead. So strange. Anyway, I'm here after 7 years on Reddit, this is my 1st post. Hi!
What he did was stupid and downright wrong. There is no spin to defend these decisions. It was done deliberately to kill all 3rd party apps.
Besides the ridiculous pricing and no NSFW content, 3rd Party apps are not allowed to run their own ads, forcing them to rely strictly on subscription fees to cover their expenses. No matter how good an app they make, how do they even compete with Reddit’s free app?
The only things he could’ve done was to cancel the roll out and have a serious discussion with the community on what he was trying to do.
I know some apps like Relay and Infinity are going to try to have a go at making the paid API model work, but there are plenty of users who refuse to give a cent when they know that Reddit is taking way more than is reasonable.
He's been a gigantic asshole for his entire (public) life. It's too bad effectively 100% of "leadership" are the least skilled anything resembling actual leadership, regardless of corporate structure.
Insightful comment I heard from someone else - once Reddit reopens the subs and the third-party apps have shutdown, moderators won't be able to moderate properly and we'll see all sorts of terrible spam. It's likely the largest subs won't be able to cope.
This by itself might not be able to hurt the IPO, but if they IPO after July 1st, it might be a whole new ballpark. (In other words, the lack of effective moderation - caused by the loss of the third-party apps that helped so much with moderation - might ruin the subs and cause Reddit's value to drop.)
I moderate a somewhat busy subreddit, the main tools that I use are probably not going to be affected by the API changes. But I only moderate while on desktop. Moderation via Reddit's app was horrible, and the third party app I use is somehow worse.
Even though the tools I use shouldn't be hit by the API changes, I'm still going to scale back my reddit presence considerably. Reddit betrayed my trust here, who knows what they'll do next.
I think that's exactly it - you can't trust them to not disable or make more difficult the tools you use to moderate reddit from desktop.
Even regular users now feel they can't trust reddit to protect their own experiences - so many used to stick with old dot reddit dot com exclusively, but with the trust broken we never know when that will go away. (friendly w/o JS, no ads, so concise!)
As reddit makes more unpopular changes to increase their revenue, I expect more users to leave, and more junk content to replace the previously insightful data that previously existed there.
Twitter's value plummeted partly due to alienating users, I expect Reddit to suffer something similar. Social media platforms only have value because they have users.
True, but the question is if the majority of users cares enough to leave Reddit in the long term. I think /kbin and the whole fediverse are awesome, but to be completely honest, it's not as simple to use for the average user. All the different instances and how communities work might seem intimidating to some
Reddit already reached the point where it is (or was, depending on what's going to happen) the platform to meet as a community.
I think that will only happen if the lack of moderation tools causes the quality of content to plummet, as someone earlier in the thread predicted. The majority of users do not use third party apps (with many not even knowing these apps existed) so that part of the issue has no effect on them.
Yeah, you're probably right. That's why I think that not much will happen short term. If the subs go dark indefinitely Reddit's just gonna open them up again and staff them with new mods.
The big exodus will probably only happen if they try to milk their userbase dry or overload the site with ads...
Keep in mind that mods are voluntary positions and it will be very difficult to get competent help. Not to mention the bad blood reddit has already left with it’s technical community.
I think it‘s difficult to say how much chaos there will be. If the new mods are just power tripping it‘s certainly going to drive away users
But smaller subs with a dedicated community might be fine
What‘s certain in my opinion is that it‘ll be rough. But Reddit‘s just gonna blame it on the mods/community for ”not taking responsibility” or something like that
IIRC though, that valuation was conducted before they announced all the changes. The fact that the results of it went public right as the blackout was being planned was sheer coincidence.
Now that said, I’d love to see it drop even further now after reddit decided to shoot itself in the foot with all this.
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