The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. The article describes it as "the official end of the battle," which seems an overstatement to me, but it's the certainly the end of the initial phase.
the conversation should never be about reddit losing, it's about the users winning. And I personally feel like I won. I showed my support for Christian and 3rd party apps, I abondoned ship quickly and I've found a new home on the fediverse.
I also stopped using facebook and instagram 18 months ago. They both still exist, but I won. I'm happier now without it. Job done.
This is the mindset people should be having. Reddit is gonna be fine regardless of all this, and time will only tell if the Fediverse becomes big enough to be a competitor as a social media platform.
Truthfully, I was on the fence of leaving Reddit because of how much I didn’t like the hivemind there on the majority of subs. I still go on there for my niche and specific communities that aren’t on the Fediverse, but I pretty much just lurk there once every so often instead of actively participate - I instead actively participate on the Fediverse because the community is genuinely waaaaaay better than Reddit’s community ever was, even with the FOSS app gatekeepers here.
the conversation should never be about reddit losing, it's about the users winning.
if only. Lotta people really thought they could make reddit worried and that if they rebelled enough they could fix reddit. If it wasn't going to work after that 2-3 day blackout, it wasn't going to work. The mod in that article said it best:
“More than a month has passed, and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people’s attention has shifted to other things,” an r/aww moderator wrote in a post about the rule change.
And yeah, attention span on the internet is low. If you can't fix, it's best to start rebuilding what you want elsewhere. The best time for a backup community was 5 years ago; the second best time is now, so we don't have this problem of "where do we go from Reddit?" in another 5 years. If more people had the courage to leave, it may have ended in a better protest than these attempts to ruin the IPO or whatever.
Better to play the long game for now. This won't be the last drama, and it's simply better to make sure any jank is fixed for the next time people get frustrated and seek greener pastures. That slow burn is how we create a proper platform.
If by won you mean cause controversy, drive away some users, and allienate most of those staying than Mission Accomplished. Nothing positive happened for Reddit out of this.
Really? Reddit retained about 98% of its users and gained full control of the app market. I’d call that a success for them. They got exactly what they wanted.
I'd also say the brand reputation has taken a pretty decent hit with their awful handling of the situation. With an upcoming IPO you think they would have handled it carefully but they just seemingly YOLO'd it
The users aren’t the value in reddit, it’s the content creators and savvy community members that respond to questions and leave useful content in their own right. Reddit lost a number of those, and those users are forming the nucleus of their demise.
I would argue it doesn't matter if they go extinct. What is important is the non-market decentralized alternative. It is the only refuge and defense against enclosure and what can be called platform-feudalism.
For markets and free expression to exist we need a fediverse, a world where the average person and small proprietors can prosper instead of being exploited.
A large enough non-market alternative keeps the excesses of concentrated power in check.
They solidified the establishment of competing services (kbin, Lemmy). Many of us would've never even considered using them otherwise. It may not have hurt them a ton in the short term, but they've helped set up their competition.
Anecdotal, but the only reason I ever tried out Lemmy was because of the things Reddit was doing. Sure, Lemmy doesn’t have nearly the userbase Reddit has, but it was able to become a viable alternative at the very least because of Reddit’s actions. There are plenty of active communities here.
From my point reddit was already ruined for years and it was becoming even worse. I often had to scroll quite a bit to get past the obnoxious US politics posts, not to mention the endless stream of low effort pictures. Just because something is popular doesn’t make it good.
Reddit was always going to rebound eventually, it's got a massive userbase and can pull through a fair number of people leaving. I'm pretty happy with the amount of free time I've won back since I've stopped doom scrolling Reddit.
Pretty keen to see how the fediverse improves over time.
I’ll still likely get answers to questions by including “Reddit” in my search engine searches, but for general community posting consumption I’ve been really pleased with Lemmy. I haven’t missed Reddit and avoiding ads is 100% worth it for me. It feels like using Gimp instead of Photoshop.
I’m frustrated. I had curated reddit so that mostly I just saw stuff I found interesting, with very little doom and gloom and ragebait. Now I’ve switched to Lemmy and the communities I’ve subscribed to so far aren’t very active so I end up scrolling All to find more things but it’s mostly doom and ragebait with only the occasional porn as a break from it.
I tend to agree with the sentiment here that we are all the winners for having discovered and are still using kbin, a platform that most wouldn't have even known about before Reddit's shenanigans. Though, I want to point out that total user activity on kbin is down 7,000 people since about 10 days ago...
It seems people are either going back, or are abandoning for Lemmy because of their abundance of mobile apps. Artemis is a decent kbin app, and is almost ready to release for public beta now that the API is complete (just waiting on integration) - though I fear it needs to happen sooner than later if we are to retain the userbase.
Yeah. that is probably true for many since we all came looking for an alternative due to the loss of our mobile app... Lemmy is a little more mature since it's been around a lot longer, so it already had an API to build on. @Rideranton has been working on an API and has several pending pull requests to implement one. I truly believe kbin is a better software so I'm hoping that the API sparks more dev interest.
The thing that made me use reddit less and less is old format version of lemmy.world. I tried looking for separate instance when world is getting DDoS’d, but the very familiar format made me always go back to it.
Using memmmy is brilliant though. It’s probably just wishful thinking, but I hope that other sites have the old reddit format version for ease of transition. Until then, I’m here in old.lemmy.world
Artemis is now available (Play Store link), but I completely agree that the lack of maturity in apps make Kbin a less compelling offer. It's still my usualy way to browse from my desktop though.
The tiny subreddits I used to moderate are still set to private. I haven’t been on the site in weeks, but I’m guessing Reddit won’t do anything to recover my subreddits that had like 1000 subscribers.
That’s the thing they’re going to be missing the most going forward: all of the small communities that made Reddit fun. Anyone who was active on that site for longer than like a year knows that the major subreddits wasn’t where the best communities were. The drop in quality content Reddit is experiencing will be most noticeable in small communities where it’s just not worth it for someone to make a bot to repost old content for upvotes.
Add comment