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.
Tbh, reddit did win. They’re set to become a highly commercialized social media platform, focused on maximizing engagement through generic content.
They may lose dedicated eccentrics looking for a welcoming place to geek out over shit in their niche community. They’ll also lose users who value long in-depth discussions with complete internet strangers.
But, Reddit doesn’t want our need those people. As long as they have the generic subs (like r/funny, r/pics) and the outrage groups (like r/aita, r/publicfreakout), they’ll keep getting views and sweet sweet ad money. And that’s all Reddit cares about.
Everything you described in the second paragraph is exactly why appending site:reddit.com is a thing, it's a source of genuine discussion of products and expertise. That is what gives Reddit its SEO power in search engines and if those communities go, Reddit doesn't have much to fall back on. Meme level fluff can be replicated anywhere.
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.
Funny thing is that those of us who left aren’t there anymore to comment that we did leave… So anyone who is still there is probably looking at the others who stayed and saying “See?! The protest didn’t work because we are still here!”
I used to spend hours per day on Reddit. Now I visit once or twice a month, read-only. My subscription is canceled and all my posts/comments deleted. My "front page of the Internet" is now here.
I think Reddit likely lost a lot of users who were exclusively Reddit users and didn’t use other social media. That might not amount to that many people total, but it does mean advertisers lose one of the more important demographics Reddit had to offer (since they can target the others more efficiently on other platforms anyway). Hope it still hurts their bottom line.
I quit using it, but I was using a third party app that didn’t have ads. However, I still insist that there is a way for someone to buy accounts, votes, and even entire subreddits directly from Reddit. The way reddit and other websites turn a blind eye to how many fake accounts they have just doesn’t make sense to me.
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.
Is it over? I mean, reddit definitely got what they wanted. Bootlicking power mods got control of more subreddits, bots are running rampant and pumping up the numbers, and the API change went through with a couple people willing to pay the exorbitant cost.
But the quality of content has dropped dramatically and I've seen a lot of people take notice. It's constant reposts, one popular post will hit like 5-10 subs at the same time. And it's mostly rate me shit and fake aita type posts. Reddit being boring will kill permanently, no protest needed.
Basically what they did was amplify the conditions that are causing the exodus from reddit , what we can do is promote the fediverse on discord and other social media sites . And their freefall into irrelevancy will continue.
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.
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.
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