Not sure if I agree with him (or rather, pretty sure I disagree). The protest was very successful for me - it got me off the site, and I have no plans of going back, even if it fully opens and goes back to "normal". In my case, reddit is not winning, it completely lost. I see more people like me around here every day and it makes me happy. Can't remember lat time reddit made me happy, so I'm enjoying the change, even if it comes with a fair bit of jank.
My first account was 14 years ago. Every year or so, I switch to a new account. I nuked every single account I had: nuked the comments, nuked the submissions, just over-wrote then deleted everything. I privated the tiny handful of small communities I modded, turned over the keys in a couple of them, and de-modded myself. I unsubscribed from every single subreddit I was part of.
I found some worthy comments and spent all the reddit coins I'd accumulated from when other people gave me gold. I went through every saved comment and saved it (in context) offline. I PM'd a handful of people my email address, wrapped up a couple of "oh, I'll get that to you later"s, and ... just walked away.
14 years, 17 accounts. My "smallest" account had about 140k karma; my largest over 440k. Probably a couple million between all of them.
I'm done with reddit, I'm gone. I'm not going to fool myself that I'll be missed there but, given my accumulated karma, I think the loss of some of my contributions (I mostly hung out in news and science subs) will make the site a little less useful to the people still there. Enshittification, indeed.
Since I started hearing people say that their deleted/edited posts in many cases were being magically restored minutes afterward, I was actually looking into selling mine... 🤷♂️ An 11+ year old account with varied activity, under 1k post karma (cuz fuck that rat race for imaginary e-peen points 🤣😂), but 65k+ comment karma... They can hook it up to a bot farm and have it shitpost from one side of that god-forsaken cesspool till kingdom bloody come for all I care at this point.
I kinda feel like Han in A New Hope when they bust into the detention level to rescue Leia...
shoots communication panel"Whatever, it was a boring conversation anyway."
The majority didn't move away from twitter either. Some people moved to mastodon, but most either stayed or just straight quit twitter
That said, I Am so much happier here on the fediverse
His broader point is that he thinks mods should have stuck to their guns and kept subs private which would include their historic posts. By even reopening, they're allowing traffic to return to the site even if a few large communities are memeing hard. For the most part, subs that have reopened are going to return to business as usual. All because the mods of those communities didn't want to sacrifice their control. Spez called their bluff.
While thousands of users have been driven away, there are still more than enough who will remain and continue to engage with the site. The only lesson Reddit will have learned is that they can just wait it out no matter how unpopular of a decision they make.
I'm very curious to see if there will be any meaningful drop in traffic at this time next month.
Reddit was never going to just go away as a result of this. Even if every blacked-out subreddit remained private forever and everyone who was aware of this protest walked away, there's plenty of oblivious users and remaining subreddits to continue operating.
The "win" condition for the protesters is some or all of the following:
Give Reddit bad publicity in the mainstream press
Cause a drop in ad revenue. Money is life as far as Reddit is concerend.
Harm Reddit's valuation in its IPO. Money is life.
Help Reddit replacements get established, restoring competition that Reddit thought had long ago vanished. (You are here).
Nothing was going to stop Reddit from going ahead with their API change, all we could hope for was to make it hurt for Reddit. And in that regard I do believe we've scored a solid win. The Fediverse is now competition for Reddit, and as they squeeze and squeeze their users for money over the years to come there's now an escape valve that users can flow out of under that pressure.
My goals in aiding protests were just as you say. I wanted to help consolidate the instances I use, and the communities I use. I've always known reddit will stay there. I don't even think I'm wounding reddit. That beast is too big. All I can do is piggyback some popular posts and get a few hundred to a thousand people to fill up my instance and make me a bit happier about this whole debacle :)
We're a swarm of mosquitoes. We bite Reddit and it's painful, but really the only way we're going to kill Reddit is if in the process of swatting at us Reddit forgets that it's holding a machete in its hand.
Fortunately Reddit shows signs that it is indeed doing that.
Thing is, Reddit is so big that it can only die due to stupidity on their end
So I see it more as Reddit, instead of swatting, going full bug spray mode and spraying so much they poison themselves instead of a little poison that's just enough to keep the mosquitoes down (in this case, things like the over priced API, brushing off the protests, the threatening mods, and other self destructive behaviours. The API was going out during dusk, the brushing off protests was going, "It's fine" instead of applying repellent, and the threatening mods and other behaviours from here on out being them getting swarmed, panicking, and spraying the toxic shit in obscene amounts)
I don't really get how reddit is "winning" if I am no longer using it. Lemmy and kbin have more than filled the gap from reddit. Even if users at large don't switch immediately, that is fine.
This and both are heavily growing heck I saw a sub redditors just made jokes about that only 2k migrated to lemmy... 1 day later it's already 10k users
What bothers me is the stereotyping reddit mods as pear shaped basement dwellers that cling to pretend power and go through DTs if they don't have their mod authority for three days.
I am on a... .LOT of shit lists with staff on many locations for legitimate and non reasons. To the point you'd expect me to be agreeing with the assessment, but nope. Those are volunteers that make the network go 'round.
It's the FIDO admin clusterfuck yet again. 'Shit talk the guy while he's there. Guy steps back for mental wellness reasons. sudden outpouring of 'you made everything work! You were the greatest!' etc etc.
He can definitely speak with a lot of vitriol :/ It's why I stopped watching his videos. I'm glad he's pushing for right-to-repair stuff, but I just couldn't handle the anger and negativity.
Wow that's pretty bad, why am I not surprised though. He definitely seems like the kind of person who would think that way. You just get a feeling when you encounter certain people that they might be like that, when I first saw his videos I got that feeling.
It was a couple of years ago, just after he had hooked up with a gf, and he was doing weird AMA videos while wearing a smoking jacket. The general gist of the rant was his political beliefs on racism, wokeism, and 'there are only two sexes', it wasn't a full on hate-speech-apoluza, and probably not enough of a red flag for him to continue gaining in popularity.
For me, it coming a little while after Cody going a bit too RWNJ after Kanyon left him, it was enough for me to nope-out of his channel, but I have a very slim tolerance of youtube celebs anyway, I find most of them unbearable.
edit: given the 'My Girlfriend owns a macbook, F my life' video that was posted a week or two after his rants, I'm going to say it must have been 2019.
I wouldn't expect him to lol. Every time I watch one of his videos, I'm reminded of one of The Onion News Network's greatest creations: The Autistic Reporter.
Note: Whether Rossman is on the spectrum (I assume so) I'm not throwing shade at all. He's a powerhouse.
It was pretty much just an online quiz in a livestream he did fairly recently, I think.
Iirc it was something along the line of ‘I have friends on the spectrum, and I’m not unlike them’, and that online quiz coming to a similar result. I don’t think he’s been officially diagnosed, he just has a fairly high margin of similarity.
Note: Whether Rossman is on the spectrum (I assume so)
According to one of his other videos, he took an internet autism test and it determined based on his answers that he was probably autistic. No idea if he was properly diagnosed by a doctor though.
It's funny, the way that he's been addressing the Reddit blackout and protests recently sound almost exactly like the scab comments I see on Reddit in r/save3rdpartyapps and r/RedditAlternatives even if that's not his intention it's still really weird to me that he's choosing this approach. I guess he knows that his followers will still continue to listen to him even if he sounds as bad as the idiot scabs underneath every single protest comment. The thing about this that sort of bothers me is that a lot of these scabs are going to watch this and think that he's encouraging that behavior because he literally says a lot of the exact same things they do.
Honestly it's great that he's Pro right to repair but honestly there's plenty of other people who are doing a better job than he is. They're doing it in a friendlier way as well that's bearable to listen to.
I get what he was going for, even if he phrased it in a shitty way. His problem was more the mods that caved in and went back, not with the ones who said "I'm done" and stuck to thier guns.
While there'll undoubtably be much more people coming to here and other places given time (I wasn't there when people left Digg en mass for Reddit, but I highly doubt it happened in days, or even a year or two), I can't help but also look at those that went back and think "Would have been better if yall just cut the cord and left Reddit behind completely" because it's not changing.
Regardless, he was right about not giving a time limit when drawing a line in the sand
Their refusal to change doesn't mean they are succeeding. The absolute mess that /r/all became over the weekend is already hurting their ability to sell ads.
Even if Reddit removes all the moderators from these thousands of protesting subreddits and replaces them with people willing to tow the line, that will only stem the bleeding short-term. As the most talented moderators and creators continue leaving the platform, Reddit will slowly lose it's ability to produce content that keeps people reading.
Communities are not made in a week or months, and we shouldn't expect that Reddit communities will decline in those time frames, either.
IMO, the only way Reddit survives is with automated automation. Replacing the mods is dangerous precident; any future mods should pay attention to the current situation. Reddit is disincentizing moderators from volunteering.
As much as Louis is on our side in this, I feel like he alone was responsible for the MOST damage to the protest efforts. After his video about how a 2-day blackout wasn't enough, dialogue from the anti-protest side started to shift heavily toward "this isn't even going to do anything," and his video was cited as often to support "we need to do more" as it was to support "you guys are stupid if you think you're doing anything." So I hope he finds some room to be pissed off at himself while he's pissed off about the "failed" reddit protest.
And, spoiler alert: it takes time for momentum to shift, and it's very much shifting - it's just not happening as fast as this guy wants it to.
Yeah it's very interesting that most scabs on Reddit sound very similar to him and his video. Even though his intention was to help the protest, ironically he's done the most damage to the protest and given the scabs and anti-protestets plenty of ammunition to use against protesting efforts.
I'm sure he's not even willing to admit where he's wrong or at fault here, he doesn't seem like the kind of person to own up, in any meaningful way at least.
I'm not quite sure what he would need to own up to? If people are going to scab but cite a source that says "This won't be effective, we need to do more" then I think that would be a weakness on their part.
Dont care, just quit Reddit and they can't win. I saw a lot of sub-reddit who said "Well, blackout was great but here we are! Online now!" so... just leave.
Generally agree with him, but I don't like how he doesn't appreciate all the mods that are still protesting. After all, this is the internet where most people have become used to social media corpos just doing whatever they want. I'm glad such a protest even took place.
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