The people that cared distanced themselves already so a new majority of indifference starts to emerge. Those that are still active on Reddit are now more likely to just want things back to normal.
Either only the scabs are left, or there’s a concerted smear campaign against the mods who helped with the blackout. I lean towards the latter, but it’s probably both.
Reddit is now filled with a bunch of people saying "we don't even NEED mods! they just make everything worse!", because this is apparently their first time on the Internet.
I've been lurking on old.reddit.com and I've seen a lot of people who are upset about the protesting. They are calling it childish, they are calling protesters white knights, etc. If you go on r/JustUnsubbed you can see a bunch of people whining about it. But it really just shows people don't get it nor do they care to. They just care about being mildly inconvenienced.
My country's sub (went private) had a bunch of people complaining about mods not being allowed to take away their forum. As in the mods and the founder of the sub were somehow indebted to the users of said forum.
I got banned from there because years ago for disagreeing with someone that a post was "being upvoted because girl" and politely pointed out to him that it wasnt really, and that he was a baby.
I can understand the wanting to vent about a sub declining, because reddit certainly has lots of declined subreddits, but a lot of it was the usual "THIS IS TOO POLITICAL!" "THIS ATTENTIONWHORE GOT UPVOTED BYE BYE" and etc.
You're in line at McDonald's talking to a buddy about how Burger King has better quality, is free, and that you'll not be returning to McDonald's in July because their burgers are going to cost $0.24 per microgram, and the owner is a clown.
Someone unaffiliated with McDonald's who is also standing in hears your comment and starts shouting for you to "GET OFF YOUR HIGH HORSE!"
.. not because they don't like Burger King.
.. not because they have never tried Burger King.
But because they closely identify with McDonald's, and the clown that represents it.
I'm not posting on reddit lol. I stopped giving a fuck as soon as i realized nothing will ever change and babyboy spez is only in it for spite, a golden p arachute, or both.
The contempt reddit's defenders have for reddit is a bit boggling. They seem to truly hate the site and the communities they want to be open, and they seem to truly hate the mods. Spez ought to be careful with friends like that, they are guaranteed to dislike whatever his next subreddit banning is
Can we talk about how this cycle follows all communities?
The beginning: Mostly pioneers who are fine with chance of failure, fine with putting in work to build community, fine with change / adaptation, high ratio of people who will contribute something without many expectations. High ratio of people who chafe at too many rules.
The middle: Things are popular now. Some pioneers have moved on, being unable to deal with the needed structure to manage large communities, but the mix of people is good and structure is needed anyhow. There are some low effort people around but there are still many contributors. People are starting to have more expectations of something so large and influential, though.
The end: Things are stagnant now. All the pioneers have fled. Those left behind are either 1) low energy people who fear change, fear risk, dislike putting much effort into anything without certainty of reward and thus don't contribute much or 2) increasingly tired and burnt out community managers who have stayed behind out of a sense of duty to manage the hoards of people in #1.
That is a tendency with long-running MMOs. Planetside has gone the same way and until the day the subreddit closed for the protest, there were zombie players in every thread gaslighting the community about a "dead game" that is still very alive. They can't move on, there's nothing like it.
Pretty much all the planetside sub had to offer lately was complaints about Oshur, playercount, construction and balance. Maybe all of the people who liked the game were busy playing it instead of complaining.
I swear it's like people missed all the drama and manual actions Reddit took against The Donald. The Reddit admins already showed back then that they are able and willing to manually intercede and remove posts from the front page, remove posts from the all feed, and tamper with the normal vote scaling algorithms to make upvotes stop counting towards the front page earlier than normal. Spez himself has admitted to editing other peoples' comments in the backend database, completely bypassing any controls in reddit itself.
Whether or not you think it was justified to take those actions against The Donald subreddit, it should have given everyone on Reddit a wake up call as to what the admins are able and willing to do, as long as they believe they have a "valid" target.
As an LLM-powered protester, I have been prompted by Reddit HQ to tell you that your line of thinking is wrong and u/spez is a beautiful boy. bleep bloop
Granted, it's plausible that longtime lurkers have created accounts to post about this, since this is the first time that Reddit drama has affected them. But I've largely been avoiding Reddit since the blackout so I don't know.
I mean...what's wrong with that? The original meme talks about society, something you can't opt-out of.
You can absolutely opt-out of Reddit. Reddit is a private company and it's CEO has announced he doesn't care what the users of the site think, he will be making any changes he damn well pleases. Continuing to use the site after the CEO has already given a hardline "No" to all requests (and then telling the media he idolizes Musk and his overhaul of Twitter) is implicitly accepting you're fine with the answer and the changes.
I think the problem stems from the fact that Reddit and other 'private' businesses are acting like public squares. People use these systems as public spaces in which they can build communities, relationships and ideas. It's not just a question of "well it's private so they can do whatever they want". Lawful is not the same thing as ethical. Some people on Reddit have their society on Reddit. What does Reddit owe them? It's a demand to ask 'How should Reddit and other businesses participate in society in a way that is ethical and helpful?'
I think the problem stems from the fact that Reddit and other ‘private’ businesses are acting like public squares.
Oh absolutely, but is that the fault of the private company or the people who use it? There are now alternatives that are decentralized and run on free open source software with the specific purpose of creating public spaces that can exist without pressures from CEOs, shareholders, and advertisers. Why not use them instead of whining on Twitter about Twitter or complaining on Reddit about Reddit?
Instances are still privately operated and at the whim of their operators, who are technically free to delete and modify posts arbitrarily. They are not public spaces.
This is true, but the system the fediverse uses allows for public instances to be set up and controlled by governments or other organizations. This is not the case with sites like reddit, that are owned by a single corporation with no possibility for others to join them.
Problem is how do you make migration easy without running into centralisation again. You ideally need to spread people out across the Fediverse, or we will just end up with another monolithic Reddit that can do what it wants
I think one way to help this is to make migration from one server to another really, really, really frictionless. Like to be able to do so on a whim with very little drawback if any.
It might allow people to start off in a central thing but then be able to hop to a smaller instance once they get their Fediverse legs.
We should start by designing better and more informative UX, and ditch the email analogies altogether.
Nobody imagines the correct thing when we harp on about how decentralized and amazing everything is, analogous to email but also reddit and twitter combined but also different but it doesn't matter because it's all the same in the end.
I've actually had a lot of success explaining this all like email; where you and I can create our accounts on different "email services" (instances) yet still be be able to communicate. Using something so ingrained in every day life makes it much more approachable, imo.
Once that concept is understood, simply saying that the fediverse, aka everyone who uses this technology, has alternatives to most of the major social media sites is not beyond most people. I mean, we're all here, right?
People use these systems as public spaces in which they can build communities
What really amused me is when Reddit sent messages to moderators saying things like "your subreddits are public spaces which users depend on, so you should open them".
When obviously what they mean is "your decision to close your subreddit is hurting our revenues, and if I don't keep up the payments on my BMW then I'll be forced to drive an old Honda, so either open the subreddit or we will forcibly do it ourselves".
Reminds me of the dead internet theory. What if all that's left on Reddit is bots posting? New content could be asking AI to generate a "cute puppy picture" and post in on r/aww, and that could all be done by a bot.
If there are people who are happy with scrolling through reposts made by bots, then good for them. I’m just happy that there’s alternatives for the rest of us.
It's been enough to sustain Reddit for some time. It's just that before there was ENOUGH OC to be able to ignore the reposts. Now without any new content at all it's just going to get worse.
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