Ultimately, what went wrong is that most Reddit users were screeching at individual leaves littering their garden, without noticing the tree creating those leaves on first place. They failed to connect the dots between: arbitrary bans, subreddit suspensions, user-on-user harassment, the idiotic way that rules are enforced, the presence of powermods, then Reddit trying to get rid of the powermods, the 3PA being killed… while focusing too much on a braindead clown called Steve Huffman.
It’s all about profits. You can’t enforce any demand if you don’t make Reddit lose money. Blackouts and John Oliver posting only go so far, you need to migrate out of the platform. And if you’re staying in the platform you need to transform it into an advertiser-hostile shithole. But for that you need more coordination than just “HURR DURR WE WRITE FUCK SPEZ IN PLACE LOL LMAO”.
Honest question: how is Lemmy safer against power tripping mods, user-on-user harassment and everything else? Sure it’s a super nice place now but eventually the powertippers etc. will pop up. ?
In Reddit those problems backtrack to the Reddit admins giving no fucks about the users. Why would they? Even if the users are mistreated, network effect still keeps them in Reddit, as they don’t want to lose the content.
Here in Lemmy however, if the admins of an instance are arseholes, negligent, stupid etc., their users will simply migrate to another instance. The users won’t lose access to their content, and they know it.
And in some cases, admins of other instances might even defederate the instance with problematic admins, to protect their own users. (Specially useful when it comes to harassment, as harassers tend to gravitate towards the same places.)
So for example. In Reddit you got the powermods going rogue, being abusive towards the users, and the admins went like, “NOOOOO THEY’RE A PRECIOUS PART OF OUR COMMUNITY”. Until the powermods turned against Reddit itself; then the admins took action. Here, the admins would need to act as soon as the powermods become an issue for the users, not just for themselves.
Additionally: it’s hard to power-trip when you got a public modlog telling people what you did.
It contains the fallout of site-wide issues to some extent. Mods and user-on-user will still be issues. If one federation owner goes on a power trip everyone can just leave that server while continuing to use other Lemmy instances.
Essentially you’d only lose access to some subreddits instead of all of reddit in that situation.
You also would have 3rd party apps that would continue to work. Unlike now where apps like Sync are just down for a few months until they finish development for Lemmy.
But don’t worry, reddit had a run of like 6-10 years there where mods weren’t an issue so we have some time before that all starts.
The John Oliver thing was so dumb. Like, so what? Doesn't matter if you're posting John Oliver as a protest, you're still using the platform on a sub that allows advertisement.
The only thing that could actually go anywhere was making the subs NSFW, since those will actually hurt Reddit's finances, but obviously they forced the subs to revert and most easily gave up.
I think that the John Oliver thing was useful to raise awareness, but people eventually confused a situational strategy with an actual solution.
Besides NSFW-ing, mods could’ve also promoted ad blocker usage, the sort of consumption criticism that advertisers outright despise, scorched the earth (slowly removing content from the subs), and harshly restricting the scope of the subreddit, not just through a “haha John Oliver” but a permanent solution. Or just stop moderating at all, since all those clowns that u/ModCodeOfConduct is putting on the place of older mods are incompetent clowns and powertrippers.
Except a huge number of people only ever use reddit on mobile. There are no ad blockers that can target specific advertisements inside of an app itself. You can do network wide advertisement blocking with things like pihole, but the people using reddit on mobile aren’t the people setting up a network wide domain filter. I only ever used reddit on the desktop through old.reddit.com, but I could see the writing on the wall that they’re going to get rid of that sooner rather than later.
Around 70% of the users are on mobile, more specifically. However my point still stands - even if only 10% of the desktop users pick an ad blocker, this means at least 3% less ad revenue for Reddit Inc., it’s quite a bit.
Another thing that they could be doing is to create a bunch of rules that would displease mobile users the most, but that would not be detected as “targetting mobile users”. Such as banning for emoji usage, or for writing “R/subreddit” instead of “r/subreddit”, this sort of stuff. Aiming at actually destroying the subreddit, so people migrate elsewhere.
But for that they’d need to accept that their Reddit communities are lost, and yet most of them are still wallowing in that “no, we can recover Reddit!” wishful “thinking”.
Nothing "went wrong" with it. It was simply never possible. Reddit controlled whether those 3rd party apps could function, and Reddit wanted those 3rd party apps to cease functioning.
I think the only thing that could have been done better if for mods to more rapidly migrate to other plate forms and leave a detail message on the locked subreddit about why and how to move to the platform.
I’m not saying that it has to be Lemmy, but it would have been nice if it were.
Spez realized that he literally paid for other companies to harvest one of reddit's two greatest assets and that he needed to do something to recover. So he's been flailing around like a toddler, breaking everything in his desperation to stay on his feet, and in the meantime completely alienating reddit's other greatest asset.
What was that comment he made? Something like "reddit will continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive". Like the arrival of profits is inevitable and they don't need to do anything for them to arrive.
Also, he claims that reddit has never been profitable. How much has he spent chasing phantoms - reddit cryptocurrency, customizable snoovatars, reddit NFTs, special programming for a single day each year, buying an app then paying to make it worse, deciding to self-host images and videos, thereby drastically increasing the need for both storage and bandwidth, when they'd been perfectly happy to let others do the heavy lifting for well over a decade, paying to implement a drastically flawed video player (remember when it first launched and it was incredibly slow and we found out it was because it was trying to download every available resolution).
In 2022, reddit had $670,000,000 in revenue. There's a reason it's never turned a profit, and for the past eight years, that reason has been Steve Huffman.
I miss it, kinda. I think it was uniquely poised to take advantage of lockdown, and there was some great stuff broadcast - I particularly remember watching a kalimba concert. But we all got tired of lockdown and online meetings and that's where it floundered.
I also STR that at least some of the feeds weren't viewable after the event ended (don't know if it was all of them or not). Which meant that it wasn't really a format for short videos (because people need time to find them), so they were more effort to set up and run, and for at least the ones that weren't viewable afterward, there was nothing you could point to afterward and say "I made that!"
I think if they'd kept it around, it could've found it's niche, but at the time I didn't really miss it when it went.
There’s something wrong with people who are so out of their depth like that who don’t just find and hire someone more competent to do this stuff for them. Either just a complete lack of awareness that they are floundering or some weird stubbornness that it’s only worth succeeding if they are personally holding the tiller.
Autocratic platform CEO doing his thing. Nobody ask what went wrong with the peacefull protest in North Korea and why did Kim not step down or change his mind. We got digitally slaughtered and are now in heaven (lemmy).
The only thing I can think of was that the mods announced a time limit of 48 hours for the protests, but I’m not sure that making all the protests indefinite would have solved anything.
Spez was determined to copy Elon Musk even though Elon clearly doesn’t know how to run a social media platform. Now both Reddit and Twitter are dying.
I think it was an uphill struggle and nearly impossible to pull off.
Spez had absolutely no interest in changing his stance on working with developers. The hugely ironic thing I read that made me give up hope (and stash my ~1 year in development Reddit App) was Spez saying “It was never designed to support third-party apps.” – yet no acknowledgement that the “official” app was literally a third party app that they purchased years ago called Alien Blue.
He’s a fucking idiot or a liar. I’d believe either. Or both.
The entire point of having this free, public API is because a free, public API can be monetized, and content scraping cannot. If you are offering a free web app, and you don’t have a free, public API, someone will create scraping tools to do it. So then, instead of spending money maintaining a revenue generating API, you spend money playing cat and mouse with content scraping bots.
The fact that reddit can’t figure out how to push monetization over that API has nothing to do with third party apps, and everything to do with the site having shit leadership.
Not defending spez, but their business model was not designed to support third party apps, that much is true. They needed a proper model to share profits with third party apps.
How they went about “fixing” that was completely dilletantish and dumbfounding, though. Now they’re not getting any of that potential extra profit and lost a significant amount of users on top
RIF kinda still works for me, I can browse but can’t post or upvote so that’s good enough for me but I have cut down browsing Reddit loads since the protests
The fact that Reddit moderators quickly folded the moment Spez threatened to take their “powers” away made the whole thing quickly fail. Very few had the balls to go through with the protests and didn’t care about those imaginary powers (honorable mention to the former r/interestingasfuck mods), but many were too addicted to that fake status symbol to even imagine letting go of it and Spez took advantage of that to kill the protests.
For those of us who left Reddit and mostly only use Lemmy now, I believe the 3rd party apps thing was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I think it’s just that we already hated Reddit so much that when presented with Lemmy we immediately jumped ship.
For many other Redditors however the appocalypse didn’t make any difference, many big subreddits are still very active and the Reddit moderators who folded realized they don’t want to lose their control over those subs and all the potential that control gives them (monetization via partnerships with brands, sponsored AMAs, selling film rights like one former mod of r/wallstreetbets did, shilling your new app, website or crypto like again r/wallstreetbets mods did etc…).
The mistake in these protests was to assume that Reddit mods would align with the interests of 3rd party app users.
Well, it doesn’t help that the main means of the protests were centered around the moderators’ ability to close down the subreddits. I think the outcome would have been different if other means were used, like collectively nuking your account, promoting Lemmy and Adblockers etc… These have been done, but only individually.
This, here. Reddit is going the way of Digg, but trying to be more savvy about it. THey don’t care that the specific group that’s leaving are the content creators because they intend to charge content creators (paid API) who expect to profit from the traffic. They don’t care that it’s lower quality content creators. They want the money both ways, and don’t care what percent of their “high quality” traffic disappears for it.
Since they’re bigger than digg, they still have some high quality traffic. There’s never a 100% protest with something as big as reddit. It’s win/win/win for them.
I'd say what went wrong was nobody did anything meaningfuk or cared. Nobody put their money where their mouth is and deleted their accounts, and staying off the site for 2 days was too much to ask of >80% of the users.
The Mods closed a few subs but didn't themselves do anything meaningful. They should have let reddit replace them if they actually cared. They should have moved their community to lemmy or kbin. The ones who did sick it out I'm grateful for, the rest cared too much about their own pride to bother trying to keep the admins in check.
Overall the reddit userbase since the pandemic are mostly entitled whiners who don't really give a shit as long as they get their twitter and TikTok reposts. There's literally only one piece of OC on the frontpage of reddit right now. There's not much value to going there anymore.
I'm done with Reddit, and honestly I haven't missed it. My time is now more full of hobbies and actual reading, I'm better off for deleting it.
This. The protesting subreddits should have been creating alternative communities at Lemmy and elsewhere while they were locked down or hidden for whatever, and then they’d have had real leverage when forced back open.
I’ve been using the Reddit app lately and it’s absolute dogshit. It mostly shows me content that I didn’t ask for. It trying hard to be tiktok or something. Very annoying. It functions differently from how most people use Reddit
The hive mind went from “fuck spez we’re staging an internet revolution” to “let it go already, nobody gives a shit, stop inconveniencing us with your real issues” in an instant. Basically, everyone’s attention span has lapsed and if you keep talking about it people think you’re killing their buzz. It’s no longer a relevant problem for the vast majority of the userbase, if it ever even was.
The people who this really affected - third-party app users, people affected by the poor accessibility of the regular app/site and the anti- ‘hail corporate’ types have already migrated or are otherwise disengaged with Reddit, leaving just the bootlickers.
And this was the entire point. Reddit was tired of being the place for over-educated, angst tech bros with lots of free time to be subversive. They want to refocus on the lowest-common denominator Facebook/Instagram/TT crowd who gives themselves over to popular media mind and body.
Probably how a large amount of the subreddits participating in the blackout came back in a measly two days. Like Louis Rossmann said in his video describing the reddit api situation, all they see is that we’ll put up with their bullshit 363 days a year…
maybe if all subreddits participating went dark or posted meaningless content (white squares,etc) there might have been a bigger inpact.
A lot of us moved to other platforms like Lemmy though, so I wouldn’t say it was a complete failure.
Exactly this. All the f*** spez comments and complaints still generate discussions. Same as John Oliver photos. It needs to be meaningless noise
That being said, last I looked, the quality of discussions is now totally downhill there and as you mentioned, a lot of us have moved (and it seems to be mainly people you’d want to move too).
I’m happy that the psychopath crowd on Reddit didn’t join us during the move
Some people will, but I haven’t installed the official Reddit app and only occasionally check it from my PC. 90% of my previous usage was based on the phone fro Sync Pro.
That and apathy/Ignorance of the issue. Especially with the younger generation (which is the majority of reddit now).
Tried to get a few smaller subs with a lot of Zoomers in them to join me, and their response was basically “bruh, who is spez?”, “in your dreams”, or “spez isn’t a pedophile; quit making shit up”. I mean just look at this. They straight-up attacked me:
Yeah I have never heard of spez being a pedophile. Unless he’s been convicted you shouldn’t be calling him that. It could be taken as defamation.
Also I fully get why people don’t want to move. Lemmy is a great idea but it’s a work in progress with a small user base. I lost my whole account not long ago. This a community which is already fragmented from moving platforms why would they go through that hell again when Lemmy might not even pan out.
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