It worked for me, I haven’t really used reddit much since July 1st. That’s good enough for me. It’s not about bringing the whole thing down ad most of society dgaf about shit like it’s been since the beginning of time.
Yeah, I rarely load it up these days. I have to admit that this site with the smaller base is much nicer to use. It actually feels like I have conversations with people rather than just throwing comments into a wall of noise.
Same here. It would have been nice if reddit changed their mind, but ultimately the whole situation allowed me to break my addiction. I feel much healthier on a daily basis now that I spend maybe an hour on Lemmy, Beehaw, or Tildes vs 5 hours pointlessly arguing with people on reddit. I have a ton more gaming time and reading time now and I feel comfortable checking reddit if I need to reference something (like, it really is the best place to access Destiny 2 community info, for example). It’s honestly really great not checking social as much, I didn’t realize how much life social media was sucking out of me.
As far as the protests go, they were quite successful. Reddit’s traffic went massively down; users, especially power users who uploaded content and moderated subreddits, left the site; and Lemmy became a viable alternative to Reddit with the influx of users. Reddit is still struggling to replace the moderators who quit, and they’ve been forced to take desperate actions like reinstating r/place and paying users who get a lot of upvotes to keep traffic on the site. The decision was never going to be reversed, the old free API scheme legitimately cost Reddit money and forcing users to use the official app like every other major social media has meant they could collect more data on users to sell. But as far as what the protest accomplished besides reversing the decision, it massively hurt Reddit and bolstered Lemmy into being a viable replacement
A limited blackout did nothing to change Reddit’s mind. Periodically asking users if they want to end the Blackout did not help since as dissatisfied users left for Discord or Lemmy, the voters became biased toward ending the Blackout.
In the future, boycotting and demanding that advertisers cancel ad revenue would be far more effective. Lawsuits about Reddit restoring user content involuntarily may still do damage but not quickly enough to help the protest.
Nothing went wrong. Reddit knew from minute 1 they weren’t going to negotiate this change (not in good faith, anyways).
Add to that, like everyone else is saying, the fact that they weren’t actually pushed to change thier minds in the slightest by users when push came to shove; because yeah, some of us left, but a lot of us participated, said they weren’t gonna back down…and went right back to Reddit when all was said and done.
(Not saying “the protests were a total bust” because, from what I understand at least, this happened to Digg in the past, and it wasn’t immediately overtaken by Reddit. It happened in waves of users over time until it got eclipsed. Pretty sure it was bad policy change effecting users after bad policy change that made everyone start to pack up too, not just one. Part of me is hopeful that history is repeating).
But to circle back, basically the attempt was doomed to fail because the decision was made absolute long before any talk of protesting it was even a thought in anyone’s mind.
They screwed up with the most critical group. To cite Steve Ballmer: “developers, developers, developers, developers”. Now tools like bot banning are gone.
Some moderators have stepped down or stayed till they were banned but in large they gave in. As nearly all posts in r/modnews have under 20% upvote ratio the mods are still not happy (e.g. 17% upvotes, 83% downvotes for the r/place announcement and comments are by large negative).
Btw. If you want to hurt Reddit: Post good content on Lemmy and cross-reference it on Reddit.
Btw. Lemmy won’t replace Reddit. This might be hard but it’s the truth and it might be the best for Lemmy as a big platform has a different flair compared to how Lemmy is right now.
Yup, that’s the word for it. Initial burst. Definetly not the last.
That’s gonna be fun for the new mods to deal with lol in fact, i think they already are.
Reddit had years to build up its content, and Rome wasn’t built in a day (something i feel alot of people easily forget, and not just in this case) so in some ways I can’t blame them for not moving. It’s like you said tho, the best way to hurt Reddit is to post good content elsewhere, and IDK, I feel like that could have been better than just bitterly staying.
That’s not for us to decide, i think. Lemmy might be a whole different beast, but if enough people come in and bring the Reddit expierence to Lemmy, it just might. Maybe not a 100% replacement, it’ll never be a 1:1 replacement after all, but just enough.
I prefer it here. The comment sections are few and far between, but the ones that do exist have a higher quality of dialogue. We just need more of the experts to shift over; the only thing I really miss about the other place is when some person who’s an expert on the most random thing starts chiming in on a topic and dropping knowledge.
I like it a lot here too, tho I’m honestly not too bothered if there’s much more activity in the future tho. IDK, i feel like growth is going to happen sooner or later (because it always does), whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.
What went wrong is simple and clear as day: People did not commit to their protest. Only a fraction of those who took part made the important step of quitting reddit altogether. Because the protest was limited, reddit absorbed the hit.
If you're not willing to give up your abuser, you're destined to be battered.
It is important to remember that you owe these platforms nothing. There is life after an endless stream of dopamine hits. Just walk out.
Everything that has a beginning has an ending (perhaps with a long tail). Perhaps the only wrong thing is that we forgot about that. All of these Internet services tend to have a long tail, most of everything we remember once using is still around in some form barely being used but for a tiny and loyal user base that is still hanging in there for some reason.
None of these things were great in and of themselves, it was always the community.
Infinity didn’t get hit yet for some reason, other than the porn. I assume Apollo was the main target and it will trickle down eventually. My usage has dropped enough that I probably won’t notice when infinity does get the axe
I think most people knew it was a protest and nothing more - I doubt a lot of people thought, hey Reddit is totally going to back down.
It was a mass expression of user dissatisfaction which escalated from an initial 2 day blackout into something so much more, and so I'm pretty impressed with what it did, which was stirred up shit for the management and made the CEO say some ridiculous things in the press to boot.
What I am a little disappointed in is that not as many mods walked. I'm not a mod, but I was fed the line 'it's going to be impossible to mod my sub without the 3rd party apps'. Given the amount of subs that seem to have been ticking over just nicely since the API switch though I feel like I was fed some bs in that department
The other claim is that "reddit doesn't care about blind people" which is the most ridiculous claim of all. The new site design is WCAG AA compliant. I did both an automated assessment with WAVE and used VoiceOver to confirm. It is useable for blind users with standard screen readers and other ATs.
Is it easier with apps? Sure. But it's not impossible.
I don’t claim to be familiar with their issues but I thought the problem was that the mod tools were not usable for the blind. I recall posts that they had to get help from sight-capable users to moderate r/blind.
I dunno. I think if the response has been a bit enough threat to their long-term goals they could have easily just walked back a bit by changing the pricing for API access and extending a grace period to developers already using the API.
They should just give up and leave, bless them for trying and all but haven't they learned anything...
Don't get me wrong. There's some support communities on Reddit I still visit. I don't want to see them burn down in flames. But there's no help from the admins coming. You might as well ask your cat.
almost everyone I know that uses reddit just switched to the official app if they weren’t using it already. Whether we want it or not a lot of normies started using reddit in the past few years and they just don’t care.
The protests had a good run i would say. Had a critical mass, reddit needed to react in some form or another, it got good press coverage. Not bad.
IMHO the turning point was when reddit started to message automated threats to the mods. Instead of escalating it further most subs just folded. Even though the community, subs and mods still had the upper hand at the time. There was no way for reddit to replace the mods of thousands of subs. They couldnt do it in a timely manner with even a single subreddit(i dont remember which it was, interestingasfuck?). What followed was funny but had no meaningful impact in any way. NSFW, swearing, John Oliver. Who cares?
Also a "fuck reddit" meme instead of "fuck spez" would have been IMHO a more impactful message since not only the ceo is a dickhead, the whole company sucks.
On top of just staying dark i think the community should have invested more time exposing the bullshit reddit was pulling off at the time. Like using bots powered by chatgpt. There was so much weird shit going on worth exposing.
I think part of the issue was that there needed to be a well promoted off-site hub for discussion and coordination established before action was taken.
Reddit was goining the way of the other big tech players, removing API for third party apps, maybe will remove old.reddit.com next ? force everyone to sign-up using their phone number, using your real names instead of nicknames, verifying your identity using goverment issued ID.
the sign is on the wall but the majority of people are fine with that, look how facebook hit the record of 3 billion users a month. these corps are too big to fail.
Third party apps still seem to work still, just logging in is broken on some. Not sure if reddit just “forgot” to disable anyonymous access or if they realized doing so would probably result in DDOSing themselves like twitter did.
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