It will survive, it always does, but it will lose a chunk of users.
Reddit went corporate a long time ago, and the only reason I ever went there was because I had RIF on my phone. Now I don't, so I won't, and I'm sure there are many like me.
But if they survived all their other controversies there isn't any reason to think they won't survive this one too.
Sad to say... Most people don't care, they just consume.
Yeah I’m with you. Core reddit has been a disaster for a long time. I happily left a long time ago and eventually came back as 3rd party apps allowed me to have s completely different experience on mobile and I could finally stop using desktop (though res always lively fondly in my heart).
I’m moving away from Reddit for a least a while too see how things begin to unfold. Will try Lemmy, too, and see if it grows enough to be worthwhile and have the momentary to build some sort of critical mass offer time. Seeing some major said move here (Boost, for me) will be awesome.
But I don’t expect reddit to disappear. As was said, for a ton of people, the 3rd party so exodus is not impactful, if they’re even aware of it.
I’d guess Reddit continues for a long time, but becomes even more diluted than it has since the tencent investments and the huge leave-facebook migration from a few years ago.
I'm not sure this is true. Social media is very temporary - even thought people feel a sense of permanence it is false. It's today's content people consume, today's users that matters. While there is a lot of interesting old content on reddit, the vast majority of people are there for the new.
So when a social media site goes into decline, it can be a rapid downward spiral. Digg has been mentioned here, but also MySpace was by far the biggest social media platform in its day - it imploded in less than a year or two when Facebook came alone. Tumblr was a big blogggin site until it started first forcing people to it's app, and then outright banned adult content - it imploded almost immediately and people moved on to Twitter and Reddit with that content.
Reddit mistake is they did not value what they had - users generating content, and users moderating themselves. Reddit is nothing more than a host, but they see the content as their property to monetise. Today is not the first step on their own decline, but it will certainly accelerate it.
I suspect the fediverse will be the long term solution. This first major wave of migration brings in the early adopters, including crucially people who are interested in coding and development which will benefit Kbin and Lemmy. Further waves of users will follow and find more mature established communities when they arrives. I expect the next big battle to be over adult content - advertisers are already nervous about it with it's use in protests, and the simplest solution is to ban it. Even if reddit reversed it's course on the API, I think the damage is done and the course is decline to irrelevance.
But Reddit biggest mistake around the API is not the API itself; you're right most users won't care. But it's big mistake is losing the users who care - they are the power users, the technically savvy users, the early adopters. Reddit big mistake is it has encouraged those people to leave and help develop it's competitor and alternative. That is why this has been so important and that is why I think reddit is probably not salvageable now.
Last time someone tried to compete with reddit it was single handed and closed - Vo.at. Now it's open source, collaborative and decentralised.
It’s truly a mystery to me how the Reddit execs, investors, and board of directors think that these changes, and the way they’ve been rolled out, will be good for the long-term health and prosperity of the company. Even short term with an IPO on the horizon, none of this makes any sense. Maybe I just don’t understand the nuances of company valuations, IPO’s, executive pay, etc., but I don’t see how this move makes anything better for anyone involved. I could at least understand them shitting on the mods, communities, and apps if it meant a better payday for the investors and execs (it would be selfish and lousy, but at least I could understand it). I don’t understand the wisdom of this in the slightest.
The problem is that Reddit users are generally pretty savvy. They know how ad block works and they know not to click to dumb links. This is bad for investors.
Reddit will go the same way as Digg. The site will remain, but the lurkers will start to migrate once it becomes apparent that the 1% of us that create content have mostly left. Down the line in a few years, we’ll all be laughing at the pissbaby formerly known as Steve Huffman and say “Anyone remember THAT clusterfuck? Oh man, he really thought he had it made, talk about fucking yourself over!”
RIF made Reddit bearable to surf on a phone, without it, there’s just no point. RIP RIF, you were a fucking amazing app for the tiny investment it cost everyone!
Reddit will fizzle out very very slowly. A bunch content creators and mods that use 3rd party apps have left. What is left is the mass horde. It will survive on tiktoc and Twitter reposts for a long time. Like years... and eventually it will become stagnant and boring and the horde will find something new and disperse. It won't even be clear that this is what caused it or if it is the normal tide of the internet. To stay relevant you need to have progress that keeps people's attention. This move is a regression that will kill it in the long term.
Yeah, I think the big thing here isn’t really users it’s creators - I’ve tried various interesting things on Reddit, created some tools and bots because it used to be a great platform for that but going forward there’s no way I’ll waste time making them there when I could make them here.
A lot of the most interesting new things will get made here, especially with how flexible it is for people customizing their own instance to create totally new experiences. Over time there will be increasing more reasons to have a Lemmy account which will result in more people casually participating and shifting over this way.
I think you are correct. In later years it became more and more tiktok reposts and the same post over several subs. I saw a Ghostgum video when he compared it to the escape from Tumblr
People are right, Reddit will live on as a shell of its former self. In time, people will forget that this happened and the API change and loss of third party apps that didn’t want to pay those high fees will also be forgotten by those on Reddit.
Yes, it will survive. I still use it and will continue to use it because for me, Lemmy is not a fully replacement for many of the niche communities I follow.
I’m really excited about Lemmy and the fediverse in general. I’ve grown tired of small “for the people” web services turning corporate and fucking us all by jamming ads into our face or delivering a bunch of bullshit content they want us to consume.
I went to the internet at an early age in part because I could find content that wasn’t littered with advertisements and all the other bullshit on TV. The fediverse seems like it can be a space more like the original internet, separated from the few big players (Meta, Twitter, Google, and I suppose Reddit now).
Just head over to Digg and take a look around. All redditors were on Digg before they messed up the interface and pissed people off. Then almost everyone left digg for Reddit (about 15 years ago I think).
Same thing will happen with Reddit - people will get pissed at the lack of apps to access reddit, the native app sucks and they are going to do away with old.reddit soon enough.
The damage has been done, people like me have discovered the fediverse (and squabbles.io ) - I get my social media fix here now. And for the time there aren't a ton of trolls and bots manipulating post to push them to the top of r/all
Probably not, still too big to fail at this point, but hope CEO gets canned. Spez singlehandedly devaluated and depopulated Reddit while treating userbase as garbage. Fuck you Spez.
Made an off color joke and I had already used up my temporary suspensions months ago.
It was a triple parentheses (((them))) joke. In the context I was replying to, I thought it was a pretty obvious, if perhaps a poor taste joke. But I guess the admins vehemently disagreed.
I think reddit will eventually shrug it off. There's an enormous number of users who think their app is perfectly fine and claim to not even notice the ad spam. Whether they're blind or braindead is another question and I don't get it, but most people don't care.
The ones who do care are the ones who still know old.reddit and make the platform worthwhile with their expertise. As those people migrate elsewhere reddit will become even more mediocre and irrelevant.
Reddit will survive, just like Twitter and yahoo are still alive. But eventually nobody will even notice that it's still alive.
As much as I would like to boycott it completely, there are still too many big communities there, too much information you can't reasonably find anywhere else.
I've stopped posting and commenting to stop contributing to the problem, and obviously I won't be using it on mobile, but already before the API shutdown there were many users that were OK with using their official app.
Many mods gave up their protests when reddit applied pressure, instead of e.g. saying "you don't like NSFW tags without NSFW content? Ok, for compliance, every post needs to contain a picture of an asshole".
Reddit will probably either take over the remaining communities or let them die. It still has critical mass. It'll survive, at least for a while, until something better comes along to replace it. I hope Lemmy will be able to do it but I doubt it. Too many rough edges, too many issues around federation and defederation, no critical mass (yet).
Yes, it will. But at what cost? Over time, the brain drain will likely become more pronounced as moderators jump ship and those who remain become a compliant group of lickspittles. As Reddit faces the consequences of its disastrous policies, it will become even more aggressive in securing revenue - and likely even more despotic. It can take years to build a reputation, and a few months to lose it. I suspect that their CEO has done an excellent job of accelerating this process.
That’s the bigger part of why I left; There’s probably 12-18mo of good content on the niche communities I liked, but 1) RIF and RES kept me away from the obnoxious format the site adopted, and 2) I know it’s just going to keep getting worse. Better to rip the band-aide off now.
I think the rise in trolling and negative commenting without moderation is starting to show. With Rif scheduled to die, I've been spending a bit of time there and the bullying type comments seem to be worse than I remember.
I don't think it will die too much as the content is still coming in by the looks of it, but it's probably going to turn into a sea of YouTube comments.
The negativity over the protest really came to the forefront in most of the subs. A lot of the subs that still have echoes of the protest like /pics still get a lot of blowback over it. People simultaneously denigrate reddit (why tf do you care about a social media site?!) and yet get bitterly angry when people care about it enough to change things.
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