Yeah the article ends up pretty much making this point too:
We’re at the dawn of a platform shift. As Google tunes its algorithms and incorporates more AI content into its search results, the business model of the entire internet is undergoing an unpredictable change. Over the long term, Reddit’s scrambling efforts at financial security may prove just as futile as the moderators’ attempts to fight back.
I'm really glad to be out from under all that corporate social media bs.
Good for them, but the damage is already done. They seeded this place with a lot of users. Will it be enough? Who knows. But Lemmy is probably a looooot further along than if they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.
This place obviously needs to continue with good content and active communities, but at moment I don’t really have the urge to open Reddit they way things are.
I lurked on reddit for years. I was lurking here for a couple weeks now but thought I should make an account to contribute. Reddit has gone down hill and I’ll never go back.
I'm glad to have moved to lemmy. It feels raw and real, vs reddits polished curated feel. As if I'm actually reading posts by people. And I like that is doesn't get me scrolling too much.
The host of a tech podcast I listen to has had a Mastodon instance for years. I knew of the Fediverse because of that, but I always thought of it as decentralized Twitter and not necessarily a way to decentralize all types of social media platforms.
When RiF died I deleted my accounts and found my way here. I still open a couple of niche subreddits from time to time just to check on updates but otherwise my time on Reddit is done. 2010-2023 (damn I hate to admit that).
Yup, I saw the paltry userbase and didn’t bother. Other alternatives like lobste.rs and Tildes were a bit too closed, so I just stuck with Reddit. When Reddit decided to be stupid, I tried out lemmy and haven’t looked back.
Thee developers really crunched over July. It went from a niche beta platform to fully featured third-party apps and a ton of platform optimizations in a month, which is really impressive.
Yeah, even when I’ve had the urge to check Reddit for something I’m trying to figure out, I will do everything I can to avoid it. And if I can’t, I try to determine how much I care about what I’m searching before I even give them a single click. It’s a small, insignificant protest, but it’s a forever protest, for me. I’m happy on lemmy, I don’t browse as much, I interqct with more of the community and want to help build it. On Reddit, I felt dirty because of everything they’ve been doing the last 5 or so years. Tencent, killing third party apps slowly and then in one fell swoop, etc. fuck ‘em
I've had to visit Reddit twice since the protests started, to get information from a specific user. Both times, I used Brave browser in Private mode. They didn't get to count me as a login, they couldn't serve me ads, and their trackers were blocked.
I don't anticipate needing to go back to Reddit ever again, but for anyone who can't avoid it, I recommend that method.
I mean it’s pretty damned true though. Reddit won their stupid fight. They were always going to. Yeah they lost a lot of users, but there still a ton of users left.
They probably paid for the title but the article isn’t actually that peachy, I’d say its assessment is accurate. The Reddit sub protest is over, and technically spez got his way, but the platform has been damaged and may recover or may begin to die out and be replaced.
I doubt it given the way the article ends- it suggests that while reddit’s leadership got it’s way, that the incident might still have damaged the platform’s reputation and that in the long term reddit might not be successful in it’s attempts to be profitable either. I’d imagine a paid article would have a more positive or confidence-inducing message than that.
I've moved to using my time to watch more movies. I plan on reading but it's a process to get me away from a screen at the moment. I check kbin maybe two or three times a day for about 30min increments. I used to spend hours and hours on reddit, but I like not having to constantly check it. I'm not really active on any other social media site, and reddit was basically my one and only. Now I just pop on kbin from time to time.
Yeahhh. Even if they reverted everything, brought back the apps, and released a scheduled weekly video of Spez crying as different mods whip him with a belt, I am not interested.
Reddit can do whatever. I found an adequate replacement due to the protests, and I took it in direct response to Spez's clockwork PR disasters, so the protests did not fail for me.
Interesting read that should have gone without saying to anyone trying to manage a company, what trust thermoclines are and how to avoid them.
Judging the worth of the protests depends on what your individual goal was. If it was convincing reddit admins not to cut and run with a giant pile of free money, now you know better. Nothing in the company's history made me think they were the type, which is itself a warning sign.
If it was reddit going down in flames, that's always a slow burn and seems nigh unavoidable for any company as the years stretch on and management grows complacent, but they visibly did damage themselves because you're reading this.
And it was enough damage that several hundreds of thousands don't really mind making their home at a competitor instead. It's only going to get worse, not because they don't already have millions of users who didn't leave, but because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.
The protest was a death sentence because their proven problem solving method is to ignore the problems as they mount.
because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.
Specifically, if you volunteer to moderate, create content, or build community on Reddit, you will be insulted and dismissed by people who are only in it for the money.
Honestly, those still on Reddit are either lurkers or never gave a shit about the “protests” to begin with. The real measure will be the IPO. With that said, one tech group stroking off another means very little, anymore. Gizmodo can write their fluff piece.
The capitalists are concerned about the plebs using social media to organize and call out lies, doing everything they can to break up or muddy the waters of social media platforms ahead of the 2024 US presidential elections. The goal is to disrupt the platforms and drive away dissenting users who would use these platforms to organize against them and debunk misinformation/lies.
Musk buys Twitter (for far more than it was worth, lol) and drives it into the ground. Zuckerberg starts Threads to give people another “slowly boiling pot” to catch some of those looking for Twitter-alternatives. Spez and company enact changes to the platform, to artificially inflate their ad revenue ahead of their final valuation, which can’t happen if users are allowed to skirt their ads with better clients. I didn’t talk about Facebook, but it hasn’t been relevant since COVID showed us how bat-shit crazy our families and neighbors are. Facebook is basically Nextdoor, but world-wide. We can’t forget about the TikTok users. The parent company can’t be touched or bought so they’re just trying to outright ban the platform here.
The ultra-wealthy are showing us how scared they are of the up-and-coming new demographic of voters, who grew up on social media, know how to use it better than them, in ways they couldn’t predict, and don’t give a fuck about TV news, printed media, or corporatized websites. The last two elections have slowly been reversing the progress these regressionists have made using the gullibility and entitlement of the Boomer generation, the ignorance of the Gen-X generation, and the brittle corpses of the millennials to push their agenda.
The Arab Spring showed these wealthy fuckers how dangerous the people can be when they are allowed to use social media to organize and they don’t want it to happen again at a time when we’re finally starting to wise up to the “two-sides-of-the-same-coin” world we live in, and a new voting season has so much on the line for them.
Fuck the wealthy, money’s made up, and may ass cancer rid us all of their kind!
Thank you! Someone finally gets it! The rich fucks are scared of a new generation that sees the two parties as what fhey are: two sides of the same corrupt, owned by the rich, coin.
As I understand it, reddit has shattered its trust with its userbase and has hemmoraged users because of it. I can hardly view that as a ‘win’ for them.
The remaining users have proven they’ll all willingly look at ads and suffer an inferior UX. It’s a win for reddit. There’s not much they can do to get rid of this core user group of… What, 90% of their users? That doesn’t care if they make things worse.
It matters to me, which is why I left. At the end of the day, I don’t care one bit if the social network I use is financially successful, only if it provides me a good experience.
Depends on your definition of “won”. I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that the real winners who were able to migrate somewhere better, and that those platforms got enough of an influx to actually become worth visiting.
Well, I only allowed Open Source software on my phone. Because the reddit website is pretty unusable compared to lemmy, I can’t use reddit anywhere excrpt PC and just switched to lemmy. But I also use Jerbora Open Source app.
Imo, nobody won here and the reddit user lost everything. The Fediverse wasnt ready for the influx of users and lost its chance to “win” for a long time. The sites couldn’t support the load and there was a lack of polished mobile apps that felt familiar to people that wanted to browse and shit post.
Without content – without interaction, a platform whithers; and my experience, so far, has been comment oasises while scrolling through pages of desert.
It works fine for me. There was little to lose from Reddit at that point anyway because the quality had already gone through the floor. This was the catalyst to make people wake up and leave.
there was a lack of polished mobile apps that felt familiar to people that wanted to browse and shit post.
I’d argue that’s a good thing, I’d rather have posts that aren’t shit.
Unfortunately that is starting to seep back in here now.
Exactly how I feel! I don’t care at all what happens on the other site. This whole thing opened my eyes to what it has become, and it’s not just the API, that place has become toxic af.
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