In the statement from the AMA mods, they stated that if Reddit wanted to continue providing that sort of celebrity outreach that they had been doing for free, they should hire a liaison for that.
Before the mods took that responsibility on for themselves, Victoria (/u/chooter on Reddit) used to be that person.
Victoria was able to pull in some big names for AMAs, and she was good at identifying good/interesting questions and helping with submitting responses. Reddit unceremoniously fired her one day and the quality of celebrity AMAs dropped significantly after that.
I just had a good laugh at myself because rampart is so non-existent in my mind, that I had to Google what the hell you were talking about.
So Woody Harrelson is forever famous for the worst AMA ever because he aggressively plugged a movie that must’ve been so bad and irrelevant that I have no idea what people are talking about when they reference it today.
Lol I remember someone in that thread asking Woody if he remembered taking a high school girl to her prom and knocking her up. And the social media manager faking Woody’s involvement just answering “can we stick to the movie?”
Yeah the entire AMA was a dumpster fire, but that was when things really devolved. It quickly got upvoted to the top, and it refused to die. Every single comment he made was quickly bombed with “why haven’t you answered that prom question yet” responses.
It's amazing to me how sanitized the reddit front page is. All this nonsense going on right now (which Reddit The Company, and Steve Huffman in particular is responsible for) is incredibly important to any potential future of Reddit The Website, up to and including the possibility of Reddit (the Website, the Company, and the Userbase) becoming irrelevant.
But go browse reddit, and you have to look for it. Right now, the first arguably "anti-spez" submission is from r/shitposting, halfway down page two.
And that's it. There's nothing else. If you wanna talk about the current events of the website you're on, on that website, apparently go fuck yourself.
Most people don't actually give a crap and those of us that did probably already left. I think this is mostly what Reddit was banking on happening. The question remains whether those that have left also were contributing the most content through posts or comments which could make the site stale and in turn drive more people away.
I'm surprised at how low-value the content appears to be. My Frontpage, which I've curated fairly meticulously, looks like All, and All looks like a Tiktokky shit show.
I suspect they've fiddled with the algorithm in order to put their finger on the scale and better control the narrative, and also, a non-negligible group of original content contributors have decided to step away.
I’ll be very curious to see the stats start rolling in regarding any decrease in Reddit’s views, etc. since July 1. I’m still using it, but only about half as much as I did with Apollo.
I’m only using Reddit on Safari now that Apollo is gone and, even then, my use has been minimal since the blackout last month.
It will be slow, but Reddit’s death will be fine for me. I will definitely miss the smaller, niche communities, but I think they’ll all find a way to carry on either through Lemmy, et al, or whatever rises from there.
Reddit’s decisions, from investing in NFTs to letting go of Victoria way back when, have all been contributing to the inevitable, but when the content providers leave - and they are - the site will just collapse. My schadenfreude lies in Reddit never even realizing its IPO after all this drama.
You should try Comet. It’s not as great as Apollo, but I think it’s better than Narwhal. Why there are many still up and running but Apollo was nixed way before midnight is beyond me.
That being said, r/all definitely doesn’t have as much substance as it use to.
there was definitely a dip, but there seems to always be a dip on weekends and with it being a holiday in the US it is hard to say how much that is affecting usage
Wednesday should be the first ‘normal’ day since July 1st so I’ll be interested to see how much it recovers
I don’t really care if Reddit dies as long as we keep getting good content here on the fediverse. So far I have been totally surprised exactly how good this place has been as far as activity goes. I will miss the niche communities on Reddit so if we can siphon a bit more growth off this is excellent but the various Lemmy servers have enough activity to replace Reddit for general content for me
I doubt we will see any big dent in numbers so soon, if at all. The brutal honest truth is that most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else. This is why subreddits protested as they did, interrupting the content feed with blackouts and extremely niche rules.
What may actually happen is that a lot of the content creators leave, which will decrease the quality of the site in the long term and maybe push out the casual user when the content gets bad enough. This is not something easily quantifiable, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
But personally, I’m ok even if reddit isn’t toppled. Now that I’ve stopped using it, I have no stake in the matter anymore.
Yeah. In the beginning I'm rooting for the death of reddit but now that I've weaned myself off of it I just don't give a shit any more. They can rake in billions, or they can crumble tomorrow. I'm elsewhere and I feel fine.
I hope reddit adopts twitters new rate limiting and stars making people log in to view content that will really drive traffic away and make searches for blank reddit searches dissappear from Google and hopefully be replaced by blank lemmy start showing up in Google
most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else.
And, a lot of the content creators and content moderators leave, decreasing the quality of the content on reddit.
Then, these lurkers will leave the platform.
I don’t see why these folks would stay on reddit if the content decreases in quality. Especially, if we are assuming these lurkers do nothing to contribute to the content they are consuming.
It’s interesting, you actually provided great evidence which counters your original claim that reddit will not be affected by all of this bad publicity.
The point of contention which is why I believe as above is that the standards of most people still on reddit are fairly low. Reddit has been going downhill for years, this much is known; it’s only now, with this latest screw up, that I, (assumedly) you, and many others have decided to jump ship. I, personally, willfully ignored much of the enshittification of reddit, content that I could use third party tools and apps to make up for it’s deficiencies; now that reddit is showing they don’t care about us and are tearing down those tools, I’m gone.
But for many others, they don’t care about any of the current goings on. Many do not even understand how the site actually works, confusing mods with admins as the same thing and not even getting that a sub could shut down (I was a mod, and saw many pieces of mod mail that amounted to “why can’t I see posts here help”). Their standards for how bad things can get until they’ll make a change in their browsing habits are surprisingly resilient.
I don’t think Lemmy is big enough for more high profile people to come here. The main reason celebrities do AMAs are for publicity for whatever they’re promoting. Lemmy has way less total users than /r/iama has.
It wasn’t originally any celebrities or high profile people at all, it was literally like, “I’m a postal worker who’s also an amputee, AMA” and it was great. Rampart ruined the format, IMO.
Seriously. A few were cool. But most were pretty much just marketing teams with celebrities who couldn’t care less about the 2011 hit crime drama Rampart starring Woody Harrelson
I love the smaller ones. And I think that made early reddit AMA great. Also whoever that girl was that helped do the AMAs was great. Who remembers that era. She was a mini celebrity and then they fired her.
Lemmy could definitely make headway by going back to the basics and doing AMA with random people with cool or niche expertise
I remember how James Corden got fucked over while holding his AMA. Good times.
The Fediverse needs to trick him over here too, so we can do it again. See it as the Fediverses official legitimization or coming-of-age ceremony on the internet.
It’s so weird. Ellen is a horrible mean person but she gets a talk show. Corden is a horrible mean person and he gets a talk show. Is it because Carson was also a horrible mean person or something?
It’s one of the reasons I stopped going to them. Once I realized that if I saw an AMA for a specific person, it must have meant that they were just there shilling some new project.
It was a flawed system, but it really benefited Reddit. Volunteer mods did it because they were supposed to be the leaders of their communities and reddit was supposed to just be a platform for hosting them. By attacking that system they removed the main incentive for volunteer mods to exist.
AMAs stopped being interesting a while ago. It was more like a quick press release session with celebrities trying to promote their latest stuff.
I kinda miss the IAmA part of it. People like us in usual or unusual circumstances sharing their daily lives. Like researchers in remote islands, members of ethnicities or cultures that rarely get media attention, cool or unconventional jobs and how they got there, etc. People and their stories.
Agreed, all it is now is a marketing stunt. Usually with responses built by some lawyer or publicist. But anyway, 1 horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses?
There are a couple small subreddits I’m part of that are lifelines, close communities for people who need a space to share information & be themselves. I’ve checked in on them once during the past month & they’re still holding together. The mods are staying because those small groups of users need them & don’t have another place to go. I expect once the Fediverse spawns more highly specialized niche communities, they’ll drift over.
Honestly, any user or mod that sticks around Reddit after this entire thing…I just don’t get. How can you be so disregarded, have your opinion so thoroughly dismissed, and then just keep creating content and driving traffic to the company? Fuck capitalism, but fuck reddit in this particular instance.
Some of us are still occasionally browsing parts of reddit because not every niche community has fully made the transition yet and said niche communities are the ONLY places to get relevant, timely information for those niches.
I know for me there are some decade+ old MMO communities that haven’t swapped over yet. Since many of the old wikis got shut down years ago when fandom, etc, took over everything, for some games the only choices are youtube and reddit. Personally, I hate youtube’s monetization forcing tiny bits of information to be strung out into 15-20+ minute videos more than I hate what the reddit team is doing, and I hate what’s happened to reddit a LOT.
The move is going to be an ongoing process for a while.
Labeling everyone with broad brush strokes misses some of the nuance of the situation, but I look forward to the day I no longer have to visit Reddit for the information I’m looking for.
I understand users, they just want the forum and don’t care about the politics.
Mods on the other hand… it’s a busy job that you are already doing for free. If the platform is turning against you what incentive is there to work for them?
I didn’t even care about the original API issue that much but when spez started talking shit and heavy handing mods it left such a bad taste that I’m here on Lemmy now.
Big companies representatives 😉 doing AMAs telling the truth about the horrible things their companies are doing would be interesting to say the least.
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