I'd like to introduce the gizmodo.com writers to the term Pyrrhic victory. One look at /r/all and it's become nothing but reposts and memes that are hours, if not days old.
Reddit drove out its most important users - the moderators and content creators. They have enough old content to keep their viewership for awhile, but they'll never regain the community trust they've lost. And this will continue to kill their influx of new material, which will inevitably erode the viewer base.
Do I think reddit will die? No, it will continue on, just as have slashdot and fark and other staple communities from the same era, but the highwater mark of the community as the "front page of the internet" is long past.
Yep was going to say aww, video and pics are just dime a dozen memes that Facebook, twitter, whatever all do. Reddit USP was niche community that I have to admit i have not been able.to 100% escape. But I was hartnened that when watching good omens the sub I posted on for s1 is locked during s2.
In addition, the fallout is not over. Until recently I was using a 3rd party app that was only barred from signing in to reddit, I was still able to read and navigate the website. Now it seems that they have cut that access off so that drove me to create an account here.
I’ll still use reddit whenever I’m at my pc on weekdays, but if content moves elsewhere I will likely follow and wean off reddit further.
To be fair, it's been like that for a while. Just look at /r/videos. #11 sub on reddit. 30 million subscribers.
Right now:
3k online
top post is 18hrs old, 3k upvotes, 200 comments.
second top post is 10hrs old, 65 upvotes, 11 comments. This little thread we're in has more comments and will likely soon have more upvotes. This magazine has 1000 subscribers. /r/videos claims to have 30 million. It doesn't add up.
I strongly suspect reddit is lying about the true numbers. If you factor in repost bots, porn bots, and bots which increasingly repost comments from previous posts or comments from off site, reddit often feels abandoned.
Subreddits like /r/videos? Everyone left for tiktok.
Just look elsewhere on the site. Supposedly they have 500 million regular users, but if that's the case why is no one upvoting or commenting on anything? And it's summer, so the kids have far more free time.
But of course they're not upvoting or commenting, they're all on tiktok or wherever. Reddit has become a legacy social media.
Obviously, the fediverse is even more niche, but we're not pretending to be incredibly popular and don't need to boost our numbers for a looming IPO.
Agreed - I think that the trend was in play already. The protests tapped into it and definitely accelerated it, but the decline in the quality of posting and commentary has been steadily increasing since 2015. I personally mark the sudden popularity of The_Donald as the point at which the community started to die - the influx of Russian trolls, bots, and their 4chan goon squads was the beginning of the end for intelligent discussion on the site in my opinion.
Slashdot is actually a fairly active community that was never aspiring to be the "front page of the internet". As far as I can tell, it's about as popular as it ever was. And Fark isn't much different...slighlty less users than in the past, but they have some active content creators.
The comparison you're looking for is Digg. That was the previous "front page of the internet" before they committed suicide and handed the title to Reddit. Now they are a news aggregate site where almost all content is created by bots. This is the path Reddit is travelling down. Completely curated, AI generated, with bots commenting to create the illusion of engagement. It's almost there now. The amount of reposted content and copied comments has increased substantially over the last few years. And with the availability of LLMs now, it will only get worse.
Wait until the IPO, if it ever happens. The site will transform into a news aggregator ran by bots. No one will care about it anymore once Spez cashes out, or if he can't then the entire thing will implode dramatically. Just like Digg.
Lol - shows you how old I am. There was a point, pre-Digg and pre-Reddit, where Slashdot was the premiere news aggregation site (circa 2000 - 2004) followed closely by Fark.com as the premiere shitposting site... mainly because they were the first to use the post/commentary style that made Reddit and Digg so popular. Slashdot didn't aspire to this point of prominence - they simply assumed it because there was nothing else out there at the time that was as good.
You're correct that when Reddit and Digg came on the scene, they pretty much erased the concept of Slashdot or Fark being the "frontpage of the internet". Neither site died, as you note, and Slashdot in particular continued to maintain an active community that persists to this day by keeping their content tech-focused and not fucking with the user experience that made them popular in the first place.
I chose Fark and Slashdot as examples because I think unlike Digg (which just completely collapsed), I do see Reddit communities persisting in a similar reduced form.
Of course Reddit will carry on. But it will never be what it was. It will transform into an admin driven site, as opposed to a user driven site. The big subs will stay popular, filled with posts from admins posing as users, like in the early days. It this time it will be completely curated, and assisted by LLMs that will create the content that gets approved by admins. And posts will drive an algorithm, as opposed to just creating filler.
Really, a better comparison is Facebook, where content is constantly generated but very little is by actual users. You can scroll endlessly and never see the same thing twice. Which is exactly what Reddit is designed for. But Reddit will go one step further with LLM generated comments to goad real people into engaging. It's already happening now with low quality repost bots. Once admins control it, Reddit will be a sea of high quality bots talking to other high quality bots. And no one will know the difference. It'll look great from a numbers point of view when going for the IPO. But in a few years, it will essentially be a Facebook clone.
So tired of this dumb take. Reddit was never going to die, but the point is enough people cared to leave that alternative platforms like Lemmy are viable now. The Fediverse as a whole is getting more and more support every time a company does something stupid, so people that genuinely care and left Reddit did win.
Reddit was never going to “die” from the protests, but it’s certainly a shell of what it used to be. Technically, Digg, MySpace, and Tumblr are still around, and they still see daily users. They’ve just completely fallen out of popularity.
Yeah, and it’s not like reddit grow to that size overnight in the first place. Things take time. I think this and the stuff happening at Twitter are a nice kickstart to get lemmy and other ferdiverse stuff going. I for one am happier here, it feels somehow more like old school internet.
I think this and the stuff happening at Twitter are a nice kickstart to get lemmy and other ferdiverse stuff going.
Long live the ferdervers!
But seriously, I'm with you in sentiment. I'm never going back to the centralised/for-profit soc med services.
All their value comes from the free interactions between people chatting, and they think they deserve to get rich for renting the hall. Fuck that, we can just rent the infrastructure ourselves if that's what it takes to talk in peace.
I can speak for me that after RIF was disabled, I fully switched to Lemmy and I’m not looking back. The comment section here is way smaller but I think the quality is incomparable to late-stage reddit
It has grown… a lot. I have been here since the early protest days (6th of june). Those days, the front page was almost static for days, the most popular posts was lucky to get 20 upvotes, and it was a sensation to get 10 comments on a post.
I just can’t stand not being able to use my beloved custom clients. When twitter did its thing, I fully switched to mastodon and couldn’t be happier. When Reddit killed Apollo I just stopped using it, and I waited for an alternative client for lemmy or kbin to come around on iOS. I’m using Memmy right now, and although it’s not as polished as Apollo, it feels good to be on the fediverse.
I’m kinda on the edge about lemmy, I’d have preferred being on a kbin homeserver, but whatever, until a client for it comes around I’ll be in here
Have you looked into Voyager? It’s basically Apollo (with most of the core features of the original app). I use it as another Apollo refugee and I’m loving it
i joined reddit back on the ground floor with no subreddits, 'college' oriented.. and then i got to watch as it was built it something beautiful .. before conde... after the real money started coming in you could see the VC writing on the wall, im just surprised it took them this long.
i needed something to renew my interest in that ground floor, in what reddit was, and break my doom scrolling habits. Kbin FTW
reddit is dead to me, and thats what matters. I won.
While true, I feel like there is less “filler” content in my feeds, just probably because of how recently I’ve curated them. My reddit subs were a hot mess of 10 years of subbing to things with never doing any sort of mass sweep of things I’m not really finding value in.
I do worry about how the community will handle when that eventually becomes a problem, or how the community might keep it from becoming a problem in the first place. Low-quality posts are inevitable with a sufficiently large user base.
Reddit wasn’t going to die. Wasn’t about winning and losing. It was about making people aware of the bad business practice running in the background and trying to get them to change. Also, it would have been much better if there was a clear alternative offered. I only found out about Lemmy through a friend. Never saw anything about it throughout the protest.
I mean I don't think any of the people protesting actually thought 'yes, Reddit is absolutely going to back down as a result of the protests no question!'
What I think is pretty cool is that what was initially only going to be a two day black out that (from memory) 6000 subs signed up for turned into something much, much bigger. And got the CEO to say some pretty stupid things in black and white to the press to boot. It's done much more than it set out to do.
'Fuck Spez' was a stupid meme though. Should have been 'Fire Huffman' or something that meant something outside of Reddit users.
Not to mention, some big names did pull out. If I recall, r/IAmA said they were no longer going to liaison their big-name celebrity AMAs or verify posts. Someone at Mojang/Microsoft probably got nudged to no longer post on Reddit because r/Minecraft is no longer getting changelogs from Mojang.
This is 100% true. That said, I bet most redditors had no idea this was happening. But as I think about it. I bet most sub mods did, they could have found spines… but like you said…
I mean, I was mostly looking at the front page. Hard to imagine missing it unless you were just someone coming in from Google, which I know is a significant number but I’m not sure it’s near a majority
Sounds like your faith in the average redditor to have general awareness is quite lofty. I suppose I don’t share that conviction. For the record I never looked at the front page. Just jumped straight into my communities of interest.
No I have a low opinion of Redditors now. I just thought it was super hard to miss, but I didn’t use Reddit like you did. I will note however, that my news feeds even outside reddit were showing me articles about the API changes every day or two for a couple months.
Reddit removed mods and replaced them with other people who didn’t hold the same views. Once they broke the spine of resistance, other communities realised they lost.
I will occasionally check Reddit, but I’ve dropped it by about 90%. And I don’t post there anymore, even if someone is asking something I know the answer to. I would rather contribute on Lemmy and bring people into a FOSS, copyleft, non-corporate alternative.
We know the corporation thinks it can own a community.
We saw how the corporation treats people who put in immense quantities of work, FOR FREE, making the site worth using.
These dumb motherfuckers made it impossible for me to come back without it feeling like a betrayal. I’m out. Sixteen years last month, and I am just fuckin’ done. Any time I’m there again is either an accident, or an effort to preserve my own goddamn records from the last decade and a half.
Digg losing to reddit didn’t mean Digg went away. The empty box was never the point. It’s the users, stupid. And the people who just want a safe spot to shoot the shit with one another don’t need some fucking asshole deciding they’re doing it wrong. Certainly not if that useless whipped bastard declares that half the goddamn site will be ignored, when they demand the tiniest concession to reality. Do they know what reddit is for?! The whole website is predicated on democratized opinion, gated by moderator approval, and this absolute dolt brushed aside all levels of power, to declare that no action could possibly change one iota of corporate say-so.
K bye, fuckhead. Good luck with your box full of trolls and bots. Hope your IPO goes swimmingly, now that we’ve all seen the revenue-per-user figures putting reddit somewhere below advertising on bus-stop benches, before a critical mass of regulars just fuckin’ bounced.
And then you deleted all the money people gave you directly.
I go back intermittently cause lemmy just doesn’t have some communities yet or there empty but every time I do I’m reminded of there awful app why didn’t they just buy the good apps. Anyway hopefully sooner rather than later I never have to go back there.
I literally don’t care anymore. I should thank these greedy corporations, I’m spending more time in my workshop, making furniture, read more, using all this little off-time over the day much better. As I see it, we won. People. Gotta go now, a kitchen cabinet wants to have it’s final touches.
The focus is different. The Lemmy apps are trying to provide a good user experience, while the Reddit app is trying to cram as many ads as possible into the screen space.
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