How reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history: Did it, though?
How reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history: Did it, though?
Users were outraged, but Reddit mostly won.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1190537
How is reddit post protest, did it really win over protesters? Did the ones who left make a dent? Or like all things before, did it ultimately do nothing?
Of course they're gonna claim they won. Most people don't realise the sheer amount of bot generated content on there anyway, which has only increased.
87It’s going to dramatically increase. BotDefence, a popular moderator tool, is shutting down
30I've seen way less quality content on a few subs I enjoy. And on the biggest sub I mod, there was barely anything posted.
13bUt tHe bOtS wIlL hAvE tO pAy FoR tHe ApI tOo
i honestly wonder if they'll try to sell investors on this absolutely braindead take. after all, easier to ask for forgiveness five years later in court when you already appointed the right scapegoats
6
Before the protest, going to /r/all would show you posts with ages between 30 minutes and 3 hours. Today, on /r/all, there isn't a post less than 10 hours old in the first 40 entries. The content has changed from primarily trending news interspersed with memes to about 90% memes and shitposts padded with a few soft news summaries and opinion pieces.
In comparison, my Fediverse feed has exploded. The quality of content is at the level of pre-Digg reddit, and the commentary at a significantly higher level. There's still not as much of an audience, particularly in niche communities, but it feels like that's changing quickly. It's clear to me that the creative drivers of reddit - the mods, the content creators, and the engaged commentators - have left, and that the traffic is being maintained by a mostly non-participating readership that uses Reddit as entertainment, not a community.
Reddit crushed the creative spirit of its most active populations. Whatever wins Spez is claiming, it's come at the cost of what made the site worthwhile to begin with.
53That’s an interesting take. If reddit can claim victory, it would be a hollow one, even if the remaining mods do cave.
7Reddit has been careful to set the goalposts entirely in the realm they control, they ensured that in public communication "victory" means having the remaining subs open up. Ultimately, they do have final say over what is actually served on reddit.com. However, what they cannot control is their users, the contributors who built their empire for free. And they did a piss poor job of keeping us around.
They can force mods out, but they won't be able to force them back in. As for users, I have no doubt they managed to push away the ones most resistant to monetization, but if that really was their strategy, whichever moron came up with that really needs to google the 1-9-90 principle.
5It'd be a pyrrhic victory.
3
A note about niche community audience: the community count number only shows the number of poeple on your instance subscribed, not the total number. The only exception is if the community is on that server.
There is a PR for lemmy to make this a little more clear, but its not implemented yet.
4Completely agree. I think it’s just going to become a very mainstream basic place for basic discussion, probably with a lot of mean comments, racism, bigotry, etc. It wasn’t that way when I joined and it had already fallen pretty far when I left last month.
It’s not going to die as a site but the community is already gone.
3
That's not important, we've already moved here
42An incredibly insignificant amount of users migrated over, yes. Protest failed and got decimated. Reddit won. That's all there is to it.
-23Migrations take time, it was never going to be a flick of a switch. Reddit content will slowly get worse and worse, and Lemmy content (or some other competitor) will get better and better as more people move. it’s those core users that generate great discussion that matter the most and those people are looking for somewhere else.
22The users who left were often likely to be the most dedicated (which is why they were the most butt hurt). This is only the beginning and the exodus will continue and the content will decline, although I don't know why I'm even telling you this since you're probably a spezbot.
8Reddit: we are going to make our site objectively worse for everyone
Everyone: fuck you reddit, we will stop using reddit in protest
Reddit: ok
Everyone: Oh... Wait... So like I actually have to stop using reddit?
Reddit: ...
Everyone: Fine, we'll come back but I am fake mad about it!
7yeah but… who cares? we all won: there doesn’t need to be winners and losers
5Nobody pushes over the coke machine first try. You gotta keep rocking it.
5Insignificant? Putting aside the issue that it’s not the number that counts but the content the new lemmings create and the number of post shoot up by a million, I don’t have the numbers but we put a heavy pressure on Lemmy’s instances.
5
As long as we can keep up the content here, this has replaced Reddit for me.
The Connect for Reddit app is much more enjoyable to use than the official Reddit app. Heck, I even like it better than I did Sync for Reddit.
37This place is feeling a lot like the Reddit from 2008. Just get some rage comics back and this place will be 🔥🔥🔥.
Lemmy takes a bit more curation to start finding communities and has some rough spots, but I’m super excited for this.
11I'm all in for rage comics revival 💯
7
I personally think Jerboa is a the smoothest experience so far. But I'm planning to jump to Sync when it becomes available.
5I've settled on Jerboa for now. The only thing i can't find is a way to share a link to a community.
4
Permanently Deleted
32Thank you! All the effort people are making to make Lemmy like Reddit. With the bots reposting content here to “seed communities.” FFS, why did these people leave, then!? Same with, “but I want to see all the content on Threads!” Then join Threads. Lemmy is Lemmy. Please let it stay that way. People lose sight of the main point of the protest: the community of users. Those folks moved here and elsewhere. It’s those people, not bots or astroturfing communities, who are going to make Lemmy/Squabbles/Spyke/etc. great places.
24Who actually gives a fuck?
A lot of people do.
What Reddit has done and is doing is very big news due to their size and the role they play on the internet. Just because you have a teenager's snarky "who cares" attitude doesn't mean that this isn't important to a large portion of the online population, including many of the people who left reddit and came here.
9And also even though lots of people like to say there's no "competition" between Reddit and the Fediverse, that's not actually true. Social networks need a critical mass of people participating in order for them to be good. The two systems might not be in financial competition but they are in competition for users.
7besides, talking about news, reddit or not, is one of the main things communities on aggregator sites like lemmy or reddit do
3
I do. It’s about justice. Call me crazy, but I actively want to see companies that spite their users and customers lose. Reddit behaved like a mad dictator and didn’t value the only thing that made them valuable. And what‘s worse: they didn’t know it. They can F directly off until they turn back and apologize, at a minimum. Not so we can all go back to Reddit, because for me, that ship is sailed. But I’d prefer not having such deep disrespect for other humans, and I feel that action would be somewhat redeeming.
3I can browse kbin, without it bitching at me to download its app constantly. Good enough for me.
2
I saw that article and i thought, "Reddit won? I lost? That's funny, because i kinda feel like I'm winning."
31Yeah it feels like a useless competition. They felt the need to be bragging of ‘winning’ against their customers or products. I didn’t come here to win. I came here to not fight with that nonsense.
5is it a competition?
how does an individual win this competition?
2Nah, lemmy is still definitely the losing option. A fraction of the content for now and you can't post videos yet, hope that changes.
-13
Gaslight me daddy!
19Saw Lemmy, never looking back. I hated the mobile web interface anyway.
12I don't care what happens to reddit.
11Ditto. I didn’t come here to win anything. I came here to get out of playing the game.it’s a stupid game. It shouldn’t be a game.if anything that article confirms I made the right choice. If the bully of the playground is yelling how he’s won just cuz I went to a different park to play, he can have the playground. I don’t need that toxic shit in my life.
2
Elmo's twitter has taugh spez that you just take the hit and push through. Reddit has now alienated its powerusers, lost some historical content, and most of all decreased its potential for quality content. I believe that spez will even accept a decrease in MAUs. Any positive change now will have to come from other stakeholders.
10I was one of the top 1% karma earners on Reddit last year (just saying as a measure of activity). I left it at the blackout and I'm not going back.
11Same.
3
Yeah reddit won. But the whole fiasco led me to lemmy which I like much more, so they can have their cake
10Lemmy and Kbin won.
Reddit came out of it possibly still standing, but obviously weakened in many ways compared to before. Meanwhile, over here there's now a bunch of activity and the development and servers seem to be well funded. And we (the Fediverse) didn't even participate in the fight - it was all Reddit punching itself in the face.
The consumers also won, as we now have viable alternatives to choose from.
Maybe the fact that Reddit is still alive and active could be considered "winning", in which case Musk's Twitter is also "winning" every day. But that's one hell of a low bar for what should be considered a victory in a fight you yourself started.
21
So it WAS a game to him. Glad I stopped playing it.
6Very well presented. Strong points distilled to conciseness.
4Permanently Deleted
3