I read The Verge’s latest interview with Steve Huffman here and it seems as though the Reddit blackout is having little to no effect. It also seems as though the communities at large don’t really care and will probably just use the official app or don’t really know there are 3rd party ones. So it seems this will pass and be mostly forgotten about.
What are your thoughts?
This will end exactly the same way the Twitter -> Mastodon thing ended.
Reddit will continue. A slightly worse Reddit, with more bots, more low-effort content, and less quality OC.
Moderation will degrade slightly as the admins replace protesting moderators with more obedient ones, and/or communities lose interest and use the new “voting” (lol) systems to pick admins which will give them the reliable dopamine hits.
A small percentage of Redditors, especially the power users, will move on. A small percentage in Reddit terms is a tidal wave for any other platform. Some percentage of that number of Redditors leaving will come here.
Lemmy & Kbin will experience growing pains. Issues caused by scaling up infrastructure, instance to instance friction, etc. These will get resolved with time. When things settle, we will have a fraction of reddit’s userbase, but neither will we need more. We’ll have enough to have stable, engaging communities which will slowly grow.
In other words, a mirror reflection of the Mastodon story.
Twitter relies on celebrities, athletes, and journalists. All of them want to be where the eyeballs are so until Mastodon grows more, they’ll stay on Twitter.
Lemmy just needs to continue to grow and improve. Maybe it never gets as big as reddit but the content has the potential to be just as good.
In the three or so days I’ve been using it it’s expanded noticeably, and I’d say it’s on the verge of being big enough already. Once it rounds that tipping point it has a decent chance of becoming sustainable on its own.
It reminds me of old reddit when it was primarily tech-heavy content filled with passionate developers constantly building on top of the platform. I doubt Lemmy or kbin ever see a fraction of reddit’s traffic but that’s ok with me as the content is better suited to me and the conversation taking place is just as valuable
Having been on Lemmy now for a few weeks it’s really brought home to me how brand and bot driven Reddit had become.
I spend a few hours here a day and have yet to see a single post which subtly (or non subtly) includes branding.
It’s really quite refreshing to just be among other people, our thoughts and opinions without being sold to.
Like the Reddit of yester year for sure…
I think it was bound to happen at some point. Like the tech-oriented part of the conversation moved from reddit to Hacker News in a drip feed.
All of them want to be where the eyeballs are
This might be a little different for a website like reddit, where lurkers want to be where the content creators are. Concent creators, posters don’t need lurkers as much as lurkers need them.
But to make Mastodon more enticing, it should be necessary for celebrities to also post there. Feels like a “the chicken or the egg” situation.
Why not post in both places? Many celebrities probably don’t directly post on Twitter, it’s a job for the PR team. Most celebrities probably are not even aware of Mastodon. But the PR teams probably are.
Then what is the chance that petty little CEO decides to punish anybody posting in the competition? Most PR teams might also have this on their minds.
And Reddit will probably do something else before long to drive even more people away and hopefully the Fediverse will be better prepared and ready for the influx with a better user experience.
Don’t forget Reddit making a few more incredibly dumb and tone-deaf moves to give the ‘threadiverse’ a few more influxes of users while the bugs & issues with Lemmy and Kbin are worked out! :)
Of course he is going to say there is none. With the latest news how they are undeleting peoples comments and are going to replace mods; it is absolutely affecting the bottom line
They sure are trying really hard to put a stop to the blackout they say is having no effect.
It may be true that the disturbance has minimal effect on overall site traffic and advertising revenue, but it’s caught the attention of the media which could have much larger effects.
But the blackout isn’t really what’s catching most of the attention anymore, it’s the mishandling of the situation that’s ending up in the news most of the time now. Spez is bringing most of this on himself.Unfortunately, articles I’ve seen about this on the front pages of major, classic, news outlets primarily report spez’s position and don’t mention any of the nonsense stuff that’s gone on.
If there is no effect, then why is he losing his ever loving mind over it? Why are they going to potentially change rules that have stayed the same since Reddit’s inception as a result?
I believe there was a report saying that they’re changing policy to allow moderators to be voted out. If true, to me if they are announcing something so drastic, which can be manipulated by bots, then there is an impact of some kind.
I’d guess there’s impact if they’re forcing subs to reopen via threats and generally acting like tyrants with the self control of a toddler.
I think this is the wrong question to ask. The real question is if Lemmy is good enough for you to replace Reddit, and if not, how can we improve it. What happens to Reddit is irrelevant, and in my view it will continue spiraling towards being a hellhole of memes, ads and guerrilla marketing. Some people will stay there no matter what, and for me that’s fine - I’m not sure if I have much to discuss with people like that in the first place.
I don’t really care. I’m here now, deleted my 12 year old account in the process. People thinking Reddit will die are delusional. The Reddit as us old people know it has died years ago, it just became unbearable now.
I have to admit that I’m enthusiastic about the whole fediverse thing mostly because reddit became the new facebook. Reddit used to be a bit of a nerdy place but gradually it became just another shitty social network. The people who migrate away from reddit right now are the nerds who care about things like a decentralized internet, which is exactly the kind of geeky thing that old reddit’s userbase cared about.
Reddit right now is like the Simpsons. It won’t die but it stopped being good a long time ago.
Agreed, couldn’t care less about Reddit, the protest was a damp squib in most respects, Spez knew it would be business as usual Wednesday so just waited until it all blew over. Some are carrying on, they say mods may be forced out, if people had any sense they’d walk away from the place. We were slowly but surely being turned into product.
Agreed. I’ve been feeling that way about reddit for some time now. This whole thing just helped me pick my next distraction a bit sooner.
Yeah , like every time Facebook was in a massive scandal - they’ll still have a billion users and unlimited money to make problems go away - but is it a nice place to be? 🥶🥶
Considering the volume of bots spreading venom about it, I have to say it’s doing something
I mean, if that’s how they treat the mods, who would want to mod for reddit? It is unpaid work, the only reasons they are doing it would either be to feel empowered or to foster a community. What spez did is to tell mods they are powerless and to show them the community doesn’t matter. Without good mods, people won’t be sticking around.
This incident won’t be the last straw, but it will be the turning point of a slow and general decline.
Yup, it reminds me so much of Tumblr’s shitty decision making right up to the porn ban.
I think one needs to see the bigger picture here. The protest that started earlier this week might not have left a big dent in reddit yet. What it did though is raise attention and increase awareness for alternative news/content aggregators like kbin. They’re not anywhere close to competing with reddit yet but the door got opened.
The shortsighted reddit politics basically helped to kickstart their own future competitors. If we do our best here and bring in good content, comment and get past only consuming there will be a real chance to become more appealing than reddit in the long run. I’m definitely here to stay.
I’m gone, that’s for sure. And it’s so much better. My blood pressure is lower.
I’ve decided to devote the time I spent there on learning programming. Much more useful. And roam around here some still of course.
Enough for them to refuse to comply with GDPR, restore user content against user’s will and make deleting account hard/impossible. Not to mention bots set up to ban people who wiped their contributions to install second thoughts into anyone who did. They are absolutely affected. Let it motivate you.
Not hard deleting all of a user’s information on request goes against the right to be forgotten AFAIK, I hope the EU screws then
If you have the time don’t just hope but rather report them. :)
Zero impact on Reddit.
Reddit has 52 million daily active users and approximately 430 million users who use it once a month. In comparison, Lemmy has a mere 143k users and kbin has about 33k users. Reddit hasn’t noticed that anyone left, and it never will.
Reddit will consolidate its platform and fully implement its ad business. 99.9% of users will stick around because they don’t care that much about 3rd party apps. Reddit will then have a big revenue stream from ads, allowing it to achieve profitability and do an IPO, which will bring in another boatload of money. At that point Reddit has plenty of cash to invest in improving its in-house app, mod tools, spam filters, etc.
Yep, this is the most realistic take. They did give lemmy/kbin a boost that will be home to a bunch of users, but it’s not winner take all. Both will now exist. People won’t leave reddit until they are personally affected. Most people didn’t care about 3rd party apps, and once the blackout is over, regular users won’t care unless reddit attacks them directly.
It won’t improve them though. It will further restrict what is accepted as the shareholders won’t want piracy or jailbreaking or posts critical of products or organized campaigns such as strikes or talk of unions that hurt their bottom line.
Reddit is going to the highest bidder.
