So I’ve seen a few posts regarding news outlets calling the protests a failure, and I don’t really think that’s the case. The protests have clearly made an impact, especially if the Reddit CEO is willing to oust MODS to reopen subreddits. I truly believe that something has been jump started here on Lemmy, Kbin, and all of the fediverse. What happened on Reddit has simply pushed those already on the fence, or looking for other social media platforms to jump ship. I truly believe the impact is greater than what the media and Reddit in general want us to believe. Something has started here on the fediverse that simply cannot be stopped, all we can do is inform others and show why it’s the future of aggregated news boards and social media.
Whether or not it’s was a failure depends on what you expected from it. Reddit was not going to change its mind. The investors demand more money and will continue to squeeze Reddit for ever dime the can. It wasn’t going to die overnight either.
What did happen is a non-trivial amount of users left and found the Fediverse. Apps are currently being developed to make it more accessible to your average user. The Fediverse will no longer be some obscure thing for a niche group. I think it was a huge success and will have long term repercussions for Reddit.
I 100% never would have joined the thrediverse if not for 90% of reddit protesting!
Precisely how I feel on it. Would it have been magical if the protest resulted in every last user leaving reddit behind for better alternatives? Of course. But that was never something I thought was likely. However, it’s caused a lot of us who were already unhappy to leave and come over to the Fediverse, and I do think that’s a success.
It’s not like Reddit was even likely to die. I think we all knew the best case outcome that was still grounded in reality was something like Reddit falling into a slow but certain nose dive.
I mean, even Twitter is still kicking despite all the horrible stuff that’s gone on there. Reddit isn’t Twitter levels of bad. A slow decline was the best we could have hoped for.
Honestly, we wouldn’t have been able to scale to a massive migration, anyway. A slow migration is ideal for scaling and community building.
Whether Reddit dies or not also depends on what you consider “Reddit” to be.
Will reddit.com go down? No. Likely not for a generation, at least. Will Reddit be totally unrecognizable in the future? Probably not.
Will it be a souless zombie, kept operational by nothing more than its brand name and advertising?
Yes. Yes it will.
All very good points! So yeah, I’m taking what victories I can, in this case my victories are having found the Fediverse and no longer being on reddit ☺️
IDK I guess I kinda hoped that people would realize how stupid and exploitative the whole system of reddit is and the site would get overrun with spam and turned into an archive site. Was very disappointed in that pipe dream.
I know. Me too. It fucking sucks that we don’t see larger, more consistent examples of unity over issues like this. Part of me is grateful for the amount of people that did port over, and part of me is mad at that grateful part, thinking that I should–we should–be able to expect more. And part of me wants to take the victories that I can. It’s not a simple issue, so I’m trying to hold on to the faith that I have left that we’ll figure all of this shit out and do what I can in the meantime.
Yes, I jumped ship to mastodont after Elon took over and Twitter is still a thing. It’s slowly getting worse and worse but some users just don’t want to leave.
I still lurk. I expected the slow decline and change in character that others here have predicted.
What I have seen in the last 8 days floored me. Continues to floor me. Reddit is already a zombie platform. Front page is week-old posts. Bot generated reposts from 2 weeks ago.
And astroturf posts trying to spin the whole thing as a “what was that blip?” Or “glad those whiners are gone”It happened so much faster than I expected.
as someone that refuses to hit the site in any way, shape or form - thank you for the eyes-on-the-page update.
A non trivial amount of users. That makes me happy.
Be ready for another wave on the 30th/1st. Probably won’t be quite as big, but that’s when the 3rd party apps die.
The bigger waves are likely to come with the inevitable old.reddit shutdown and porn bans.
I actually think it will be much bigger. I’d be surprised if there aren’t a lot of users in the wait-and-see-how-bad-it’s-really-going-to-be camp, although they probably won’t start showing up until a few days after the 1st.
Reddit was not going to change its mind.
Honestly, I thought they might. Not to cancel the API fees entirely like some wanted, but to reach a compromise with developers that would increase Reddit’s revenue and let the apps stay in business.
But it’s become clear since then that killing the third party apps isn’t an accident or side effect, but the explicit intention of the API changes. Now I can’t see Reddit compromising as long as spez is in charge.
I still have a dim hope it could happen. The protests aren’t over and Reddit is feeling it.
Have you seen Huffman’s comments regarding Musk’s handling of twitter?
I was rather surprised and not a little scandalised to find that Huffman found this inspiring.
I kinda hope I’m wrong but I think the chances of any kind of concessions here are slim to none.
Personally, I’d never even heard of Lemmy, Kbin etc until recent events and thought it was limited to only Mastodon which never really interested me.
The amount of software development recent events have inspired around the Fediverse seems to be just the kick it needed to have a bright future too.
I mean, kbin’s been in development for a bit, but we only really started hearing about it generally in the Fediverse like a month ago? Maybe 6 weeks ago? Kbin.social is only a few weeks old.
The developer set up a testing environment, and then Reddit jumped aboard basically immediately.
I hit up kbin first but was having some issues with it, which makes sense as I was probably in the middle of the swarm. I jumped to shitjustworks, because it did what it said on the tin. I do think kbin would be a better fit, has it smoothed out any?
Considerably, though it’s still having some hiccups.
Oh, I think it’s hurt Reddit more than it seems on the surface. Of course they will say “it’s not working” but reading between the lines of this Engadget article [1], the number of ad impressions would be down rather significantly. Note the difference between time spent on site (seeing ads) and “visits” – many of which were likely people checking on the site rather than participating in the site. I think this is taking a toll, and am hopeful this situation will serve as an example of poor leadership for the next generation (Digg being a previous example).
It didn’t fail, r/all is a shit show right now. Or, it’s a porn show. Porn is all over r/all, r/popular is getting hit by it. F-u/spez made front page porn popular again. A lot of the porn pages have switched to other things; only fans being only fans, literally. Etc. you get the idea. I cannot imagine the board is happy.
Don’t care now, found kbin & Lemmy and that works just fine for me!
Wasn’t a fail to me. I moved on from Reddit after 12 years of daily activity. I’m happily settling into Kbin now.
Not to overstate the obvious, but this isn’t over yet, the third party apps are still operating. If news outlets were doing their job they would stick to the facts instead of making a judgment on the situation by declaring it a failure. The story is still developing and it’s only just beginning.
Looking at fedidb, the graph has started looking real exponential in the last 48 hours.
And this is still days before the third party apps actually stop working. The exodus aint even close to peaked yet.
Edit: dear lord the user count has spiked. We broke 200 000 threadiverse users just a few days ago, and we are about hit 400 000.
This is true, and for the most part extremely good news… But are also stories circulating about a landslide of bot accounts being created on Lemmy recently so numbers from the last 24h or so may want adjusting down slightly.
Turning mods and power users off Reddit, even casual users who are getting tired of the disarray in their subscribed subreddits are unsubscribing - I definitely think it’s having an impact.
I have always appreciated the work of the moderators because I prefer lively content without nastiness. A busy, well moderated forum can be a delight. When the mods in my favorite subreddits told us how hard their jobs would become, I knew what I had to do. I’m happy to find such a worthwhile (if yet young) place to land. By the end of the month I will have put Reddit behind me. They can succeed or fail without me. I suspect it will be somewhere in between. Actually, what I think is that it will become much nastier in many subreddits, and overall less worthwhile. I think individual subreddit rules will give way to mere reddit rules, where for instance a woman who posts pics in a sewing subreddit of herself in the dress she made may find herself subjected to sexual comments which would previously be subject to moderation.
IMHO, it’s still a success. Reddit’s behavior has provided clear proof of the need for an alternative. Plenty have taken notice. The winds of change are blowing…and it is likely not in Reddit’s favor in the long term.
I would like to point out that the Digg migration didn’t happen overnight. It happened over the course of weeks and months, even though ten years later it feels like it happened overnight. There were plenty of people saying “fuck off, Digg is fine” after v4 launched.
The news, despite our perception, has largely never been about speaking truth to the injustices around us. Both historically and now, its used largely as a veiled mouthpiece of the powerful around us who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The examples that we think of when groundbreaking journalism comes to mind are almost always the exception and often end poorly for the brave who bring them to light.
Over the past 5 years this has become even more salient to me. I’ve been to protests and the coverage will produce an entirely different picture that gets presented to those not in attendance. There were protests in my city during the party primary debates and the footage was edited to make crowds look smaller and in the case of our DSA chapter, they cut to a different camera anytime they were about to be in frame.
Trying not be be tin foil hatty there, but was at the marches and then watched all the different feeds. Calling something so obviously curated “news” feels like the information dystopia has been here much longer than we give it credit.
Reddit admins made it perfectly clear they’re not interested in feedback or compromises, they’ve quadrupled down on that point.
The way they handled this situation clearly shows their contempt for their user base, they want you to create as much content as possible and farm engagement so it looks good for their IPO.
The best thing people can do is either quit entirely and migrate to sites like this one or at the very minimum only use Reddit for lurking, don’t post, don’t upvote / downvote, simply cost them resources as that’s how they see their user base, a bunch of parasites
It obviously had an impact because reddit wouldn’t have taken such draconian action in response. Reddit admins have been forced to show their ass to the public, and many people who previously had positive or neutral opinions of Steve Huffman & co. have now seen what a manipulative, dishonest group they are. They are looking to harvest more user data at a point when no reasonable person would entrust them with this data. They are looking to expand advertising at a point when a significant number of users have either jumped ship or are remaining behind only to actively sabotage the site. More and more people have come to understand that migrating to the fediverse is no big hurdle.
Of course reddit will pay certain outlets to report that the protest has been a failure, but to me it looks like it has been a great success. We knew reddit wouldn’t reverse its decision, and we knew it wouldn’t just disappear (Digg is still around ffs), but a lot of people have seen that … reddit the web site never really meant that much to us.
I’m a normal user and just want a place to browse comments and read comments I don’t care if it’s Reddit or something else.
Reddit admins have been forced to show their ass to the public, and many people who previously had positive or neutral opinions of Steve Huffman & co. have now seen what a manipulative, dishonest group they are
There’s a long tail here that will get spez in the ass later, and that’s been the Verge, NYT, Forbes, and so many mainstream outlets that were previous incurious about spez having to talk to him and report on his AMA. He could very quickly end up characterized as a Musk-like buffoon if that’s how people who need to make their money from ink start to see him, especially if he doesn’t manage to find a new personality before he opens his mouth again. Like the average Redditor, spez doesn’t think he’s transparent when he’s being smug or snarky, and that is particularly visible to journalists who have degrees in snark.
I think it was a success no matter how mainstream news outlets or Reddit want to spin it.
The mods of subreddits very cleverly pointed out that the direction Reddit is heading in stinks and even all the masses who don’t care about it still got the message though being inconvenienced by not having access to their favorite echo chamber for a few days. Just look at all the comments on “should we open up” posts from pissed off mouth breathers basically demanding they return things to normal.
At the end of the day, of cause Reddit was going to force mods to open up their subs or remove them. The mods never really had any power in the situation anyway and the precedent of Reddit just taking over subs was already well established. If Lemmy or Kbin was another 5+ years in development with a couple of much larger communities already well established then the exodus might have approached Digg levels again, but the lack of easy mainstream alternatives means that Reddit was always going to get its way eventually.
Maybe it’s the news outlets I frequent, but I haven’t read anything describing the protests as a failure. Anyone want to provide a source or two?
