I see a lot of posts about how they uploaded anti-spez stuff onto reddit, or participated in the nsfw spams/john oliver spams. While I get wanting to let it all out, this ultimately keeps up engagement on reddit rather than bringing it down.
The best way to make sure things go your way? Vote with your wallet, or in this case your voice. Don’t speak on reddit. Devote more time helping out the alternatives grow and flourish. And as much as it is a meme, touching some grass can help your mental fortitude.
If you absolutely 100% need to interact with reddit, I suggest installing a redirector addon (such as privacy redirect or… redirector) that can link to a teddit or libreddit instance. Or archiving it with wayback/archive.is/ghostarchive.
See here’s the thing - if you are worried about protesting reddit, that inherently means you’re hoping to interact with it. As far as I’m concerned, just don’t care. Yes I disagree with what reddit is doing. Does that mean I shouldn’t give it any visits or make any posts? well, depends on what I want to do. For example, just now I used it to spread info about some of this to fellow mods and within our local community. I believe it was worth doing. I don’t believe it was less positive than just being overly simple minded and saying “I don’t like what reddit is doing, therefore it’s bad if i use reddit.”
I don’t believe the message here is “i don’t like what Reddit is doing, therefore it’s bad if I use Reddit” at all.
The point is: reddit couldn’t care less what you say. Reddit at this point only cares about traffic and metrics. How many items posted in the last 7days, how many unique logins over X period, how many views on ad trackers. That’s why it’s bad to log in. As P.T. Barnum once said-“There is no such thing as bad publicity”. Whether you say “fuck spez” or “spez is the second coming in the flesh, all hail” doesn’t matter at all. Just 1m logins, 2m new posts in the last 24 hours.
They don’t even care about logins anymore. They care about advertising impressions, sponsored post engagements, and ad conversions. Marketers on the platform don’t care about how many users they have, they care about impressions, clicks, and conversions. That’s all it comes down to - are you providing value by trackably converting on an ad, buying Reddit Gold, or subscribing to Premium? If not, why are you being a drain on server resources that could be used to benefit a paying customer?
Yeah this is the message I intend. I still check reddit occassionally for the random question (and also to work on my userstyle since it’s inspired by the colorscheme). However, I don’t stay in too long, don’t upvote, comment, or create posts, since that adds traffic to the site.
What I’m about to say is going to sound like I disagree with you in spirit, but I don’t think I actually am disagreeing. Despite using reddit for a specific thing when you made this post, you also just… didn’t really give a fuck one way or the other. You could take or leave it, and for now, you chose to take it while it made sense and benefitted you.
There was a time when sites and apps (or “programs”) didn’t have so much longevity. No one really blinked when people stopped using the IM services. They just logged on while it made sense to because their friends were active, and then one day, they didn’t log in anymore. No one thought twice when Napster was overtaken by KaZaA, or when that one went away for Limewire, or any of the other host of P2P services. They used them until broadband Internet became ubiquitous, and then they went to bittorrent. MySpace went quietly into the night and was gradually replaced by Facebook. Both of those (and their predecessor, Xanga) replaced the old geocities/tripod/angelfire personal websites. From my youth, Google is the only giant that remains.
Seeing the way people act about Twitter and reddit make me realize how much the standards have changed. It doesn’t have to be a big event. This is nothing new. These things wane as they meet better, more efficient, and more user-friendly competition. This is no different. No one has to weep for it or give a concerted effort to make it change. The fedaverse options are modeled after a similar UI, it won’t be such a big adjustment if people just let it happen and stop trying to save a corporate corpse. We used to not care about preserving the familiarity of failing services, and we were all the better for it. I think everyone could benefit from taking a page out of Web 1.0’s book from time to time and inject a little more of that Wild West energy we used to be flush with. I know things can never be like that anymore - for good reason - but seriously, just stop giving a flying fuck about reddit in any capacity. It’s making less and less sense to use it, so now we have this. One day, less and less might be zero, and that’s an OK and natural progression.