I’ve heard only the briefest information about what is going on with Reddit. Is the blackout something that is temporarily being done by the community or is it permanent?
The blackout itself is an initiative by the community. However, from June 30th third party apps will no longer work, and many users (and moderators of many large subs) have explicitly said that they aren’t interested in continuing with the official Reddit app or site. This will cause a huge chunk of reddit users to leave. Some will go back, some won’t. Besides that, it’s a matter of principle. They’re choosing stakeholders over users.
The protest will be temporary for some subreddits, but indefinite for others. I don’t think that Reddit Inc. will accept the demands; instead it might force the subreddits to open again.
But in the medium- or the long-term, Reddit is over. I don’t think that the platform will recover from that. Even the ones left behind will be less eager to contribute with it, so there’ll be less content, so less encouragement to browse it, thus less content, in a downwards spiral.
“My drill is the drill that’s gonna pierce the heavens!” - Simon.
“My drill is the drill that’ll bury Reddit into hell!” - Steve “Pigboy” Huffman.
instead it might force the subreddits to open again.
Even if they do, many of the mods simply wouldn’t return to moderate. And as someone else mentioned many of the mods rely on third party apps to moderate efficiently. Without that support the subreddit a will spiral out of control with bots and spam, surely.
Another possibility is that they’ll demote top mods from subs protesting, where there’s an available sycophant to take their role. Apparently that already happened with r/adviceanimals.
Either way the situation will spiral out of control, because of what you said plus people actively trashing the sycophant in protest against taking the side of the admins. (Plus typical hate against mods. Frankly? Given how power-hungry the Reddit moderation is, as a collective, I get it.)
Plus the content creators themselves are disengaging.
For most subreddits it is temporary blackout but some communities like one of the piracy subreddits I saw completely packed bags and the mods moved to lemmy. It’s too early to say if reddit is over or if this is just a temporary setback. Reddit may even concede and revert some of their api changes to appease the populace. Simply put, we don’t know enough yet.
Some users like us will stay on Lemmy/kbin or any other sites, but according to experience (Twitter), probably most of the userbase will stay on Reddit.
Inertia is a thing, both in a positive and negative way. What I mean by that is, you can reach a threshold where people are leaving fast enough that Reddit will lose more people than not (positive from our current point of view).
The other way it works is people are just so used to Reddit and the habit returns quickly once the blackout is over (negative from our point of view).
Which way will this go? My pessimistic outlook is that tons of people are exploring Lemmy/KBin/whatever fediverse thing now while they have a Reddit sized hole in their daily routines, but once Reddit is back they will go back there. I think this is shown in how Twitter users bailed off pretty hard at first and Mastodon got a bunch of new people but those people slowly went back to Twitter. Some people will stay at the new place for sure, but a lot won’t. None of that is really a problem per se, either.
