In the last 3 days I’ve been paying attention to r/all, expecting several posts about it and…
Yeah
Wasn’t expecting the website to literally shut down nor to monopolize r/all, because 3rd party users are the minority, but I hoped for more than whatever this was.
At least there’s a silver lining, I discovered new alternatives that have healthier communities
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Reddit crashed, spez came out of hibernation, 5k subs are still down according to Reddark when initially there were only 2.5k that agreed to the blackout, we also hugged kbin and Lemmy to death 4 times to my count so its not too underwhelming although I get the sentiment though as these sort of things are a slow death particularly this one as moderators use old.reddit and third party apps the absence of moderators wont be felt immediately
But on the other hand, look at how much the lemmy and kbin user base has grown. The blackouts had a significant impact in increasing lemmy adoption and usage.
Prior to the announced blackouts, I had no idea Lemmy even existed. Now here I am running my own instance.
Also, advertisers Reddit sells to have halted their campaigns until “next week.”
I think while on the surface it might feel underwhelming, it had more impact than you think. And now mods are discussing extending the blackout too.
What comes after the blackout is the exodus. So in time, Reddit will decline and people would hear more about Lemmy as the network effect grows, Lemmy can come out pretty strong.
Exactly. Just like Digg is still around, Reddit will be too. But it won’t ever be the same
For me it’s been pretty great. Lemmy and the fediverse kinda remind me of reddit circa 2007 or 2008 before the eternal September. I’m going to enjoy this for as long as it lasts.
I’m definitely happy the blackout encouraged me to move to the fediverse.
Same, I could never really get into mastodon as I never liked Twitter much, so I’m pretty happy I found out about Lemmy. I know everyone on this site has been saying this, but it feels fresh, and the fact that it’s all open source and community owned is great.
This is what I’ve been saying! Lemmy feels like what the old Reddit experience felt like and can become what reddit was supposed to be all along.
the eternal september?
Its a reference to Usenet back in 1993, its essentially when an online community has to deal with a never ending influx of new users. So think of this as Reddit before it got big/mainstream.
I was using usenet a bit back then. I actually found myself debating stuff on usenet by going to Google groups and searching for my name. Have to say, I was expecting to be embarrassed to read it all again, but it wasn’t too bad. What I wrote still makes sense to me now 30 years later. I didn’t expect that.
Ah yeah so you’ve seen it all, that’s awesome. I wasn’t around when usenet was in its prime (on account of being roughly -2 years old).
It’s a reference to a historical increase in internet and usenet usage, and a massive influx of users in many forums.
I’m not sure what you were expecting to see? /r/all was never going to look obviously different, there’s just too many people on Reddit. 99.99% of Redditors could leave and the remaining 0.01% would still be enough to churn out a passable couple of pages of content on /r/all.
Plus the people who care about the situation are exactly the people who aren’t currently participating on Reddit, so it’s hardly surprising that no-one is really taking about it there.
Incoming demise of third-party apps and (potential) IPO blackout should increase more interest towards fediverse link aggregator and discussion platforms…
Fediverse is neat and waiting to be discovered.
Exactly! For me it’s like a whole new world out there
there’s room on the internet for more than one link aggregator - even if reddit returns and is bigger and badder than ever, I still wont use it. that platform is dead to me now
There are several points to be made:
The Old Reddit, whatever it means, is long gone forever. Aaron is gone. Spez does not care. No apologies or retracting will be made and that’s it.
Reddit must have calculated that there are enough ‘casual’ crowd (not a long timer, does not use or care about 3rd party apps or the old interface, comes for the quick laughs and watches ads) so they could withstand whatever pressure the ‘hard-core’ crowd (long timer, uses and cares about old UI and API changes, does not generate ad views in general, spends long hours in site) generates.
Reddit must have also considered the possibility of the second crowd simply going away. I suspect Spez or the investors simply does not give a damn about it. Ad revenues are everything and there’s a loud minority that threatens to leave? Why should they care, after all? All they see is a potential for “more” growth.
What they do and must care is the eventual entrance of a sizeable competition that eats into their revenues - less visitors mean less ad revenues. Lemmy and Fediverse, as much as I love it and will keep using it, is not that threat - yet.
What will probably happen is that the wider internet will label the riot (as of now) a massive failure, laugh at the “bravery” of slacktivism or whatever the latest meme can be slapped at.
Despite that, it should mark the emerging of a sustainable group of Reddit-like communities that could, in one day, become the competition Digg never thought they would face.
No, I don’t think Lemmy is perfect. I do have an issue with the dev’s political stance. But as long as they don’t become the Spez of what was supposed to be the Federation, and the software and the protocol and the community can sustain and rule themselves, things might be alright.
Reddit will eventually die, like many other internet websites. Perhaps not now. They won’t go out in a spectacular way the Digg v4 happened, but simply wither away like Facebook. But we have another home, and it’s all that matters.
The other truth a lot of us don’t want to face is that, in all likelihood, reddit wants the old heads to leave. We are not their demo anymore. Users with accounts in the 10-15 year range are in their thirties and forties generally. We’re not their target demo, and they think our complaining about the good ol’ days is probably keeping away some of their gullible you get demo that don’t care that their data is being mined, don’t realize when they’re talking to bots, and are used to being assaulted by ads because they don’t know any better.
Aaron is gone.
;_; RIP.
I didn’t go and check things out. But I gotta say, before I was an only Reddit user. Now I don’t expect to totally forgo Reddit forever, but I now know there are alternatives and it is a nicer community so far here.
At least here I’m not getting spammed with bots and “Satan Gets Us” ads.
satan gets us ads?? i’ve been using apollo for years and don’t know what you’re talking about AT ALL hahahaha those sound crazy
Same. I won’t let go of Reddit completely until more of the people in my favorite subs migrate and rebuild their communities here, if they do so at all. But Lemmy and Mastodon will become my new main social hubs either way.
Someone’s gotta be the early adopters, it looks like that’s us today.
Actually been dramatic for Lemmy. Users went from a little under 50K to a little over 125K total users. I do not know how that is not dramatic. It is not about Reddit really, it is about how many of these users will stay here.
I certainly will
I’m watching the Active last month from the Lemmy stats and see that the spike didn’t yet turn into a needle.
This sentence weirdly fills me with hope. Maybe things will actually be better for the internet.
Have you ever added the word Reddit to a web search so you could find an answer online a lot of digging?
Stuff like that I imagine got hit hard. There will always be core communities that either stay up or are easy replicate but I imagine they’ll be losing a lot of smaller communities.
This is just about the only thing I use Reddit for anymore.
yes! i landed on reddit twice during the last couple days that way.
- the NixOS sub wasn’t dark, but users were asking about that and some were dropping the lemmy link.
- the selfhosted sub (or one adjacent to it, don’t remember) was dark, and for this query i actually could not find the info i needed written anywhere else. that was a wakeup call.
This is why subreddits shouldn’t close permanently. I wonder if its possible to leave subreddits in read-only mode? to allow anyone to find all the incredibly valuable information.
More importantly this is why we never should have allowed private companies to monopolize our access to our own freely shared information.
Yes it’s called restricted mode. Only whitelisted users can make posts or comments.
Saying you are going on a hunger strike but then announcing you’ll only go on it for two days made it a long shot that other subs would push for longer.
Any idea how only a 48 hour black out even got started instead of longer? Who proposed only 48 hours to make it catch on as that short of a protest.
I wouldn’t put it past a Reddit admin to impersonate a mod to encourage something like that
I think that it depends a great deal on what subreddits you use. I mean, I normally use only a small number, and they are all presently private or restricted, so it has an impact.
And if you specifically want information on something coming from Google and are trying to read old posts with information about, say, how to work around some bug, then that is disruptive.
But if you just hit Reddit looking for something interesting to look at or read, which is a legit use and how many people are going to use the thing, then I think that the impact is probably limited.
I think the reaction on the site itself also suffered from the AMA getting hard buried.
Which was stupid. People should have upvoted the post in the AMA sub which was just a link to the AMA on the Reddit sub. It wasn’t even pinned. And even if you did find it, until they did a summary you couldn’t see his responses because also buried (understandably)
That said, yes, I agree with you and the adjacent poster - the upside is alternative platforms got a huge boost, and even if a lot of the influx doesn’t stay, it’s still a huge boost.
The question is basically, how many mods and power users moved to other platforms. It was clear that Reddit would not die over night or that the Fediverse would be able to take on all the users of Reddit.
But without much of the volunteer labour, Reddit will enter a slow death spiral of worse and worse subreddits and the remaining users will slowly leave as a result.
