Prior to the protest reddit was in full support of the protest. Most polls on subs supported a shutdown. Now, seemingly every community cant understand why the protest was needed and they’re calling it a mod power trip. There is a 3rd possibility. This is an unfounded conspiracy but reddit themselves could be manipulating scores.
See the NFL thread if you don’t mind sending traffic
https://reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/14b11kh/were_just_here_so_we_dont_get_fined/
I think the only people left heavily skew as the people who didn’t care. Case in point, the discord for my kebble sub saw a LOT of new members as those who didn’t like the way reddit was handling it prepared other ways to contact each other. That was and still is very much in favor of the protest and they’re still working out a platform to move everyone to.
The actual reddit sub for the kebble has turned on a DIME about it and is now infighting between the people who do care and are only using reddit so they can speak in that particular sub, and the ones that never cared in the first place and think the act of protesting anything in general is, and I quote, “childish.” Were an outsider to scroll through it, they would think we never supported it in the first place.
Before this, we were uncommonly civil towards each other, took as much text as we wanted to eplain our viewpoints properly, and usage of the downvote button was both frowned upon and extremely rare to even see. Now I’m seeing downvotes. The whole thing is causing a schism that doesn’t bode well for the site in general. This will be reddit’s main userbase going forward.
Quite disappointing isn’t it, I kinda wish that in preparation for the blackout an alternative forum was opened for popular subs (on the federation for example) so the community had somewhere to go instead of being annoyed at the lack of interaction
Unfortunately it’s a fairly common pattern among humans, people don’t prepare ahead of time for disasters that have “never happened before.” Or that haven’t happened in their lifetime. Especially when those preparations cost them something, be it time or money or effort.
It’s been long enough since Digg that this generation didn’t believe that it would happen to Reddit too. Maybe someday it might happen to the Fediverse, somehow - there’s only so much you can do with protocol design alone to proof against centralization, we’re already seeing some interesting cracks around the Beehaw defederation mess.
That would have made any kind of sense. They wouldn’t have gone a route that threatened immediate mutiny, I think, because the initial point was to get Spez’s attention, not to leave. For all the good anyone thought that was going to do in the face of an OpenAI amount of money.
From what I hear, all attempts to decide on a destination on the mod discord have fractured into a billion pieces. Which I guess isn’t surprising. If you know about anywhere else at all, you already probably have something set up there and would be averse to abandoning it in favor of someone else’s idea