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’ve been on reddit for 13 years. My wife finally got an account last year. She cannot understand any of the fuss. She didn’t know there were apps outside the official app. She never used RES. She just scrolls and never comments or posts. I would be surprised if she even upvotes or downvotes. She’s not a monster, she just doesn’t reddit like I do.
95% of users are like my wife. 5% of users are like me. I haven’t even tried to explain this whole Lemmy/Kbin experiment to her yet.
But the thing is, if 50% of the 5% of us who are active posters (e.g., 2.5% of total users) are now over here on Kbin/Lemmy, the 95% who are left are going to notice a huge difference in the experience of the site. Conversations will be dull. New posts will be more ad-focused. They may not be able to explain what happened, but they will notice that Reddit is not as fun as it used to be.
Will this stop spez from getting stupid rich? Probably not. Will my wife switch to Lemmy or Kbin? Never gonna happen. But the people who want to be part of the old culture will find their way here. The stuff that made reddit great is already happening over here. Reddint will not die anytime soon, but it will cease to be relevant. Think of how long yahoo lasted even though no one cared about it. Reddit is going to be like that.
I haven’t yet deleted my reddit account. It will probably happen. But I also haven’t missed it. I’ve actually been excited to come over and see what’s happening every day in the fediverse! I’m posting more, and considering modding for the first time.
I pretty much agree with this. If you look at the accounts of the people complaining, how many of them have posts hitting the frontpage? I’m not saying I have any data, I’m just speculating that most people who are power users, whether they use 3rd party apps or not, can recognize how shitty reddit went about this and won’t complain about the protest.
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Helps that to a certain extent a fairly large portion are going to be at least moderately tech savvy (probably less so than 5+ years ago), so switching to the fediverse is a lot less daunting to them than to the average user.
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My biggest concern for the switch over was figuring out what instance I would like best. I think settling on kbin has been a good experience so far, barring some of the hiccups. Luckily, earnest has been crushing it with the fixes the whole time.
Yes, he’s really been putting in the work. Buy the man a coffee or ten, everyone!
Oh yeah, I completely forgot about doing that. Was gonna throw him $50. You have the link?
What would you say is the best way to get a kbin invite?
You need an invite now? I didn’t when I signed up.
@Liontigerwings @yacht_boy @Blakerboy777 @Alto @digitallyfree
I mean your not lying. On Mastodon I saw posts about people deleting accounts with thousands of karma, lot’s of people with positive reputation in their communities left, and the people who remained either are not active posters or don’t really care.
I’m in the process of deleting all my comments but it’s taking a while.
I’ve got probably 100k karma over a few accounts.
I feel kinda bad about taking away all the technical help and collaborative type stuff I’ve done over the years, but… Reddit wants to use all that data to cash out on it’s users, so it has to go.
Yeah, I deleted my two year old account with around 150K karma yesterday. What having 150K after two years says about me, let’s not discuss… but they’ll not be getting my brand of snark ever again.
I feel kinda bad about taking away all the technical help and collaborative type stuff I’ve done over the years
Its ok, ChatGPT has already trained on your data /s
Probably all the users who like me used old Reddit and apps. Those that joined recently only know the Reddit official app and don’t care
I visited Reddit for years when Google searches led me there. About 2 years ago I got into some niche hobbies/interests, and that motivated me to sign up. I almost always used the official app. I was doomscrolling and posting lots of comments ever since.
It takes me a long ass time to commit to a new technology. But I also heard and understood with the API issue that mods need the proper tools to do their job, and if you take away their tools, they cannot do their job. And once they can’t, they will leave and the entire experience of Reddit will change. I also understood that there are 3PA that the heaviest users and commenters use, and once those apps die, those people will not.come back, and with them will go their expertise and all of their posts and comments.
That told scaredy cat me that I needed to find.aome new place(s) for chat and entertainment. I like it here at kbin. I’m also enjoying Tildes, and I’ve been visiting Mastodon and Substack (I set those accounts up when Twitter went haywire), Hacker News, Fark and Metafilter. I’m enjoying the diversity.
Just mentioned all this to say that relatively new /official app using Redditors might also be making the jump.prior to Doomsday.
Didn’t take that long to sign up for reddit myself, but I also only used the main app. But it already feels like reddit has moved here and I’m loving it
I mean most posts on the fediverse have way less votes. But I see similarly many comments as I used to see on reddit. It just feels like reddit is here now.
Stronger evidence: there’s documented cases of people’s deleted comments being restored. Whether or not that’s intentional by reddit, I can’t say for certain, but if I were a betting woman, you bet I’d bet on them doing it on purpose. And if they are, then we’re talking about reddit losing a substantial enough amount of content just from people deleting their accounts in protest, substantial enough to impact their bottom line. And that’s just those of us who are deleting our content - I’m not among them since I still need to occasionally look at my saved posts since there’s important and useful information in there. They’ll stop getting content from way more people. That’s gotta terrify them.
Obviously the fediverse lacks a lot of the polish that reddit had. Mostly by virtue of reddit being around longer and having more developers - lemmy’s had like 2 developers for 4 years, kbin came out a few months ago, and I’m not sure about mastodon. But with time, that’ll change. A lot of reddit power users are programmers, and now that they can touch the code of the site they care about, I bet we’ll see a lot more polish in the coming months. I’ve certainly gotta get off my ass and dig into the code a little bit.
I wouldn’t call myself a power user, or even an especially good programmer, but I have my moments, and I feel more at home here than I’ve felt on reddit in years.
Same. I’ve been redditing since 2012 and have tailor made a select group of subs I follow for all of my hobbies. I was an avid commenter, with reply’s as long as your own. It was definitely my most visited site. It was as much for stupid pictures when I was going to bed as it was discussing things with fellow collectors or getting advice or tech support. Old.Reddit on my Desktop, RIF on my phone. I am one of the people this hooplah affects. And it makes me mad.
I know a lot of people who reddit in real life, but most of them might use it for 10 minutes a day on the toilet or while on the bus. They primarily lurk and stick to a lot of the easily accessible and fun subs. They also just use the official App, or they just look at it in their phone browser. Like you said, this whole thing doesn’t affect most of them.
I’m now spending a lot of time trying to find new communities in kbin and lemmy. But I have to admit the specialty subs I follow either don’t have a community here (like Moon Knight stuff) or very small communities (functional print, comic book collecting, etc). I’m sticking to the protest as long as makes sense to me (it still does). But I have a feeling reddit might die before these niche communities find purchase elsewhere.
Almost exactly same situation as you. I’m mad, it hurts, I’ve already purged my Reddit account of all content on it, multiple times since the most recent posts kept getting restored. The account itself isn’t deleted yet, I still think I’ll keep coming back for some stuff that just isn’t here on Lemmy or kbin yet… But as for participating in discussions and communities, I’m now 100% here.
It’s just sad. I’ve met the majority of my current online friend group that I chat with everyday on Discord, through Reddit. I hope at some point that becomes a real possibility in the Fediverse too. That we gather enough weirdos that are way too much into niche things that you can select which of them you’d like to be friends with.Yeah a couple of neiches are yet to be filled. There are some forums for my ttrpg like enworld and RPG net it’s like going back to 2009. I am missing some of the Reddit about specific shows I watch though
I wouldn’t be surprised if discord ended up having a lot of them, but the topic and comment idea of reddit feels like it’s here. Discord is like a chatroom, and to analogize further chatrooms feel like where communities gather, but forums feel like where communities live.
Even if I’m not totally off of Reddit, recent events got me out of a rut for a bit and that’s good. Already, the threads on Reddit/all seem stale and even in the past 24 hours what I see on kbin and lemmy.world is starting to give me the tingle I hadn’t felt since the early Reddit days or even the period before when I used to browse multiple sites so in a way this is going back to my Internet roots, surfing across multiple sites for nuggets and truly browsing and not doom scrolling a single website aggregator. It’s a breath of fresh air.
It’s like having gotten used to a favorite diner with a massive menu but when the classic joint starts going off the rails, one decides to explore, finding new culinary niches, pop ups, and little shops with unique offerings. It’s no longer as convenient, but then again, maybe it shouldn’t be.
I’ve hard avoided Reddit this week to break the habit and help keep traffic numbers down for their metrics. Will I return to some of my small subs later? Maybe. Kbin and Lemmy have already done a great job at providing more content than I can really engage with already, so there’s not a huge need for me to go back. The only time it’s a struggle is when the Kbin servers are hugged to death, but I’ve been lurking squabbles during those dark times.
I also choose this guy’s wife.
I call this a perfect callback. 5/7.
Yep this is the truth. The vast majority of users just go there and scroll and click through stuff. They don’t really care. They were inconvenienced by the blackout and want it back to normal.
The real consequences are that a significant chunk of the active and power users have left the site now.
I haven’t deleted my reddit account either. I have definitely noticed that my feed on reddit has less interesting content now.
It’s all repost of not even week old stuff.
So in other words reddit’s conversations will become as dull as Facebook.
Spez will get openai to make an llm moderator and he can control the weights. An army of spez moulded ai’s let loose on the Internet.
Exactly. Love the vibe here, discussions with ppl of similar stlye and interests (exactly how my forums were a long time ago, also reddit used to be years ago, and how it still was in some communities)
95% of users are like my wife. 5% of users are like me.
This is a pretty broad assumption.
It’s well known that most social media, and very much so for Reddit, are primarily consumed by lurkers. There’s loads of daily users that don’t even have an account because it’s not necessary. The lurkers may be good for ad revenue, but they don’t make the content. You need the active community there to produce the content that lurkers consume. Without the community, the lurkers aren’t going to step in and do it themselves, they’ll just stop visiting Reddit. So yes, I’m sure the balance looks like 95% lurkers and 5% community.
think of it this way - back in 2008 100% of the users had accounts made on or before 2008
reddit has doubled something like 8 times since that point. after 1 doubling, that 2008 or earlier becomes 50%. after 2 doublings, 25%… etc
at this point it’s below 1~2% depending on where you get your figures
majority of people (and an increasing majority) will only know reddit through new.reddit or the app. my gf just joined reddit because of me a few months ago… and she only know the official app. that is “reddit” to her.
reddit has moved on past us, the original users. they’ve decided that we are such a small minority that we essentially do not matter anymore and therefore are sacrificing us to raise IPO price
It’s not only the original users that are against all these changes. I only started on Reddit <10 years ago and I’m here. But I’m sure the portion of new users embracing “the old ways” over “the new ways” has still decreased over time, yeah.
I honestly think this is shining a massive light on the core issue of freedom. It shouldn’t be “sure, you can use [the app] or not.” But that is how the majority of people think. It’s disheartening. I hate to bring politics into this, but it’s like people saying “don’t like what [party X] is doing in this country? Then leave!” Binary decisions suck in real life.
I think 99% to 1% is probably closer to reality even.
She’s not a monster, she just doesn’t reddit like I do.
The way you need to precise she’s not a monster make me doubt it. Does she live by night, avoid the sun at all cost during daytime and drink children blood for dinner ? If so I have bad news.
on a more serious note, I agree that most people come on reddit for a little giggle or to spend time but don’t know that much about the backend of it. Eventually they find out after some time and then decide if they care or not about the api price change, in the meantime no one can blame them for just living their life without caring about reddit.
I think so too, the users who care enough to even consider 3rd party apps are the ones who commented and posted the most imo.
Damn ++ making this comment so I can save this comment. This is the boat I’m in.
While it’s possible that Reddit could be rigging the scales, I think the simplest answer is that the people most critical of Reddit have already left Reddit. Vice versa, everyone here is clearly in favor of boycotting Reddit because well… we’re here now.
Its a classic case of people having no fucking clue about scale, bias, the vocal majority and silent minority.
For every loud reddit dissident, there is 100 people who just heard about reddit and grabbed the official app from the store. They dont comment, they dont post, they dont give a shit. If reddit went down they wouldnt question it, they would just grab a 9gag app or something and continue on consuming content. They dont block ads, they dont get invested in net neutrality or anything else the EFF are involved in, they dont mod the UX, they dont dig into dodgy shit going on behind the scenes. They dont give a shit.
In other words, they are the perfect community for a corporate social media.I’m interested to see what happens when the third party apps actually die. And old.reddit.com obviously
Userbase here will explode, then continue to grow. Content and moderation quality on reddit will decrease week by week, but they will go on for a very long time anyway (see Digg)
I read somewhere that a shim was being developed to allow reddit apps to join a lemmy instance. Not sure how practical it would be, or how far off it is, but its an interesting idea. Would obviously need to be implemented by the original reddit app dev, or a forked version if open source.
I imagine at least a couple of developers will migrate over here. If they update their app to the fediverse, join in on other open source projects, or just leave the scene is yet to be seen though.
If Sync ever did that, I would be over the moon. That app made browsing a genuine joy with how good the UI is and how customizable it is. I really hope the devs for the existing third party apps repurpose them or make a version for the fediverse.
I can’t find the comment because the sub is private, but /u/ljdawson did actually say modifying Sync to work with lemmy was a possibility. I would be so happy if it ended up working out.
I read somewhere that a shim was being developed to allow reddit apps to join a lemmy instance
I assume you’re talking about this project?
My partner still hasn’t left Reddit yet, but because it’s a habit for her now AND Apollo still works… once Apollo is gone she’s already signaled she is moving on.
I wonder how many others are just waiting for the third party’s to be killed before moving on?
This is kinda the case for me. I’m working on getting use to this.
Survivorship bias. Most of us who care left already and are exploring the alternatives.
@Liontigerwings: There’s always been an undercurrent of “mods just want power and control because they can’t get it themselves in their lives” that goes against my experience as a moderator.
Personally, my response to people calling for moderators to put their money where their mouth is, to step down as a moderator and leave the site was, “OK, will do”.
I think this will be a 4-6 week process where people stop using their old Reddit apps and either migrate to the official app, old.reddit or to that federated sites.
I don’t think it’ll ever get as big as Reddit overall but so long as a good number of people come across to sites like Lemmy or kbin and are engaged, it’ll be a vibrant place in no time.
Of the four subs I moderate, two are restricted (i.e. read-only) with links to places off-Reddit. One support sub I handed over to my co-mod who wants to keep it going as long as possible, tho he understands Reddit is likely going down, slowly but certainly.
There’s only one of my subs that’s a bit problematic, with ~45% of voting users wanting to rejoin the blackout, but ~55% wanting it to remain open. There are some people really critical of my proposal to move to kbin.social, but they are largely people with very little prior activity on the sub.
Either way, unless Reddit reverses course and fires spez, I am leaving that platform.
I mean the truth is 95% of redditors didn’t use apps and don’t care about this at all.
It’s like if your local street had a protest for sheep shearing, preventing you from going to the park or movies. It’s irrelevant to you and the large majority would want it over.
No it’s not like that.
It’s like the people keeping your city clean can no longer use tools and have to use their bare hands unless they pay a bunch of money. That’s what it’s like. Sure for a while it will be ok, but the shit will build up, it will get worse and worse, and the city you once loved will be a shit hole of trash. The workers are literally protesting to have better tools and access to keep your city clean, and you’re saying it doesn’t matter. OH BY THE WAY THE WORKERS DON’T GET PAID.
Yes this is a good analogy. Rome was neither built in a day nor destroyed Ina day.
We are thinking Reddit will turn out to be like MySpace or digg but it will be more like Facebook. It will exist but filled with clueless people consuming garbage.
Until there is a shortage of sweaters due to no wool being produced any more (akin to content creators and moderators who use reddit API)
I would have thought most people would be using an app. Most people access the Internet through their phone.
As a moderator of a small subreddit, when I checked roughly 75% of our traffic was from mobile. It doesn’t distinguish beyond that but the mobile browser experience is so shockingly bad I think it’s safe to say that is almost entirely app usage. Since there is only official app & Apollo on iOS, that means it’s one of those two… but the way Huffman tells it, Apollo has less than 5% of the install base of the official app on iOS. If that’s the case I don’t really understand his argument that they’re bleeding Reddit dry. But that’s a separate issue.
But, based on the responses we had before the blackout and the responses we got in the last few days “after” in the discussions around opening back up, I can say he appears to be right. Most people just want to use the main app, don’t want to learn anything about third party apps, don’t care why they exist, just want everyone to shut up and move on.
I did find the total 180 very odd. Vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the protest beforehand. Overwhelmingly in favor of going back to normal after. But it was different people. And it wasn’t just random one-week-old accounts that had never posted on the sub before, it was regulars, old accounts, or both, both times.
I’m proud of the properly big subs for continuing their protests. Our community was not strong enough.
Yeah, I’m not buying Reddit’s statistics. 90%+ of mod actions on desktop web and official app? I can see plenty of use for old Reddit, but they have locked quite a few mod actions behind the new interface recently. Likewise the more and more spez feels the need to mention that there was no real consequence from the blackout makes me question the validity of that statement. We’re all aware what a lying jackass he is.
I’m sure that the majority of people will continue to use Reddit regardless. I’m just not sure that the majority is as major as they are presenting it to be.
Honestly, I mostly used desktop and the official app sometimes (mostly while I was watching TV, like right now). I don’t think I’d realized there were third party apps, otherwise I would have been using one before all this mess.
I discovered reddit on desktop, switched over to RIF and one day I created a burner account on desk top (2021 ish) and was shocked at what I saw.
The actual content was in like 10 point font with ads and an instant messenger function taking up a quarter of the screen.
If people only ever used the desk top or official app, they have no idea the experience other people were getting. Essentially only the all page had ads, they were the same size as posts, they were more clearly delineated as ads, there was less of them.
I’ve heard people bitching about the “He Gets Us” ad campaign, but as a RES and RIF user, I never really experienced that. Knowing the hell they’re going through though, I know it would do nothing but piss me off. So why take the risk. Just leave Reddit.
So I didn’t know what those were until recently, when I clicked over to Reddit in a browser a few times to see things like r/gaming’s “sorry” message and to see that r/funny had opened back up.
Every single time I opened Reddit in my browser, there would be a single post at the top, followed by an advertisement for Jesus right there under the top post. The ads were designed to look like posts, too, so they weren’t even obviously identifiable as ads on first glance.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an advertisement for Jesus on any other social media site. But in Reddit, apparently it’s very, very common. Does no one else want to buy ad space from them, or do they just put no work into curating which ads users see? Did Jesus pay more to be the top spot every time someone opens their browser?
Out of curiosity, I went over to Reddit and looked at r/Jewish and sure enough, there was an ad for Jesus. Great job, Reddit ad department.
install ublock origin
While I moved over to the fediverse on the principle of it all, I’ve never used an app myself. Only old.reddit on both PC and mobile. Just got too used to it before any app came up.
I think a lot of mods probably use RES on desktop, which will still be functional after this. But yeah, statistics say that 3PA are only used by about 5-10% of users
Agreed. they also know RES only works as long as old.reddit.com works, and once that’s done, desktop is shit.
Once they kill third party they will go for old reddit. Definitely
I would agree but many sub reddits had polls before locking and the majority were always in favor.
One thing to keep in mind is that there is an active minority of users who are content generators who are much more likely to vote on stuff like that. Then there are a ton of mostly silent read-only users (most of whom don’t even have accounts). If you inconvenience the mostly silent users who are just there for cat pics on their lunch break, some of them will suddenly put in the effort to complain. But they’ll never build a community, you need the active users for that.
Yeah, good luck to the read-onlys when the content creators are gone.
I.e the 90-9-1 rule of internet culture.
My take: The people who were in support of the protest were mostly the 3rd party client users and a lot of them left after the protest, leaving normal users, like myself, who are there for the content only, to vote for the sub to remain open in order to view the content again
Yup, that’s me. I’m trying to make lemmy my new home and limit my access to Reddit (vote with your feet). I still check Reddit for the polls and a few nitch communities that don’t exist on Lemmy (yet)
Probably the latter. Most users likely didn’t care about any of it enough to vote or participate in conversations leading up to blackouts, but got annoyed when they couldn’t use reddit the same way. The rest of us probably started minimizing usage and/or deleting accounts.
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.
I don’t think the average redditor cares. They will complain about their third-party app going away, but will use the official one and go on with their life.
I think there is some pro-spez astroturfing as well as some users are just sick of it and want their subs back.
There is some hope though. I think those naysayers were simply the loudest because when I go to some subs like r/pics, r/askmen, r/apple, people are supporting the strike. On r/apple, people are even made and saying yes, reddit’s threat to remove mods is mostly a bluff as they can not replace what was 5000 subreddits of mods in a timely manner. On r/askmen (which I usually dislike but today I’m happy with them) people are wanting them to extend the blackout. On r/adhdmemes, their poll is showing overwhelmingly indefinite blackout.
On r/pics most people love the new mod rule put in place to only post pictures of this one public figure
I don’t know but there are already enough people here to make it interesting
True for general stuff, but I’m missing my more niche subreddits and there’s basically no sports here because apparently we’re too techie over here.
There’s m/chess ;-)
Indeed, I’m expecting a slow transition over from Reddit myself. And that’s fine. There’s really not that much difference between a community of 100,000 and a community of 10 million, but there’s a big difference between a community of 1000 and 100,000. So let the big interests show up here first and establish themselves with some nice thriving communities, and the smaller stuff will develop once there are enough people around to support it.
I’m suspecting bot activity, iirc there was a screenshot of a new account that just spammed how much the protest sucked
