I’d say what went wrong was nobody did anything meaningfuk or cared. Nobody put their money where their mouth is and deleted their accounts, and staying off the site for 2 days was too much to ask of >80% of the users.
The Mods closed a few subs but didn’t themselves do anything meaningful. They should have let reddit replace them if they actually cared. They should have moved their community to lemmy or kbin. The ones who did sick it out I’m grateful for, the rest cared too much about their own pride to bother trying to keep the admins in check.
Overall the reddit userbase since the pandemic are mostly entitled whiners who don’t really give a shit as long as they get their twitter and TikTok reposts. There’s literally only one piece of OC on the frontpage of reddit right now. There’s not much value to going there anymore.
I’m done with Reddit, and honestly I haven’t missed it. My time is now more full of hobbies and actual reading, I’m better off for deleting it.
I think this post, which is an attempt by mods to continue protesting, and its reception by users speaks for itself: https://np.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/158zf26/reminder_july_26_rworldbuilding_is_shut_down_no/
The hive mind went from “fuck spez we’re staging an internet revolution” to “let it go already, nobody gives a shit, stop inconveniencing us with your real issues” in an instant. Basically, everyone’s attention span has lapsed and if you keep talking about it people think you’re killing their buzz. It’s no longer a relevant problem for the vast majority of the userbase, if it ever even was.
The people who this really affected - third-party app users, people affected by the poor accessibility of the regular app/site and the anti- ‘hail corporate’ types have already migrated or are otherwise disengaged with Reddit, leaving just the bootlickers.
And this was the entire point. Reddit was tired of being the place for over-educated, angst tech bros with lots of free time to be subversive. They want to refocus on the lowest-common denominator Facebook/Instagram/TT crowd who gives themselves over to popular media mind and body.
And how many are that? Are the non bootlickers even a significant number?
So… how do you know what’s on reddit front page again? I actually did leave and have no idea what’s going on over there…
This. The protesting subreddits should have been creating alternative communities at Lemmy and elsewhere while they were locked down or hidden for whatever, and then they’d have had real leverage when forced back open.
I’ve been using the Reddit app lately and it’s absolute dogshit. It mostly shows me content that I didn’t ask for. It trying hard to be tiktok or something. Very annoying. It functions differently from how most people use Reddit
