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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
So in other words reddit’s conversations will become as dull as Facebook.
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.
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.