His broader point is that he thinks mods should have stuck to their guns and kept subs private which would include their historic posts. By even reopening, they’re allowing traffic to return to the site even if a few large communities are memeing hard. For the most part, subs that have reopened are going to return to business as usual. All because the mods of those communities didn’t want to sacrifice their control. Spez called their bluff.
While thousands of users have been driven away, there are still more than enough who will remain and continue to engage with the site. The only lesson Reddit will have learned is that they can just wait it out no matter how unpopular of a decision they make.
I’m very curious to see if there will be any meaningful drop in traffic at this time next month.
Reddit was never going to just go away as a result of this. Even if every blacked-out subreddit remained private forever and everyone who was aware of this protest walked away, there’s plenty of oblivious users and remaining subreddits to continue operating.
The “win” condition for the protesters is some or all of the following:
- Give Reddit bad publicity in the mainstream press
- Cause a drop in ad revenue. Money is life as far as Reddit is concerend.
- Harm Reddit’s valuation in its IPO. Money is life.
- Help Reddit replacements get established, restoring competition that Reddit thought had long ago vanished. (You are here).
Nothing was going to stop Reddit from going ahead with their API change, all we could hope for was to make it hurt for Reddit. And in that regard I do believe we’ve scored a solid win. The Fediverse is now competition for Reddit, and as they squeeze and squeeze their users for money over the years to come there’s now an escape valve that users can flow out of under that pressure.
My goals in aiding protests were just as you say. I wanted to help consolidate the instances I use, and the communities I use. I’ve always known reddit will stay there. I don’t even think I’m wounding reddit. That beast is too big. All I can do is piggyback some popular posts and get a few hundred to a thousand people to fill up my instance and make me a bit happier about this whole debacle :)
We’re a swarm of mosquitoes. We bite Reddit and it’s painful, but really the only way we’re going to kill Reddit is if in the process of swatting at us Reddit forgets that it’s holding a machete in its hand.
Fortunately Reddit shows signs that it is indeed doing that.
