The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,
I’m not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn’t even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can’t tell you how many times now I’ve looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.
I’ve already felt the sting of the protests when googling solutions to various issues. I used to be able to include “reddit” in the search and would almost always find relevant information quickly, but now as OP mentioned many posts and whole communities have gone dark.
It’s all been really eye opening about the potential negative consequences of having so many communities and information in the control of so few.
I do wonder if the Fediverse will ever be able to replace Reddit in terms of searchable terms for niche questions. I hate that a lot of niche communities that I’ve been apart of recently have been on discord or reddit. If those communities stay there then all that tech support will be lost; like tears in rain.
If Reddit remains the place for those kinds of niche questions that probably means spez will win in the long run. That’s what brought me to reddit, whenever I had a question reddit was always the best result.
I avoided Reddit like the plague because of how often it came up.
Quora and Yahoo Answers combined with the popularity of Facebook scared the hell out of me.
Then I dipped my toes in and found old pre-2015 Reddit, it was great for about 6 months and then The Decline started.
I remember when Reddit ran from selling gold, there was a little counter on the side saying how much they still needed.
All you got was no ads and access to the lounge IIRC.
This feels a lot like that.
Hell, we already have our own version of the poop knife, and new Star Wars movies are coming out too, we might get to revisit the Swamps of Dagobah while eating Jolly Ranchers.
If Reddit remains the place for those kinds of niche questions that probably means spez will win in the long run.
Is reddit making bank? From what I know, the answer is: No. Even currently reddit is not profitable.
So, unless reddit grows, spez loses. If reddit becomes “the place you go to for niche questions”, while bleeding on the front of hopeless and passionate addicts who make content for big subs, that is a problem. Because only big subs get big views, meaning big ad revenue.
Reddit needs to gain more people. And if not more people, then more engagement. And if not more engagement, then more high quality content from a passionate userbase, leading to more people and more engagement. With “being the place for niche questions”, you will not ever get that sweet and necessary growth. You will get a stable influx of users. But that is probably not enough. As soon as niche subs are the one attractive feature of reddit, its business model is probably dead. Because, unless reddit grows, it is already dead.
Google’s VP of searching has even mentioned that, which really is Google’s fault as it was an issue long before spez caused Reddit to crumble - Reddit was just propping up Google’s bad choices, then Musk bought Twitter and started running it into the ground, now Huffman sees both of those as examples to follow somehow… plus Stackoverflow is on strike, and the internet archive / wayback machine is facing legal troubles and may have to cease existing b/c of some decisions they made during the pandemic as well. So it’s not just Reddit: it’s enshittification of the entire internet.
I know what you mean, but also it’s kinda fun to solve my own problems lately, even if it takes 100x longer:-). Fortunately cached copies of many Reddit posts exist, although unfortunately those do not always include comments:-(.
In what way does the Fediverse prevent this kind of information destruction in the future? Will it be easier to preserve data?
My thinking is that because it is decentralized, even if sections of the fediverse decide to sell out to our corporate overlords, it wouldnt compromise the entire platform.
I wouldnt go so far as to say that the fediverse is completely immune to manipulation, but i do think the nature of it makes mass tampering\control more difficult.
We are not entitled to what other people made. They are free to delete their stuff, or to restrict access to it. We are also not entitled to have access to other peoples’ forums.
So of course the Fediverse doesn’t prevent this kind of “information destruction”. It does not. And it would be ethically questionable if it did.
The information destruction we are seeing right now is a protest against exactly this kind of stuff: Reddit is selling other people’s content for a ludicrous price by charging too much for their API use. And they are forcing communities to be managed a certain way, cracking down and forcing the replacement of moderators etc. in case of non compliance. This is the reason why this implosion is happening.
And the fediverse as a whole, as a much more decentralized system, is a lot more immune to what caused those protests.