The title is a bit clickbaity but the article is worth a read. To keep it short:
- large subreddits stopped protesting
- 1.8k subreddits are still in the dark, but those are rather small
- [from the article] “Though the Reddit team likely caused permanent damage to the platform and its relationship with users, Spez got his way. But that victory might not mean much.”
IMO it was a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, the protests ended, and most users are still stuck in that shithole… but the reputation damage won’t be reversed, Reddit managed to seed its competitors (as this one) with the necessary userbase to make them functional, and odds are that Reddit will keep going in its death spiral. And that doesn’t even take into account the amount of bad press that it generated, that will hurt IPO numbers for sure.
Reddit didn’t really have competitors before this
It didn’t, I agree. Lemmy for example was really slow; the type of site that you’d check once a few days. Nowadays however you can pretty much lurk nonstop here, and you know that you’ll see more stuff that you want to see. Same deal with other sites.
Yep, i created my first lemmy account a little over year ago when i first heard about it. I tried it for a few days and ended up back on reddit. I came back about the time of the blackout and stayed this time. I even totally deleted my reddit accounts and overwrote all their content. Since then i have spent 10 minutes total on reddit and havent loaded it in weeks now.
I still run out of new posts by the time of my last break at work but we’re well above the threshold of usability, and it’s only uphill from here.
Reddit lost. Corporate won. Reddit was much larger than their CEO.
Keep in mind the users left on reddit aren’t really the cream of the crop. They’re the ones who say stuff like “bruhhh this app is shit” fully unaware that reddit is a website first and foremost
Reddit is competing with Instagram and TikTok for the dumbest slice of the Internet. If you can think, you’re no longer welcome there, and are probably a liability to their advertising efforts
A lot of the best mods left. Some made it over here to the Fediverse, but a lot of them just stopped. Which is probably better for their mental health.
You still have good mods left over there, but there was also a distinct brain drain.
Some of the best mod tools shut down, and overall the site is just a bit worse to use.
Now, can the remaining mods train up to the level of the ones who left? Sure, but there’s going to be that doubt in the back of their minds now. Reddit Admins can no longer be trusted to let mods run their communities.
And the next time Reddit Admins do something that pisses off the community, more people will leave and not look back. The IPO is still looming in the future, and there are a lot of fuckups for Spez to make.
You still have good mods left over there, but there was also a distinct brain drain.
To add on that: even the good mods to be far less cooperative than before. Accessing the site only once a day, never reporting issues to the admins, plopping lazy automod rules full of false positives, never engaging with the userbase, so goes on. Until the mod suddenly goes missing in action - people noticed that the sub went downhill, but they never noticed that the mod was gone.
The standards of the “immigration leftover” might be low, but even those will eventually migrate once they get better content elsewhere. And at this rate even IG and TT will be able to offer it, not because they’ve become better but because Reddit itself is worse.
I don’t think corpo websites will survive high intrest rates in the long term. They’re already making rash decisions to quickly start turning a profit andbit’s only gonna piss off users. Once the fediverse gets critical mass their days are over and we’ll wonder why we didn’t do this sooner
If you look at the default subs maybe, but I no longer subscribed or had blocked most of the big ones over the years so my subs throughout the protests had normal nondisruptive activity. And I think for lot of long time reddit users it was the smaller subs that kept them around due to being able to find many different subs for their interest.
So I don’t think the protest was as disruptive in the long run. But, it did at least create a small reddit alternative with a more broad appeal than the type of individuals that drew them to Voat. And I don’t see reddit pushing away its current very large userbase away unless they do more crazy things. What comes to mind is getting rid of old.reddit and disabling RES functionality, but even that is a niche demographic of reddit’s main target audience.
Reddit demographic in large is vocal but lot will not actually be a threat to leave.
Reddit has lost 2/3 of their valuation in less than a year, and that was before the protests. That’s not a success kind of metric. And that number is from the institutional investors saying how much they’re marking down their investments - it’s not like some people trying to tank the stock.
Basically, the metrics which have not not all been made public have made the people and institutions with a collective billions of dollars already invested in the company are the ones saying it’s in the basement.
However a LOT of that was from being over-inflated in the first place from during the pandemic when everything Internet was up, vs. now when everything Internet is a bit down. I agree that there is still a story there, about greed and how Huffman probably could have gotten his IPO if he hadn’t held out for even more above what it was worth - one bird in the hand being worth two in the bush and all that.
But that is a slightly different story than what we all are dying to know: what is the devaluation since the time of the protests? And that in turn is complicated by e.g. traffic statistics somehow going up since that time (how much of that is due to activities of people deleting their content though? each and every API request for deletion, and especially additional requests for overwriting, plus more besides to monitor the situation e.g. confirm removal, all count as “traffic”, which I’m sure Reddit will still label as if due to positive rather than negative interest in the site and thus present to advertisers as “user engagement”; plus separately how much traffic has been added from
other types of bots in general as well?), and then ofc r/place just so happened to obscure any traffic stat effects lately… awfully convenient timing for that, one presumes…
It will be interesting to see what that number is, when it becomes available.
Didn’t the large subreddits get FORCED to come back? Or the mods were banned or something?
Yes to both. And that means that the mods who stayed are no longer going to trust Reddit Admins.
Also, the IPO is coming, and there will be stupid policies that are meant to drive up the stock price at the expense of the community.
Look forward to more waves of people abandoning Reddit in the future.