After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access…
Every time I read something from the EFF I’m reminded how incredibly valuable they are to our internet.
The thing here is that we haven’t really seen what the actual fallout from Reddit’s decision is going to be… and we probably won’t for a few months, at least (or until they do their IPO, whatever happens first).
What will be a better indicator is how many 3rd party app users end up switching to the official app on July 1, and if they don’t, how big of a dent they make in the volume and quality of contribution and moderation. Enough decline in contribution and moderation is going to result in less community engagement, but that’s something that will take a while to really be noticeable.
As far as the blackout, I think it’s a little disingenuous to say that a “two-day blackout” that lasted, checks notes, two days was a failure. Nobody realistically expected that the blackout would kill Reddit, or permanently cripple the site. Yeah, we hoped that’d bring Reddit to the table, willing to be more reasonable, which hasn’t really happened; but also, now there’s a whole community and team of moderators coordinating further actions, and new responses. The main goal of the blackout was to raise awareness of these issues, and I’m pretty sure that’s been raised.
Furthermore, the consequences of Reddit’s decisions and policies (not only this month, but for the last couple of years) are going to be felt in the following years, not days of weeks. While I love my 3rd party app of choice (RiF), and wouldn’t browse Reddit on the official, I’d still have old.reddit + RES + toolbox to keep me sane for a while; however, me and others are more concerned about the long-term consequences of Reddit going all-in on monetization-only decisions, that don’t consider the well-being of, or negative consequences to, the community. That’s why I’m 95% sure, at this point, that I’ll be deleting my Reddit account this month. Not because of RiF, or the official app, or the porn subreddits; but because I see this as a turning point of the admins of the site completely forgetting the principles of, as the EFF put it in the article, “free and open internet”, in order to please investors and chase a good IPO.
Reddit and Twitter are boosting decentralization and I’m all here for it
Yeah. I can’t help but think Reddit is doing the internet a favour in the long term. The more decentralized and less corporate control the better.
Feels like we’re coming full circle at this point
lol yep it’s funny: Reddit is unironically saving the Internet. It’s become pretty much 3-5 main sites and that’s it. In the 90s I had about a million different forum bookmarks, chat rooms and communities I was a part of. i’m feeling very comfortable having kicked reddit out of my life and gone back to that.
I do wish it had a different name than fediverse though, that name reminds me too much of Metaverse.
I kind of like The Federation, but that also sounds like the name of an evil empire in a sci fi show.
Fediverse has been a thing for much longer than Metaverse. Can’t blame them for not knowing Zuck will be giving his failed experiment a similar sounding name in the future.
I really liked the article that I hadn’t read before on Enshittification by Cory Doctorow from January linked from the EFF article, which really well captures the inevitability of what’s happening to Reddit (and the value of the Fediverse):
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.
This is, by far, the best article on the subject I’ve read to date. I really appreciated this paragraph being included:
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon.