I mean don’t get me wrong, its cool a lot of subs have and still are participating in the blackout, but I think it wouldve been better to link a new home for the subreddits participating somewhere in the private message. Show spez, hey if you dont change, we aren’t going to use your site (or use it less).
I think a lot of (Americans, at least) have poorly understood ideas about what protesting is and how it’s supposed to work–in no small part, I think, due to the sanitized way we’re taught about things like the Civil Rights movement. The idea that a simple show of solidarity with an announced end date would, I guess, guilt trip(?) Spez into doing the right thing was always an absurd idea, divorced from reality, and only slightly better than doing nothing at all. There’s been headlines all day about Spez’s comments about waiting for the blackout to blow over, but that’s pretty explicitly what the people behind the blackout said would happen.
Admittedly, prolonged blackouts will probably just lead to the offending moderators being replaced with new, compliant mods, but that’s still the preferable outcome. It at least leverages the unpaid but not unskilled labor moderators currently put into Reddit into something vaguely tangible–the effective and smooth running of otherwise unwieldy subreddits. Large-scale subreddits that can only function with expansive moderator tools, automod, etc. will potentially suffer noticeably when being operated by new scab mods. That decreased user experience would actually be potentially effective.
It’s also why federation is important. Maybe I’m just old and miss the web 1.0 days, but the current social media landscape is a cancer of enshittification. Kevin Rose killed Digg, Mark Zuckerberg killed Facebook (and Instagram), and Spez is killing Reddit. We need a decentralized internet, even if it’s intuitive at first.
Spot on, federation and decentralization is the right path forward. Users create the content and should own it, the output of our time and typing has value and shouldn’t be siloed away in corporate money making machines run by sociopaths. It should belong to the people to help us connect to each other.
Most of us would not have tried out lemmy and kbin if reddit didn’t implode. It’s a bit rough being so new but it’s promising and content is flowing.
I agree it’s not effective.
But any protest shouldn’t be wild thing that puts everyone involved into dark.
Announcing it and planning it so it sends message but isn’t making everyone life worse than needed, is proper way to do it.
If it’s not effective, just do it again for week/ month / move your subscribers elsewhere / etc … but let everyone involved know an keep it civil. Bad guys will reveal themselves along the way.
In this regard, IMHO those who participated didn’t do it wrong way but those who didn’t listen wronged the community as whole.
Rossman was correct in one of his videos. Community gotta stuck together and not fight each other, that’s the only way to fight those power hungry companies.
I agree decentralized internet is good. Many small competitors are better than one huge mobidick that can’t see it’s own tail anymore so. it rolls over anyone in the way.
Success will be measured in $$$ and that’s loss of ad revenue. So far, no revenue has been lost because all the buys were placed and paid for pre-Blackout.
The acid test is the 2-weeks from the Blackout - will advertisers flee Reddit for more stable/predictable pastures OR will u/spez and company be able to talk them in to staying by offering concessions for the disruptions in audience delivery?
Stay tuned until July 1: u/spez doesn’t seem like a real flexible kinda guy so far but we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes.
Honestly, part of what makes sites shitty is isn’t just the pursuit of profit over all else, but also the Eternal September. On the internet, quantity follows quality – that is, a high quality discussion board with a small to medium population will come into being, then everyone else will start moving toward it, and as more people show up, it gets more and more toxic, until the quality drops. I’m hoping that the fediverse will to some extent be able to alleviate that by allowing people to split off to some extent without having to leave completely.
We can only do what we can do.
I think of the 90-9-1 rule. If 10% of users leave or spend less time, there’s less content. Less content means the 90% will go elsewhere.
With something as big as Reddit it was never going to be easy, it was never going to be quick. But this will hurt them.
Don’t think about it as a war lost, think of it as a battle lost, but serious damage done.
Also don’t go back, that’s exactly what they’re betting on.
I’ve already deleted my account, and honestly? I don’t miss Reddit. I get the sense that the migration will be a rather lengthy process, since moving entire communities of loosely associated individuals from one platform to another is inevitably going to be a tad messy and sluggish.
No, not really. I think a lot of people just have wrong expectations of what the blackout could actually do. Your average Reddit user doesn’t care about anything that’s going on. They care about consuming their content in the most convenient way. If their main subreddits are closed that isn’t to migrate to a new platform but to a different subreddit. It took 6-7 months for Digg to lose a significant user base of their platform after their terrible changes. The same timeline will apply to Reddit. Expecting it over 2-3 days is just unrealistic.
It would also defeat the purpose of the blackout. The blackout wasn’t to get people to move to a different platform but for Reddit to change its decision. If this is done with a scorched earth strategy Reddit would still die even if they reverse their decision. Right now Reddit still has an easy out of their decision. Rather than being forced to change they can say they merely listened to their passionate user base. They can even come up with a new solution, for example, hiring the Apollo dev to rework their own app. Obviously, Steve Huffman would need to go first for that to be an option. But there are plenty of options available that continue for Reddit to be the most convenient way to spread certain content.
Let’s face it, the current Reddit alternatives lack content. Your average user would get bored here within minutes because there is not much here. It’s inconvenient to find new Magazines. And even if they find one that’s a copy of their favorite subreddit, it’s mostly empty with barely any new posts showing up. At least nowhere near the rate it used to on Reddit.
But luckily people who do create a lot of content are the ones most likely to get fed up with the changes of Reddit. They are more likely to use third-party apps or extensions because the default Reddit version is so bad. It will just take time. Because for now no change can’t be felt. Apollo is even still up and running and so is every other app/extension that uses the API. So the real decline will happen after June 30. That’s the date when users will start to feel the need to migrate.
The actual win is if the Google algorithm starts to deprioritize reddit results due to communities being privated.
Edit: I can even see Google or other big techs pouncing on the opportunity to take the community for themselves, or simply using search deprioritization to drive reddit to the brink and buying it out
Though it’s causing folks to look at other alternatives, and realize it would be a good idea to have one. So even if communities don’t end up moving, Reddit’s power is reduced slightly, just because other places do exist.
Let’s say…
- Reddit & API users negotiate a middle ground and 3rd party apps are allowed to stay: The community still loses.
- Reddit buys one of the better third party apps and replaces/integrates it with the default app: We all know what will happen next.
- Reddit does a full-stop 180, cancels all API changes, and apologizes: It’s only a matter of time until they try again.
Enshitification has infected Reddit. So to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care how the blackout is going because no matter how it turns out, I don’t think I really want to be there to watch it continue its deterioration.
I deleted all my past content and deleted the accounts. Tbh, I’m pretty disappointed in the very verbal dick riders who refused to join rhe protest. The whole attitude from those who remained of “I got mine so fuck everybody else” leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Its at the core of so many problems across society. Maybe this is just a fast way of filtering out a whole ton of garbage users at once, by leaving them behind.