I read The Verge’s latest interview with Steve Huffman here and it seems as though the Reddit blackout is having little to no effect. It also seems as though the communities at large don’t really care and will probably just use the official app or don’t really know there are 3rd party ones. So it seems this will pass and be mostly forgotten about.
What are your thoughts?
This will end exactly the same way the Twitter -> Mastodon thing ended.
Reddit will continue. A slightly worse Reddit, with more bots, more low-effort content, and less quality OC.
Moderation will degrade slightly as the admins replace protesting moderators with more obedient ones, and/or communities lose interest and use the new “voting” (lol) systems to pick admins which will give them the reliable dopamine hits.
A small percentage of Redditors, especially the power users, will move on. A small percentage in Reddit terms is a tidal wave for any other platform. Some percentage of that number of Redditors leaving will come here.
Lemmy & Kbin will experience growing pains. Issues caused by scaling up infrastructure, instance to instance friction, etc. These will get resolved with time. When things settle, we will have a fraction of reddit’s userbase, but neither will we need more. We’ll have enough to have stable, engaging communities which will slowly grow.
In other words, a mirror reflection of the Mastodon story.
Twitter relies on celebrities, athletes, and journalists. All of them want to be where the eyeballs are so until Mastodon grows more, they’ll stay on Twitter.
Lemmy just needs to continue to grow and improve. Maybe it never gets as big as reddit but the content has the potential to be just as good.
They sure are trying really hard to put a stop to the blackout they say is having no effect.
It may be true that the disturbance has minimal effect on overall site traffic and advertising revenue, but it’s caught the attention of the media which could have much larger effects.
But the blackout isn’t really what’s catching most of the attention anymore, it’s the mishandling of the situation that’s ending up in the news most of the time now. Spez is bringing most of this on himself.
I’d guess there’s impact if they’re forcing subs to reopen via threats and generally acting like tyrants with the self control of a toddler.
Of course he is going to say there is none. With the latest news how they are undeleting peoples comments and are going to replace mods; it is absolutely affecting the bottom line
If there is no effect, then why is he losing his ever loving mind over it? Why are they going to potentially change rules that have stayed the same since Reddit’s inception as a result?
