Everything that reddit has that is of any value is the contributions of it's users. Disrespecting those users will make them leave the platform, if not today, someday soon. Redditors! Choose to delete all your content NOW and let Spez IPO the ashes.
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Before you delete, do transfer your content to lemmy or kbin or any fediverse instance. It can only benefit the community the more content we have :)
Can you link some tools to do so?
I've seen a few users mentioning their comments have been "undeleted" after a few attempts to remove them, and I've also seen comments by [deleted] accounts that still have their comments visible. This was right after the 48hr shutdown period, so it might not be a thing anymore.
I wish I saw this sooner. I deleted my comments yesterday (12+ year reddit account).
It's still massive and wasn't going to die over the period of a month. People are looking elsewhere but currently have no good alternatives. Lemmy/kbin is awesome, but still not ready for the entire Reddit community. We'll get there eventually!
I have nothing to back this up and I haven't spent any significant amount of time browsing Reddit since the end of June. Yesterday, a search result took me to a section of Reddit and eyebrowsed through a bit. I feel like the people that left were the people that contributed and a lot of the remaining traffic is the people that just browse. Social media and the internet are not like real world businesses that just tank. Online social media is made up of the people who view it and the people who contribute to it. Facebook became boomers, memes that aren't as clever as people who post them think they are, You're great and posting pictures of a family reunion you didn't know existed, and a substitute for craigslist. It didn't used to be that way, but I think overall they would say their numbers are solid. Social media evolves, and Reddit is evolving in a direction, that a core group of users who I speculate were some of the more useful contributors, don't want to participate in. We're not going to wake up tomorrow and find Reddit gone. But will it ever truly be the front page of the internet again? Will it ever be where I'm glad my search took me for a specific tech problem? Will information that used to be on individual bulletin boards scattered throughout the net which had centralized on Reddit remain on Reddit? Reddit will probably cash out in some way and we'll be left with the Facebook equivalent of Reddit. If that's something that quality contributors don't want to participate in, then it will be even more akin to Facebook. So is it going to go away? Probably not. Could you argue that it's basically already gone? I would say it's at least headed that way.
Reddit went from the 5th most visited website in the world to the 20th. That's not nothing.
Lemme put on my tin foil hat for a second and say that this degrading of reddit was just in time for it to go public. It could only go up from here.
I can't predict the future, but I think this whole federating thing is good. The internet and its traffic was too localized. The people don't want to keep being sold.
Now if we could somehow get everyone that uses a site like this to actually PAY - say - $1 a YEAR, the internet would be better for it.
Didn't they set server donation goals at one stage and the community of reddit were more than happy to contribute money?
Pay who? Serious question.
Edi: Or where?
Pay your instance to help offset hosting fees.
Back in the '90s, ISPs would provide subscribers with Email (POP3/SMTP) access, NNTP access and even basic web hosting of static pages. They also used to provide FTP mirrors of most large software repositories. This saved them wholesale bandwidth and also a faster connection for their users. Maybe modern independent ISPs can reimplement this Service for their subscribers. For instance (pun not intended) Telstra and iiNet (in Australia) could offer access to a Lemmy instance, or a consortium of independent ISPs could sponsor a regional Lemmy instance.
I'm hoping this is the direction we go, and I think it will be, though if the Fediverse ever overtook private social media, I'm pretty certain the tech companies would lobby to regulate social media, try to regulate who's allowed to host web servers, or lobby ISP's to raise bandwidth costs for people who do host web servers.
Saying that it's over and the Reddit won is a bit naive. The majority of the subs that I used to frequent have come back online, but they are definitely still protesting. ProgrammerHumor is making new troll rules based on majority vote every week. Madlads made everyone a mod. Many subs are posting John Oliver or troll versions of their original purpose.
It's not over. Will they succeed? Who knows. But Reddit is currently a completely different place than it was a month ago because of the ongoing protests.
As a digg refugee I can say that I am done with reddit, too much dejavu here.
I started spending more time at reddit slightly before the digg exodus, and yeah. The masses aren't the ones to worry about, it's the people that have been creating content and moderating it for the last 15 years. Reddit has no value past that, it's just forum software (see also: digg.) Not sure how it's going to shake out, but I know that I went viewing daily and commenting often to... nothing. The official app is not getting added to my phone, the mobile website is outright hostile, and it honestly just feels gross to launch the main website. I'd rather just search for gems on lemmy or kbin or mastodon and engage on that.
Yup. I haven't logged in since Boost went down and don't intend to. Except when a link takes me there and auto-opens the app.
That said, while it's fun and informative to talk about how bad Reddit has become, I hope Lemmy can move on soon and just start being something different rather than constantly being smug about Reddit.
The subs I have witnessed (although it is difficult because I did delete my account in protest of the API changes), are all full of Astroturf and Ads and are no longer usable.
Maybe I'm biased but I feel like the soul of Reddit as a social media site is much more dependent on its users than other sites. Reddit will continue on but if the company keeps undervaluing its users and moderators (and everything points to that), it will end up being as vapid and pointless as people are saying Threads is now.
Yeah, like your experience with Facebook is largely dependent on your IRL contacts using it. If your friends and family still use it, you might not even notice that it sucks, cuz you are by default more likely to be interested in their normal life shit. But individual connections aren't really relevant on Reddit. I don't even know if any of my IRL friends use it. My experience with it depends entirely on strangers posting good content. If those strangers stop, then Reddit sucks for everyone.
I'm here now and not there. So I guess it at least did a little something 🙋♂️
Reddit is too big to die quickly (unless they suffer a catastrophic failure), but it's easy to see that it was an inflection point for them, that it's downhill from here. Remember: at one point, it looked like Yahoo Directory and Internet Explorer would be around forever too.
Same for myspace. When was the last time that was relevant?
They all died due to competitive market pressure. Reddit and Twitter are dying due to managerial incompetence. I believe that Threads will be stillborn due to managerial incompetence, but we are yet to see.
Reddit certainly has changed and I don't think it will bounce back so easily. It feels like the Mall you used to love that slowly fell from grace where all of your favorite stores slowly closed up shop and you found yourself going elsewhere instead. One day someone brings up the old mall in passing and someone else chimes in that it's now a flea market. It feels like that's where Reddit is heading... it feels like Reddit is turning into the Dirt-Mall.
Corporation sacrificed user trust, but isn't completely gone yet. More at 11, stay tuned!
There are a lot of people who find Reddit useful and aren't really interested in the politics of it. As the site fills up with spam and hate because mods are gone, more of the people who just enjoy the site will leave. Unfortunately by then the the IPO will have happened, people will cash out and start the next thing. I don't think the leaders at Reddit really care about anything except the money.
If they do care they are really going about things the wrong way. For me, I really hope we can switch to things like Lemmy and Mastodon that are not controlled by corporations or advertising.
The real mystery is how any company will look at the current situation of reddit and think "Yes, this looks like it'll be fully fixed within 6 months, tops, and profitable during 2024"
It only cost them the trust of those who trusted them most.
Trust is like a mirror. When broken, you can put it back together but you will ALWAYS see the cracks.
I have to be honest, the fact we have an active alternative(s) to reddit at last makes this a complete success for me. I've lowkey despised reddit for years. Particularly from 2016 on when bots kind of overran the website and the front page was just filled with toxic garbage that never really went away to this day. I actually did use the revanced patch to get my RIF app working again (though I can't get my ad-less premium back unfortunately), but I've been on here far more than there. I think im just having more fun on Lemmy than I have been on reddit in years. The only reasons I hop back are for sports team specific communities (and really the game threads because I like interacting with other people watching when im watching alone). On the instance i'm on currently there are generated game threads but it hasn't got the users to make them particularly active as of yet. If that ever happens i'll happily cut off reddit for good
If the only people who leave Reddit are the ones who understand what a federated FOSS link aggregator is, I think I'd be cool with that. Lemmy's share of the 3% who have moved on is already pretty impressive, at least in terms of where it was a couple months ago. And the quality of the discourse has been significantly better.
I dunno if Reddit won, but I certainly did.
The fact that the Reddit API scandal has now been spun into some 'battle' of salty users vs Reddit is, in microcosm, a win for Reddit. By all appearances, when viewed under that lens, they 'won'.
It was never a struggle, it was a statement of intent. And that statement of intent has, in my opinion, been actioned because here we are now, with a promising alternative.
Reddit will probably flourish under its new guise, accepting that isn't a sort of capitulation. Just move on.
Inertia will carry them pretty far, and I'm sure they'll find some way to increase profits — most likely by changing the rules to the point where the site and community is unrecognizable. It will take a while before anyone really notices, and many people probably never will. Reddit will continue boiling the frog indefinitely in search of profits, the same way most social media corps do. Today's YouTube is nothing like what it was when it became popular. Same with Facebook, same with Twitter.
Reddit just needs to pivot before they fall. They probably are in good position to do so, tbh.
There's more money in passive, less-savvy users. The ones who don't use ad blockers, don't use third-party apps, and just consume the feed.
I shouldn't be surprised that Reddit is actively alienating people like me, because people like me do not bring them ad revenue. We DO bring them users, in theory, because we contribute to conversations and make original posts — you know, the things people go to Reddit too see — but what does that really mean for the bottom line? Possibly nothing. There's no shortage of posts on Reddit, many of which never see the light of day because they never get the upvotes. If the top contributors leave, it will just create more room at the top. The feed will remain full, and the subjective quality of that feed probably won't affect the bottom line very much.
I agree for the most part, but the one thing that I think they'll have trouble with is bots. I think they truly underestimate the work that mods and contributors did for free in raising the quality of content, and now they have to build the plane while it's flying after having booted the ones building it off, and now it's just pilots and passengers. Those uniquely impactful few that have been brushed away will hurt the most in a brain-drain kind of way.
This feels short-sighted. The odds of the protest having a major and immediate impact were always low. It's not like the suits were going to have a sudden change of heart and realize they were alienating their users. The majority of Reddit's userbase weren't going to suddenly leave the site forever. But that wasn't the point.
Here's what's changed since the API changes were announced:
- Reddit's responses to user concerns and protests have alienated even more users than the initial changes themselves, showing users exactly how Reddit's administration sees them.
- A whole bunch of mods, devs, and contributors who put in a lot hard work improving Reddit for free are now much less motivated to do so (if they're still willing to do it at all).
- The protest raised awareness of federated Reddit alternatives, which have grown substantially as a result. A lot of those people who helped improve Reddit for free are now turning their attention to kbin and Lemmy instead.
- Reddit is on a clear trajectory. They've shown they will continue making user-hostile decisions and antagonizing their userbase in pursuit of further growth.
We now have an established alternative to Reddit that has reached a critical mass for growth. A lot more people are now working on making the fediverse better, and communities are forming that will attract new users on their own. From now on, every time Reddit makes another move like this, more people will move over (or get closer to moving over) and Reddit will drop in quality even more as a result. If there's ever a Digg V4 moment (maybe when they kill old.reddit), the fediverse will be much more prepared to take on the mass exodus that results.
It's remarkable to me that Reddit could have let one of their PR drones write a post that essentially took seven paragraphs to say, "Sorry but we have to" and it probably would have mostly blown over.
But Huffman's ego took the wheel and he had to make it personal. Instead of just leaving, people are actively cheering for Reddit's downfall.
It always amazes me that these idiots don't have a think tank which has great ideas for them and can tell them when their own ideas are shit.
If I was rich. Absolutely 100% would do this. It would be like cheating at life.
It seems like everyone who runs a large social media platform believes we live in a meritocracy and they're somehow geniuses.
It really really hope Lemmy takes off. For me, there’s enough here that I’m set. I look forward to the apps getting better and the platform getting more stable.
No, it didn't get crushed. The goal was never to move everyone off reddit, it is to trigger the death spiral by having the people who cared about and actively contributes to abandon reddit and being redditors.
If this trend continues, reddit will get Facebook'd as their algorithms will make contents there get louder and dumber and angrier than ever before and cause more people to leave.
Remember, reddit is cynicism and despair, and despair is the enemy of progress.
The big reveal on the impact from this will be in the aftermath from the future IPO. I believe the damage on the brand certainly had a big impact on the target price Reddit can ask.
Also, it showed how fragile its ecosystem is to a bunch of unpaid volunteers which may not have the shareholders interest at heart.