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?
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.
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.
In the three or so days I’ve been using it it’s expanded noticeably, and I’d say it’s on the verge of being big enough already. Once it rounds that tipping point it has a decent chance of becoming sustainable on its own.
All of them want to be where the eyeballs are
This might be a little different for a website like reddit, where lurkers want to be where the content creators are. Concent creators, posters don’t need lurkers as much as lurkers need them.
And Reddit will probably do something else before long to drive even more people away and hopefully the Fediverse will be better prepared and ready for the influx with a better user experience.
I mean, if that’s how they treat the mods, who would want to mod for reddit? It is unpaid work, the only reasons they are doing it would either be to feel empowered or to foster a community. What spez did is to tell mods they are powerless and to show them the community doesn’t matter. Without good mods, people won’t be sticking around.
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.Unfortunately, articles I’ve seen about this on the front pages of major, classic, news outlets primarily report spez’s position and don’t mention any of the nonsense stuff that’s gone on.
Considering the volume of bots spreading venom about it, I have to say it’s doing something
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?
I think one needs to see the bigger picture here. The protest that started earlier this week might not have left a big dent in reddit yet. What it did though is raise attention and increase awareness for alternative news/content aggregators like kbin. They’re not anywhere close to competing with reddit yet but the door got opened.
The shortsighted reddit politics basically helped to kickstart their own future competitors. If we do our best here and bring in good content, comment and get past only consuming there will be a real chance to become more appealing than reddit in the long run. I’m definitely here to stay.
Zero impact on Reddit.
Reddit has 52 million daily active users and approximately 430 million users who use it once a month. In comparison, Lemmy has a mere 143k users and kbin has about 33k users. Reddit hasn’t noticed that anyone left, and it never will.
Reddit will consolidate its platform and fully implement its ad business. 99.9% of users will stick around because they don’t care that much about 3rd party apps. Reddit will then have a big revenue stream from ads, allowing it to achieve profitability and do an IPO, which will bring in another boatload of money. At that point Reddit has plenty of cash to invest in improving its in-house app, mod tools, spam filters, etc.
Yep, this is the most realistic take. They did give lemmy/kbin a boost that will be home to a bunch of users, but it’s not winner take all. Both will now exist. People won’t leave reddit until they are personally affected. Most people didn’t care about 3rd party apps, and once the blackout is over, regular users won’t care unless reddit attacks them directly.
The louder they protest it’s not doing anything, the more you can be certain that it is.
That’s the fine. What it shows is that Reddit is concerned primarily and exclusively about making money. The average user is concerned primarily about convenience. Those that take issue or want smaller communities without the mass effect of a mainstream platform will find themselves elsewhere.
Personally I don’t care if the protest is having an effect or not because it’s been already said that it will not change reddit’s policies. Reddit is over for me, I’m just waiting for the API changes so that i can’t use my mobile client of choice anymore. In contrast, I’m finding interesting and vibrant discussions and comments on here, which is looking like the early Reddit days, and I’m very glad for this.
I certainly don’t think Reddit is going to die out from this; its far too big. But I do think that Spez has managed to irrevocably change the culture of the site forever (particularly by forcing out the long time users). I personally have no intention of going back despite having been active on the site almost daily since 2010
Steve’s trying to discourage people. He’s scared about the logistics and fallout that come with up and replacing the mods forcing subs to open.
We also have to be weary that anyone posting on here could be working in favour of Reddit’s interest, trying to discourage subs to open as well.
I don’t really care. I’m here now, deleted my 12 year old account in the process. People thinking Reddit will die are delusional. The Reddit as us old people know it has died years ago, it just became unbearable now.
Yeah , like every time Facebook was in a massive scandal - they’ll still have a billion users and unlimited money to make problems go away - but is it a nice place to be? 🥶🥶
They are threatening to remove mods who won’t reopen subreddits, you really believe it isn’t impacting them? They are getting desperate.
