Can Reddit survive as its volunteer workforce close down subreddits and walk away from the site in protest at the management’s new policies?
I think Reddit will be fine from the exterior. IPO may not go so well. But what really matters is the soul of Reddit died long ago.
It’s going to be Facebook’s little cousin.
So I haven’t used Facebook in ages but what’s its relevance? Do people share articles, memes, etc. on Facebook? What about celebrity AMAs?
I think Reddit won’t fail in a long time, being so established now. And say what you will about Fediverse but shared “front page of the internet” is really useful when every other popular social media spews garbage customized just for you. (And I hope I’m wrong but quietly afraid I’m not.)
Facebook being used as a way to keep up with friends has been fading for a while. It’s mostly only older people left on it, Elder Millennial and older (I’m an Elder Millennial fwiw).
Facebook’s real social media power is in its groups and pages. There’s usually local town groups, like you’d have with NextDoor. But there’s also giant meme groups. New Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens (NUMTOTs) is huge, and is basically posts about trains and hating landlords, but it was big enough to the notable when the group endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016. Another huge one is Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends, which is memes about nature and wild animals. Facebook has become a lot like reddit, in that it’s what you make of it in terms of weird friends and niche groups.
The current go to joke about facebook goes like this:
“Facebook is lame, there’s no one on it anymore and it’s no fun.”
“Facebook is still fun if all your friends are gay communists.”Facebook is still fun if all your friends are gay communists
Or anti-vaxxers. Or qanon cultists. Or “friends of January 6” or whatever.
FB is mostly used by the 40+ crowd.
IG is mostly 25-40
Tiktok is predominately under 25.
I use Facebook to talk to about a dozen or so people I wouldn’t otherwise. I know, because I dropped off for a couple years and didn’t really connect with them, which sucked.
But on a day to day basis? It’s the absolute worst dregs of boomer humor and low effort, brick stupid content. It took a long time to screen out the political garbage I hate and slowly unfollow the various people who’ve gone insane in the past 8 years. I was left with like … purposefully bad cooking videos, advertisements, the occasional comic book page (why?!?), more advertisements, old/bad memes, more advertisements, and most important of all, advertisements.
In fairness my wife uses it to coordinate with other parents from our kids school. Why we can’t use something else to do that coordination I don’t know, but eh.
tldr: It’s for older millenials on up and mostly garbage algo promoted content thoroughly seasoned with advertising.
Yeah, it’s been a slow boiling pot of water, but the problem has been the same basically the entire time.
- Community: reddit, we do not like this thing you are doing. Insert thing here. All of ViolentAkrez’s messed up porn subreddit stuff, r/jailbait, r/thedonald, firing the woman in charge of AMAs, Ellen Pao’s drastic attempts at monetization (which was just her being the scapegoat for Huffman and crew) and now these API changes. Stop doing this thing that is hurting your community.
- reddit: Here are a lot of words to say that we don’t care about what any of you think, and we believe we are making the right decisions. While we understand you are all upset, we do not care and do not plan on changing.
- Community: OK, well we’re going to continue protesting this and escalating until you change it.
- reddit: that’s all great but we still don’t care.
- repeat x5 escalations
- The matter finally hits mainstream media. Gawker, or a major online news site, if we get really lucky, there’s a CNN segment on it.
- Within 30 seconds of mainstream media coverage, reddit caves and does the thing the community asked for the entire time.
This is why the protests for this escalated so quickly. We’ve done those steps over and over again, for over a decade. The point of protests at this point is never to get the reddit admin’s attention or change their minds. The point is to cause a big enough stink to get major media attention. The protests ramped up so quickly because there were only 30 days to change reddit’s mind, they showed no indication they wanted to change, and we needed the media attention. We got plenty of media attention this time. Unfortunately, media attention isn’t going to be enough to change their minds now, because this is all for an IPO and the execs want their bag of money. Even if reddit folds entirely, they’ll get to walk with the bag.
But in reality, we should’ve ditched years ago. Because, does any of that cycle sound healthy? It’s not that reddit’s admins don’t care. It’s that they haven’t cared in a long time. Huffman doesn’t care. I don’t think Alex Ohanian did by the end either. Aaron Schwartz cared, but too much. But if a community can only get a site’s staff to stop actively harming them by putting a gun to their head every time there’s a problem, there’s no future for that relationship. This was just the exclamation point. Even if reddit staff totally caves, we should not go back.
I’ve purged a lot of my social media footprint in the last 6 years and I have regretted it zero times. This too shall pass.
Well said. Boosted and upvoted… whatever those two things mean. Internet points to you, good sir!
I’ll edit to add that the main thing you point out that I think most fediverse folks want to avoid is the investment that leads to the IPO bag of cash. When the incentive is profit, I think social media can only ever get worse for the average end user. Keeping these things small and non-corporate is great in theory, but who pays for the servers and other costs when/if it needs to scale?
There’s still a big difference between making money to survive, and the insane cash grab that was this new API pricing…
That’s kind of the problem, though. That insane cash grab is profit driven. Spez said it himself in the AMA: Reddit is profit driven. That goes beyond makiong money to survive. That’s investors seeing a return on their money. That’s generating value in preparation fo that big IPO. That doesn’t usually mix well with the way a site like Reddit generates value: free community created content. Right now, Reddit is banking on enough users not caring about the protest, or the fact that the site is arguably on a downward trajectory. Looking valuable is more important than being valuable at this point.
Thanks Jack Welch for that kind of mentality. I hope you’re burning in Hell.
No argument with what you said, I’m just saying there’s a big difference between paying for a server, and paying your shareholders.
It’s not going to instantly die, no. But once the power users and the ones who truly cared start leaving the content will start dwindling to the point that the normal users start noticing and leaving as well. It’s a slow spiral that will likely take a few years and reddit probably won’t truly “die” for a while, but it will never be the same again. Time will tell what rises to take its place, whether it’s kbin or lemmy or something else.
“Maybe we should have checked where content is being created from before we cut that off.” - Some guy before getting fired at Reddit.
How delusional is that stance though? Charging someone to post their created content on your platform then turn around and sell access to that content to users through advertising. Did Mac come up with this plan?
This, a lot of the people who remained on reddit don’t seem to understand that this wasn’t a single incident, it was the culmination of years of smaller problems. I found it easy to leave because these newfound spaces are much more like the reddit I remember in 2012.
I don’t really care either way if reddit stays or goes. I’ll be on kbin and lemmy regardless.
Whether Reddit goes on successfully forever or goes down the drain next week I don’t really care. Things like this have shown me the Fediverse is the future, that’s where I’d rather make my “home” on the internet.
Regardless of how great a service like Reddit may have been, putting all of your eggs in a basket owned by a single company who’s inevitable goal is to make money just isn’t going to work out well. I’m not faulting a company for trying to make money, that’s the world we live in and they’re just playing the game. By continuing to contribute to services like that, though, we’re only increasing their value, not ours.
The only chance we’ve got for an internet we actually want to spend time on is one that can’t be controlled by a handful of corporations. Hopefully that’s the Fediverse, but who knows.
A lot of the mods won’t want to give up the power. That’s why the original “protest” was only 2 days, it was never meant to be serious. A lot of users have left to come here, but there are way more who will never leave reddit, no matter how bad it gets.
But I bet that we’re getting a much higher proportion of the users that make actual content and have real conversations. The ones that only type out two word replies or pick arguments over trivial things can stay on Reddit.
Yeah, for sure. A lot of people aren’t looking for actual content or discussion though, they just want their cat pics and stale repetitive jokes. The fediverse will grow but reddit isn’t going isn’t going to die.
This is it exactly. The users and mods that are leaving and protesting are the ones who make the site what it is (was). Reddit corporate knows it too. If they didn’t, I feel like we’d have seen some stats put out about how “these third party app users don’t contribute”.
It’s not a loss of volunteer manpower, its just a changing of the guard. Sadly there will always be legions of scabs willing to take the place of those protesting.
It takes more than warm bodies to maintain a large community. There’s tons of people lining up because they imagine being a moderator of a large sub is a power trip. What they’ll actually find is that the job sucks. There’s not a whole lot of power tripping to be had. It’s mostly boring administration, filtering out obvious trash, all for the low low price of free.
I foresee a ton of turn over as scabs abandon post and Reddit admins scramble to keep finding more fresh meat to grind.
They will still exist but they will lose a bunch for sure.
They’ll lose the heavy contributors. Those that rely on the 3rd party apps to contribute.
Yeah, it disproportionately affects power users/content creators/moderators.
I nuked all my posts on r/vans yesterday because I got the random thought to Google image search “reddit vans [keyword/model]” and my images/posts were all over Google images. Half the time they were the 1st result, most of the time they’d be in 2rd and 3rd.
I was a big contributor on r/vans for years (different username) and there’s no question that my posts must’ve generated a lot of traffic for reddit. Not anymore! I don’t feel good about all my photos being on reddit any longer. No plans to go back there either.
I want to rebuild here, with blackjack, and hookers! It’s still very new, but I made lemmy.world/c/vans. The r/vans community and mods are great, but there’s just no going back to reddit for me. But I can now see the argument that one user doesn’t make a difference is bullshit, when it’s my posts all over search engines’ top results. Fuck you reddit!
Again with this Steven Vaughan-nichols??
I was reading a previous article and it was him raging about the GPL being stuck in the 1980’s, then another article it was him raging about the distro maintainers living in stone age. Now it’s an article where he is raging about reddit.
Is it Steven Vaughan-nichols posting his own articles?
Reddit is becoming an unusable garbage site.
'Tis.
I second this. The subs I’m subscribed to are losing a lot of quality, and human interaction is degrading. Doesn’t feel like a comfortable place anymore.
Agree–I’m seeing a lot of what I called ‘quiet quitting’ lately. The regulars are posting a lot less, or not at all. I’m not ready to burn-it-all-down, because I want to be able to lure people over later when this is a bit more mature. But it already feels different there.
Yup. I just popped over there and even r/politics feels “thinner”–not as many posts, nor as many comments replying to posts as I would have seen a month ago.
Agreed. I use it much less than I used to and post a lot less. So that’s obviously going to lead to an appreciable loss of quality ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ
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Let’s understand that Reddit has spent over a decade enjoying its status as a world-leading platform while kicking the ‘we’ll figure out how to monetize later’ can down the road. Along the way, some important social questions have arrived and Reddit is still failing to show leadership in this matter. Let me explain:
Those that say Reddit ‘will continue on’ aren’t looking at the situation through the lens of history. At its core, ‘Reddit is a rare social product that has seemed to become more relevant over time, as a growing user base comes to appreciate its distinctive, human-centered approach to digital conversations.’ A digital third place, built on mutually-shared beliefs and principals of digital altruism – Reddit existed to Give People Voices – aiming to create a safe space for all viewpoints.
So that’s what Reddit is supposed to do as a ‘platform.’ What about Reddit as a ‘company?’ Sadly, boardroom shenanigans have pursued Reddit throughout its entire lifecycle. Reddit lost the public-spirited people like Aaron Swartz, and gained trolls, hate groups, and the soap opera that was the Ellen Pao debacle. As Will Durant said: ‘A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.’
Actions this year by Reddit have pushed it much farther down the path of ‘less user-oriented.’ Worse, public statements and private actions by the company leave nothing to doubt when it comes to their intentions. “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,” Steve Huffman the CEO of Reddit, wrote in a recent AMA.
Spez’ decisions have ripped the guts out of Reddit’s understood social identity and community intent. Those public statements and private actions by the company I mentioned earlier? They aren’t there to make Reddit a more human-centered place. Monetizing API use won’t increase Reddit’s stature as a ‘a safe space for all viewpoints.’ Like when managers decided to launch the Challenger space shuttle, “the concerns about the O-rings that ultimately led to the explosion were buried in a vast sea of thousands of other decisions … leading up to the ill-fated launch.”
Risks don’t rely on your perspective for existence. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” as Philip K. Dick famously said. This recent Reddit move to monetize APIs creates major cracks in its foundations of digital altruism and human-centered behavior. As I said last year with Twitter: “Twitter has every chance to prove to us that it can be a safe, responsible place for us to interact with our readers if they want to. In the meantime, it’s getting too weird around here. I’m mustering at the life boat station now, in case we must abandon ship.”
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Creators have worked to create Reddit. Those creativities are actually important rather than the survival of Reddit as a platform. Another platforms would been created any time if they enjoy creating.
I hope not. Actions should have consequences.
