It is so frustrating seeing how people received the protest.
“it’s not working” “Reddit doesn’t care” “they can do whatever they want”.
Well yeah, if that’s the attitude!
How do people not see that the protest disrupted the entirity of Reddit? Just about every weekly active user felt it.
How do they not understand the impact on revenue (especially ads), and how Reddit cannot feasibly sustain it, and were banking on the idea that it’ll eventually die down?
The fact of the matter is, if Reddit became worried that the protest will continue in strength indefinitely, they would be forced to roll back. The loss impact would greatly outweigh whatever measly profits they make from this API change that no one will buy.
Yes, this was a lot more for Reddit than just profits. If Reddit had backed down, it would have impact much greater than just third party apps. It remind people once again that users hold the power when they’re United. They can decide how to run their communities. But Reddit just could not afford this to happen, which is why they fought to convince you that the protest isn’t working and you should back down. And unfortunately many of us did…
The protest has been already very successful IMO, for once, we showed we can literally crash the entire platform just by flipping a switch.
Then there’s the significant drop in ad revenue as you said (there was a Verge article about it) and we probably also ruined the IPO (Reuters, I mean fuc*king REUTERS, said the IPO is premature and reddit should reconsider for the time being).
But the most important thing, the protest made people aware of valid alternatives, I didn’t know anything about the fediverse before the protest begun and now I’m happy to be here, many other people like me.
I think people saying the protest is not working are those hoping reddit changes, they’re being delusional, reddit won’t change, but even it they did change, I really can’t grasp how some people want to be treated like sh*it like reddit has done so far.
Reddit is being abusive towards their users and that alone should be more than enough a reason for moving out.
The only good move is to leave
I do miss having all my content right there and being able to mindlessly scroll. The fediverse gets better daily but I can’t exist the way I did on Reddit.
That being said, that’s not necessarily a bad thing lol. I deleted my posting account on Reddit and I haven’t logged in days
It’ll take some time, but I think we’ll get there. Lemmy kind of feels like Reddit did to me when I first started using it. Some cool memes, some simple commentary on big news events, cat photos, etc… The biggest thing missing is the critical mass that allows some of the niche communities to come together and be reasonably active. I think Lemmy also needs some refinement on the back-end. Things like user-level blocking of instances(just because I don’t want to see something doesn’t mean I think it needs to be completely defederated), something equivalent to multi-reddits to browse sets of communities/instances, maybe a method to publish/subscribe to user’s blocklists. Can definitely feel the beginning of something awesome, hopefully it works out for a while.
I honestly feel like the 3rd party app space is what is going to bring the features together. If you can have an app that allows multiple accounts from different instances that aggregates posts, maintains custom block lists, and shows you one feed, then that will rival Reddit.