I remember taking part in /place before Reddit sold out. It was an amazingly fun time. But now the veneer has peeled off. I no longer see Reddit as a benevolent community focused and motivated platform. Rather, it is another Meta. Another shitty company that turned on its community and the people who make the place so interesting. It’s a pretty fucked up tactic in my book.
Reddit won’t be dying anytime soon, so I agree with the OPs approach. And yes, most of us found Lemmy/Kbin because we thought it was fucked up what Reddit did, but I’m guessing most of us are a little more on the tech side of things and willing to branch out beyond Meta and now Reddit.
Also, Place returning right now is too soon. It feels forced. It’s clearly motivated by the IPO and that bothers me. It’s not organic. It’s carefully calculated by a bunch of greedy assholes.
… which is exactly why we should give it zero attention or traffic. They’re using this as a pathetic attempt to bolster their traffic ahead of the IPO so they can point to this and say “HEY LOOK HOW AMAZING OUR TRAFFIC IS!!! Think of the potential ad revenue!”
I get this perspective, but the reality is that Reddit has a lot of users that don’t care. Similarly, millions of people signed up for Meta’s Threads forking over a shitload of privacy. The majority of people aren’t educated enough to know or care about the issues at hand. So rather than us trying to fight a behemoth, we have to work alongside it to siphon off its community one member at a time.
I totally get your perspective too. I just feel like at this point we’re dealing with diminishing returns. Anybody who really cares about finding an alternative has already migrated. I feel like giving Reddit ANY traffic at this point benefits them more than it hurts them.
