I decided to take a peek at Reddit to see what kind of activity is happening, a good handful of the subreddits I am subscribed to are still super active with posts and commenters.
There’s quite a few news articles on the front page regarding Spez and the blackouts, I am surprised those articles are even still up for people to see.
The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit’s and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted…
Perhaps there is some AI activity going on, I mean it’s kind of easy to do in this day and age. You just prompt an army of AI bots to defend Reddit, and try to keep users engaged.
I am so happy I found Lemmy, and I am so happy that there is a comfortable level of activity. Sure it’s only a small fraction of what Reddit is activity wise, but it’s so much more hearty and welcoming.
Reddit has just turned into one big toxic mess. Lemmy reminds me of what Reddit used to be 10 years ago.
People have been saying it but were being ignored for weeks: this blackout thing will not work. And we were correct. It was a useless attempt to try and win over the majority.
Plenty of people use the main app and are the majority of users, and it is what it is. The ones who care about the Reddit API fiasco should move away. That’s the only valid move.
I’ve done it, and everyone else who care should. Leave the ones who are fine with Reddit on Reddit.
I don’t think it’s particular the main stream of Reddit that is protesting, it is indeed a small percentage. However, I think the discussion in the recent Waveform Podcast hits the nail on the head:
That small percentage that left Reddit are the people that care most about Reddit. Those are the powerusers. The users that generally contribute most to the platform, be that in the form of content, informative comments, moderation, writing tools or other stuff. It’s the people that are most valueble to the website. When those people leave there might others might not notice it instantly, but after a while the overall experience will deteriate somehow.
It is somewhat comparable to if when many of the big youtubers were to leave Youtube after bad management. They might be only 1% of the people uaing Youtube, but they are also the people that are important to the website for the experience of the other 99%.
Thing is though, only those power users are likely to care about the decline in content quality.
The people who just use it for memes and funny videos won’t even notice
I see the blackout as a nudge to overcome addiction. A few days or weeks without content, and people start looking around. The the network effect (downward) will make the rest.
I want to specify that I have no interest in all the userbase of reddit moving to Lemmy, but just an initial influx of people who care will help making it reach a critical mass. After that, reddit can even reopen fully, at that point it won’t matter.
Except those people went to twitter, Instagram, and tiktok for their memes, news, and funny moments. All the major subs that I subscribed to are back on and people are back as usual there. The blackout was useless and another lazy version of internet activism, and it made people hate the mods instead of Reddit for “power tripping.” Literally made people side with Reddit because of that lol.
I had a different experience, to be honest. The sub I am more active in, /r/Italy is open, but it has still a ridiculous activity, and most of the active users wanted an indefinite blackout. A sibling sub, italyinformatica is even more desert (yesterday last post was 4 days ago). I think that in principle the blackout is a very effective way to protest, it worked like a charm to keep me off the site, at least, but I agree that saying “we do it for 2 days” undermines the whole thing.
I wish people would just drop it. Do not visit Reddit. The blackouts are meh, to actually be effective, do not visit. No clicks, no views, no content.
They gotta do a coordinated Leave Reddit Day like how they did with Digg
That was what the blackout was supposed to be- no clicks, no content. It had some effect but perhaps not the overwhelming effect that was desired. A lot of Reddit traffic now is just idiots scrolling in the app who probably never even notice the blackout let alone care.
That said- I think the effects of the last few weeks are going to take a longer time (many weeks or a few months or more) to truly play out. For me at least, the biggest effect is now I’m diversifying- while my social media time WAS almost 100% Reddit, now I’m trying to do as much Lemmy as I can. The bubble of trust is popped. Unless Spez gets fired and the Reddit board or his successor publicly walks this back and makes commitments to openness, I don’t see myself putting any trust at all in them going forward. Too bad really :(
The lack of societal solidarity for the betterment of everyone is sad.
But that’s ok, reddit was never going to die after this protest.
I think what took place was a successful test of what alternatives exist out in the wild.
Now it’s up to those of us who migrated to post through the highs and lows of early adoption in order to encourage others to come and stick around when the next shitty move by Spez takes place.
For example, I migrated to Mastodon in late 2018 during an initial surge. And over the years tried to keep posting content so that when the next migration took place when Elon took the reigns, people were able to possibly feel more at home.
This shit takes time. A lot of time. But the internet is a big place and there’s plenty of opportunity for things to be better. We just can expect things to rush themselves
It’s funny reading posts that say something along the lines of “I’ve always used the reddit app and it’s fine, I didn’t even know there were third-party apps”. I get this might be astroturfing or bots but if not, congrats on not having a clue, I guess.
It’s probably not purely bots. My girlfriend is one of those people lol
She isn’t tech literate and doesn’t get things like FOSS or 3rd party. To her, the Official Reddit™ App is a mark of trust and safety. She doesn’t use an adblocker (despite my protests) and just avoids services like Youtube where ads are unavoidable.
I haven’t used an app for reddit since Alien Blue. I was just on the mobile website. I can still understand the problem with what they’re doing. I don’t know why so many people can’t understand a problem unless it affects them personally.
what made the switch easier for me, was installing an RSS feed widget to my desktop and adding lemmy instances to it. gradually, i start to notice topics that interest me more and more which are viewable straight from the rss widget itself and i am able to comment on it, thus i have interacted more on here in the last few days than reddit. though it is still hard not to add :“reddit” to my searches online.
That is a great idea. Sorry friend, I’ll have to steal it!
The more on here the merrier! I don’t mind at all. :p
I caught my husband on reddit yesterday. Went into full attack mode, explained the blackout, and offered to help him switch to Lemmy. Showed him that some if his subs have lems and even tried to sway him with lemmy porn. He didn’t care…at all!!! Now, if i want to read anything on reddit i have to go outside or to the bathroom so he doesn’t see me.
Look people have different motivations for different things, like it or not, not everyone is going to take the API issue and greed of a for profit company as a deal breaker, and I personally dont think we should lash out at those people. At the end of the day essentially all they are doing is choseing a different social media service.
Also may I ask why you “went into attack mode” when you still go onto reddit?
wait, where’s the Lemmy porn?
That’s the CP-allowing community. Don’t spread that cancer around…
Looking up on that sub and all the current talk, sounds like there was some issue where pedos thought it was okay to post CP there, but it seems under control now.
Probably not them allowing CP in the first place, so much as them struggling to moderate fast enough at first. Make sense for communities exploding this rapidly, and nsfw communities have always and will continue to need to constantly be tightly moderating to get any illegal shit out of there ASAP.
I don’t know what cp is, but whenever i set to ALL / NEW and scroll, every few posts theres a blurred out one.
I don’t know what cp is
cp = “child porn” but likely not in the way you’re imagining. A certain subset of people think that “child porn” is any drawing of a girl, or any photograph of a real woman under the age of 35.
Edit: Oh, look. Angry downvotes and not a single attempt to refute me. Guess I was right.
Reddit populated itself with fake accounts early on in its life, so they could be very well doing the same thing again here.
Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2
ps. This is my first comment, does hyperlinking work here?
Hyperlink worked just fine.
I noticed earlier today that all the top posts were reposts of previous top posts on each main sub.
Like they literally just reposted all the top posts of all time.
That’s the kind of thing that is possible when they own it all.
Lots and lots of gold too. Has anyone ever bought it? I have my doubts.
As much as I feel that Reddit was pretty underhanded, I doubt that they’re using AI to fake content to keep people on the site 'cause (a) people would catch on pretty fast by looking at the history of the account and (b) running LLMs probably cost more than the earned advertising revenue.
What’s more likely is that people/bots have always been reposting for karma a while
I don’t think they’ve used AI to do anything or even create fake content. They just reposted things that are already known to be popular, so that new users will experience good content.
Or maybe if Reddit didn’t do it, then it’s just karmabots taking the front-page, because there is no good OC to beat them.
Personally I think Spez and his staff are currently glued to the screen and handing out votes and gold for whatever isn’t about the protest.
This happened long ago. Bots would repost frontpage content that’d past the year-long wait to avoid repost detection. Gif subs would be very quiet without that kind of content being recycled
This may just an old interwebz man talking, but I’d say “Don’t worry.”
It’s not a 1:1, but this is similar to what happened with Digg in the mid 2000s. I was there. I migrated from there to Reddit - specifically because Digg had decided to ignore its vocal user base and fundamentally change what the site was.
It ultimately resulted in this :
The scale is so much larger now. Reddit could lose 1m users and its a blip.
Reddit’s actual daily users only equates to about half that number. While an interesting metric, Google search rates don’t equate to users. Heck, my searching for that information contributed to that and I didn’t click through to Reddit once.
That is a good point, today internet is mainstream, and heavily indexed websites are much more reliant on such type of interactions than forums and social media were when digg was big, so reddit has a comparatively huge influx of click from google searches alone. However, that might change as they are making the web inferface worse and worse to redirect the traffic towards the app. If reddit becomes app-centric, i don’t kno what may change given how it is so reliant on google searches.___
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I have noticed a huge quality decline on reddit. I hope people get fed up and search for other options.
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I’m new as well. Made my account a few days ago. First time participating in the fediverse and I am loving it so far. I love the vibe and building new communities. I wish I better knew how to spread the word because up until last week I never knew any of this existed.
There’s been so many threads I’ve read on lemmy where pretty much everyone was able to voice disagreement in some way, but the discourse refrained from being toxic. That seemed so very rare on Reddit. I wonder if this is due to the lack of the total karma metric or something.
I think that it’s because the bad users aren’t here yet.
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Not if the redditors that leave are the ones that do the majority of the moderating and quality posting. If the quality goes way down, people will look elsewhere. Also, I have a feeling we’ll see a much bigger migration once the third party apps all die on the 30th.
Thats true. I am continuing to keep using reddit to spread awareness of Lemmy so that people know it exists.
Well, “unfortunately” some of them will stay up since they are classified as open-source and non-profit by reddit. So, while I’m glad that these projects live on, it will certainly soften the blow for Reddit on 30th.
Iam not to use. Before I left reddit. Most of it was just reposted tiktoks and just general low quality posts on the big subreddits already
Worth noting that the main migration happened in 2007 and start of 2008, but look how it managed to drag on for another 4 years before really dying.
I think the same will happen here - like there’ll be a lot of users on Reddit still, but it’ll be heavily corporate controlled and moderated, and most comments will be on the level of “Putin small pp” etc.
Wow, I didn’t realize the Reddit to Digg migration was so drawn out. Do we know how big the initial migration to Reddit actually was in terms of user count? It seems like Lemmy/Kbin are seeded with a few tens of thousands of users, and I wonder how it compares.
The main migration was actually in 2010 after the v4 redesign. Digg wasn’t dying in 2007-2009, it was one of the hottest websites on the internet.
Hmm something happened in 2008-2009 though, as it was when I migrated and I remember loads of people were doing it at the same time.
It might have just been Reddit having a cleaner, more direct interface, and a better community.
The site started to go downhill around that period because of power users and some started to move to reddit, but it was still pretty niche.
I stayed on digg until v4, then I moved with the masses over to reddit. They lost over 30% of their users that month!
I suspect that some of the main subreddits - funny, aww, and pics, for example - could be populated entirely by bots and a lot of people would still browse through them. If you’re just idling through looking for a little dopamine, then r/aww and r/pics are kind of like instagram or tiktok. From Reddit’s perspective, those are the important subs, where the smaller ones where you can find good discussion and insightful answers don’t get enough views to serve enough ads to affect their bottom line.
Those subs could just be replaced with random bot reposts from the last decade. Actually, I think that’s most of the content already. Tho r/pics going full Sexy John Oliver today was hilarious. I even broke my personal embargo to go and vote for the SJO format (and to do a daily re-delete of any of my comments which might have been restored).
The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit’s and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted…
Thing is, all the people in favor of the protest left Reddit. So now pro-Reddit content is being upvoted.
Thing is, all the people in favor of the protest left Reddit.
Except the mods. Now they’re getting abuse from those that didn’t care about the protests.
I’m sorry but the protest was a complete failure that accomplished nothing. The real successful protest would be making a sub on here and redirecting their uses to it.
Lemmy went from a few thousand users with very little activity to 100k+ with constant activity. It was a massive success.
We don’t know yet. If it’s sticky then I would wholeheartedly agree. But if activity drops to pre protest levels in a month then eh…
Yeah, we don’t know yet. On the one hand, it’s still the early days of (some) people leaving Reddit - and who knows if they won’t go back.
On the other hand, the API payment structure and the shutdown of 3PAs hasn’t even happened yet. Even people who are completely oblivious to the situation but who are using a 3PA will have to decide if they’ll be able to deal with the shitty official app, if they’ll just stop browsing Reddit on mobile, or if they’re willing to take a look at alternatives.
For a website with over 800 million monthly users, 100k is nothing, barely even a rounding error. You can say it was a success for lemmy, but as far as the actual goal of the protest it achieved basically nothing.
As Lemmy grows reddit will shrink. Reddit might always be around, but that’s the same crowd that uses Facebook. Stragglers be damned, many users found a new home and that’s a big win in my books. The rest were shown how shitty and incompetent the management is at Reddit, and it’ll only get worse until they lose more and more users.
And when Lemmy becomes compatible with the wider activitypub network, we’ll gain another 9M users. (Its also closer to 200k now I believe.)
Over 800 million monthly users, really? :D
Different sources have different numbers. One says 800 million, one says 400 million, the point is that lemmy poaching a couple hundred thousand users is nothing to reddit. If lemmy has 200k users that left reddit, even if we assume the smaller value of 400 million reddit users then that’s only 0.05% of reddit users that left.
What percentage of Reddit users are actually contributing versus just showing up to consume? I’d suspect it’s a very small percentage of that total. If that smaller group migrates away in more significant number, then that’s the real impact. The consumers will show up wherever the content goes.
I actually found Lemmy from a post doing exactly what you said: subreddit went dark, with a stickied post directing people where to go. And here I am! Rock me like a hurricane.
I wouldn’t say it accomplished nothing. I clearly motivated a bunch of people to start investing in other platforms. Platforms like Kbin and Lemmy now have a lot more mods and developers contributing. It gave alternatives MUCH needed attention. Mos of us had never even heard about these platforms a few weeks ago.
We will get a second influx on July 1st as well, so we need to work had at maintaining activity and community growth in the meantime.
What we have now is already fairly good.
And that’s something that’s easy to forget once you’ve made the change. Uprooting something you use daily, to move to a new platform which feels new and different, takes quite a bit of mental effort and requires you to accept some anxiety, as you wean yourself off your habits. But when the power users go, and the new place becomes more familiar and understood, the rest will follow eventually as every step becomes easier to accept.
a lot of them are chatgpt accounts approved by Reddit. Same Reason r/programming went down since many people took notice of it
Funny yet sad that it’s come to reddit botting their own platform to try and shore up support for themselves.
They’ve been botting their own platform since DAY ONE.
I’m sure advertisers are lining up to market to entirely scripted customers!
https://browsermedia.agency/blog/new-reddit-ads-products-launched/
This allows advertisers to appear in active conservations on Reddit, containing/about their chosen keywords. Advertisers can input relevant keywords, create ad copy containing those keywords and show ads to Reddit users that are interested in those terms.
actually, you couldn’t be more right. That’s fucking right you thought it was a fucking comment but it was actually ad by reddit
Actually now that you’ve brought up the idea, how would advertiser’s even know that they’re hitting real people when they’re looking to pay money for exposure?
I don’t think they can really know. Even if reddit provides proof that they are not doing stuff server-side they could still use regular bots with accounts. Also they need a good moderation quality to minimize third party bots.
This can harm their reputation heavily and it is almost impossible to rebuild that.
I’ve posted a comment, I think on another instance that highlights something similar
often, when someone suggests lemmy, they dont get upvotes, but people replying that you can’t go there because its full of tankies, get many upvotes. I saw several times: this subreddit cant move to lemmy, that would exclude people like me, where lemmy is blocked at work.
What kind of firewall blocks lemmy but not reddit?
and which lemmy instances?
Reddit app is fine for me. Y’all some cry babies.
Reddit app lacks efficient Mod tools and accessibility settings.
That’s not my problem.
This is the attitude of Reddit rn. Shit’s disgusting in all honesty. It’s genuinely depressing how people try their hardest not to push the world to be better.
This is just how people act in general. It doesn’t affect them so it isn’t their problem.
Humans suck, don’t we?
Yes. The only thing we can do is strive to be better ourselves.
I was just thinking how nice it would be in an environment where people don’t just dismiss things that don’t affect them… and circled back to your comment upon the realisation that humans charge an arm and a leg to people for the privillege to be in a nice environment.
We’re paying for the lack of meaningful human interaction in our own lives. We’re slowly realizing it was there along with no need for pretext. Lemmy has been super thought provoking for me tbh. I’ve always been a thinker, but I numbed myself to get by. The whole idea of paying for hapiness doesnt sit right with me at all. I’m here now. We need to keep pushing to get better as people. 💪
I think we are all really smart, here. And look ma! No hands! I’m gonna be a real boy!
Don’t worry, it will become an even more toxic cesspool soon…
This is the truth, when I heard they were trying to kick out the mods who were pushing the blackout, I knew that whoever is left after all of this is not going to be worth reading. Reddit massively underestimates the value the power users and mods give to the site for everyone else to use. Without them, the site is just a bunch of software trying to push ads on whoever stumbles on it.
Even a few conversations I have on reddit in the last week (after many already migrated)-
Its obvious, lots more trolls. Lots more shittalk. Just- not pleasant.
Can’t expect the millions of people who don’t even understand what an API is to care about the API changes. Hell, I didn’t use a 3rd party app or really care about the API changes but I’ve wanted to get into the fediverse and disliked reddit for a long time, so it’s as good an excuse as anything.
