That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
I completely understand Reddit wanting to be as profitable as possible, however it’s the approach to the users, developers, and blatant lack of care, respect and transparency that got my back up - suspect a lot of people may be the same. Communities always move and change, no platform is too big to fail.
All they had to do was allow Reddit premium users to access the site using third-party apps.
Yup. I was plenty happy to pay to keep using BaconReader. Give everyone a few months to set that up and I think things would’ve been fine. Instead, we get basically the most ham fisted way it could’ve gone.
Ohh interesting. Thinking about that, yah I would of signed up probably.
Not only this, but this has happened before. It was called Digg back in 2010.
I’m with you. I get needing to make money, but needing to go public and become just another cringe social media platform is just sad. RIP Reddit. Hello Lemmy.
I was waiting it out until I heard mods were being threatened. That’s the final call.
I’m going to be replacing posts with links to my never used socials because who cares if I’m spamming at this point.
Reddit can’t run without its moderators and it can’t monetize without data. I encourage everyone who’s defected to Lemmy from Reddit to wipe their old Reddit account using Redact. I just wiped my old account of 15 years worth of comments and post history.
I wiped my 10 year old account last night. Everything except my last post telling spez to fuck off and that he and his board have no soul or humanity.
It was hard seeing it all go, but if life has taught me anything, it’s that all things are impermanent and we should always be prepared to let go.
I’m waiting for a couple of days until I’m sure my deleted comments stay deleted. After that, I’ll wipe my 6 years old account.
There was a YouTube vid posted a few days ago showing that posts are being reinstated after deletion.
Ignore, duplicate 😣
As much as I would like to do this I have too many posts there have legitimately helped people who were struggling with things.
I’ve had people respond to months old posts thanking me on several occasions for helping them. I can’t in good conscience remove thay just to spite reddit, and I do a lot of stuff out of spite.
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It was just a matter of time, really.
I’ll never understand the people who are hell bent on trying to get reddit back. No matter what they won’t have a say in anything that happens, own anything, or even have a voice. I’m glad people are finally moving to an open source alternative.
Like others, I’m also here from Reddit Is Fun. I was a reddit user for over 16 years (with a 15 year old account). For over half of that time, RIF was my exclusive conduit to Reddit as the desktop site became increasingly unusable. Now that RIF is gone, I won’t be going back.
Invested time… And this place is pretty far behind a usable replacement in terms of content alone.
I was an early user of reddit, and it had a lot of the same problems this place had. There were no “smaller subreddits”, everything was small. But the quality of content was good, so I stuck around. It really takes a lot of effort to build a community, it doesn’t come for free. I hope you stick around and help 😀
Long live OSS.
I think only linux users moved over here… maybe
Windows user checks in. But I’ve got to admit, just as with Mastodon, the sign-up process (and finding communities across servers) might scare some people that are not as familiar with computers as most people that are on here now.
might scare some people that are not as familiar with computers
That’s true.
Honestly, signing up was a horrible experience.
I signed up yesterday. It was not bad at all. No blood oaths or anything.
It took me a few tries over multiple days to sign up successfully
I had swear the First Ideal. The storm light is kinda fun though.
Journey before destination, Radiant.
Journey before destination, Radiant.
Really? I don’t know, I just went to a page and wrote in my data, just like registering on any other page.
It took me about 12 attempts over a few weeks to sign up. It always got stuck at the “submit” and would just load endlessly, but never send the confirmation mail.
Different computers and phones and browsers and happened across multiple servers. …I can totally see how that drives away a lot of people.
undefined> drives
That was my experience today. Finally got through, but it took several attempts.
I’m here from reddit is fun , I’m on Android and going to try on my windows PC in a minute
Technically Linux…
Technically Linux…
I’m using an iMac right now.
Dude I have communities I still want to be a part of there. It’s not easy to just walk away. I have now but when the NFL season starts it’s going to be hard to not go back unless there is a good alt here.
With so many of the power-users and mods abandoning ship, we’d better start a death pool for old.reddit.com, since it’s mostly power-users that stay with old Reddit. How long until it gets Spez’d so desktop users have to suffer enshittification with the mobile app users?
Reddit will die off in stages. Slowly.
First the power users are leaving now. These are the mods and the major content creators (think Minecraft leaving)
Eventually they will piss people off again and the more common content creators will leave.
Then after reddit has worse and worse content, the users who just comment will leave.
After that there will be nothing worthwhile for the lurkers and they will leave too.
Reddit will then be a wasteland.
This will all take quite a while. Even Digg took time to die off.
I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won’t be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.
As a person who really gets stuck in his ways and hates having to change things if I don’t have to, here I am on Lemmy. I’m ready to settle in.
Joining this was easier since I haven’t been on Reddit since the 12th
Got past the habit stage. Now I’m onto alternatives
Unfortunately for me, one of my favorite uses for reddit has been live game threads for various sports and that really only works with a larger user base. For instance, I follow the Seattle Mariners and I have found two different Lemmy instances for them. The one with the most subscribers (44) hasn’t had a game thread posted in 13 days despite the Mariners having played like 10 games in that stretch. The other one has 9 subscribers, although it looks like someone has set up a bot to automatically post a game thread and a post-game thread; however, every single one I looked at has 0 comments.
I’m not gonna be able to pull the plug on reddit entirely until Lemmy gets a serious increase in users.
Hi! I’m an admin of fanaticus.social. I’d like to apologize for the game bots disappearance. It’s back now! I made pinned a post about it, which you can read here.
We’re working hard to iron out the kinks in the game bots but I apologize for the inconvenience. I was on vacation last week and because of a bug, the choice was between keeping the fanaticus servers up or putting the bots to sleep.
The live game threads were some of my favorite parts of Reddit too. I can’t do anything about the small user base but porting the game bots over to lemmy and posting content is the best way I could think of to start attracting users.
I miss a lot of my favourite smaller subreddits too. There’s way more now popping up then there was a few weeks ago so it is getting better. It’ll take time for communities to grow, we can’t expect it to be instantly like our fave subreddits were right off the bat. We have to remember that our niche subreddits started small as well at one point. Also consider doing some posting in those slow communities yourself to get the ball rolling. I’ve noticed it takes someone else commenting and providing content before other people feel brave enough to join in too. Kind of like no one wanting to be the first or only person on the dance floor. Once a couple people get in there and begin dancing others join too.
Lemmy is something like .02% the size of reddit
Do you think that number would change significantly if one were to discount bots from the calculation? I swear 3/4 of comments on some subs were bots, I’d like to think that it’d take a chunk off the actual reddit user base
Let’s change that!
What do you propose? Lemmy is significanly more difficult to understand, sign up for, and use, with far less content than Reddit. And the majority opinion seems to be ‘fuck those kids that don’t understand how to use lemmy, we don’t need them’.
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I’m not sure if Reddit will “die off”. There seems to be a significant portion of users who don’t care about the API debacle or protests - they just want to scroll through memes.
I would definitely like to see Reddit experience more pain, given how cunty they’ve been to users and moderators. But we live in a world where big companies act like shit and get away with it.
no memes to scroll through if there is no one to post the memes
When I’ve checked the Reddit home page in the last few days (using an ad blocker of course, or sometimes an alternative Reddit front-end), it looks like stuff is still being posted.
Hopefully Reddit will feel more pain that persuades it to change course at least a little bit. But I won’t believe that the pain is happening until I see it. Unfortunately it seems to me that there are some Reddit users who just want to watch the funny videos and don’t care about Reddit’s poor behaviour.
it’s still too early. These things take time.
True I suppose things could change over time. We’ll have to see.
It’s been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.
Yeah Digg didn’t die in a day. It takes time. I joined lemmy today, but I looked into it a few weeks ago first. It wasn’t worth the effort then, it is now. Having an Apollo-like app is a big help too.
Every previous major exodus had the problem that it was the people everyone was better off without leaving. Maybe you hated Reddit in 2015 and were pissed at their decisions, but the alternative was a place dedicated to mocking fat people and saying slurs.
Comparatively lemmy just kinda has a similar vibe to Reddit. Like I need to look for equivalents to some spaces I miss, but it’s not the people we said good riddance to
I’m in the same boat, I just joined today and I’m surprised but Lemmy already scratches the same itch that reddit did
After being a Lemmy lurker for a few weeks, I submitted a request for an account on an instance that manually approves accounts earlier this week. Just checked and confirmed that my account was approved. This was based on calls for engagement to help grow the community. While I’ve been here for a bit, here’s my first participation. Ayo!
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Good job on not only lurking!
Who is investing in Reddit at this point? I guess they can just dump their shares against etf buying.
Reddit is not public, so it’s just private investors at this point that funded series tranches. They, of course, are pushing to have Reddit get profitable and then IPO.
I guess we will see what happens, but Spez may have totally messed-up their plans with the inept API pricing and the response to the concerns about it.
It could have been totally averted if they just introduced a reasonable user fee and license that could be used in any third party app.
Spez could have even required 3pas to carry Reddit ads - a lot of us would have grumbled, but stayed.
But Spez didn’t want that, did he? If I had to guess, I’d say Reddit’s official app is even more rigged with tracking than Tik Tok. That’s why it lags - it phones home every time you pause in your doom-scrolling, to log what stories you’re interested in.
That’s the most bizarre thing to me. Without knowing Reddit’s financials, it seemed like everyone could have their cake and eat it too. We could get a UX catered to how we choose to interact with Reddit and Reddit could make money hand over fist. We all knew the totally free experience wouldn’t last. Reddit very easily could have been like “ok guys, party’s over. We need to force ads on 3rd party apps”. We’d bitch about it, but it’d ultimately be fine. This scorched earth approach to how they handled it is just so out of left field.
If it’s programmed right, there’s no amount of data collection that should cause lag. It’s just a poorly written app.
They never even updated the API to show ads… Like, you could’ve worked on that at any time, it’s your own API.
You’re right. I highly recommend Duck Duck Go browser app on your phone. It has a beta feature that blocks all tracking requests from your apps, and you can go look at what apps are submitting the most requests. Someone took a lot at the official reddit app compared to 3rd party and it submits an absolutely absurd amount of tracking requests. Like multiple orders of magnitude more, and higher than any other social media app.
Well, WSB is planning to short the stock as soon as the IPO opens. Technically that’s investing
Look, much like Kanye we love those guys but they’re jackasses.
WSB was never the same after the $GME debacle.
Pretty sure that was also the catylst for the death of Reddit too. It became the new Facebook after everyone heard of it because of the news coverage
You’re onto something here
It was just another wave in eternal september imo, a big one but just another bit of notoriety for the website
Pretty much, between COVID and GME, the sub 10x’d its users within a year and became a pool of the same handful of low tier memes that are cycled through every week.
A lot of Mods might be looking at all the work they have put into their communities over the years and think “I can’t leave all of this.” Which at this point, given Reddit Corp’s behavior, is a sunk cost fallacy.
It’s time to jump ship, or learn to live with the new reality. Which is really the same as the old reality, the thin veneer of civility has just been stripped away. This is Capitalism and it always turns out this way. Just look at how many products have been ruined, because someone, somewhere decided they needed more money. Anyone familiar with Hasbro’s heavy handedness with Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons knows what I am talking about.
Reddit is too big to fail, they have achieved critical mass. Keep in mind facebook is still around despite being a reviled company, and instagram certainly hasn’t had a mass migration off of the platform either.
At the end of the day Lemmy isn’t a replacement to reddit yet. It depends entirely upon it getting traction which thus far still hasn’t occurred - we are not at critical mass yet. I hope it happens but there are many reasons why this site could fail even after reddit’s admin blunders. Too many people are apathetic to the changes and not all of them are lurkers who do not post or comment.
Today you can’t just stop using reddit either, especially for google searches. Too much content is ONLY on reddit. It’s a huge problem. We really need a wikipedia style reddit where it’s not for profit and still moderated for content.
Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the “metaverse” to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn’t seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There’s no denying that. But, it’s their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.
As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There’s a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there’s also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don’t know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can “get back to normal” and continue being Google’s sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that “the beatings will continue until morale improves,” it’s hard to imagine how they can get back to “normal.”
At some point it’ll be easier for Google to buy reddit for the content than to unfuck their own search engine. Bonus points because they can tell themselves they fixed it for good and keep making google search even shittier.
I have wondered if some of the big players interested in AI might decide to buy or recreate (again) something like Reddit so that they just have the data and control it. Google owns Youtube, so they are already managing the liability that comes with moderating a social media platform.
I’m okay with lemmy getting just enough traction to bring in the best users without being “popular”
lol nah Reddit can fail. Just like Tumblr, and Digg, and MySpace, and LiveJournal, and GeoCities, and the list goes on. Reddit relies on volunteer work to provide its content, and just like when Digg tried to do almost the same thing, the community will move on. It always does. It has since the 80s and will until the extinction of humanity or the collapse of civilization.
Let it fail.
Too big to fail doesn’t mean it’s too big to decline.
I don’t think reddit is going anywhere as a company and a platform, for a while at least. But that doesn’t mean it can’t lose a good share of it’s users to competitors.
I don’t think the comparison with Facebook is a valid one though. Primarily because Facebook is a “true” social media platform. You have your friends and family on it which creates a very strong network effect.
Reddit on the other hand is primarily a content aggregation platform. I don’t need to convince my friends and family to switch from it.
Additionally, Facebook is a lot more successful than Reddit financially. They make disproportionately more money per user due to having very targeted advertising. They own other platforms like Instagram and whatsapp. Unlike reddit, Facebook doesn’t need to concern itself with having financial troubles.
A better comparison would be tumbler, which was quite big and while it still exists, it’s a shell of its former self.
Digg had critical mass. It went down in flames.
It doesn’t take bajillions of users to generate enough content to form a reasonable alternative.
Niche subreddits will be hard to recreate though unfortunately, but plenty of time to grow. And long-term, federated seems like a good model so that once these communities are rebuilt they aren’t at the mercy a company who’s main concern is short-term profits.
Federation makes so much sense for reddit style communities. I hope it’s able to catch on
Federation makes so much sense for reddit style communities. I hope it’s able to catch on
This is the most level-headed take. Reddit is going to continue to slog along with or without my account, with or without Lemmy’s 53k active users. Anyone who thinks this protest is going to sink them entirely is naive.
However, they may stagger along as an enshittified website that has lost it’s spirit and never meaningfully grows again. Reddit is still better than any other alternative at this point in time, but Reddit is not by my estimation going to improve again. It’s all downhill. So I’m doing my part and trying to work to build community elsewhere.
We don’t need 50MM users to reach a mass where the content is fresh and engaging all the time. Probably a fraction of that would be. Lemmy’s userbase is double Squabbles and there is already a noticeable difference in content.
Yep. I think people need to think about what “failure” means in this context. Reddit isn’t going to go away, and honestly the “default” experience - what you see when you just visit the homepage - isn’t likely to change much at all IMO.
The thing is I haven’t liked the default reddit experience for many years. The draw of reddit was that they could do all their crappy changes to the default-level site and it still left the niche discussion-based communities to their own devices.
Now they’ve affected those communities, which is why I’m here. But I’m well aware that a great majority of reddit’s userbase uses reddit to doomscroll through endless insipid bot-generated meme lists. None of that is going to change. People like me who care about the small places that will be impacted are in a very small minority compared to the overall userbase of reddit.
So reddit will fail (or has failed) for my use case, certainly. But I’m under no illusion that it will cease to exist.
I feel like I’m being repetitive, but yes your point that the Reddit popular/all front pages won’t be dramatically affected is spot on. Those are where a huge amount of passive users spend their time, and the posts there have been trash and reposts for years now.
The quality content enjoyed by many people who jumped ship was never showing up on the front page anyway. I made numerous original content posts that gained a lot of traction relative to the niche subreddit it was in, but my 3K upvoted quality content was never going to compete for popular/all space with a 50k upvoted repost of a repost of TikTok video.
I did notice, when I visited Reddit desktop today that r/popular has a lot of political posts, despite one of popular’s reasons for existing to be a non-political alternative to r/all. I wonder if that’s something that’s crept in over time and I never noticed, or if that’s the result of losing so many subreddits that politics had to backfill popular though.
I think being repetitive is ok, because I continue to see the sentiment out there that everyone who is upset about reddit is delusional and think reddit will be closed in a month, etc.
The reality is more complicated. And I think a lot of people don’t get it because a real lot of people actually don’t ever see the great parts of reddit that we all loved.
I like to get that message out there as much as possible because saying reddit is ruined for my usage isn’t the same as saying it is going to go under.
Yes, reddit will always retain some user base and they might even continue to grow. But the quality will be worse. Just like Facebook and other social media platforms, there will be users that simply don’t care enough to look for alternatives. I really hope that it will be a downward spiral for them. Too many (contributing) core users leaving, moderation getting worse and spammers and karma farmers reducing the quality of posts to a point where it’s just too cumbersome to scroll through all the crap to find a worthy post. I think that reddit either reverses its decision or that it will slowly fade into meaninglessness…
The quality has been dropping for years and years. I miss reddit from a decade ago, when niche little community things could happen leaving waves across the site.
Now we just get a ton of the same things over and over, hardcore advertising and mass manipulation. It’s no longer the tiny little site nobody knew about but is instead the big focus for all the businesses out there that think there’s a market to be had. Plus there’s the herd mentality that always comes from giant populations on a platform.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still niche communities but they just don’t have the same flavor of cohesion that they did in earlier times.
Reddit CEO calls unpaid moderators’ concerns “noise”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOm_UKGyrZg
This is abusing volunteers. If there are 140,000 active subreddits and if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits. They can close the subreddits, pay someone to moderate, try to pawn them off on a new sucker, or have bots run the subreddits. The question is, in the meantime, will the spammers abuse Reddit like their mods are being abused by Reddit? Let Reddit deal with these problems. If you’re a mod, why are you giving your time away for free to a company that doesn’t care about you?
If you’re a mod, I get that you care about your subreddit, but why waste your talent on someone who thinks your concerns are just noise?
The Minecraft Devs left Reddit:
Leave Reddit? To quote Din Djarin, “This is the way.”
As soon as the threat was made all the mods should have quit. An unmoderated reddit would collapse in hours. It would have been glorious.
This is true. I suspect for many mods the power they have to push their ideas, ideals and beliefs and punish who they see fit more than makes up or the fact that they do it for free.
Mods like that probably exist. There are also many quiet mods, particularly in smaller communities, who try to govern even handedly. I never engaged in any protests or pushed any agendas until the recent API changes, and am trying to set up an alternate space to help ensure a space exists for the content/community.
Quite honestly, I don’t like moderating or leadership and sort of fell into the role. Now that I’m here though, there’s a sense of duty/obligation that makes it hard to leave.
I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product’s users and mods to be a winning strategy.
I don’t think he knows what he’s doing… in his mind he’s running the last meter of the finish line to the IPO when all these “problems” are cropping up for “no reason” and he just wants to finish the race
Reddit is dead after this
Sadly, I don’t think so. I think they looked at the number of new users and the number of users using 3rd party apps and decided they can lose those.
Edit: apparently Reddit has between 500 million and 1.6 billion active users monthly. According to RiF developers, RiF and Apollo have a combined 3 million active users. If all of those 3rd party app users decide to never go back, Reddit might lose between 0.6% and 0.2% of their userbase. I think they’ll be fine…
I don’t think the issue is that users will abandon, but that the site was only as usable as it was because of the mod tools that allowed the people who worked for free to moderate.
Now spam, hate, and all other such garbage will be a lot more common. One subreddit I subscribed to only had a single active mod and the only reason the sub was functional was the mod tools that now no longer work.
It may take some time, but people will leave when the subreddits are flooded with hate and spam.
Idk if it matters what happens to reddit. It would just be nice to have something better. Its hard to see though how reddit can progress anywhere now.
