this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.

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The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won. [Clickbaity title, but be sure to check the article itself] (gizmodo.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The title is a bit clickbaity but the article is worth a read. To keep it short:

  • large subreddits stopped protesting
  • 1.8k subreddits are still in the dark, but those are rather small
  • [from the article] "Though the Reddit team likely caused permanent damage to the platform and its relationship with users, Spez got his way. But that victory might not mean much."

IMO it was a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, the protests ended, and most users are still stuck in that shithole... but the reputation damage won't be reversed, Reddit managed to seed its competitors (as this one) with the necessary userbase to make them functional, and odds are that Reddit will keep going in its death spiral. And that doesn't even take into account the amount of bad press that it generated, that will hurt IPO numbers for sure.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you look at the default subs maybe, but I no longer subscribed or had blocked most of the big ones over the years so my subs throughout the protests had normal nondisruptive activity. And I think for lot of long time reddit users it was the smaller subs that kept them around due to being able to find many different subs for their interest.

So I don't think the protest was as disruptive in the long run. But, it did at least create a small reddit alternative with a more broad appeal than the type of individuals that drew them to Voat. And I don't see reddit pushing away its current very large userbase away unless they do more crazy things. What comes to mind is getting rid of old.reddit and disabling RES functionality, but even that is a niche demographic of reddit's main target audience.

Reddit demographic in large is vocal but lot will not actually be a threat to leave.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit has lost 2/3 of their valuation in less than a year, and that was before the protests. That’s not a success kind of metric. And that number is from the institutional investors saying how much they’re marking down their investments - it’s not like some people trying to tank the stock.

Basically, the metrics which have not not all been made public have made the people and institutions with a collective billions of dollars already invested in the company are the ones saying it’s in the basement.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

However a LOT of that was from being over-inflated in the first place from during the pandemic when everything Internet was up, vs. now when everything Internet is a bit down. I agree that there is still a story there, about greed and how Huffman probably could have gotten his IPO if he hadn't held out for even more above what it was worth - one bird in the hand being worth two in the bush and all that.

But that is a slightly different story than what we all are dying to know: what is the devaluation since the time of the protests? And that in turn is complicated by e.g. traffic statistics somehow going up since that time (how much of that is due to activities of people deleting their content though? each and every API request for deletion, and especially additional requests for overwriting, plus more besides to monitor the situation e.g. confirm removal, all count as "traffic", which I'm sure Reddit will still label as if due to positive rather than negative interest in the site and thus present to advertisers as "user engagement"; plus separately how much traffic has been added from
other types of bots in general as well?), and then ofc r/place just so happened to obscure any traffic stat effects lately... awfully convenient timing for that, one presumes...

It will be interesting to see what that number is, when it becomes available.