I don't think anything went wrong. Reddit decided it was time to fully close the garden. And that's that. You can take it or leave it.
The people in the Lemmy verse decided to leave it. Luckily lemmy is here and we're here with Lemmy.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
19 points (95.2% liked)
13435 readers
1 users here now
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I also noticed a significant decrease in quality of content on Reddit on the subs I used to enjoy. The people who used to post and comment on there just simply don't, and garbage posts get to the top of my front page much more. I consciously decide to use it less (even though my mobile app of choice, Relay, still works for free for now), and it's not even all that hard.
The fact that Reddit moderators quickly folded the moment Spez threatened to take their "powers" away made the whole thing quickly fail. Very few had the balls to go through with the protests and didn't care about those imaginary powers (honorable mention to the former r/interestingasfuck mods), but many were too addicted to that fake status symbol to even imagine letting go of it and Spez took advantage of that to kill the protests.
For those of us who left Reddit and mostly only use Lemmy now, I believe the 3rd party apps thing was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I think it's just that we already hated Reddit so much that when presented with Lemmy we immediately jumped ship.
For many other Redditors however the appocalypse didn't make any difference, many big subreddits are still very active and the Reddit moderators who folded realized they don't want to lose their control over those subs and all the potential that control gives them (monetization via partnerships with brands, sponsored AMAs, selling film rights like one former mod of r/wallstreetbets did, shilling your new app, website or crypto like again r/wallstreetbets mods did etc...).
The mistake in these protests was to assume that Reddit mods would align with the interests of 3rd party app users.
I think this places too much blame on mods. Reddit is a corporation and they were going to do what they’re going to do.
Power users cared about 3p apps, the average redditor probably didn’t even know they existed.
It was never going to “succeed” if success was that Reddit backtracked from their position. It would have made spez look too weak.
I think it did cost them a lot more than they suggested in the short term, and I think it’ll cost them more in the long run too.
Lemmy is going to become a real competitor. And it probably never would have previously.
I think this places too much blame on mods.
Well, it doesn't help that the main means of the protests were centered around the moderators' ability to close down the subreddits. I think the outcome would have been different if other means were used, like collectively nuking your account, promoting Lemmy and Adblockers etc... These have been done, but only individually.
I'd say what went wrong was nobody did anything meaningfuk or cared. Nobody put their money where their mouth is and deleted their accounts, and staying off the site for 2 days was too much to ask of >80% of the users.
The Mods closed a few subs but didn't themselves do anything meaningful. They should have let reddit replace them if they actually cared. They should have moved their community to lemmy or kbin. The ones who did sick it out I'm grateful for, the rest cared too much about their own pride to bother trying to keep the admins in check.
Overall the reddit userbase since the pandemic are mostly entitled whiners who don't really give a shit as long as they get their twitter and TikTok reposts. There's literally only one piece of OC on the frontpage of reddit right now. There's not much value to going there anymore.
I'm done with Reddit, and honestly I haven't missed it. My time is now more full of hobbies and actual reading, I'm better off for deleting it.
I think this post, which is an attempt by mods to continue protesting, and its reception by users speaks for itself: https://np.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/158zf26/reminder_july_26_rworldbuilding_is_shut_down_no/
The hive mind went from "fuck spez we're staging an internet revolution" to "let it go already, nobody gives a shit, stop inconveniencing us with your real issues" in an instant. Basically, everyone's attention span has lapsed and if you keep talking about it people think you're killing their buzz. It's no longer a relevant problem for the vast majority of the userbase, if it ever even was.
The people who this really affected - third-party app users, people affected by the poor accessibility of the regular app/site and the anti- 'hail corporate' types have already migrated or are otherwise disengaged with Reddit, leaving just the bootlickers.
And how many are that? Are the non bootlickers even a significant number?
Lemmy growth numbers since the whole API thing kicked off might give some indication.
This. The protesting subreddits should have been creating alternative communities at Lemmy and elsewhere while they were locked down or hidden for whatever, and then they'd have had real leverage when forced back open.
I've been using the Reddit app lately and it's absolute dogshit. It mostly shows me content that I didn't ask for. It trying hard to be tiktok or something. Very annoying. It functions differently from how most people use Reddit
So... how do you know what's on reddit front page again? I actually did leave and have no idea what's going on over there...
I think it was an uphill struggle and nearly impossible to pull off.
Spez had absolutely no interest in changing his stance on working with developers. The hugely ironic thing I read that made me give up hope (and stash my ~1 year in development Reddit App) was Spez saying "It was never designed to support third-party apps." -- yet no acknowledgement that the "official" app was literally a third party app that they purchased years ago called Alien Blue.
Not defending spez, but their business model was not designed to support third party apps, that much is true. They needed a proper model to share profits with third party apps.
How they went about "fixing" that was completely dilletantish and dumbfounding, though. Now they're not getting any of that potential extra profit and lost a significant amount of users on top
He's a fucking idiot or a liar. I'd believe either. Or both.
The entire point of having this free, public API is because a free, public API can be monetized, and content scraping cannot. If you are offering a free web app, and you don't have a free, public API, someone will create scraping tools to do it. So then, instead of spending money maintaining a revenue generating API, you spend money playing cat and mouse with content scraping bots.
The fact that reddit can't figure out how to push monetization over that API has nothing to do with third party apps, and everything to do with the site having shit leadership.
Wow! Is that what happened to Alien Blue? I remember people Praising Alien Blue Years ago... How did they mess that up so bad?
Nothing went wrong. Reddit's desire to monetize simply trumps everything.
We were witnessing enshittification process in full force.
The only thing I can think of was that the mods announced a time limit of 48 hours for the protests, but I'm not sure that making all the protests indefinite would have solved anything.
Spez was determined to copy Elon Musk even though Elon clearly doesn't know how to run a social media platform. Now both Reddit and Twitter are dying.
Nothing "went wrong" with it. It was simply never possible. Reddit controlled whether those 3rd party apps could function, and Reddit wanted those 3rd party apps to cease functioning.
Probably how a large amount of the subreddits participating in the blackout came back in a measly two days. Like Louis Rossmann said in his video describing the reddit api situation, all they see is that we'll put up with their bullshit 363 days a year...
maybe if all subreddits participating went dark or posted meaningless content (white squares,etc) there might have been a bigger inpact.
A lot of us moved to other platforms like Lemmy though, so I wouldn't say it was a complete failure.
That and apathy/Ignorance of the issue. Especially with the younger generation (which is the majority of reddit now).
Tried to get a few smaller subs with a lot of Zoomers in them to join me, and their response was basically "bruh, who is spez?", "in your dreams", or "spez isn't a pedophile; quit making shit up". I mean just look at this. They straight-up attacked me:
You can see a lot of the sunk cost feeling going on in there.
Yeah I have never heard of spez being a pedophile. Unless he's been convicted you shouldn't be calling him that. It could be taken as defamation.
Also I fully get why people don't want to move. Lemmy is a great idea but it's a work in progress with a small user base. I lost my whole account not long ago. This a community which is already fragmented from moving platforms why would they go through that hell again when Lemmy might not even pan out.
Nothing went wrong. Reddit knew from minute 1 they weren't going to negotiate this change (not in good faith, anyways).
Add to that, like everyone else is saying, the fact that they weren't actually pushed to change thier minds in the slightest by users when push came to shove; because yeah, some of us left, but a lot of us participated, said they weren't gonna back down...and went right back to Reddit when all was said and done.
(Not saying "the protests were a total bust" because, from what I understand at least, this happened to Digg in the past, and it wasn't immediately overtaken by Reddit. It happened in waves of users over time until it got eclipsed. Pretty sure it was bad policy change effecting users after bad policy change that made everyone start to pack up too, not just one. Part of me is hopeful that history is repeating).
But to circle back, basically the attempt was doomed to fail because the decision was made absolute long before any talk of protesting it was even a thought in anyone's mind.
The initial bust happened.
They screwed up with the most critical group. To cite Steve Ballmer: "developers, developers, developers, developers". Now tools like bot banning are gone.
Some moderators have stepped down or stayed till they were banned but in large they gave in. As nearly all posts in r/modnews have under 20% upvote ratio the mods are still not happy (e.g. 17% upvotes, 83% downvotes for the r/place announcement and comments are by large negative).
Btw. If you want to hurt Reddit: Post good content on Lemmy and cross-reference it on Reddit.
Btw. Lemmy won't replace Reddit. This might be hard but it's the truth and it might be the best for Lemmy as a big platform has a different flair compared to how Lemmy is right now.
Yup, that's the word for it. Initial burst. Definetly not the last.
That's gonna be fun for the new mods to deal with lol in fact, i think they already are.
Reddit had years to build up its content, and Rome wasn't built in a day (something i feel a lot of people easily forget, and not just in this case) so in some ways I can't blame them for not moving. It's like you said tho, the best way to hurt Reddit is to post good content elsewhere, and IDK, I feel like that could have been better than just bitterly staying.
That's not for us to decide, i think. Lemmy might be a whole different beast, but if enough people come in and bring the Reddit expierence to Lemmy, it just might. Maybe not a 100% replacement, it'll never be a 1:1 replacement after all, but just enough.
It was never on the table. They decided to kill them, it was not a negociation. Now go play in /r/playplace and stop thinking about it !
Ultimately, what went wrong is that most Reddit users were screeching at individual leaves littering their garden, without noticing the tree creating those leaves on first place. They failed to connect the dots between: arbitrary bans, subreddit suspensions, user-on-user harassment, the idiotic way that rules are enforced, the presence of powermods, then Reddit trying to get rid of the powermods, the 3PA being killed... while focusing too much on a braindead clown called Steve Huffman.
It's all about profits. You can't enforce any demand if you don't make Reddit lose money. Blackouts and John Oliver posting only go so far, you need to migrate out of the platform. And if you're staying in the platform you need to transform it into an advertiser-hostile shithole. But for that you need more coordination than just "HURR DURR WE WRITE FUCK SPEZ IN PLACE LOL LMAO".
The John Oliver thing was so dumb. Like, so what? Doesn't matter if you're posting John Oliver as a protest, you're still using the platform on a sub that allows advertisement.
The only thing that could actually go anywhere was making the subs NSFW, since those will actually hurt Reddit's finances, but obviously they forced the subs to revert and most easily gave up.
I think that the John Oliver thing was useful to raise awareness, but people eventually confused a situational strategy with an actual solution.
Besides NSFW-ing, mods could've also promoted ad blocker usage, the sort of consumption criticism that advertisers outright despise, scorched the earth (slowly removing content from the subs), and harshly restricting the scope of the subreddit, not just through a "haha John Oliver" but a permanent solution. Or just stop moderating at all, since all those clowns that u/ModCodeOfConduct is putting on the place of older mods are incompetent clowns and powertrippers.
Honest question: how is Lemmy safer against power tripping mods, user-on-user harassment and everything else? Sure it's a super nice place now but eventually the powertippers etc. will pop up. ?
It contains the fallout of site-wide issues to some extent. Mods and user-on-user will still be issues. If one federation owner goes on a power trip everyone can just leave that server while continuing to use other Lemmy instances.
Essentially you'd only lose access to some subreddits instead of all of reddit in that situation.
You also would have 3rd party apps that would continue to work. Unlike now where apps like Sync are just down for a few months until they finish development for Lemmy.
But don't worry, reddit had a run of like 6-10 years there where mods weren't an issue so we have some time before that all starts.
Ultimately, not enough people had joined the protest, so it didn't have enough economical power.
The way this was pitched internally was almost certainly "we will see a drop in pageviews, but those pageviews will finally be profitable."
It was quite clear that they primed the relevant stakeholders for some turbulence.
Ot wouldn't have mattered if every single person had joined the protest. The decision had already been made, nothing was going to change that
This, here. Reddit is going the way of Digg, but trying to be more savvy about it. THey don't care that the specific group that's leaving are the content creators because they intend to charge content creators (paid API) who expect to profit from the traffic. They don't care that it's lower quality content creators. They want the money both ways, and don't care what percent of their "high quality" traffic disappears for it.
Since they're bigger than digg, they still have some high quality traffic. There's never a 100% protest with something as big as reddit. It's win/win/win for them.
Reddit already decided from the executive level they were gonna do it, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it
And nothing happened which caused ownership to override the executive leadership. A lot of people were mad, but they still used the site.
almost everyone I know that uses reddit just switched to the official app if they weren't using it already. Whether we want it or not a lot of normies started using reddit in the past few years and they just don't care.
It worked for me, I haven't really used reddit much since July 1st. That's good enough for me. It's not about bringing the whole thing down ad most of society dgaf about shit like it's been since the beginning of time.
Yeah, I rarely load it up these days. I have to admit that this site with the smaller base is much nicer to use. It actually feels like I have conversations with people rather than just throwing comments into a wall of noise.
Reddit was goining the way of the other big tech players, removing API for third party apps, maybe will remove old.reddit.com next ? force everyone to sign-up using their phone number, using your real names instead of nicknames, verifying your identity using goverment issued ID.
the sign is on the wall but the majority of people are fine with that, look how facebook hit the record of 3 billion users a month. these corps are too big to fail.
I log onto reddit twice a month or so, but if they get rid of old.reddit.com, I won't be doing that anymore.
what all is broken, tho?
I can still view without an account on Infinity.
Sometimes I hit rate limits but so do the official frontends.