this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Technology

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[–] Nurgle 215 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

Good for them, but the damage is already done. They seeded this place with a lot of users. Will it be enough? Who knows. But Lemmy is probably a looooot further along than if they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.

This place obviously needs to continue with good content and active communities, but at moment I don’t really have the urge to open Reddit they way things are.

[–] acceptable_pumpkin 139 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Absolutely. I had never even heard of Lemmy or anything Fediverse prior to all the 3rd party API shutdown. Once Apollo died, I stopped using Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I had heard of it, but was like "that's dumb, just use Reddit, there's no reason not to"

They gave me and many others that reason to reconsider

[–] Meltbox 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep. I also didn’t think this would work as well as it does. Remarkably good platform so far.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Thee developers really crunched over July. It went from a niche beta platform to fully featured third-party apps and a ton of platform optimizations in a month, which is really impressive.

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[–] Hackerman_uwu 17 points 1 year ago

That, and Reddit was getting pretty fucking annoying. The little annoyances had really begun to pile up for me personally and I know I’m not alone.

[–] MrCyan 15 points 1 year ago

Same here. So far I’m rather enjoying Lemmy.

[–] Dragontre 13 points 1 year ago

When RiF died I deleted my accounts and found my way here. I still open a couple of niche subreddits from time to time just to check on updates but otherwise my time on Reddit is done. 2010-2023 (damn I hate to admit that).

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I lurked on reddit for years. I was lurking here for a couple weeks now but thought I should make an account to contribute. Reddit has gone down hill and I'll never go back.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Never would have heard of Kbin and now it's all I use.

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[–] Polydextrous 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, even when I’ve had the urge to check Reddit for something I’m trying to figure out, I will do everything I can to avoid it. And if I can’t, I try to determine how much I care about what I’m searching before I even give them a single click. It’s a small, insignificant protest, but it’s a forever protest, for me. I’m happy on lemmy, I don’t browse as much, I interqct with more of the community and want to help build it. On Reddit, I felt dirty because of everything they’ve been doing the last 5 or so years. Tencent, killing third party apps slowly and then in one fell swoop, etc. fuck ‘em

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[–] FartsWithAnAccent 13 points 1 year ago

Lemmy, Kbin, Raddle, Tildes, etc. - there are definitely more alternatives that are becoming increasingly popular.

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[–] Decimit 94 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Reddit “won” but I predict it will never regain what it once was.

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[–] PixelatedSaturn 81 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I won, because I found lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Exactly how I feel! I don't care at all what happens on the other site. This whole thing opened my eyes to what it has become, and it's not just the API, that place has become toxic af.

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Well it cured me from checking reddit all the time, so I count that as a win.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Me too but now I check Kbin all the time.

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[–] xantoxis 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They didn't win shit. What they did broke the site for everyone. It doesn't stop being broken because they seized control over the subs, something they could have done at any moment.

Reddit has detonated all its credibility, leaving a hole in the side just big enough for most of the site's users to escape as they decide reddit isn't worth it, or find good-enough alternatives. It won't happen all at once, but it'll happen.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sure reddit will limp along, Tumblr did, myspace is still technically running although I don't know anyone that would use it.

Maybe a younger crowd will get attracted to the site, maybe it will live again on fresh blood but I'm just not going to be a part of it. I'm not going to endorse their actions with my presence.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

As I understand it, reddit has shattered its trust with its userbase and has hemmoraged users because of it. I can hardly view that as a 'win' for them.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The remaining users have proven they'll all willingly look at ads and suffer an inferior UX. It's a win for reddit. There's not much they can do to get rid of this core user group of... What, 90% of their users? That doesn't care if they make things worse.

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[–] Kaavi 40 points 1 year ago

I agree it's over, I moved here and don't care about Reddit anymore. :)

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We're in such a shitty timeline right now where these CEO's realize that they have so many mainstream users who just don't actually care about the platform and just want the content, that even with significant controversy if they just ignore it, they can almost certainly weather the storm. Sure, their platform will be worse off, they'll lose users to other platforms, but it's a far cry from the Digg v3 -> Reddit situation when there was a much smaller user base who was more passionate about the site and community and they abandoned the old site as a result of those shitty decisions.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Big platforms like Facebook, Digg, Twitter and Reddit don't fail in a day. Their decline is rather gradual. If you noticed any decline on Reddit's quality after the API lockdown, then that's the beginning of a gradual slide. Just wait for a while before judging the results.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago

I won't really call that a win,

Reddit lost the trust of many users, a non insignificant part of contributors and moderators left, the enshittification of the platform is not going to stop but they lost a big part of what made Reddit great. They damaged their image and popularity.

It's like saying Elon won by trashing Twitter. Sure he does what he wants with it but making your platform less desirable sure isn't a win for the platform.

[–] mjhelto 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, those still on Reddit are either lurkers or never gave a shit about the "protests" to begin with. The real measure will be the IPO. With that said, one tech group stroking off another means very little, anymore. Gizmodo can write their fluff piece.

The capitalists are concerned about the plebs using social media to organize and call out lies, doing everything they can to break up or muddy the waters of social media platforms ahead of the 2024 US presidential elections. The goal is to disrupt the platforms and drive away dissenting users who would use these platforms to organize against them and debunk misinformation/lies.

Musk buys Twitter (for far more than it was worth, lol) and drives it into the ground. Zuckerberg starts Threads to give people another "slowly boiling pot" to catch some of those looking for Twitter-alternatives. Spez and company enact changes to the platform, to artificially inflate their ad revenue ahead of their final valuation, which can't happen if users are allowed to skirt their ads with better clients. I didn't talk about Facebook, but it hasn't been relevant since COVID showed us how bat-shit crazy our families and neighbors are. Facebook is basically Nextdoor, but world-wide. We can't forget about the TikTok users. The parent company can't be touched or bought so they're just trying to outright ban the platform here.

The ultra-wealthy are showing us how scared they are of the up-and-coming new demographic of voters, who grew up on social media, know how to use it better than them, in ways they couldn't predict, and don't give a fuck about TV news, printed media, or corporatized websites. The last two elections have slowly been reversing the progress these regressionists have made using the gullibility and entitlement of the Boomer generation, the ignorance of the Gen-X generation, and the brittle corpses of the millennials to push their agenda.

The Arab Spring showed these wealthy fuckers how dangerous the people can be when they are allowed to use social media to organize and they don't want it to happen again at a time when we're finally starting to wise up to the "two-sides-of-the-same-coin" world we live in, and a new voting season has so much on the line for them.

Fuck the wealthy, money's made up, and may ass cancer rid us all of their kind!

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[–] Florida 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Was there really going to be any other outcome?

[–] g0nz0li0 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

Nope. And the goal of protests aren’t necessarily to force change, it’s often just as much about raising awareness and attempting to change the discourse with those who hold power. So I think these headlines don’t do the movement justice.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Depends on how one defines "win".

We coulda gotten more people here. Reddit's kind of the perfect centralized service to decentralize. Major subreddits have millions of subscribers and mods with years of experience managing large communities. Many of them could have set up their own Lemmy servers and just said "we're over here now". You get a few large, but still not exactly mainstream r/all kind of subreddits doing that, and things could've been significantly different.

At the same time, there are several ordres of magnitude more people here now than there was before, and the space isn't showing any signs of dying. That's kind of a big L for Reddit, as they're going to continue enshitifying themselves in the months and years ahead, and there's a legit, if somewhat underground, alternative space for people to go when they're finally fed up. Now with an insane amount of mobile app support, to boot.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But will reddit ever be the same as it was? I highly doubt it

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[–] schwim 14 points 1 year ago

What did Gizmodo think might happen instead? That everyone, including those that were never impacted by 3rd party app changes, would just abandon the site, leaving it without users? "Peak journalism".

[–] BanditMcDougal 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Imo, nobody won here and the reddit user lost everything. The Fediverse wasnt ready for the influx of users and lost its chance to "win" for a long time. The sites couldn't support the load and there was a lack of polished mobile apps that felt familiar to people that wanted to browse and shit post.

Without content -- without interaction, a platform whithers; and my experience, so far, has been comment oasises while scrolling through pages of desert.

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