Prior to the protest reddit was in full support of the protest. Most polls on subs supported a shutdown. Now, seemingly every community cant understand why the protest was needed and they’re calling it a mod power trip. There is a 3rd possibility. This is an unfounded conspiracy but reddit themselves could be manipulating scores.
See the NFL thread if you don’t mind sending traffic
https://reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/14b11kh/were_just_here_so_we_dont_get_fined/
I’ve been on reddit for 13 years. My wife finally got an account last year. She cannot understand any of the fuss. She didn’t know there were apps outside the official app. She never used RES. She just scrolls and never comments or posts. I would be surprised if she even upvotes or downvotes. She’s not a monster, she just doesn’t reddit like I do.
95% of users are like my wife. 5% of users are like me. I haven’t even tried to explain this whole Lemmy/Kbin experiment to her yet.
But the thing is, if 50% of the 5% of us who are active posters (e.g., 2.5% of total users) are now over here on Kbin/Lemmy, the 95% who are left are going to notice a huge difference in the experience of the site. Conversations will be dull. New posts will be more ad-focused. They may not be able to explain what happened, but they will notice that Reddit is not as fun as it used to be.
Will this stop spez from getting stupid rich? Probably not. Will my wife switch to Lemmy or Kbin? Never gonna happen. But the people who want to be part of the old culture will find their way here. The stuff that made reddit great is already happening over here. Reddint will not die anytime soon, but it will cease to be relevant. Think of how long yahoo lasted even though no one cared about it. Reddit is going to be like that.
I haven’t yet deleted my reddit account. It will probably happen. But I also haven’t missed it. I’ve actually been excited to come over and see what’s happening every day in the fediverse! I’m posting more, and considering modding for the first time.
I pretty much agree with this. If you look at the accounts of the people complaining, how many of them have posts hitting the frontpage? I’m not saying I have any data, I’m just speculating that most people who are power users, whether they use 3rd party apps or not, can recognize how shitty reddit went about this and won’t complain about the protest.
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I mean your not lying. On Mastodon I saw posts about people deleting accounts with thousands of karma, lot’s of people with positive reputation in their communities left, and the people who remained either are not active posters or don’t really care.
I’m in the process of deleting all my comments but it’s taking a while.
I’ve got probably 100k karma over a few accounts.
I feel kinda bad about taking away all the technical help and collaborative type stuff I’ve done over the years, but… Reddit wants to use all that data to cash out on it’s users, so it has to go.
Yeah, I deleted my two year old account with around 150K karma yesterday. What having 150K after two years says about me, let’s not discuss… but they’ll not be getting my brand of snark ever again.
I feel kinda bad about taking away all the technical help and collaborative type stuff I’ve done over the years
Its ok, ChatGPT has already trained on your data /s
Helps that to a certain extent a fairly large portion are going to be at least moderately tech savvy (probably less so than 5+ years ago), so switching to the fediverse is a lot less daunting to them than to the average user.
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My biggest concern for the switch over was figuring out what instance I would like best. I think settling on kbin has been a good experience so far, barring some of the hiccups. Luckily, earnest has been crushing it with the fixes the whole time.
Yes, he’s really been putting in the work. Buy the man a coffee or ten, everyone!
Oh yeah, I completely forgot about doing that. Was gonna throw him $50. You have the link?
What would you say is the best way to get a kbin invite?
You need an invite now? I didn’t when I signed up.
@Liontigerwings @yacht_boy @Blakerboy777 @Alto @digitallyfree
Probably all the users who like me used old Reddit and apps. Those that joined recently only know the Reddit official app and don’t care
I visited Reddit for years when Google searches led me there. About 2 years ago I got into some niche hobbies/interests, and that motivated me to sign up. I almost always used the official app. I was doomscrolling and posting lots of comments ever since.
It takes me a long ass time to commit to a new technology. But I also heard and understood with the API issue that mods need the proper tools to do their job, and if you take away their tools, they cannot do their job. And once they can’t, they will leave and the entire experience of Reddit will change. I also understood that there are 3PA that the heaviest users and commenters use, and once those apps die, those people will not.come back, and with them will go their expertise and all of their posts and comments.
That told scaredy cat me that I needed to find.aome new place(s) for chat and entertainment. I like it here at kbin. I’m also enjoying Tildes, and I’ve been visiting Mastodon and Substack (I set those accounts up when Twitter went haywire), Hacker News, Fark and Metafilter. I’m enjoying the diversity.
Just mentioned all this to say that relatively new /official app using Redditors might also be making the jump.prior to Doomsday.
Didn’t take that long to sign up for reddit myself, but I also only used the main app. But it already feels like reddit has moved here and I’m loving it
I mean most posts on the fediverse have way less votes. But I see similarly many comments as I used to see on reddit. It just feels like reddit is here now.
Stronger evidence: there’s documented cases of people’s deleted comments being restored. Whether or not that’s intentional by reddit, I can’t say for certain, but if I were a betting woman, you bet I’d bet on them doing it on purpose. And if they are, then we’re talking about reddit losing a substantial enough amount of content just from people deleting their accounts in protest, substantial enough to impact their bottom line. And that’s just those of us who are deleting our content - I’m not among them since I still need to occasionally look at my saved posts since there’s important and useful information in there. They’ll stop getting content from way more people. That’s gotta terrify them.
Obviously the fediverse lacks a lot of the polish that reddit had. Mostly by virtue of reddit being around longer and having more developers - lemmy’s had like 2 developers for 4 years, kbin came out a few months ago, and I’m not sure about mastodon. But with time, that’ll change. A lot of reddit power users are programmers, and now that they can touch the code of the site they care about, I bet we’ll see a lot more polish in the coming months. I’ve certainly gotta get off my ass and dig into the code a little bit.
I wouldn’t call myself a power user, or even an especially good programmer, but I have my moments, and I feel more at home here than I’ve felt on reddit in years.
Even if I’m not totally off of Reddit, recent events got me out of a rut for a bit and that’s good. Already, the threads on Reddit/all seem stale and even in the past 24 hours what I see on kbin and lemmy.world is starting to give me the tingle I hadn’t felt since the early Reddit days or even the period before when I used to browse multiple sites so in a way this is going back to my Internet roots, surfing across multiple sites for nuggets and truly browsing and not doom scrolling a single website aggregator. It’s a breath of fresh air.
It’s like having gotten used to a favorite diner with a massive menu but when the classic joint starts going off the rails, one decides to explore, finding new culinary niches, pop ups, and little shops with unique offerings. It’s no longer as convenient, but then again, maybe it shouldn’t be.
I’ve hard avoided Reddit this week to break the habit and help keep traffic numbers down for their metrics. Will I return to some of my small subs later? Maybe. Kbin and Lemmy have already done a great job at providing more content than I can really engage with already, so there’s not a huge need for me to go back. The only time it’s a struggle is when the Kbin servers are hugged to death, but I’ve been lurking squabbles during those dark times.
Same. I’ve been redditing since 2012 and have tailor made a select group of subs I follow for all of my hobbies. I was an avid commenter, with reply’s as long as your own. It was definitely my most visited site. It was as much for stupid pictures when I was going to bed as it was discussing things with fellow collectors or getting advice or tech support. Old.Reddit on my Desktop, RIF on my phone. I am one of the people this hooplah affects. And it makes me mad.
I know a lot of people who reddit in real life, but most of them might use it for 10 minutes a day on the toilet or while on the bus. They primarily lurk and stick to a lot of the easily accessible and fun subs. They also just use the official App, or they just look at it in their phone browser. Like you said, this whole thing doesn’t affect most of them.
I’m now spending a lot of time trying to find new communities in kbin and lemmy. But I have to admit the specialty subs I follow either don’t have a community here (like Moon Knight stuff) or very small communities (functional print, comic book collecting, etc). I’m sticking to the protest as long as makes sense to me (it still does). But I have a feeling reddit might die before these niche communities find purchase elsewhere.
Almost exactly same situation as you. I’m mad, it hurts, I’ve already purged my Reddit account of all content on it, multiple times since the most recent posts kept getting restored. The account itself isn’t deleted yet, I still think I’ll keep coming back for some stuff that just isn’t here on Lemmy or kbin yet… But as for participating in discussions and communities, I’m now 100% here.
It’s just sad. I’ve met the majority of my current online friend group that I chat with everyday on Discord, through Reddit. I hope at some point that becomes a real possibility in the Fediverse too. That we gather enough weirdos that are way too much into niche things that you can select which of them you’d like to be friends with.I wouldn’t be surprised if discord ended up having a lot of them, but the topic and comment idea of reddit feels like it’s here. Discord is like a chatroom, and to analogize further chatrooms feel like where communities gather, but forums feel like where communities live.
She’s not a monster, she just doesn’t reddit like I do.
The way you need to precise she’s not a monster make me doubt it. Does she live by night, avoid the sun at all cost during daytime and drink children blood for dinner ? If so I have bad news.
on a more serious note, I agree that most people come on reddit for a little giggle or to spend time but don’t know that much about the backend of it. Eventually they find out after some time and then decide if they care or not about the api price change, in the meantime no one can blame them for just living their life without caring about reddit.
So in other words reddit’s conversations will become as dull as Facebook.
Spez will get openai to make an llm moderator and he can control the weights. An army of spez moulded ai’s let loose on the Internet.
Exactly. Love the vibe here, discussions with ppl of similar stlye and interests (exactly how my forums were a long time ago, also reddit used to be years ago, and how it still was in some communities)
Damn ++ making this comment so I can save this comment. This is the boat I’m in.
Yep this is the truth. The vast majority of users just go there and scroll and click through stuff. They don’t really care. They were inconvenienced by the blackout and want it back to normal.
The real consequences are that a significant chunk of the active and power users have left the site now.
I haven’t deleted my reddit account either. I have definitely noticed that my feed on reddit has less interesting content now.
It’s all repost of not even week old stuff.
95% of users are like my wife. 5% of users are like me.
This is a pretty broad assumption.
It’s well known that most social media, and very much so for Reddit, are primarily consumed by lurkers. There’s loads of daily users that don’t even have an account because it’s not necessary. The lurkers may be good for ad revenue, but they don’t make the content. You need the active community there to produce the content that lurkers consume. Without the community, the lurkers aren’t going to step in and do it themselves, they’ll just stop visiting Reddit. So yes, I’m sure the balance looks like 95% lurkers and 5% community.
I also choose this guy’s wife.
I think so too, the users who care enough to even consider 3rd party apps are the ones who commented and posted the most imo.
While it’s possible that Reddit could be rigging the scales, I think the simplest answer is that the people most critical of Reddit have already left Reddit. Vice versa, everyone here is clearly in favor of boycotting Reddit because well… we’re here now.
Its a classic case of people having no fucking clue about scale, bias, the vocal majority and silent minority.
For every loud reddit dissident, there is 100 people who just heard about reddit and grabbed the official app from the store. They dont comment, they dont post, they dont give a shit. If reddit went down they wouldnt question it, they would just grab a 9gag app or something and continue on consuming content. They dont block ads, they dont get invested in net neutrality or anything else the EFF are involved in, they dont mod the UX, they dont dig into dodgy shit going on behind the scenes. They dont give a shit.
In other words, they are the perfect community for a corporate social media.I’m interested to see what happens when the third party apps actually die. And old.reddit.com obviously
I read somewhere that a shim was being developed to allow reddit apps to join a lemmy instance. Not sure how practical it would be, or how far off it is, but its an interesting idea. Would obviously need to be implemented by the original reddit app dev, or a forked version if open source.
I imagine at least a couple of developers will migrate over here. If they update their app to the fediverse, join in on other open source projects, or just leave the scene is yet to be seen though.
If Sync ever did that, I would be over the moon. That app made browsing a genuine joy with how good the UI is and how customizable it is. I really hope the devs for the existing third party apps repurpose them or make a version for the fediverse.
I can’t find the comment because the sub is private, but /u/ljdawson did actually say modifying Sync to work with lemmy was a possibility. I would be so happy if it ended up working out.
I read somewhere that a shim was being developed to allow reddit apps to join a lemmy instance
I assume you’re talking about this project?
Userbase here will explode, then continue to grow. Content and moderation quality on reddit will decrease week by week, but they will go on for a very long time anyway (see Digg)
My partner still hasn’t left Reddit yet, but because it’s a habit for her now AND Apollo still works… once Apollo is gone she’s already signaled she is moving on.
I wonder how many others are just waiting for the third party’s to be killed before moving on?
This is kinda the case for me. I’m working on getting use to this.
Survivorship bias. Most of us who care left already and are exploring the alternatives.
@Liontigerwings: There’s always been an undercurrent of “mods just want power and control because they can’t get it themselves in their lives” that goes against my experience as a moderator.
Personally, my response to people calling for moderators to put their money where their mouth is, to step down as a moderator and leave the site was, “OK, will do”.
I think this will be a 4-6 week process where people stop using their old Reddit apps and either migrate to the official app, old.reddit or to that federated sites.
I don’t think it’ll ever get as big as Reddit overall but so long as a good number of people come across to sites like Lemmy or kbin and are engaged, it’ll be a vibrant place in no time.
Of the four subs I moderate, two are restricted (i.e. read-only) with links to places off-Reddit. One support sub I handed over to my co-mod who wants to keep it going as long as possible, tho he understands Reddit is likely going down, slowly but certainly.
There’s only one of my subs that’s a bit problematic, with ~45% of voting users wanting to rejoin the blackout, but ~55% wanting it to remain open. There are some people really critical of my proposal to move to kbin.social, but they are largely people with very little prior activity on the sub.
Either way, unless Reddit reverses course and fires spez, I am leaving that platform.
Many news outlets paint the protest as “mods dont like change, thats why they are protesting” which is missinformation and someone that is lazy to do some research doesnt see the importance of it
I suspect this combined with a lot of more technology inclinee users jumping ship for places like this has left a vacuum to be filled by people who oppose the blackout or otherwise don’t care.
I think there is some pro-spez astroturfing as well as some users are just sick of it and want their subs back.
My take: The people who were in support of the protest were mostly the 3rd party client users and a lot of them left after the protest, leaving normal users, like myself, who are there for the content only, to vote for the sub to remain open in order to view the content again
Yup, that’s me. I’m trying to make lemmy my new home and limit my access to Reddit (vote with your feet). I still check Reddit for the polls and a few nitch communities that don’t exist on Lemmy (yet)
I don’t think the average redditor cares. They will complain about their third-party app going away, but will use the official one and go on with their life.
I think the only people left heavily skew as the people who didn’t care. Case in point, the discord for my kebble sub saw a LOT of new members as those who didn’t like the way reddit was handling it prepared other ways to contact each other. That was and still is very much in favor of the protest and they’re still working out a platform to move everyone to.
The actual reddit sub for the kebble has turned on a DIME about it and is now infighting between the people who do care and are only using reddit so they can speak in that particular sub, and the ones that never cared in the first place and think the act of protesting anything in general is, and I quote, “childish.” Were an outsider to scroll through it, they would think we never supported it in the first place.
Before this, we were uncommonly civil towards each other, took as much text as we wanted to eplain our viewpoints properly, and usage of the downvote button was both frowned upon and extremely rare to even see. Now I’m seeing downvotes. The whole thing is causing a schism that doesn’t bode well for the site in general. This will be reddit’s main userbase going forward.
Quite disappointing isn’t it, I kinda wish that in preparation for the blackout an alternative forum was opened for popular subs (on the federation for example) so the community had somewhere to go instead of being annoyed at the lack of interaction
Unfortunately it’s a fairly common pattern among humans, people don’t prepare ahead of time for disasters that have “never happened before.” Or that haven’t happened in their lifetime. Especially when those preparations cost them something, be it time or money or effort.
It’s been long enough since Digg that this generation didn’t believe that it would happen to Reddit too. Maybe someday it might happen to the Fediverse, somehow - there’s only so much you can do with protocol design alone to proof against centralization, we’re already seeing some interesting cracks around the Beehaw defederation mess.
I don’t know but there are already enough people here to make it interesting
True for general stuff, but I’m missing my more niche subreddits and there’s basically no sports here because apparently we’re too techie over here.
Indeed, I’m expecting a slow transition over from Reddit myself. And that’s fine. There’s really not that much difference between a community of 100,000 and a community of 10 million, but there’s a big difference between a community of 1000 and 100,000. So let the big interests show up here first and establish themselves with some nice thriving communities, and the smaller stuff will develop once there are enough people around to support it.
There’s m/chess ;-)
I think I’ve contributing factor that’s likely is that the users that care already bailed and aren’t on there anymore
Well, people who have left the site will, by definition, not be the people who are still commenting over there.
And as others say, probably a some bots are involved.
Exactly. I just… Stopped using it. Everyone else like me wouldn’t be part of the conversation.
I could certainly see them gaming the algorithm a bit too, to make it look more active. I think we’ll just have to wait and see, if advertisers/investors pull out.
There is some hope though. I think those naysayers were simply the loudest because when I go to some subs like r/pics, r/askmen, r/apple, people are supporting the strike. On r/apple, people are even made and saying yes, reddit’s threat to remove mods is mostly a bluff as they can not replace what was 5000 subreddits of mods in a timely manner. On r/askmen (which I usually dislike but today I’m happy with them) people are wanting them to extend the blackout. On r/adhdmemes, their poll is showing overwhelmingly indefinite blackout.
On r/pics most people love the new mod rule put in place to only post pictures of this one public figure
