this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I've said it (with a different wording) on some post on reddit, I'm saying it again here: I want history to repeat itself. Not because I have a sadistic need to see reddit fail, but because this will ultimately be better for the users.
All of these protests are a nice sentiment, but I can't help but think the take I've read from some people is right: this is all a "door in the face" technique from Reddit to get people to accept a more reasonable compromise on pricing that they were going for all along, but without taking as much of a PR hit. So people will be relatively happy, and meanwhile reddit will have squeezed redditors just a little more, as they have been doing little by little in the last years. It's a boiling frog scenario.
So this protest may well "reverse" this specific situation, but it won't reverse the general trend on governance on Reddit that has been slowly going on for a few years already, mostly around the time that Victoria got canned.
So, to that end, I really want to stop using reddit regardless of the outcome of this debacle. Lemmy seems promising, although it does have its own set of problems. But it's still on its infancy, I'm sure it'll grow and at least some of these problems will be fixed.
I don't want to sound like an elitist, but I guess I will regardless: the most important number of people simply don't care.
I think it's safe to say that the people who will be affected by the new API pricing and other decisions, as well as the people who want to protest at least some of it at least somehow (be it boycotting for a few days or migrating to fediverse in any capacity) are simply not the demographic that the Reddit board really cares about. Not necessarily because they're evil, anti-privacy, Machiavellian moneybags (they still are), but because Reddit is a business, a big one, and big businesses care about money more than anything else.
I'm not really optimistic about the boycott and any other aftermath. I think the best we'll see is influx of users on lemmy and other instances, which is good, but that's about it, and I'm fine with it.
Part of me thinks that while a majority of folks will remain on reddit, the most active, engaged members will leave. ...the mods, the people posting original content, the people posting the most replies.
Over time, the content on reddit could become even more stale, repetitive, and low quality.
agree here. it will be like bots talking to bots.
Kinda feels that way already, honestly.
Right? I felt like all the top comments were always the same on all the subs, usually lame jokes that have been done to death on the rest of the site.
Whatever your political leanings are...this is ridiculous:
https://ibb.co/hCJWBBQ
It's just easier to separate on the political subs. But imagine something like that right there pushed out in subs you don't really think to look for it in, with a totally different message.
Oh yeah, left-leaning subs aren't immune to bots. The 2016 American Presidential election showed the power of using bots to push a uniform message.
Big agree. Supposedly I was in the top 1% of reddit commenters last year. Now I'm here, dipping my toes in the Lemmy waters. I'm sure I'm not the only one. The comments section makes reddit for me, and if all the commenters and moderators leave it, then it will be an even bigger cesspool.
Oh, I agree with you. Whatever happens here, it won't mean an exodus en masse from Reddit to Lemmy ( or to any other platform for that matter) on the immediate future. Reddit will bleed users, only in a long timescale.
I'm not as sure as you are about how things will play out exactly, so for now I'm just watching the situation with curiosity. But I'll say this: while the majority of users don't care, those who DO care I (want to) believe are also the ones that generally tend to generate higher-quality content, while those who don't care (again, I want to believe) tend to be either lurkers or generate lower quality content, although the split here might be closer to 50/50 - we don't know. But in that case, one likely scenario is that in one or a few years Reddit will have so much low-effort and low-quality content that it will just naturally lose any appeal, and people will move on to something else.
I'm sure reddit knows where the majority of their content comes from(API pull or not) and they seem to think it's worth losing them.
3rd Party mobile apps will make people think a bit. once moderation goes to crap and everything gets worse, that will make a dent, but a slower one.
I think the minute they get rid of old.reddit.com they will see a giant loss of people.
Then all thats left are the people who like reddit looking like facebook
One thing I've realized is that people use reddit in all sorts of different ways. I never look at the memes / pic subs, I 99% only care about conversation subs. And pretty specific ones at that, I guess /r/movies and /r/tv might be the most generic, followed by /r/anime - but I also don't spend much time in those subs either.
The subs I spend a lot of time in I can either get the same elsewhere /r/news isn't exactly special for a news feed lol...
And for like /r/askphotography or /r/photography there's discord already, with some mastodon thrown in I guess (though I think thats more like /r/itap).
The ones I hope sort of migrate over are /r/sysadmin but somehow as a work thing I'll just go there on old.reddit.com till that dies, at which point I'll just do without. I expect by then either there'll be other options I'll re-find / find, or maybe GPT replaces it lol.
Yeah, reddit I see is different from the one other people see on /r/all since I have so much stuff blocked on my third party app and through RES on browser. Without it reddit is filled with memes or tiktok and twitter videos and content, which makes sense as the demographic has changed and stuff like following accounts started happening.
I think the new users of Reddit are happy with it, and it's more the long time users who don't make a majority of reddit that are starting to feel pushed out.
There's also stuff like pixelfed for this kinda thing, it's very Instagram like
Though I concede that that isn't necessarily going to give you that same sorta interaction as a forum like Lemmy
But 3rd party app users are often content contributors or mods or the ones answering questions. I feel like reddit is about to use a chunk of real human active users
Me too honestly. The people who want (or prefer) a more centralized, commercialized web can stay on reddit, and those who don't have lemmy, kbin, mastodon, bbs boards, and so on.