Reddit Migration

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.

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.

I mean the truth is 95% of redditors didn't use apps and don't care about this at all.

It's like if your local street had a protest for sheep shearing, preventing you from going to the park or movies. It's irrelevant to you and the large majority would want it over.

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.

I assume it's just a biased sample size? The people left on Reddit are the people that don't support the blackout. The people that do care are here instead.

I think there is probably a mix of things going on.

First, the angriest people already did leave.

Second, people suck at protesting. I mean, the entire reason it was a 2-day protest instead of defaulting to indefinite is because the idea of sacrificing your own habits in a protest blows people's minds. There is a reason "slacktivism" is a thing.

Third, there is probably a segment of the user base who basically got their addiction checked. Social media is addicting, and reddit is not exception, I mean, even I've kept habitually opening the site this whole week just cause that has been my browsing habit for over a decade. It's just how I've check ed news.

And then lastly, the protest reached the more casual core of people who may have not even known about the protest before hand or understood the extent of it, and they are angry that this thing that didn't affect them took away all their content.

Don't forget that reddit has the ability to astroturf themselves. Some of those are sock puppets. Others are a coordinated effort by accounts that have never used the subs they're bitching on before.

Check the user history of some of those. They fit the standard bot pattern

I created a community on KBin for one of my favorite niche sub Reddits, which just came back from going dark. I shared it with them this morning and my post is getting downvoted to oblivion.

I don't know but there are already enough people here to make it interesting

Could be a lot of bots but I won't rule out shortsightedness either.

The truth is, most people will stay on Reddit, at least in the short and medium terms. But with each migration wave, there is a group that will stick around and make things just a little bit more active and interesting, and make it that much more appealing for the next wave.

I predict the next wave is when Reddit inevitably announces the shutdown of old.reddit. Now there will be a more viable alternative for that migration wave, and so on, until we hit critical mass.

That's the hope, anyway.

Back when it was first becoming known that Facebook was passively allowing human trafficking groups and was generating revenue from those groups, I asked around different anti-human trafficking collectives whether or not they would continue to use the platform given ad revenue from their users goes towards creating safe spaces for those bad actors. I received silence from every single one of them. They ignored that question and continued to post how we all need to fight for trafficking victims (very marketing style posts if that makes sense).

Some people are just so engrained in platforms that it doesn't matter what a platform does. When faced with a choice between comfort and ethics, they choose comfort at the expense of all else.

I think it's mostly Reddit addicts being mad they can't see their memes anymore. The support I think is still there and you can see it in the polls, but the ones mad about it are naturally a lot more vocal.

Reddit will fuck something else up in the future and hemorrhage more users.

I'm not too concerned, they'll figure it out. I'm enjoying learning this platform at the moment.

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.

In that nfl thread, is it an old mod or a new one who re-opened it? Reddit is replacing the mods who shut down their subreddits with people who will re-open them.

There was always a substantial number of people who didn't care about the API. They probably only used the official app and are newer Reddit users. They were also probably not around for other mass migrations, such as from Digg to Reddit, so they don't treat Reddit any different than Facebook, where they put up with whatever bad changes are made because they see it as the only option, as if it will always be the internet's main news aggregator.

Anyone who's been around for a long time knows that Internet communities are ephemeral, so what's really popular today won't be in 10 years. It's more than people moving from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit. Search engines used to aggregate news on their home page, and lots of people used RSS feeds or StumbleUpon. The history of the Internet is splashed with sites like Reddit, and every time one dies, another pops up that is more popular.

I'm amazed that Reddit has lasted as long as it has. Whether this is its death or not, I cannot tell, but it seems clear that its days of dominance are waning.