Not sure if I agree with him (or rather, pretty sure I disagree). The protest was very successful for me - it got me off the site, and I have no plans of going back, even if it fully opens and goes back to "normal". In my case, reddit is not winning, it completely lost. I see more people like me around here every day and it makes me happy. Can't remember lat time reddit made me happy, so I'm enjoying the change, even if it comes with a fair bit of jank.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/
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I think his comments are directed at the moderators who have caved, not necessarily to every viewer of the video
His broader point is that he thinks mods should have stuck to their guns and kept subs private which would include their historic posts. By even reopening, they're allowing traffic to return to the site even if a few large communities are memeing hard. For the most part, subs that have reopened are going to return to business as usual. All because the mods of those communities didn't want to sacrifice their control. Spez called their bluff.
While thousands of users have been driven away, there are still more than enough who will remain and continue to engage with the site. The only lesson Reddit will have learned is that they can just wait it out no matter how unpopular of a decision they make.
I'm very curious to see if there will be any meaningful drop in traffic at this time next month.
Reddit was never going to just go away as a result of this. Even if every blacked-out subreddit remained private forever and everyone who was aware of this protest walked away, there's plenty of oblivious users and remaining subreddits to continue operating.
The "win" condition for the protesters is some or all of the following:
- Give Reddit bad publicity in the mainstream press
- Cause a drop in ad revenue. Money is life as far as Reddit is concerend.
- Harm Reddit's valuation in its IPO. Money is life.
- Help Reddit replacements get established, restoring competition that Reddit thought had long ago vanished. (You are here).
Nothing was going to stop Reddit from going ahead with their API change, all we could hope for was to make it hurt for Reddit. And in that regard I do believe we've scored a solid win. The Fediverse is now competition for Reddit, and as they squeeze and squeeze their users for money over the years to come there's now an escape valve that users can flow out of under that pressure.
My goals in aiding protests were just as you say. I wanted to help consolidate the instances I use, and the communities I use. I've always known reddit will stay there. I don't even think I'm wounding reddit. That beast is too big. All I can do is piggyback some popular posts and get a few hundred to a thousand people to fill up my instance and make me a bit happier about this whole debacle :)
We're a swarm of mosquitoes. We bite Reddit and it's painful, but really the only way we're going to kill Reddit is if in the process of swatting at us Reddit forgets that it's holding a machete in its hand.
Fortunately Reddit shows signs that it is indeed doing that.
My first account was 14 years ago. Every year or so, I switch to a new account. I nuked every single account I had: nuked the comments, nuked the submissions, just over-wrote then deleted everything. I privated the tiny handful of small communities I modded, turned over the keys in a couple of them, and de-modded myself. I unsubscribed from every single subreddit I was part of.
I found some worthy comments and spent all the reddit coins I'd accumulated from when other people gave me gold. I went through every saved comment and saved it (in context) offline. I PM'd a handful of people my email address, wrapped up a couple of "oh, I'll get that to you later"s, and ... just walked away.
14 years, 17 accounts. My "smallest" account had about 140k karma; my largest over 440k. Probably a couple million between all of them.
I'm done with reddit, I'm gone. I'm not going to fool myself that I'll be missed there but, given my accumulated karma, I think the loss of some of my contributions (I mostly hung out in news and science subs) will make the site a little less useful to the people still there. Enshittification, indeed.
Obligatory fuck spez inserted.
Every comment and submission deleted is just a tiny bit of value taken away from the site. I did my part, too!
It's why I unsubbed everywhere as well, I don't want my zombie accounts used to inflate reddit's statistics.
Left and will not return. It can only get worse.
Money corrupts all
Well said.
The majority didn't move away from twitter either. Some people moved to mastodon, but most either stayed or just straight quit twitter
That said, I Am so much happier here on the fediverse
Typical Rossman to think anything but the platform shutting down (before 3pas actually stop working even) is a failure.
He can definitely speak with a lot of vitriol :/ It's why I stopped watching his videos. I'm glad he's pushing for right-to-repair stuff, but I just couldn't handle the anger and negativity.
Pretty much where I'm at. I appreciate him for all he's done, but his recent content is so bleak and hopeless. Can't handle it.
I think reality is a bit bleak and hopeless now, at least for Rossmann and his causes. He doesn't seem like the sugarcoating type.
I wouldn't expect him to lol. Every time I watch one of his videos, I'm reminded of one of The Onion News Network's greatest creations: The Autistic Reporter.
Note: Whether Rossman is on the spectrum (I assume so) I'm not throwing shade at all. He's a powerhouse.
That connection will live forever in my head now lol, also how do I get to live in prison?
I think he hinted in some recent reddit video that he's somewhere on the spectrum, or he thinks so.
It was pretty much just an online quiz in a livestream he did fairly recently, I think.
Iirc it was something along the line of ‘I have friends on the spectrum, and I’m not unlike them’, and that online quiz coming to a similar result. I don’t think he’s been officially diagnosed, he just has a fairly high margin of similarity.
Note: Whether Rossman is on the spectrum (I assume so)
According to one of his other videos, he took an internet autism test and it determined based on his answers that he was probably autistic. No idea if he was properly diagnosed by a doctor though.
But is the train okay?
I stopped when he went on a transphobic rant about 3 years ago.
Yikes, I wasn't aware of that. I'm already avoiding his videos, but I'll probably completely hide his channel on Youtube.
EDIT: Do you have a link for that video? I'm searching for it, but trying to find it without clicking on Reddit links is a pain :(
It was a couple of years ago, just after he had hooked up with a gf, and he was doing weird AMA videos while wearing a smoking jacket. The general gist of the rant was his political beliefs on racism, wokeism, and 'there are only two sexes', it wasn't a full on hate-speech-apoluza, and probably not enough of a red flag for him to continue gaining in popularity.
For me, it coming a little while after Cody going a bit too RWNJ after Kanyon left him, it was enough for me to nope-out of his channel, but I have a very slim tolerance of youtube celebs anyway, I find most of them unbearable.
edit: given the 'My Girlfriend owns a macbook, F my life' video that was posted a week or two after his rants, I'm going to say it must have been 2019.
What did Cody ever say/do to give you "right wing nut job" vibes? He basically just started homesteading and pretending he's on Mars.
That's the same reason I switched to cinema wins from cinema sins. They went from good natured driving to the next best thing to pure vitriol.
What bothers me is the stereotyping reddit mods as pear shaped basement dwellers that cling to pretend power and go through DTs if they don't have their mod authority for three days.
I am on a... .LOT of shit lists with staff on many locations for legitimate and non reasons. To the point you'd expect me to be agreeing with the assessment, but nope. Those are volunteers that make the network go 'round.
It's the FIDO admin clusterfuck yet again. 'Shit talk the guy while he's there. Guy steps back for mental wellness reasons. sudden outpouring of 'you made everything work! You were the greatest!' etc etc.
Of course I can’t speak for him but I think he’d rather Reddit change course.
Generally agree with him, but I don't like how he doesn't appreciate all the mods that are still protesting. After all, this is the internet where most people have become used to social media corpos just doing whatever they want. I'm glad such a protest even took place.
As much as Louis is on our side in this, I feel like he alone was responsible for the MOST damage to the protest efforts. After his video about how a 2-day blackout wasn't enough, dialogue from the anti-protest side started to shift heavily toward "this isn't even going to do anything," and his video was cited as often to support "we need to do more" as it was to support "you guys are stupid if you think you're doing anything." So I hope he finds some room to be pissed off at himself while he's pissed off about the "failed" reddit protest.
And, spoiler alert: it takes time for momentum to shift, and it's very much shifting - it's just not happening as fast as this guy wants it to.
Yeah it's very interesting that most scabs on Reddit sound very similar to him and his video. Even though his intention was to help the protest, ironically he's done the most damage to the protest and given the scabs and anti-protestets plenty of ammunition to use against protesting efforts.
I'm sure he's not even willing to admit where he's wrong or at fault here, he doesn't seem like the kind of person to own up, in any meaningful way at least.
I don't really get how reddit is "winning" if I am no longer using it. Lemmy and kbin have more than filled the gap from reddit. Even if users at large don't switch immediately, that is fine.
Is Reddit winning? It seems too early to tell.
Their refusal to change doesn't mean they are succeeding. The absolute mess that /r/all became over the weekend is already hurting their ability to sell ads.
Even if Reddit removes all the moderators from these thousands of protesting subreddits and replaces them with people willing to tow the line, that will only stem the bleeding short-term. As the most talented moderators and creators continue leaving the platform, Reddit will slowly lose it's ability to produce content that keeps people reading.
Digg and Myspace didn't die in a week.
Communities are not made in a week or months, and we shouldn't expect that Reddit communities will decline in those time frames, either.
IMO, the only way Reddit survives is with automated automation. Replacing the mods is dangerous precident; any future mods should pay attention to the current situation. Reddit is disincentizing moderators from volunteering.
I get what he was going for, even if he phrased it in a shitty way. His problem was more the mods that caved in and went back, not with the ones who said "I'm done" and stuck to thier guns.
While there'll undoubtably be much more people coming to here and other places given time (I wasn't there when people left Digg en mass for Reddit, but I highly doubt it happened in days, or even a year or two), I can't help but also look at those that went back and think "Would have been better if yall just cut the cord and left Reddit behind completely" because it's not changing.
Regardless, he was right about not giving a time limit when drawing a line in the sand
Dont care, just quit Reddit and they can't win. I saw a lot of sub-reddit who said "Well, blackout was great but here we are! Online now!" so... just leave.
I really like Rossman, he fights a good fight. It also seems like his personality/brand is to be upset about most things.
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