Reddit protest updates: news on the apps shutting down and Reddit’s fights with mods - The Verge
Reddit communities went dark to protest recent changes.
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I think it's all had a bigger impact on Lemmy than it has had on Reddit. The lasting impact might be that Reddit now has viable competition for the first time since Digg, which is a good thing.
Yeah. They do not realize that despite “their traffic being back to normal” they destroyed their monopoly status. It’s a slow rot. But a rot that will kill their value eventually. And I am here for it.
On the bright side for them, they still have a commercial monopoly. The number of ads might go up while the quality of the content goes down.
Inertia will keep a train going for a while, as the engine dies.
The people that are now on lemmy were the heaviest users. The ones that bought 5 different apps to improve their experience and figure out which one they preferred : the mods, the creators, etc.
Have they all left Reddit completely? Probably not, but now they split their time. And stats say the proportion on Lemmy is increasing.
We now have an opportunity not only replace but contribute in the creation of something new - new mechanics, new rules and more.
Reddit is tired and has been for a while, Lemmy developers are building the Reddit they always wanted, and are innovating at breakneck speed.
Simple things like Top by 1, 6, 12 hours which we now have here, was badly needed in Reddit but they were too busy trying to shoehorn video and flairs.
I just dropped Reddit from my phone today, the Firefox moderator protest to change r/firefox to "We are a subreddit about fire foxes aka red pandas" was oddly enough the breaking point for removal from my phone (despite last night's unfortunate hack).
The protests have just become the new reddit fad. Anyone still there that's not part of a self-help, resource/info sub, and claiming to be part of the 'protest' is just circlejerking.
I'm kind of starting to feel like that actually may be what reddit wants - because the tech savy people using third-party apps are also probably just ad-blocking, and it's usually a niche content that will never be massively consumed. Compare that to the junk at instagram or TikTok, that doesn't require any kind of effort to interact with, and compare how many users such platforms have.
I think Reddit would be pretty happy with their content turning into TikTok junk for the masses, and their userbase changing into consumers of that content. Just because there's just a lot more of people who consume such content, and who are used to companies milking them for profit and bombarding them with ads, because they just don't care.
EDIT: And by driving away the "nerds" who moderated and kept a higher standart of content, which in turn turned away the users looking for more easily consumable content, they may get just that. The teens who probably heard about Reddit being the place where cool nerds hang out and tried to get into it, only to be turned away by actual content, will now find exactly what they are looking for.
I'm okay with this. As long as Lemmy is thriving with good content, that's all I care about.
Yeah. I don't expect Reddit to necessarily collapse immediately, or Lemmy to replace Reddit for all Reddit users. I'm just happy if Lemmy becomes at least a medium-sized social network. That means that it would have moved from a niche platform into a large enough ecosystem to sustain itself, and become a viable alternative to Reddit, like you said.
With a huge platform like Reddit, the impact of the current events might not be instantly obvious. But with everything going on recently with Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Lemmy, and even Threads, I think it's clear that there's some kind of transformation of the social media landscape going on. But how long it will take, and what the end result will look like, is anybody's guess. Maybe it's the fall of the old giants and a rise of new, more democratic platforms. Maybe the giants keep standing, but significantly weakened, with a bunch of new, smaller, more open platforms becoming real alternatives. Or maybe it's something else.
Be it as it may, I'm glad that the status quo is being shaken up a bit.
I'd be happy if Lemmy becomes like what Reddit was when it started and never grew beyond that. I don't need tons of clickbait outrage trash to doomscroll though every day.
The only thing I really miss from Reddit is a few of the smaller, niche subreddits that had small but active userbases. But that will come with time as the Lemmy userbase grows.
Yeah. I still go to reddit for those, since I don't have the time or energy to put into moderating anything, and/or don't want to talk to a void. Sucks, because I want those communities here to be active, but content creation is taxing.
This. Some of the users in my favorite niche communities have migrated over, but overall, it's still a bit of a ghost town compared to the same niches on Reddit.
Reddit was at its best when you stuck to the smaller subs where people were primarily positive and cheering on newbies, which really makes for active, welcoming communities that I truly miss. Having a bigger user base in those smaller communities is invaluable, because having a place to come and get advice from people who've been around the block is way different than the blank canvas you find in the same communities on Lemmy. My personal favorites were subs that specialized in "you like this? Have you tried that?"-type threads, and one of the coolest community norms I ever saw was in r/doommetal, where instead of blacklisting bands that got posted too often, they had the "Green List," and anyone who posted anything from the Green List was cheered on and inundated by suggestions for more bands similar to the OP.
I found many of my favorite small bands and content creators in subs like r/doommetal, r/OSR, and r/boardgames, and the amount of good advice I got in subs like r/professors, r/luthier, and r/chempros is impossible to overstate.
I'll miss my reddit niches, and I just hope the Lemmy niches eventually grow up to be a real replacement for those communities.
Now that I think about it, what if someone created a Lemmy instance that just... Mirrors chosen Reddit subreddits 1:1 via a scraping bot? So that if you wanted content from a subreddit, you could just subscribe to it on that instance, or ignore it if bot content isn't what you want. It could work for smaller more niche subreddits (because I suppose that you would quickly run into a throttling problem or bot detection otherwise), but it may kickstart a few communities.
I feel like having no karma and Thus no rewards for such behaviour helps a bit.
What really helps is the power users and moderators moved over too this time. Hopefully with this type of userbase Lemmy will be able to self-moderate and won't end up like Voat.
I hate to see the content we created help fund the pockets of spez and his fellow crooks, but at the same time I'd also hate to see tonnes of possibly the most valuable information on the internet going down the drain. I'll be happier to see Lemmy get to the point where people can say "there's a community for everything" more than seeing the collapse of Reddit.
I deleted everything. It's too bad, a lot of searches are going to turn up threads and find blank spaces where the answers should be.
Yeah I’ve already had a few niche searches result in finding [deleted] content.
I can say I’ve noticed. Do you think spez ever will?
I don’t think it’s ever occurred to spez that anyone else would know more than he does.
*pre-2010 Digg
Digg after that was no longer competition. It was an ad-riddled trash-fire which drove a massive number of its users away to places like reddit... including myself... who just kinda did something similar with reddit.
I went to Reddit from Digg during the great migration and I didn't look back. The Ads and format change were a huge misstep on their part. I honestly would have left Reddit when they went to New Reddit if we would have had Lemmy back then.
when they went to New Reddit
I never went to New Reddit...
I would have left even if Lemmy didn't exist.
Yeah, I jumped ship without a plan. After a couple days I remembered I had heard about Lemmy in one of the "What are you going to do on July 1st" posts.
Am so happy with the results that I honestly no longer care what happens to reddit, I prefer this.
Smaller? Sure, but it'll grow. Even if it tops out at current user base I wouldn't see that as a bad thing.
I know it never left for PC and I used it over there but I was mostly a mobile user and killing Apollo destroyed my desire for reddit.
I was also not a fan of some of the changes that affected everything like removing NSFW from r/all.
Same. In fact I tried to find alternatives but there just wasn't one at the time.
Old reddit still exists
Yes but evenso site wide changes still affected old reddit. NSFW subs were still removed from r/all and the sponsored content was still there too. Not to mention all the bots and spam. I was also primarily a mobile user so killing Apollo was the end for me.
For now, yes. As clueless and inept as Spez has been about this whole thing, it's only a matter of time until old.reddit gets nuked.
They already tried nuking i.reddit a few months ago.
There's a workaround, you can append .i to the end of a URL and it works, but still, shame to see the lightest weight reddit interface disappear
It did indeed, I knew nothing about the fediverse before the reddit protest began, didn't even know lemmy existed, now I happily migrated here, like me many other people.
Same, joined last week after my app of choice was killed. Already spending more time here than i was at the end of my time on reddit.
Was getting so sick of the rage-bait, low quality comments and general snarky behavior, i might have quit anyway. So much better here.
While I see many comments regarding the Reddit changes, unfortunately I am not seeing much discussion in any other posts yet.
![[The Verge] Reddit protest updates: news on the apps shutting down and Reddit’s fights with mods](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/cbc8631e-0e83-4b13-b41e-c618f3488cec.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)