“Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. It cannot.” - The Verge

I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won't be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.

Yeah Digg didn’t die in a day. It takes time. I joined lemmy today, but I looked into it a few weeks ago first. It wasn’t worth the effort then, it is now. Having an Apollo-like app is a big help too.

Every previous major exodus had the problem that it was the people everyone was better off without leaving. Maybe you hated Reddit in 2015 and were pissed at their decisions, but the alternative was a place dedicated to mocking fat people and saying slurs.

Comparatively lemmy just kinda has a similar vibe to Reddit. Like I need to look for equivalents to some spaces I miss, but it’s not the people we said good riddance to

It's been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.

I'm not sure if Reddit will "die off". There seems to be a significant portion of users who don't care about the API debacle or protests - they just want to scroll through memes.

I would definitely like to see Reddit experience more pain, given how cunty they've been to users and moderators. But we live in a world where big companies act like shit and get away with it.

Also: we're still not going to pay you, but treat you worse. And if you quit, and the people after you keep quitting... we're going to have to replace you with PAID moderators... and if you play your cards right and we forget who you are, you might be one of those paid mods, so uh... shut up and get back to work for free!

Good job on not only lurking!

if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits

Not exactly. Most subs have more than 1 moderator.

Spammers must be salivating, like "Yes Splez! We would be happy to take over this sub for you!"

I don't think he knows what he's doing.. in his mind he's running the last meter of the finish line to the IPO when all these "problems" are cropping up for "no reason" and he just wants to finish the race

I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product s users and mods to be a winning strategy.

FTFY.

The users are the product being sold to the advertisers. Framed that way, it makes it even more clear how idiotic driving away users is.

Well, we former Reddit mods don't need to understand anything in that regard. Fuck Reddit in its entirety. I'm not wasting time considering their point of view. I understand that they're pieces of shit. I did negotiate - they doubled down and so I carried through and walked the fuck away, revoked my registered copyrighted material and took the first steps to litigation when they reposted it. They've taken it back down after the DMCA was filed, we'll see if it goes back up.

An ultimatum is a negotiation.

The mods need to understand that the admins see the mods just as the mods see the users.

They can be gotten rid of on a whim and no one will care

One of the comments on the Verge article, that I agree with:

There's nothing wrong with the mods being volunteers. Reddit just needs to respect them (and the other users) more. In fact if the mods were paid employees there'd just be even less standing in the way of these administration deuchebag moves. And I think that if they were paid hires there'd be less assurance that the mods were truly interested in the subject matter of their subs - I'm just hypothesizing there. Anyway I don't think the volunteer model wasn't working. It's the admin layer outside the mods that's broken.

No one needs to pay them. Not being treated like garbage is sufficient.

Or, I know this is crazy, don't piss them off when you already make their money?

All they had to do was allow Reddit premium users to access the site using third-party apps.

I'm with you. I get needing to make money, but needing to go public and become just another cringe social media platform is just sad. RIP Reddit. Hello Lemmy.

Not only this, but this has happened before. It was called Digg back in 2010.

I was waiting it out until I heard mods were being threatened. That's the final call.

I'm going to be replacing posts with links to my never used socials because who cares if I'm spamming at this point.

The only thing that makes me sad is we cannot take the years of knowledge stored in reddit with us. Some of those co tributors who posted valuable contributions are not active anymor or some has quietly passed away irl.

If reddit decides to wall their site, unviewable to non paid subscribers, then it will be like an end of a small scale civilization where poeple go back to basic living,

I hope in time we can rebuild the same kind of knowledge here.

It's easy to index decentralized networks is literally Google. Every website is decentralized from every other website the fact that Lemmy/kbin/Masterson sites can communicate with each of the doesn't really make any difference.

If the content gets great enough, that will happen. Going to take time, but it will absolutely happen. Especially with so many people deleting their comments and Reddit having their feet held to the fire with people making complaints about them violating GDPR.

Lemmy, Mastodon, and the entire Fediverse are really what the internet was supposed to be. I am glad to see the pendulum swinging back and I hope it continues. I am mostly really excited about the mobile apps being developed for Lemmy. Those are coming along at lightening speed and I those will be THE THING that makes Lemmy happen.

You can use Lemmy Explorer to search through all 900 or so Instances for the communities you're interested in.

This is true. I suspect for many mods the power they have to push their ideas, ideals and beliefs and punish who they see fit more than makes up or the fact that they do it for free.

Reddit will REALLY be good when those apathetic users are all that's left to produce content and moderate subs! /s

People just need to change their attitude for how they interact with Reddit now. Gone are the days of good faith and honest interaction. I'll happily lurk and absorb content and provide no interaction back, not wasting my time curating / generating content for them anymore.

I think you overestimate the willingness of people to stay in a Spam, porn, and bot infested hellhole (if you think it's bad now you haven't seen nothing yet), especially as public consciousness starts to realize that. There will be a point in the future where Reddit will be seen as about as respectable as an adult video site, there are people who would be willing to stay through that but there are plenty of people who wouldn't either.

Another good thing to remember is that most of the people on Reddit are the kind of people who laugh and upvote stuff, they're not the kind of people who are going to be making high quality posts. So when the people making high quality content leave the only thing that will be left is the lowest common denominator. It doesn't really bode well for the continued survival of the platform, at least as a place that people are going to want to go.

My theory is he's heard Musk brag about how he's made Twitter profitable, and only lost bots and scammers - the users and advertisers all came crawling back (without releasing numbers)

No way that's true, but every owner of social media seems to have paid attention. They want to believe it - there's growing pressure to turn a profit now, so when someone tells you "the users might get mad, but they'll come crawling back if you stand firm" they pay attention

It's pretty easy to convince someone of something so convenient

Honestly in my opinion Huffman isn't the brightest bulb in the bunch, he also seems to have a problem with understanding the consequences of his actions. He thinks that we're stupid, he also thinks that users will stay on Reddit no matter what. I'm sure some will after all there were a small minority of users that stayed on digg right up until the bitter end. However a large majority of users aren't going to keep up voting and posting there as the platform slowly devolves into a spammy mess. Maybe he thinks that that won't happen, after all they do have the audacity to think they can reliably prosecute "ban evasion" when in reality they can't, especially for bots.

Twitter is still here as well, without much moderation.

The platforms survive. Interactions just get a lot worse. But most people still refuse to leave.

I don't want to be a part of that system anymore, which is why I'm here even though I don't necessarily believe this form of federation social network is designed very well.

To be fair, a lot of Reddit was starting to turn into that anyway. Not the more niche subs, but many of the bigger ones had been going in that direction for a while now.

Interested, so I went to have a look.

Holy shit, it's.....not great.

Oh hai Mark

I am now

Sadly, I don't think so. I think they looked at the number of new users and the number of users using 3rd party apps and decided they can lose those.

Edit: apparently Reddit has between 500 million and 1.6 billion active users monthly. According to RiF developers, RiF and Apollo have a combined 3 million active users. If all of those 3rd party app users decide to never go back, Reddit might lose between 0.6% and 0.2% of their userbase. I think they'll be fine...

Ever worked somewhere where management got cleaned out and replaced with new people who had no existing connection to the place?

Bad mods have always been an issue, but for most places there would at least be some sort of chain of succession where the person who started the community brought on somebody they thought was good, and so on. Most places in having multiple mods would have crossover between new and old mods.

Nuking all that and appointing some rando has a much higher chance that the new mod is going to be bad. Look at the snackexchance drama where some rando totally “randomly” got appointed head mod and his first action was talking about getting government ID verification going for exchanges without asking the community anything.

Reddit will likely be able to subdue most subreddits eventually, but the time and effort spent doing so will be wasteful and publicly ugly as they parade in various mods, and have to step in to crack down on userbases bent on being disruptive.

This is a common argument that I usually see people making, there are a few big problems though with the idea of just getting new moderators. The first problem is that moderation is difficult. It's really easy to look at online posts talking shit about moderators and think that you could do a better job than them but you couldn't and neither could most people, it is a very tedious and difficult process, while there may be many people who are willing to do it there are not as many people who are cut out to do it.

The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit's promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum. This is a problem because it means that even for seasoned moderators content moderation is going to become increasingly difficult. Now imagine for somebody who isn't a seasoned veteran moderator, who was freshly appointed by Reddit's administration to fill the roles of mods who quit. I imagine they're probably not going to be able to do this job effectively.

Even If you hired a paid moderator team they would still be nowhere near as effective as the volunteers who poured their heart and soul into it, especially considering that those moderators will be working regular jobs. They're not going to be able to moderate to the lengths that an unpaid volunteer could. This is also ignoring the fact that Reddit very much cannot afford to appoint paid administrators to moderate all of the largest subs on Reddit, considering that making a lot of money is their goal that just isn't sustainable.

So yeah while they could get new moderators it would not be a very easy task for them, and would definitely come with severe drawbacks. Obviously Steve Huffman doesn't really care, he'll probably try it anyway and who knows maybe it'll seem to work out short term, the new moderators won't really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated. A good thing to keep in mind is that the scammers are watching this scenario, they've already started using it to their advantage by messaging moderators pretending to be administrators as a phishing attack. An experienced mod might be able to Ward this off or not be affected, but in unexperienced mod may fall for this kind of attack without knowing better.

They won't deliberately wreck the place, but they won't understand what made reddit a great site.

Unless they pay for new mods, their only option is to take volunteers.

The people who would volunteer to be the new mods after this shitshow are not the kinds of people that can run good communities. It's going to be power tripping psychos and uncommitted absentees and, yes, saboteurs that want to wreck the place for fun. They'll get a few good mods, but they'll be outnumbered.

Its not just replacing mods though. Take the issue that happened with that snack sharing subreddit. The current mods held it for 10+ years. They built several tools that automated verification and rating people who shared with each other and it prevents a LOT of drama and scams. Then reddit replaced them because of the protest. But what about the automated tools that they personally made for "their" sub. The owner of those tools took them down. The new mod put them back up. They will die on the 30th anyways because they wont make the API requirements and if they are forced to stay up byt he new mods then the person who will have to pay reddit for the API usage is no longer the mod there.

This is not a unique situation either. Tons of people made auto moderation bots and tool over the past 16+ years. Most of those tools break today and if the mods are replaced then those tools are stolen from the owners. If the owners remove the tools reddit sees that as protesting and removes the mods.

It's going to be a train wreck and a legal nightmare.

Even in a perfect world you are replacing mods that know the communities and have created them and worked on them for years with a new set of mods with no attachment or experience running those communities.

I'd been using RES to overwrite, then delete all my posts and comments every few weeks for the last years. If Reddit tried to restore any of my stuff, even if they went past the overwrite nonsense strings, they most likely only caught a fraction of it.

Well, it survived all 11 years of my tenure so...

I wiped my 10 year old account last night. Everything except my last post telling spez to fuck off and that he and his board have no soul or humanity.

It was hard seeing it all go, but if life has taught me anything, it's that all things are impermanent and we should always be prepared to let go.

I'm waiting for a couple of days until I'm sure my deleted comments stay deleted. After that, I'll wipe my 6 years old account.

There was a YouTube vid posted a few days ago showing that posts are being reinstated after deletion.

Ignore, duplicate 😣

As much as I would like to do this I have too many posts there have legitimately helped people who were struggling with things.

I've had people respond to months old posts thanking me on several occasions for helping them. I can't in good conscience remove thay just to spite reddit, and I do a lot of stuff out of spite.

Long live OSS.

Invested time... And this place is pretty far behind a usable replacement in terms of content alone.

Like others, I'm also here from Reddit Is Fun. I was a reddit user for over 16 years (with a 15 year old account). For over half of that time, RIF was my exclusive conduit to Reddit as the desktop site became increasingly unusable. Now that RIF is gone, I won't be going back.

I think only linux users moved over here... maybe

reddit was the same thing as twitter, just a woke censorship mob that deleted dissenting opinions or even insinuating a slightly different viewpoint.

lol nah Reddit can fail. Just like Tumblr, and Digg, and MySpace, and LiveJournal, and GeoCities, and the list goes on. Reddit relies on volunteer work to provide its content, and just like when Digg tried to do almost the same thing, the community will move on. It always does. It has since the 80s and will until the extinction of humanity or the collapse of civilization.

Let it fail.

Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the "metaverse" to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn't seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There's no denying that. But, it's their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.

As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There's a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there's also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don't know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can "get back to normal" and continue being Google's sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that "the beatings will continue until morale improves," it's hard to imagine how they can get back to "normal."

I'm okay with lemmy getting just enough traction to bring in the best users without being "popular"

Digg had critical mass. It went down in flames.

It doesn't take bajillions of users to generate enough content to form a reasonable alternative.

Niche subreddits will be hard to recreate though unfortunately, but plenty of time to grow. And long-term, federated seems like a good model so that once these communities are rebuilt they aren't at the mercy a company who's main concern is short-term profits.

Too big to fail doesn't mean it's too big to decline.

I don't think reddit is going anywhere as a company and a platform, for a while at least. But that doesn't mean it can't lose a good share of it's users to competitors.

I don't think the comparison with Facebook is a valid one though. Primarily because Facebook is a "true" social media platform. You have your friends and family on it which creates a very strong network effect.

Reddit on the other hand is primarily a content aggregation platform. I don't need to convince my friends and family to switch from it.

Additionally, Facebook is a lot more successful than Reddit financially. They make disproportionately more money per user due to having very targeted advertising. They own other platforms like Instagram and whatsapp. Unlike reddit, Facebook doesn't need to concern itself with having financial troubles.

A better comparison would be tumbler, which was quite big and while it still exists, it's a shell of its former self.

Facebook may not have failed, but it's a shell of the platform that it was. Twitter is on the way to that status, Tumblr did it to their users and it's happened time after time. The little bit I've browsed the front page of reddit in the last little bit there's been a noticeable drop in post and comment quality.

I know there's a few reddit archive projects, and it may be worth looking into a project that could scrape the html and present the info without it being Reddit.

This is the most level-headed take. Reddit is going to continue to slog along with or without my account, with or without Lemmy's 53k active users. Anyone who thinks this protest is going to sink them entirely is naive.

However, they may stagger along as an enshittified website that has lost it's spirit and never meaningfully grows again. Reddit is still better than any other alternative at this point in time, but Reddit is not by my estimation going to improve again. It's all downhill. So I'm doing my part and trying to work to build community elsewhere.

We don't need 50MM users to reach a mass where the content is fresh and engaging all the time. Probably a fraction of that would be. Lemmy's userbase is double Squabbles and there is already a noticeable difference in content.

Yes, reddit will always retain some user base and they might even continue to grow. But the quality will be worse. Just like Facebook and other social media platforms, there will be users that simply don't care enough to look for alternatives. I really hope that it will be a downward spiral for them. Too many (contributing) core users leaving, moderation getting worse and spammers and karma farmers reducing the quality of posts to a point where it's just too cumbersome to scroll through all the crap to find a worthy post. I think that reddit either reverses its decision or that it will slowly fade into meaninglessness....