The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.

The way I see it, all of us who migrated here won. Enshitification is eventually going to kill reddit, the only question is when. I’ll grab some popcorn when it happens, but for now won’t worry about it and just enjoy my time here on Lemmy.
- Yeah, I agree with this suspiciously named man. Whether it happens sooner or later, Reddit’s death is on the horizon, as it will keep making the wrong choices and so steadily lose those communities and content that built it in the first place.
  
  Reddit won't actually die, it'll just be a hollow shell of what it once was.
  To illustrate my point, Digg still exists.
  
  I agree. I don’t think we’re there yet, but next time the they give people another reason to leave the Lemmy/kbin ecosystem will be even more appealing. Simply the app and dev community here is really exploding.
  
  "I like the way 'namffuH' thinks!"
- I agree with you. Actually, Lemmy woke me up to how much reddit had already been enshitified. I didn't realize that I had stopped commenting altogether because the subs were so big that either no one saw your stuff, or there was always some one pissed off who felt the need to respond. Lemmy reminds me of reddit the way it was when I joined 12 years ago.
  
  And forget about trying to post articles on any subreddit. Always buried with 0 votes, because some bot network is trying to promote the latest Barbie movie or whatever.
  
  Not sure if you only posted on the mainsubs or what but Reddit really did hit that "hyper specific topic conversation" for me. Like up to the protests I could make a meme about a topic or reply to a post and have good discussions. When I deleted all my posts I deleted some of the top of all time posts off some subs lol.
  Lemmy still hasnt hit that for me, I'm another in a swarm of people saying Lemmy doesn't fulfill my topic based sub needs. Like I'm currently obsessed with Marvel Snap and loved the subreddit. The lemmy version is dead af. And I try to converse and interact but none of the lemmy filters for posts seem to show the posts reliably to me and I have to remember to go check it. The Spider-Man PS4 sub was another favorite of mine to interact with and I ended up having to make it for Lemmy and it's got like 80 subscribers and I make a point to comment on every post but it's still not getting much conversation going 😞
  
  How dare you? I feel the need to respond. \s
  
  No it doesn’t.
- It won't die. It will just hollow out. Same as Digg. Same as Facebook, Twitter, and every other shitty part of the internet. The power users are what make the internet the magical place it is. Without those people, the sites will still work... but they won't be as great as they were before their respective turning points. It's a cycle it seems.
  
  It won’t die. It will just hollow out.
  The result is still basically the same IMHO. It's like saying "it won't die, it will just turn into a zombie" ... sure it'll still move, but it's dead inside and rotting on the outside either way, devoid of the life and soul it once had.
- It might not even kill it. Facebook is still kicking, after all, for all its enshittification. It's just... idk, some of us were freed to move on to a more satisfying experience. That's all. Life continues here, life continues there
  
  Honestly if all the buttmunches stay there and all the cool people come here, I think that's the ideal scenario.
  
  facebook's on the decline, meta's betting on instagram since that's what the kids use. facebook is for boomers to looking at family vacation photos and nazi radicalising and is a legacy service at this point.
- Yeah, I feel like I hit the jackpot by finding out about the fediverse/non-corporate social media.
- I’ll grab some popcorn when it happens
  There won't be a day when reddit goes away, it will be a gradual decline, digg still exist.
- Honestly I'm happy with a slow death than a big freaking one. A humongous explosion is not always a good thing lol.
- Right? The protest was just the lighter. Now we watch as the fuse burns. Fuck off Gizmodo, Reddit didn’t win shit yet
- That‘s right. Without the protests, i probably would nit have been aware of the fediverse existence
- I doubt it. Only few people left and they'll just get a bunch of new people in to replace the lost ones. It's just a little dent in their statistics.
- Enshittification will one day kill Lemmy. Somehow.
  And we'll be elsewhere.
  
  Lemmy is open-source software. If the project root starts doing something stupid or gets abandoned, it can just be forked by someone else and it will live on.
- I can't tell if it's just cognitive bias on my part but I feel like the content and discussion has gotten even worse on Reddit since the protests.
  
  Meanwhile here, I find most engagements thoughtful and written because people want to engage. Sure, a few assholes post stupid shit or try to be mean, but most are just trying to participate in good faith.
- Shit birds Ran.
- Idk if it will ever go away. Digg is still around.
- Good thing you reality deniers have no reason to be here then. Byyyeeee!
  
  Geez, you trolls are so pathetic.

That title is a bit misleading. Reddit mods might have stopped protesting, but the news of the implosion was quite significant. The existence of Lemmy is a testament to this. I don’t think their IPO is going to be as strong as they had hoped. That financial impact is quite opposite of the victory they claim to have achieved.
Also, the posts on Reddit and the responses have declined in quality in my opinion.
- the post quality sincerely feels reminiscent of when I started using reddit a decade ago, might as well be posting rage comics again. so much vile shit is making it to the front page too.
  glad I finally got the kick I needed to jump ship, i'm really enjoying what I've seen on lemmy and hexbear
  
  Ah, if that was what you're after, it's too bad you missed the wave of old memes that happened on !memes@lemmy.ml.
- So what you’re saying is spez will be richer than 80% of people instead of 90%
  
  Actually he will be richer than way more than 90% either way
  
  To be richer than 90% of people you need to have a net worth of $90,000 USD.
  
  On the bright side, people like him are unlikely to be happy with what they have. He’ll spend the rest of his life dreaming about the billions he ‘lost’, rather than being satisfied with the obscene amount of wealth he already has.
- They pissed off a lot of their quality submitters, who either moved somewhere else or decided the hell with it, and they're doing other things now entirely.
  When I upped stakes and left, I did indeed up my stakes. I torched all of my posts and comments, which means that, yes, all of my typical reddit bickering is lost to time now. But so is all the specialty knowledge about specific topics I'd put into posts and comments which are now gone from their platform entirely. Outside of the usual cats/porn/vidya/political bickering cycle on reddit, a large portion of what made it valuable to people was (were?) all the niche subs full of knowledgeable people posting information and answering questions about whatever the topic was. The reddit administration didn't just piss off the power mods, it pissed off all the people contributing to those subs as well.
- The question is, numbers-wise, how many of us actually left reddit?
  
  Couple of hundred thousand maybe
- The existence of Lemmy is a testament to this.
  Lemmy has existed before the reddit shitshow.
- Possibly we should all occasionally contribute shit posts to Reddit.
- I've been browsing Reddit logged out and haven't seen even one thing that made me want to comment since the apps got shut down. It really does seem like the content quality has tanked.

I think I won. I found a place I like more than reddit. Maybe we won even. We all got this place right here now. It's nice.
Maybe reddit won. Maybe they wanted to get rid of us and succeeded. Could be easier to milk the platform for shareholders after getting rid of anyone who would protest beforehand.
Maybe it doesn't matter because neither side needs the other anymore. Both sides changed and don't fit back together anymore.
Certainly declaring a winner in this situation is dumb.
- I agree. If Reddit won, the victory was pyrrhic if anything. Their whole plan to end 3rd party app support could have been just a small road bump if they had just done it transparently and planned it with reasonably thought out timelines. They instead chose to do a whole front flip over it and get everyone mad, tanking their brand while trying to make it look like nothing happened.
  Anyways, congratulations on your victory. Here's your prize: ❤
  
  Ex-Apollo/Reddit 10+ years here. I really can’t understand why they didn’t offer API users the ability to pay for the add-free access they were afforded by their apps (if that’s what it was supposed to be about). Did they really think that they could force people to use the dumpster-fire that is the official Reddit app? ..at the cost of losing a significant, or at least active, percentage of their user base? That’s insane. I haven’t logged in to my Reddit account since and I no longer visit old.reddit.com. Appreciate going cold turkey isn’t for everyone, but … fuck it. When social media companies stop allowing you to view their content in the way you enjoy, it should tell you how valued you are by them.
- I think Lemmy won when you came here.
  
  I think we won Lemmy.
  We lost reddit though, not the current reddit, but the one that was.
- I hope we all win. I miss Reddit. There was a more diverse range of communities that matched my interests. My list is subscribed communities here is growing but some are dead.
  That will grow over time and many are. I'm finding there is increasing engagement and comments on many posts and this engagement should breed more engagement.
  
  I think all the mobile apps for lemmy becoming available helps a lot too. Even from several weeks ago the experience is way way better.
  Also all of the major instabilities I saw at first are getting worked out very fast
  I'm seeing the increasing engagement too
- I don't need to win or anything I gave up on Reddit. What's funny is that I donate to Lemmy and never ever bought Reddit premium.
- great comment
- Certainly declaring a winner in this situation is dumb.
  It's not dumb. It's the canary in the coal mine. It's showing that people don't actually give a shit and will continually subject themselves to more and more abuse rather than simply moving to a new platform.
  And it's showing this to other corporations who continue to enshittify the internet.
  
  Imo it is dumb that media always frames anything happening like a sports event. This binary win or lose narrative rarely if ever captures the complexity of a situation. It's the strongest in the US where sensationalism is striving to become an art form due to the two party system. When there are only two competing sites politics can quickly feel like a sports event. And democracy dies to lack of actual discussion and lack of options.

At least personally i have not been on reddit for more than 10 minutes total since the middle of June. I am but one person, but i dont see how they can declare themselves the winners.
- They can declare whatever they want. The ex users won't hear or rebut.
- They think that the people who are left are more valuable than we were. At least in terms of data collection and ad views, they are probably right.
  In the long run, chasing away the power users will probably harm the platform, but it's not immediately clear.
- I haven't been back at all.
- I still check in on niche reddits but my use dropped by like 95%. Used to reddit for like an hour before bed every single night. Been reading books before bed more since the API changed and it's been super nice!
  
  Yep same here! Still check reddit for certain things but dropped it significantly and started reading again.
  
  I still go to two niche subreddits. And while there go to the country sub for a glance. But even there things have slowed down.

The reddit protest caused thousands of power users and some of the best content creators to leave the site.
The reddit protest caused lemmy to grow exponentially for weeks on end.
The reddit protest caused well known third party app developers to leave reddit and retool for lemmy.
Next time reddit fucks up, and it will, when everyone is over there circlejerking about "well are there any good reddit alternatives?"
The answer will be "there is now, and it's called lemmy." And lemmy will again grow exponentially.
Hardly seems like a win, long term. Sure, reddit beat the remaining mod hold outs. They didn't beat us.

They were always going to win. It's their platform. They can do whatever they want. But... They lost my attention and paid subscription. I now only go to Reddit when I'm looking for something I can't find elsewhere. It used to be my favorite platform.
- Reddit's main advantage is the historic number of contents and knowledge posted by their users.
  It will take decades for this advantage to shift, if even possible, to similar type like Lemmy or other platforms.
  
  This can play out in other ways. Search platforms start indexing open platforms and more links start making reference to these platforms.
  
  Decades? Nah, but years yeah for sure
- Same here. Though it hasn't been enjoyable to use since like 2018.
  
  I agree for the most part. Smaller communities were still fun.

Reddit was always going to win that battle. But the fact that Lemmy now has a much larger user base (largely populated by many reddit OGs) is telling. At the very least, the online landscape changed. I for one am happy to be on a new platform away from the old corporate overlords.
- Yeah, I don't mind that the majority stays on Reddit. I miss the old, tighter communities and conversations. When you couldn't predict the top 2-3 top level comments because it's not all jokes/memes, all the time.
  Lemmy is still young, just needs some time and work to get it's shit together and then it'll be great! Honestly, I hope Reddit stays popular so that most people stay there. As long as Lemmy doesn't turn into another escape for CP/Nazi's/random shit groups.

To be honest I didn't really care about the API thing because I used the web interface anyway. But the fact that they had this outrage from users and their answer was "LOL who cares" made me leave.
- I'm very similar. I actually just used the official app, but just seeing the way they responded made me leave
  
  I just got tired of being on a site that won't just ban you for saying Nazis should be punched, they'll ban you for calling them mean names.
- In the light of Twitter shitshow and how one person can ruin a platform it makes sense to look into more decentralized services.

Nah, I won. We won. We found better platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, and KBin.
I'm not going back to reddit, there's simply no need.

If Reddit won, why have Lemmy and Kbin's userbases grown so steeply since June? Why has the quality of Reddit's content plummeted terribly? Why is /r/place just one endless ocean of "fuck spez"?
Reddit only "won" in the same way that Florida "won" against illegal immigrants and is now facing a massive workforce shortage in essential industries.
Reddit may not be dead yet, but it's mortally wounded already. It's bleeding out and will be dead in every way that matters soon.
- Unfortunately, steeply here doesn't really capture the size disparity between Lemmy and Reddit. Lemmy has 60k active monthly users. Reddit has 450 million active monthly users. We have a looong way to go before we can really compete. But we just have to keep pushing. Now that we exist and have a sustainable userbase, the next time Reddit does something idiotic we'll be here to attract disgruntled users. Something good that we can be doing is showing up to the threads on Reddit about the terrible things Reddit does and advertising Lemmy to people.
  
  I don't think a competition is necessary. I'm more than happy if this place is better than reddit was, even if it never becomes that big. It's the content and the community what makes it good for me, not the ammount of users.
  
  Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Lemmy is getting bugger than Reddit. I just wanted to point out that Reddit is bleeding a lot of users. And judging by how Reddit's post quality has dropped, it's bleeding the best ones.
  
  To emphasize this discrepancy, based on these numbers, if one tenth of one percent of reddit's monthly active users switched to lemmy, that would represent more than 600% growth in the lemmy userbase. So yeah. Sharp growth here isn't necessarily a sharp decline there.
  But if the tiny minority that leaves is the same group that's willing to spend dozens of hours a week for free keeping the site free of spam and hate and keeping forums on topic, that has a pretty outsized impact on the quality of the site moving forward. So the small number isn't to say that reddit wasn't hurt by the exodus. It's just to say that lemmy growth numbers aren't a good indicator of that impact.
  
  the thing is we need to hit the critical mass where there's enough posts and comments that it's not dead and there's a reason to come back at least daily. I'd say lemmy just hit that point for me very recently and I imagine that if I still had a reddit account I'd be 50/50. I expect exponential growth from here on out, with more users enabling more people to want to join and that further enhances the system
  
  Stop pushing, the server gonna explode 💀
  
  I'd rather we did not complete, thanks. I don't want 450 million people running riot posting right wing extremist crap.
- We lost like 15k active users (of not even 140k) over the last couple weeks alone. I wouldn't call that steeply grown...
  
  Again, I'm not comoparing Lemmy to Reddit. I myself am on Kbin.
- Spez used a monkey paw, reddit's gonna last forever just getting more and more useless.
- They've grown considerably, because previously there was almost nothing.
  If the posts here are any indication, these users never stopped going to Reddit anyway.
  Meanwhile the number of users these platforms have gained is barely a drop in the bucket compared to the (likely) millions of new users that just moved over to their first-party app for further exploitation for data-mining and ads.
  
  Be that as it may, the quality of Reddit's content has dropped significantly. The people who left were the heart and soul of the platform. And the ones who didn't leave are still pissed. Bluntly, the site's gone to shit. It will not recover.
  Will it shut down? Probably not, but that's why I said "in every way that matters". Digg hasn't shut down either, even after all these years, but it has become completely irrelevant. Just give Reddit time to bleed out and it will be the same.

Such a small amount of users on Reddit submit links or comment. The thing that they "won" was splitting a portion of their community of power users who maintain and create the content on their site from the masses who simply consume and doom scroll the main page. I am happy with the type of discussion that is happening on Lemmy, I don't need a post to have 7000 upvotes or a comment to have 1500 votes and a shit load of coins attached to it to make it valuable or interesting.

Reddit did way worse than losing and worse than dying directly.
Reddit is dead inside and that's all that matters to me.
- The few times I’ve been back since the initial protest I’ve noticed content quality on r/all is considerably worse.
  It isn’t dead, but Digg didn’t die overnight either. Reddit is absolutely dying.
  
  Digg*
  I was part of the Digg exodus to Reddit, and now I'm here.
- When I've checked the front page it's like 15 year humor has taken over. R/unexpected top post was some dumb "NSFW" gif with a breakup and a girl saying how she loved a dude and him saying she didn't give him pussy, "🤦so cringe. All my subs were borked, not worth the effort to rebuild, I'd rather build new in lemmy.
  
  They're 100% botting to keep it "alive" but it's a facade. Happy to watch it go up.

Reddit might have won, but i definitely did too. It made me finally leave Reddit and got me here. And who knows, perhaps one day Reddit will drown in its enshittification enough for it to vanish into nothing but the great history of the internet. Then, at last, we will still be here.

Tanked reputation, loyal user base gone like the window, no 3rd party support what so ever and the face of the company making a total ass out of himself. Yeah sure, if you call that a 'win'
- They still have a lot of traffic. So yeah, they did win.
  But you know who else won? The Fediverse. This place feels really active now and has the added benefit of feeling just a bit more wholesome.
  
  Winning should not be judged within the span of a single month. Much of Reddit’s power users left, meaning the minority that posts the most content was decimated. Reddit will still have lots of traffic but it means they will decline to something where memes are circulated instead of made, like 9gag. That’s not winning by a lot of metrics.
  
  deleted by creator
  
  Agreed, and Rome wasn't built in a day. Any more crises with any of the major social networks will just continue to build this place up more. I think it's too big now to fade into obscurity and is just going to continue to grow, even if it's not as large as the mainstream stuff.
  
  I really hope Lemmy and the fediverse achieves a certain critical mass, to have enough users for a nice active community. Im perfectly fine for reddit to stay number one though, to attract all the toxic idiots and the cesspool they create in their wake.

I notice no mention of Lemmy userbase expansion...
- That's how you know its a paid article.
- Because it doesn't matter to reddit. They did the math on how many would leave and how much money they'd make pushing everyone else to their app. They came out on top and will be fine without us
  
  That spreadsheet is how they make all their decisions, including things like "should we platform dangerous misinformation during a pandemic?" or "how many domestic terrorists do we allow per reactionary sub?"
  When actual morality is cast aside in order to maximise profits, issues like "disappointing users" don't stand a chance.
  But the article has a pretty shallow definition of "won", meaning "they put an end to the protests". Given they have complete control over the platform, that was always going to be the most likely outcome.
  The cost of putting down that protest is harder to see from the outside though.
  Would they have "won" if they lost half their users in the process? Would they have "won" if the protest wiped millions off their value before their IPO? Have they "won" because they added another straw and the camel is still standing?
  But ultimately, who cares what Gizmodos take is? They're a for-profit media company publishing media that looks out for their own interests, which in this case is "it's futile to try and hurt a company's profits", no different to any other neoliberal media empire.
  
  Exactly. Sure, some people left and a few of those migrated here. But as a percentage of overall users of Reddit it just doesn't matter. Personally, I don't care. I am happy here. But there seem to be a lot of people who are still angry at their ex, so to speak. That only leads to bitterness, because the ex has moved on and it turned out you never mattered to them.
  
  The user base boost means lemmy will very likely be viable next time there's a major fuck up and people go look for alternatives
  If it happens they might start losing speed

Not really sure what Gizmodo thinks that Reddit "won". They damaged their reputation, degraded the quality of their site, popularized competition, and embittered a significant portion of their volunteer labor force.

“‘The Hangover Is Over; Smooth Sailing From Here!’ Declares Habitual Drinker, Popping Open Another Bottle In Celebration”.
Did Digg die in days?
- Man...it's been years, so I don't remember, but honestly it felt like it at the time. Everyone hated their massive V4 redesign, so people just...left. The Reddit situation is different, because it only really affected third-party app users, not every single user of the site.
  Edit: I looked it up, and yeah, there was a "quit Digg day" on August 30, 2010 when pretty much everybody just left for Reddit and didn't look back. It helped that people actively bombed Digg's front page with links to Reddit that day, letting people know where to go. Two days later Digg's CEO was ousted by the board, two months later they laid off 37% of their staff. They basically died overnight. That's not happening to Reddit.
  It's worth noting that Reddit has been around a lot longer than Digg had at the time, and has way more traffic than Digg ever did. Unseating Reddit is going to be a lot harder than quitting Digg was.
  
  reddit will also have subreddits that will be fine with very few power users.
  sport and politics/news subs will live for a long time for example, content is generated every day, just need to post it.
  
  Also it's worth noting that when Digg died, at that year there's no mobile app to use, so the og reddit design doesn't hinder the transition. On the other hand, when people switch from reddit mobile app to Lemmy browser UI, it just too different and hard to get used to, so people went back to reddit. The wave happened before there's a comparable app available, the people using Digg back then is so different than the people using Reddit today.
- For those of us who made the Bigg Digg Exodus, it sure felt like it. Same with those who left reddit when the Apollo dev shed light on the bullshit. It's dead to us who left and will forever only live on for us as an SEO zombie.
- I think we all underestimate how much smaller the internet was back then. Flickr, the premier photo sharing site back in the day, was acquired by yahoo for $25MM. Kevin rose of digg was famously on the cover of business week touting a $60MM valuation. In todays big business tech era those are small numbers even factoring for inflation.
  Basically back then users were counted in millions and if the let’s say 5-10K power users and a 100k randos moved on that could kill a service. Today Reddit is too big to fail. It would take tens of millions of users in a mass exodus to make a dent.
  Look at Twitter right now, which is about the fastest case of enshittification of the modern era. The weird trolls filled the power vacuum that proper power users left and it’s still plugging along. If something like this eventually happens to Reddit it’ll be more like Facebook, a very slow decline but even in its shell state boasting hundreds of millions of users.
  
  Wow, that cover photo gave me nostalgia, and I wasn't even young in 2006. Already seems like a distant era.
  I think Reddit and Twitter will just become garbage, zombie platforms like Yahoo - still around but basically irrelevant. We'll see. I was an avid Redditor and quit about two months ago. Honestly I don't miss it at all. It had already become garbage before the whole blow-up.
  
  Facebook didn't die because it also house businesses(pages, marketing, etc), influencer(which in turn support businesses), and there's marketplace that work well enough to support the platform.
  Even though i've left fb, i still keep the account, because my family still use it, and i will occasionally open the app and see their update(after scrolling past 10 sponsored post and 20 suggested post). The consequence of leaving fb is me drifting apart from my friend. ¯(ツ)_/¯
- Depends on what dead means. Digg is still around.
  I’d rather ask the question; how many weekly active users have Reddit lost in the past two months. It will likely take months until we know.

Reddit corporate claims victory
LOL, fucking pathetic.
Platforms don't rise and fall in a single day. Reddit used to be obscure. The fewer people go and make content there and instead just post her, the more Reddit dies through attrition. And as more active users are on Lemmy, the more it grows.
- Lemmy has already hit critical mass to sustain itself so from here on out it will only grow. It surpassed the danger zone where engagement wouldn't be enough to bring people back. On top of that, the best lemmy clients already blow Reddit's official client out of the water. Now all that needs to happen is for more communities to grow.
  
  Is there something in particular that makes you think that?
- I am eagerly anticipating their article on MySpace.
  And to learn whether such articles come about via financial incentives or death threats.

If reddit won, then why am I here?

Major social media platforms don't just explode and go extinct, they slowly slip into irrelevancy.
Digg still exists, no-one cares. Tumblr still exists, no-one cares. Myspace still exists, no-one cares. The list goes on and on.

I don't see how reddit "won". They may have gotten their way by raking devs and users over the coals, but they didn't win. They got their way. Now it remains to see if any service will usurp them in the future.
- Sure they won. Their calculations were correct. They lost some users, but not enough to hurt them
  
  Do you have actual stats for "not enough to hurt them"?
  Because that sounds like something only reddit staff would actually know. It's not like they have a legal obligation to release before and after stats about number of users, average engagement, etc.

I want to thank Spez for screwing up his platform. Reddit became to toxic for me a couple years ago so I took a break. Last summer Zuckerberg gave me a 30 day ban so instead of using a nerfed account I just went back to Reddit instead. So when the protest happened I had no issues with leaving the site.
Lemmy is fire, I'm enjoying this platform much more, every day it gets better.

IMO, Reddit kept the people who didn't care about third party apps or the things that made Reddit Reddit years ago, before it turned into generic social media. Everyone who did care, left. And that's not really a victory.

Did Spez write this article? Reddit didn't win. Trying to go back there has resulted in literally no answers for anything. It's just shills and that's it. I couldn't get answers to things anymore on some pretty major subreddits. So, glad I'm staying with Lemmy.

I mean, if they say so...
Meanwhile, I'm just going to have good time here on Lemmy.
- And honestly I prefer the lemmy experience which has soo much less toxicity.

Bullshit. This is a biased article.
As a other person commented, I won. No need for reddit at this point.
And user name checks out.

I dunno about winning. Lemmy user count is through the roof. And Im one of the people who left when they pulled the API nonsense. The way they gaslit and lied to the Apollo dev was just unacceptable. Couldn't participate there after that.
- Same. And I don't like to admit it, but I was a "power user". When Bacon Reader went dark, I never went back. Like others have pointed out, Reddit was always going to "win" the protest, even with over 1800 subs still out. But the platform's frontpage quality is in the tank. Google doesn't want to list Reddit at the top of search results anymore. The corporate failure to retain money making accounts made national news. Huffman completely missed the investment boat, and although the site itself is still generating traffic, the raised interest rates and lack of ROI for the unpopular changes spells out nothing but a slow death rattle.
  And, lmao, anyone that publicly announces they're following the "Musk Model" for social media platform leadership is clearly a fucking dipshit doomed to drive their site into the ground.
  
  And, lmao, anyone that publicly announces they're following the "Musk Model" for social media platform leadership
  Wait is this for real? I found this but that's not quite saying the same thing.
- Same, way too much BS, once sync went down I was out. So glad it's here now!

But most of these are small communities, and today only protesting subreddit with over 10 million subscribers is r/fitness.
Even if those subreddits never reopen, relinquishing the John Oliver rule officially brings the Reddit protests to a close.
These sentenences are literally right after each other. I have no idea how a 10+ million subreddit still protesting and many smaller ones means the protests are "officially over". It's died down quite a bit but that doesn't seem like a state to declare "officially over".
- That's media bias, baby!

Lemmy has taken me back to the birth of the Internet and Pirch. But like everything else when the word gets out???
- Yeah, Lemmy has the same fundamental flaws that reddit has: it's anonymous, free and it allows bots to post freely. The more popular it becomes, the more it will resemble reddit.
  But what can you do? Facebook isn't anonymous, and it's a bigger shithole than reddit. If you made people pay, then you wouldn't get engagement, and in a site like this with such a wide variety of communities, without huge engagement content is sorely lacking. And how will anyone ever be able to control bots after the LLM revolution?
  
  Yeah, Lemmy has the same fundamental flaws that reddit has: it’s anonymous, free and it allows bots to post freely. The more popular it becomes, the more it will resemble reddit.
  To a point, perhaps. There's no need for the toxicity to come from both the top down as well as the bottom up like it did with reddit. I can't imagine most lemmy instances hosting r/jailbait, r/fatpeoplehate, or keeping r/the_donald around for years after they helped organize a nazi rally.
  I'm reassured by the open hostility toward bigotry I've seen on lemmy. I hope that in particular persists.
  I'm firmly of the opinion that any community that welcomes bigots is truly welcoming only to bigots. Since it is possible to display monstrous inhumanity using only civil language, any moderation policy that focuses heavily on policing language while coddling bigots eventually boils down to a "don't sass the nazis" policy, which was far too common on reddit. I hope lemmy does not go down that road.
  I also hope that reddit levels of toxicity are not inevitable for any network with sufficient participation to make it a useful resource for niche subjects.
  
  Imo quality engagement comes from quality moderating. Facebook has a lot of moderators but they don't give a shit about community and their focus is purely monetization. Reddit used to care about community but we know how that went. Lemmy has a chance to get it right. But even if an instance fucks it up the platform is open and gives us options for other communities within the platform.

Reddit won nothing, maybe just didn't lose as hard as we expected, but the site is a cesspool (more than before).

In all honesty, I can't see any negative impact of reddits hostile behavior towards their userbase on me personally. I can fully admit that I was browsing reddit an unhealthy amount of time. As in spending 4-6 hours a day in mindless scrolling paralasis, only to reward myself with a mild chuckle every 500 posts. I mainly used Boost for Reddit which didn't help to combat this behavior with it's user friendliness. The standard reddit app and website are so bad that I cold turkeyed my bad habit and was finally able to break it. I browse Lemmy to a much smaller extend (maybe 1 hour tops) and refuse to install any frontend app, to not fall back into the same hole as with Reddit.
I also don't get the people that complain. You basically got a free get out of jail card for social media addiction, and you try to immediately backpedal to old habits. This also goes for people that desperately want Lemmy to become exactly like Reddit. The reason why Lemmy in it's current state is in my opinion already better, is because there is basically no FoMo. Post hover on the Popular page for days, comment numbers are low, and if you want to engage in an actual conversation, you won't be drowned out by the 2.7K+ tounge in cheek one liner comments because everybody is a comedian on Reddit.
I try to enjoy it while it lasts, because I know its not going to stay like this forever.
- you won't be drowned out by the 2.7K+ tounge in cheek one liner comments because everybody is a comedian on Reddit.
  But doctor, I am pagliacci.

They did not, at least not in my world, I left Reddit because of this and will never go back.
- Exactly! I had checked Lemmy half of a year ago when first time found it, and it was empty. Nowadays, I fully switched. I'm not going back to be there.
  
  Same , I checked lemmy around a year back and did not see it as an alternative, but now I have actually removed reddit from my phone 😅

I just downloaded Sync for Lemmy. Something Reddit doesn't have. Stay winning, though, I guess?

Fuck Reddit.
- Nah, Reddit was kinda cool. Fuck u/spez instead.
  
  Nah fuck reddit too, can't have a regular conversation in most subs any more with out some freak being outrageously aggressive.

Cool they won. Can we stop posting about Reddit constantly now? It would be cool if we could just move on already.

There isn't always a victor when there is a loser (and visa versa fwiw). Reddit didn't win here, Redditors lost.

They did not win. It’s like Twitter, users stayed and suffered through one poor decision after another. Then, something outlandish would happen and people would migrate to Mastodon in good size numbers. Reddit will do that and Kbin and Lemmy will grow. There are so many cool apps for both. Now when users come over there’s content and various client apps that will make their stay more enjoyable.

The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
So say mediocre minds in constant need of a narrative that's final and neat and wrapped in a little bow, all the time.
The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
By some short-term metric here and there, I guess, if you're willing to squint while looking at the panorama. And just how does the ~~hack~~ writer define "winning" - as "not disappearing or sinking into irrelevance overnight"?
Because long-term nobody knows, as places like right here are continuing to develop and grow, are quickly becoming a viable alternative, ever more active, in a positive feedback growth cycle.
- So many people said this whole situation wouldn't end Reddit, like the end of Reddit would be some big huge sudden bang when the apps turned off.
  They couldn't seem to grasp the idea that it could be the end of the Reddit we knew with a huge injection of new users to potential replacements. Only time will tell.
- Long term it gave a kick off boost to many alternatives, one of which is bound to grow viable
- The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
  So say mediocre minds in constant need of a narrative that's final and neat and wrapped in a little bow, all the time.
  The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
  By some short-term metric...
  Did you intend to quote the same sentence twice?
  
  I did. Because it felt like I was replying to the same statement in two different ways, from two slightly different angles.
- if you're gonna comment by quoting only the title I'm just gonna respond to you by only reading the quotes
  
  Fair enough, but I felt the need to directly address the clickbait title. This toxic, inescapable and ultimately unnecessary clickbait plague really, REALLY pushes my buttons in a bad way.

Reddit’s valuation is down from $15B when they closed their last round of pre-IPO funding. They were hovering in the $5B neighborhood before the APIpocalypse, and I find it hard to imagine that they’ve gained significant value since then. That’s a loss of 2/3 of the investments from their institutional partners and VCs. I hardly think they’re feeling like they deserve a victory lap.
The only reason why you wouldn’t pull an IPO due to a company’s value cratering by 2/3 is because people are looking to get whatever cash they can out of it before it completely collapses. If reddit were a healthy company, the valuation tanking would never have happened. If they were a survivable company, they would have pulled the IPO and made the organizational and policy changes necessary to restore at least some measure of value.
Spez is Musking the site because, like Musk, he is watching his business crash and burn and he has no idea what to do beyond making people pay him to be allowed to create and moderate content he can then resell.
The effects of the decisions being made will not be immediately obvious, especially when reddit doesn’t publish KPIs that show they’re hemorrhaging value. Twitter is notorious for releasing clutching-at-straws metrics in order to not have to address that the company Elon paid $44B for is now worth about $20B and falling.
Firing the mods and replacing them or bringing them to heel is at best a pyrrhic victory because they have not yet figured out how to stem the bleeding, and spez idolizing Musk’s moves at twitter shouldn’t instill a lot of confidence.

"and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people’s attention has shifted to other things"
Reddit pruned its userbase: informed and competent users don't align with enshittification path.

We did it Reddit!
But wait, really? It does not sound like a real victory here. Lots of quality mods retired, people left for Lemmy, and F--K SPEZ written all over the r/place?
Is that victory?

sure they won but i nuked my post history and stopped going in all but a few instances (still checked out a few links when i had to troubleshoot things). i was a regular submitter/commenter/voter. should/will they care? probably not. but i feel better about myself and the situation. so the way i see it, reddit won, the redditors who stayed lost, and everyone who left won.

I don’t care, good riddance. Fucking MySpace is still around too, doesn’t mean igaf
Reddit can continue to rot and choke on that CCP dick

Won! So scorched earth is winning now is it?
That is the same bullshit rhetoric General Curtis Lemay had when he claimed that they should just nuke the Soviets because as long as one American was left alive and no Soviets, American would "win".

Sure, reddit is still standing, but they've been poisoned and will die a slow but certain death. Lemmy however, will survive!

People expect social media services to die and rise in a day. As much as people like to think that is how it works, it isn't—Reddit itself grew slowly overtime, before absorbing Digg and Lemmy will hopefully do the same. We just have to use it, enjoy it, and recommend it to people. Overtime, it will grow, and we have to hope for the best and spearhead that.

The whole reddit thing aligned with other events in my life that pissed my sensibilities off, even more than i can usually stand, and i have learned to stand alot. It made me realize how much of my life was at the whims of greedy fucks who I don't agree with at all. Evolution through revolution I guess. woke me up in a way, a feeling that I've long forgotten tbh with you all. And that's mostly because of all of you and your ideas.
Lemmy is just good for me.
Those out for self interest are shortsighted, and what WE are doing is pushing in the right direction IMHO. Someone's gotta push and here we are.
- Couldn't have said it better. Same feelings here as well.

They always were going to. Redditors have no backbone. Moderators moderate for power trips, which they need subreddits to be open for that. People go back when they want content since Lemmy is still immature to be a full on replacement. Same with the Twitter situation.
The silver lining is that this amount of disdain towards these social medias means it's a better time then ever to push new social media networks. People are eagerly waiting to jump to a viable alternative, so the network issue isn't nearly as big of a deal as it was.

Reddit won the war because your stereotypical Reddit mod is a spineless narcissist who wields their banhammer as a coping mechanism for their real life issues. It's like being an internet caretaker was the only way they could gain any kind of validation.
They could very easily have overwhelmed the site and brought Reddit's admins to their knees had they collectively disabled automoderator, unbanned every user and just refused to enforce any rules (incl sitewide ones.) But the moment Reddit started threatening to demod people, they caved incredibly quickly, or tried to pull off alternative forms of protest to piss off the admins, but not to the point where they'd be immediately demodded and purged, á la AwkwardTheTurtle.
Anyone could have seen this coming from a mile away the moment we started seeing r/pics and r/videos push dumb rule changes like expletives in titles, text only, sexy pics of John Oliver, etc...
Honestly the only good thing that came out of the API protests were iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle being permabanned from Reddit, and it's bittersweet that the hill Reddit chose to kill them on was over third-party apps.

Thats how a lot of people, including me, ended up here on Lemmy, so I'm still glad it happened. Here I feel like im in the early days of the internet again and its great.

Reddit doesn't need to fall for lemmy to be a great plattform.
Why are some here so obsessed with Reddit? I'm not here to constantly read about Reddit! I understand that some of you are seriously upset about what happened and it's okay to vent for some time, but please move on for your own good.

I deleted my 12 year old Reddit account, and I’m here. I still go there, but spend minutes rather that hours. I tried Hacker News, but some posts are really technical. I hope this is a new home.
- I didn't delete my account because old reddit is still a thing but yeah, same. I probably spent around 3 hours a day on reddit. Now I'm down to about 20 minutes a week.
- Yeah, the only way I end up on Reddit now is through a search engine. I'm not too proud to read an old post but I'm not going to stick around afterward.
- Great thing about hacker news is they have actual paid mods that really keep things civil and prevent the forum from turning into a cesspool. Despite people proclaiming "hn is turning into reddit" every once in a while in past 12 years, the mods do a solid job and it hasn't turned into reddit yet. Whenever I visit hacker news there is a chance that I'd learn something new. It's a very valuable resource.
  That being said, can't shitpost in hacker news. Posted a joke? RIP.