2y ago

Users Have Had It With Reddit...But Are Powerless

A video about the effectiveness of the Reddit protest

133 comments

Powerless to change Reddit. You can always do what I did and use lemmy instead.
- This is the way.
  It's been so much nicer tbh, at least on Beehaw. I don't have any reason to go back with Lemmy and RSS feeds
  
  Same!
  
  i find that the lack of community videos really holds me back from using lemmy as a primary website, but i do understand that video hosting is expensive, just kinda sucks
- If this reddit change did not occurred, I probably never had tried Lemmy (even if I'm in OSS world for 20+ years now). First thought is that I don't think communities going black or mods leaving reddit will do anything to reddit, it's so big and alternative are somehow a niche for geek that they will not loose most of their user base. For mods they'll find out some way ... On the other hand, I don't care, I'm happy here on the fediverse, I participated more discussion here in 1 month than in years on reddit. I had bad experience on my first posts on reddit (probably not interesting enough for some and then downvoted a lot), and I think that I just always thought if my post will be appreciated or not and so and finally just didn't post. I don't have this feeling here.
  
  I haven't gone back since the blackout, I get my content here and some other bookmarks I'd forgotten about.
  Turns out a whole bunch of us were sick of reddit anyway and were eagerly awaiting a new place to go. I'd have never heard of the Fediverse if reddit hadn't been dicks about API pricing. I knew as soon as I came here and started exploring that this was the way to go; reddit is old news, it's been around for 18 years, that's forever in internet time. It's time to move onto the next thing and the idea of hundreds (thousands!) of federated servers talking and sharing content across platforms is very exciting to me.
  
  I also had a terrible first experience posting on Reddit, which turned me off from activity submitting any content and only commenting rarely. I mostly lurked and voted, which I still thought of as participating in the community. But in my short time here (Kbin for me), I see the entire userbase as activity welcoming and generally nicer! Just looking at the voting scores, it seems that downvots are hardly used at all! Maybe it's a good thing we're separating from the common audience that was quick to turn toxic and become combative for the fun of it.
- Yes! I'm also powerless to change every other social media platform out there. I'm glad to be here
- Path of least resistance is usually best in these cases, and frankly, it's nicer here. I have been waiting for Lemmy to pick up after trying other fediverse applications and there is no way I am going back for any application. Now we just need YT to implode.

Walking away and not looking back is actually very powerful.
- Yep, vote with your feet is all that we’ve got, and shouldn’t be underestimated.
- Yup, I am happier on the fediverse now.
- yeah, the only thing they are powerless is against their addiction
- Amen.
- This has the energy of walking away from explosions in slow motion.

Leaving Reddit is the only protest that works. The site looks basically the same as it did before that 2 day black out.
- At first glance, a lot of subs have gotten a lot more toxic in comments, and I think the mods have mostly greatly reduced moderating work.

Powerless to change Reddit, yes, but not powerless to find a new community!
To everyone hanging in the fediverse, I just want to say, I am proud of all of you!
- NGL I’ve found the communities on here to be much more genuine. It feels like things are less manipulated, like there are less bots and less advertising companies trying to do guerrilla marketing.
  Might just be that these communities are small enough that such things are not worth the time of those who would do such things.
  At this point I think I’ll always just migrate to smaller communities as time goes on.
  
  I think so long that the community is on an invite-basis community, it raise the cost of botting the website much higher than other platforms so it can de-incentivize them from gaming the platform.

Just don't use it lol
- How is Reddit real? You can just walk away from the screen. Close your eyes!
  
  okay eyes clised, now whar?

The people who see the protest as a failure were many of the users who used the official app, default settings, and seldom if ever contributed to the site. They were never going to leave anyway.
Look how many people came here, and there is a noticeable decrease in the number of bots and trolls. I see this as a huge win for us users.
Edit: Just realized this is ambiguous. There's noticeably fewer bots and trolls here on Lemmy than there were on reddit.
- Not only are there fewer trolls here but there are but more well thought out replies and less attention seeking in general. The entirety of Reddit is going to turn into r/teenagers
  
  🌎 👨‍🚀 🔫 👩‍🚀

I don't know, my brother has been a Redditor for as long as I was (15 years) and he became angry and hostile when I told him about Lemmy. We're both in our 50s.
He's been using the official Reddit app for years and claims it "works perfectly for him". He seems utterly blind to Reddit's enshittificaton. He's always been kind of an asshole- he behaved the same when I quit Facebook, though he eventually did the same- and he also fears new tech (he didn't have a smartphone until 2020). I wonder if people like him- of which I'm sure there are plenty- will ever wake up.
- Sounds like Morpheus was right about not freeing minds once they reach a certain age.
  
  He's two years older than I am, and I'm here on Lemmy with a deleted 15 year old Reddit account. He's always been like this, age has nothing to do with it.
- We'll see how it plays out. I have a feeling reddit may currently be putting in artificial upvotes and comments to save things. They've done it when reddit got their start, and as someone who works in tech, I know nothing's stopping them to create a fake 10 year old account with thousands of karma and fake old replies to do some social engineering to make it appear that nothing has changed. This might work out, or it might not.
  
  I know nothing’s stopping them to create a fake 10 year old account with thousands of karma and fake old replies to do some social engineering to make it appear that nothing has changed
  No need to create them, they've got lots of old 'deleted' accounts they can resurrect for this purpose.
- People who wanted to leave would have already left by now. Those who remain cannot be convinced or coerced to jump ship. Because it is their choice to remain there. It's like convincing a missionary that their god is not real.
  
  I think that's a portion but I know a few people that just take the path of least resistance. Right now, that is absolutely not the fediverse. In a few months with all the apps already in development, it might be a better experience with better content.
  
  Your first sentence I agree with. Your second sentence I don't agree with. It's still early with the reddit exodus - things have been escalating incredibly fast and most people don't even know much about it yet, or are still processing what's happening.
  Reddit was a big part of our lives for many people and it's not easy to let go. I was so deeply offended by what happened that I let go quickly even though it hurt me. But people who already used the official app? For them, it's a difficult conversation at best.
  
  Yeah, that's exactly how I felt when I left Facebook, too. When my brother eventually also left it was so hard not to say "I told you so"- but I didn't, and of course he never admitted that I was right all along. It's good that I've matured enough that simply knowing it is enough.
  
  Most of the comments on the r/Piracy "sexy pirate John Oliver" posts are just Reddit bootlickers complaining about the protests (idk about other subs)

I used Shreddit to delete all my posts at Reddit, cancelled my premium sub there, and deleted my account. I was there for over 8 years - paying the entire time, as I believed in trying to support the space.
Walking away did not make me feel "powerless" but rather glad to take my time, support, and interests somewhere else that is (hopefully...) healthier. I know of at least 15 people who have done the same, so if you multiply my story by many others I am pretty sure that such walkouts will be felt eventually - especially from those of us who were paying monthly.
When I left, I landed on Kbin first, something I now am kind of not too sure I will continue for reasons I won't get into....
but thankfully, I discovered Beehaw here is just more my speed, which makes me happy 🐝☺️
- Sorry for the question, maybe it's not appropriate so don't answer if you don't want to but, what was the problem with Kbin? I saw many people telling it's really good so I would like to hear about the opposite.
  
  Hi. No worries, it's nice to be asked. 🙂
  I mean, I have only been singed up there a week so I am not an expert on what is happening; I don't have anything against Kbin per say? but I just get this sense that maybe the real goal of the space is a little too much leaning towards a recreation of Reddit practices and features. I also noticed some threads encouraging people to move on to other instances already, which seemed sort of odd to me since again, they are just getting going.
  Meanwhile here, things feel more relaxed. I really appreciate the transparency with the vision for Beehaw, and feel that it is well reflected in practice by the mods/admins posts and their interactions, not just posted on the sidebar. The posts from community members also seem way more friendly and positive, so it just seems a much better fit for my comfort zone.

"powerless" just use Lemmy it's not like there's really anything meaningful to hold you on Reddit, afaik people don't really make friends on Reddit or anything
- This is what made the decision for me. All the enshittification aside- in 15 years on Reddit, I did not make one lasting relationship with another human being there, even though I tried very hard at times (via everything ranging from Secret Santa to local meetup subs, to niche interest subs, and more). I have friends online that I have only known online since the 1990s, so it's not that I'm "un-befriendable". Reddit allows people to form mobs, not true communities, which almost always have many subsets of friends and acquaintances, rather than a bunch of strangers who actually don't care at all if one of their members disappears.
  
  If your username is a Pink Floyd reference I’ll be your friend
  
  Village vs train station
- It depends very much on how you use reddit. E.g. there are no mental health communities here that really helped me through difficult times. There are so many specialized communities on reddit that helped me a lot, that won't just move over here on Lemmy. I get that if you only looked at the general feed, you don't miss out on much on lemmy. But I never used reddit like this and now I really feel like lemmy is (still) missing the best parts of reddit :/
  
  Keep in mind you're comparing a very mature platform with one that's literally still in alpha.
- For small communities migrating away from a subreddit might be pretty difficult because they're already very scattered as is and active only sporadically. And Reddit has a really long tail of those.
  
  If you are a member of such a small community, be sure to create it here. Users will usually take a look at Lemmy and first search for their favorite topics. If they don't find anything, they will go back to Reddit...
- Yeah, it's a really easy transition. Without watching the video, no users (and even moreso mods) are not powerless, and the fat lady absolutely has not sung yet.

Did anyone else actually watch the video? It's inaccurate in places and is biased towards Reddit (e.g. claims that Apollo had no backend costs). Also, it misspelled the CEO's name as "Steve Hoffman."
Overall, this is the first post I've seen that makes me wish Beehaw had a downvote button.
- As of this moment, the post has:
  87 points on beehaw.org
  55/38 on kbin.social
  61 points on midwest.social
  62 points on programming.dev
  The real question is if downvotes on other instances federate back to Beehaw (i.e. did they only hide the button, or did they truly block them?)
  
  As far as I am aware, downvotes do not federate to us. Don't quote me on this tho
- I gotchu fam
  Its kind of a crap video.
  
  The discussion is more interesting than the video

To be fair, if i didn’t learn about lemmy, i would be back on reddit at this point. It just kills the boredom in a way nothing else does.
- I would have probably landed somewhere besides reddit. I considered and tried 3 different options, (Lemmy being the third) and stayed here because I was very pleased by the beehaw community. And it's very similar to reddit, which made the transition easier.
  I'm doing my best to ditch reddit, and haven't used it since they announced the API pricing
  
  Same! I have no problem with the smaller lemmy community. It will grow over time. Each person who comments or posts here is helping it to become a better place.

Telling people they need to quit Reddit is not realistic. People are more likely to respond if we give them easy and realistic advice.
The most realistic course for most people is to join a few alternative communities that match your values. Join a Lemmy instance, join a Mastodon instance, etc.
Sign up for a new community; a Lemmy instance for example.
Take a few minutes to sign into the new community on all your device, you want it to be as easy as possible to start using the new community.
Prefer to use the new community whenever possible. When you're bored and going through the usual websites (you know what they are), visit the new community first, move Reddit to the bottom of the list. Avoid using Reddit, but don't stress too much if you end up there occasionally, just give preference to everything else.
This advice is not too intimidating, anyone can act on it, and even if only a few people act on it, it's still effective for those few people. This plan has everything it needs to be effective and spread.
- You're right that telling people to quit Reddit could come off as hostile.
  Beehaw seems to be easy on sign up from my experience, so it's here when July 1st rolls around when Reddit terminates API for third party apps. I think significant amount of users of Reddit use the app regularly, so they might leave Reddit once the app no longer works and I imagine that some of them would be unaware of the 'old' reddit UI so they would likely get a really negative impression of the current 'new' Reddit Ui that they would likely be deterred from using Reddit going forward.
  +1 on your advice!
  
  I think one of the most effective is answering posts people need help on while sourcing something that a user from the fediverse contributed. It's not aggressive. It's not a pitch. It's just there so people might visit it and get curious.
  Like nobody likes door to door sales people. Or cold calls. And that's what the current approach is coming off to for people who don't want and aren't asking for alternatives. People who've felt strongly enough about leaving reddit already have. Those left don't care.
- If fediverse is too intimidating there is also squabbles which people there are those who made an effort to quit too. Destined for the same end as most for profit companies, but at least it's not feeding into the current corporate juggernaut of community based companies. People do want to move and some aren't ready for fediverse and that's fine as long as they show flexibility to at least leave.

It feels like realizing that WhatsApp is a terrible Meta privacy nightmare, but you can't wake up because you can't convince your whole family to use Signal.
- Many people advise to just quit it anyways and if your family actually cares about you, they'll switch. Works as a great relatives filter too.
- Yeah, Facebook just started out as a social media company. Amazon just did book deliveries. Google was just a search engine. Then kept expanding into services that people couldn't really quit, but are privacy nightmares.
  This focus on the social media aspect of reddit has felt kind of short sided, since it's not really considering the threat of what they could become. People think it's just about online clubs right now, but might be wishing later more people had made an effort to quit.
- I've tried, but Signal is just too cumbersome to use. I sorely miss a web client and my family members sorely miss an Android tablet client. This makes it hard to recommend.

Right, I am powerless to stop Reddit. I'm not so powerless that I won't say bye to Reddit. Now I'm here and I'm liking it more.
- Same bro (or broette). I still have my account, and I have logged in twice this month, and no times since the blackouts. I will go back occasionally, probably more when football/hockey seasons start. But what I learned in all this was there are other communities where friendlier discussion happens. Where disagreements don't come with insults, and I can feel less like a number. I'm cool with that.

Reddit is a lot of peoples only form of community, especially if it's obscure interests. Without it your more or less trapped in your local area.

My growing concern for this community surviving is that it develops its own identity. My fear is that it's becoming a dumping ground for Reddit infighting and not much else. Obviously, it's early days still, but I don't quite remember this when migrating over from Digg years ago. I feel like the community mostly just made fun of Digg and went on to post new and engaging content. This feels different, and not in a good way.
- I don't have numbers but I think reddit is much bigger than digg ever was. I agree though that Lemmy/Kbin servers need their own identity beyond just grumbling about reddit. That's why I don't upvote this kind of post. It's better to just move on and create new communities here.
  
  We've got another month of grumbling coming up, lots of new users inbound.
  
  I agree, It reminds me a lot of what Mastodon instances I've seen were like shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter with that being the main thing hooking me into the fediverse despite the fact that I've never used Twitter. Thankfully those communities did develop and mature over time although it took a while for people to move towards unique types of posts and conversations. I believe the same can apply here with Beehaw and Lemmy although we need to be the ones to help foster the change we want to see.

No user of Reddit is powerless. Every single user of Reddit has the power to fuck with Reddit in whatever legal way they want, and they also they have the power to quit using Reddit.

Wow. That video is terrible. At first, I thought it might be a useful perspective because it took reddit’s views into account. At the end, though, he didn’t even mention reddit’s insulting, adversarial attitude, or the fact that reddit is threatening to replace mods who continue to protest.
I learn a lot from opposing viewpoints, but I can’t trust something that’s presented as a documentary style “deep dive” and turns out to be so biased. If someone is relying on deception and lies of omission, yet presenting themselves as neutral, I can only wonder what else they’re lying about.

powerless? Reddit has like 0% of my daily Mindshare and I have here now which doesn't really feel meaningfully different in any negative way, only positive ones! I like to think I had the power to change my life for the better in this aspect, and I did

Powerless... Lol. Maybe if you have shit for brains and keep using reddit.
- Go easy on people. It's hard to change, and something like lemmy can be intimidating for people to get on board with. That's ignoring the fact that even if they move they can't force their communities to come with them.
  I'm personally happy to see the back of Reddit, and am convincing anyone I can to switch too, but I can understand the challenge for the average user to switch. Hell, even Reddit is a technical step-up for a lotta people. The tech world has forced a paradigm that traps the average user, using the fact it all appears free as the bait. Be angry at big tech, not the ones they swindled.

They are not powerless. They have their own choice. Stop going there!

All the worthwhile content creators will (or already have) move on and it'll be even more of AI generated content circlejerk than it already is. No one should feel sorry for lurkers being lazy.

Powerless how? I left lol. I am not generating content for that website anymore which means I have taken something away from them.

/me waves from powerlessness.

Can we please keep the Reddit spam in the specific Reddit-centered communities? I'm trying to stop paying attention to Reddit.

I wonder what would happen if redditors just start ignoring rules... 🤔
- They'd get banned

The power lies in leaving Reddit behind.

they aren't powerless, they just leave.

The ones who stay probably do see themselves as powerless, which is a pretty self-fulfilling prophecy.

If they are sick of it then come here or to Lemmy.

The only issue with the dynamic is that Redditors were too fixated with their position as “moderator” and were willing to acquiesce just to keep it. If they simply refused the free labor they’re giving a corporation who’s seeking profit by near any cost, they’d have had impact.

I´m genuienely baffled why the mods of those protesting subs didn´t, at least as a backup plan, also created an alternative community on here right away. Sure, in the beginning, they might have hoped the protests could work. But even after the first two days blackuot, it was pretty clear that Reddit didn´t care at all. So why even fight this fight and not just go "Well, have fun without us Reddit. And here´s a tutorial on how to join us over at lemmy." EDIT: I know some did. r/piracy I believe were pretty open about packing up and moving to lemmy. And as the days go by, more and more "stuff" I used Reddit for also pops up on some lemmy server or another. Still, an at least fairly organized move would have been nice.

Oh. Cool. Yet another reddit drama thread in /c/technology
When do we change the name of this community to /c/YetAnotherRedditDramaCommunity instead of /c/technology ?
- I agree, this belongs on !RedditMigration , !snoocalypse, !Reddit or something similar.
- I suspect there are a lot of people here who are interested in Reddit, and also there might be something going on over on Reddit that's resulting in a lot of news being generated about it.
  Just a guess.
  
  Of course, that's understandable. But there's too many people here that are interested in the reddit drama such that it ends up taking over many subs, drowning out other content.
  It's like how r/worldnews was created, because despite r/news being general, there was so many Americans that US news dominated the sub. We need to do the same with reddit drama IMO.
  
  That's great, there are many places dedicated to just that topic! It doesn't need to keep being posted here cluttering up actual news about actual tech items.
  I don't go to /c/cats and post about dogs. Or to /c/America and post about Europe. There is a place for everything. This community has been constantly clogged up with crap about reddit.

They need to embrace the dark side.

I've deleted reddit from my phone. I haven't deleted my account, it's just going to remain dormant. Had smth like 200k+ karma. I'm just gonna chill here instead, it seems a much happier place. That, and the fact that I'm not constantly doomscrolling on my phone has done wonders for my mental health (I only do social media on my PC now, and sparingly at that).
- This sounds exactly like me. I go on a few subreddits still on my laptop, but only because there is no place else for some of my very niche hobbies. I don't engage anymore though, I'm not logged in, I just lurk (though that's been made increasingly difficult to do).
  My sleep has improved a lot by not having Reddit on my phone. Better sleep = better mental health.
  Stay strong!

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