The only thing I can think of was that the mods announced a time limit of 48 hours for the protests, but I’m not sure that making all the protests indefinite would have solved anything.
Spez was determined to copy Elon Musk even though Elon clearly doesn’t know how to run a social media platform. Now both Reddit and Twitter are dying.
I think it was an uphill struggle and nearly impossible to pull off.
Spez had absolutely no interest in changing his stance on working with developers. The hugely ironic thing I read that made me give up hope (and stash my ~1 year in development Reddit App) was Spez saying “It was never designed to support third-party apps.” – yet no acknowledgement that the “official” app was literally a third party app that they purchased years ago called Alien Blue.
He’s a fucking idiot or a liar. I’d believe either. Or both.
The entire point of having this free, public API is because a free, public API can be monetized, and content scraping cannot. If you are offering a free web app, and you don’t have a free, public API, someone will create scraping tools to do it. So then, instead of spending money maintaining a revenue generating API, you spend money playing cat and mouse with content scraping bots.
The fact that reddit can’t figure out how to push monetization over that API has nothing to do with third party apps, and everything to do with the site having shit leadership.
Not defending spez, but their business model was not designed to support third party apps, that much is true. They needed a proper model to share profits with third party apps.
How they went about “fixing” that was completely dilletantish and dumbfounding, though. Now they’re not getting any of that potential extra profit and lost a significant amount of users on top
RIF kinda still works for me, I can browse but can’t post or upvote so that’s good enough for me but I have cut down browsing Reddit loads since the protests
The fact that Reddit moderators quickly folded the moment Spez threatened to take their “powers” away made the whole thing quickly fail. Very few had the balls to go through with the protests and didn’t care about those imaginary powers (honorable mention to the former r/interestingasfuck mods), but many were too addicted to that fake status symbol to even imagine letting go of it and Spez took advantage of that to kill the protests.
For those of us who left Reddit and mostly only use Lemmy now, I believe the 3rd party apps thing was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I think it’s just that we already hated Reddit so much that when presented with Lemmy we immediately jumped ship.
For many other Redditors however the appocalypse didn’t make any difference, many big subreddits are still very active and the Reddit moderators who folded realized they don’t want to lose their control over those subs and all the potential that control gives them (monetization via partnerships with brands, sponsored AMAs, selling film rights like one former mod of r/wallstreetbets did, shilling your new app, website or crypto like again r/wallstreetbets mods did etc…).
The mistake in these protests was to assume that Reddit mods would align with the interests of 3rd party app users.
This, here. Reddit is going the way of Digg, but trying to be more savvy about it. THey don’t care that the specific group that’s leaving are the content creators because they intend to charge content creators (paid API) who expect to profit from the traffic. They don’t care that it’s lower quality content creators. They want the money both ways, and don’t care what percent of their “high quality” traffic disappears for it.
Since they’re bigger than digg, they still have some high quality traffic. There’s never a 100% protest with something as big as reddit. It’s win/win/win for them.
I'd say what went wrong was nobody did anything meaningfuk or cared. Nobody put their money where their mouth is and deleted their accounts, and staying off the site for 2 days was too much to ask of >80% of the users.
The Mods closed a few subs but didn't themselves do anything meaningful. They should have let reddit replace them if they actually cared. They should have moved their community to lemmy or kbin. The ones who did sick it out I'm grateful for, the rest cared too much about their own pride to bother trying to keep the admins in check.
Overall the reddit userbase since the pandemic are mostly entitled whiners who don't really give a shit as long as they get their twitter and TikTok reposts. There's literally only one piece of OC on the frontpage of reddit right now. There's not much value to going there anymore.
I'm done with Reddit, and honestly I haven't missed it. My time is now more full of hobbies and actual reading, I'm better off for deleting it.
The hive mind went from “fuck spez we’re staging an internet revolution” to “let it go already, nobody gives a shit, stop inconveniencing us with your real issues” in an instant. Basically, everyone’s attention span has lapsed and if you keep talking about it people think you’re killing their buzz. It’s no longer a relevant problem for the vast majority of the userbase, if it ever even was.
The people who this really affected - third-party app users, people affected by the poor accessibility of the regular app/site and the anti- ‘hail corporate’ types have already migrated or are otherwise disengaged with Reddit, leaving just the bootlickers.
And this was the entire point. Reddit was tired of being the place for over-educated, angst tech bros with lots of free time to be subversive. They want to refocus on the lowest-common denominator Facebook/Instagram/TT crowd who gives themselves over to popular media mind and body.
This. The protesting subreddits should have been creating alternative communities at Lemmy and elsewhere while they were locked down or hidden for whatever, and then they’d have had real leverage when forced back open.
I’ve been using the Reddit app lately and it’s absolute dogshit. It mostly shows me content that I didn’t ask for. It trying hard to be tiktok or something. Very annoying. It functions differently from how most people use Reddit
Probably how a large amount of the subreddits participating in the blackout came back in a measly two days. Like Louis Rossmann said in his video describing the reddit api situation, all they see is that we’ll put up with their bullshit 363 days a year…
maybe if all subreddits participating went dark or posted meaningless content (white squares,etc) there might have been a bigger inpact.
A lot of us moved to other platforms like Lemmy though, so I wouldn’t say it was a complete failure.
Exactly this. All the f*** spez comments and complaints still generate discussions. Same as John Oliver photos. It needs to be meaningless noise
That being said, last I looked, the quality of discussions is now totally downhill there and as you mentioned, a lot of us have moved (and it seems to be mainly people you’d want to move too).
I’m happy that the psychopath crowd on Reddit didn’t join us during the move
That and apathy/Ignorance of the issue. Especially with the younger generation (which is the majority of reddit now).
Tried to get a few smaller subs with a lot of Zoomers in them to join me, and their response was basically “bruh, who is spez?”, “in your dreams”, or “spez isn’t a pedophile; quit making shit up”. I mean just look at this. They straight-up attacked me:
Yeah I have never heard of spez being a pedophile. Unless he’s been convicted you shouldn’t be calling him that. It could be taken as defamation.
Also I fully get why people don’t want to move. Lemmy is a great idea but it’s a work in progress with a small user base. I lost my whole account not long ago. This a community which is already fragmented from moving platforms why would they go through that hell again when Lemmy might not even pan out.
Some people will, but I haven’t installed the official Reddit app and only occasionally check it from my PC. 90% of my previous usage was based on the phone fro Sync Pro.
It worked for me, I haven’t really used reddit much since July 1st. That’s good enough for me. It’s not about bringing the whole thing down ad most of society dgaf about shit like it’s been since the beginning of time.
Yeah, I rarely load it up these days. I have to admit that this site with the smaller base is much nicer to use. It actually feels like I have conversations with people rather than just throwing comments into a wall of noise.
Same here. It would have been nice if reddit changed their mind, but ultimately the whole situation allowed me to break my addiction. I feel much healthier on a daily basis now that I spend maybe an hour on Lemmy, Beehaw, or Tildes vs 5 hours pointlessly arguing with people on reddit. I have a ton more gaming time and reading time now and I feel comfortable checking reddit if I need to reference something (like, it really is the best place to access Destiny 2 community info, for example). It’s honestly really great not checking social as much, I didn’t realize how much life social media was sucking out of me.
As far as the protests go, they were quite successful. Reddit’s traffic went massively down; users, especially power users who uploaded content and moderated subreddits, left the site; and Lemmy became a viable alternative to Reddit with the influx of users. Reddit is still struggling to replace the moderators who quit, and they’ve been forced to take desperate actions like reinstating r/place and paying users who get a lot of upvotes to keep traffic on the site. The decision was never going to be reversed, the old free API scheme legitimately cost Reddit money and forcing users to use the official app like every other major social media has meant they could collect more data on users to sell. But as far as what the protest accomplished besides reversing the decision, it massively hurt Reddit and bolstered Lemmy into being a viable replacement
A limited blackout did nothing to change Reddit’s mind. Periodically asking users if they want to end the Blackout did not help since as dissatisfied users left for Discord or Lemmy, the voters became biased toward ending the Blackout.
In the future, boycotting and demanding that advertisers cancel ad revenue would be far more effective. Lawsuits about Reddit restoring user content involuntarily may still do damage but not quickly enough to help the protest.
Nothing went wrong. Reddit knew from minute 1 they weren’t going to negotiate this change (not in good faith, anyways).
Add to that, like everyone else is saying, the fact that they weren’t actually pushed to change thier minds in the slightest by users when push came to shove; because yeah, some of us left, but a lot of us participated, said they weren’t gonna back down…and went right back to Reddit when all was said and done.
(Not saying “the protests were a total bust” because, from what I understand at least, this happened to Digg in the past, and it wasn’t immediately overtaken by Reddit. It happened in waves of users over time until it got eclipsed. Pretty sure it was bad policy change effecting users after bad policy change that made everyone start to pack up too, not just one. Part of me is hopeful that history is repeating).
But to circle back, basically the attempt was doomed to fail because the decision was made absolute long before any talk of protesting it was even a thought in anyone’s mind.
They screwed up with the most critical group. To cite Steve Ballmer: “developers, developers, developers, developers”. Now tools like bot banning are gone.
Some moderators have stepped down or stayed till they were banned but in large they gave in. As nearly all posts in r/modnews have under 20% upvote ratio the mods are still not happy (e.g. 17% upvotes, 83% downvotes for the r/place announcement and comments are by large negative).
Btw. If you want to hurt Reddit: Post good content on Lemmy and cross-reference it on Reddit.
Btw. Lemmy won’t replace Reddit. This might be hard but it’s the truth and it might be the best for Lemmy as a big platform has a different flair compared to how Lemmy is right now.
Yup, that’s the word for it. Initial burst. Definetly not the last.
That’s gonna be fun for the new mods to deal with lol in fact, i think they already are.
Reddit had years to build up its content, and Rome wasn’t built in a day (something i feel alot of people easily forget, and not just in this case) so in some ways I can’t blame them for not moving. It’s like you said tho, the best way to hurt Reddit is to post good content elsewhere, and IDK, I feel like that could have been better than just bitterly staying.
That’s not for us to decide, i think. Lemmy might be a whole different beast, but if enough people come in and bring the Reddit expierence to Lemmy, it just might. Maybe not a 100% replacement, it’ll never be a 1:1 replacement after all, but just enough.
I prefer it here. The comment sections are few and far between, but the ones that do exist have a higher quality of dialogue. We just need more of the experts to shift over; the only thing I really miss about the other place is when some person who’s an expert on the most random thing starts chiming in on a topic and dropping knowledge.
I like it a lot here too, tho I’m honestly not too bothered if there’s much more activity in the future tho. IDK, i feel like growth is going to happen sooner or later (because it always does), whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.
What went wrong is simple and clear as day: People did not commit to their protest. Only a fraction of those who took part made the important step of quitting reddit altogether. Because the protest was limited, reddit absorbed the hit.
If you're not willing to give up your abuser, you're destined to be battered.
It is important to remember that you owe these platforms nothing. There is life after an endless stream of dopamine hits. Just walk out.
Everything that has a beginning has an ending (perhaps with a long tail). Perhaps the only wrong thing is that we forgot about that. All of these Internet services tend to have a long tail, most of everything we remember once using is still around in some form barely being used but for a tiny and loyal user base that is still hanging in there for some reason.
None of these things were great in and of themselves, it was always the community.
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