I'm going to continue using rif until it shuts down at the end of the month but there's no way I'm downloading their shitty app. I have a feeling a lot of people are in the same boat.
Pretty much same for me tbh. I'll have to see when it actually happens. But I've been in Lemmy since this all started. And it's clear the content has grown here substantially. To the point where I can scroll and scroll like in reddit. It wasn't like that the first time I got here.
Similar for me, but with Relay. I absolutely refuse to use the shitshow that is the official app. And honestly, I've been actively choosing to use Reddit less and less.
Yeah. I’m on vacation anyways, with me minimal cell coverage, so it’s been pretty easy, but I’ve popped in a handful of times. but, there’s no way I’m installing their client. None. I don’t have Facebook, or Twitters clients, I’ll be damned if Im installing reddit.
I don't think the content creators really left significantly, but the sentiment to users has certainly changed. This was never going to kill reddit, and was never gonna be a long term problem for them - for that the former mod and activist for r/jailbait was correct. But it creates negative user sentiment, which will make it easier to move people, or even make people just less excited to use the platform in the long term.
I don't think this applies to just people who support the protest either. People who just wanted to see their content and got mad at mods for shutting down subs now have more negative sentiment to the moderators and the users who may or may not support the protests.
This is a W in my books, as I never liked corporate ownership of people having conversations, which is expressly Reddit's sole product. Maybe a few hundred people will use the site less this week than last. Maybe an additional few hundred come the API changes, but the next controversy Reddit has will move more. And it'll snowball, just like Twitter's seen, and the content will change to reflect the worst who decide to stay and support reddit through it all.
But it creates negative user sentiment, which will make it easier to move people, or even make people just less excited to use the platform in the long term.
To add, it’s not nothing that lemmy and kbin have grown as much as they have. This has introduced many to the concept of the fediverse at all, or at least to those two names, and they’re more likely to switch after they’ve heard about it a couple times, or after it grows a bit more, or once reddit pisses them off even by just some toxic mod doing dumb shit and making them say “fuck this site, I’m going to that alternative I heard about.”
I guess what I’m getting at is this is effective marketing even if we don’t make the sale today. Like Hank during Grillstraveganza, you provide quality information and let the customer make up their own mind, and your sales will come in at the end of the month. We don’t need all those fancy Jo-Jack tricks to make an immediate sale, we can bide our time like Hank.
A lot of sentiment seems to suggest that for Lemmy or the fediverse to succeed Reddit has to fail.
I don't get that opinion at all. Reddit had become overwhelming bloated. A popular thread would have thousands of comments. Most of which would be near identical. Only the most up voted would ever be read and typically they had to have been commented while the thread was new.
The internet is vast, there is plenty of room for multiple social media to exist.
If you dislike what reddit has become then ignore it. If you still wish to use it then you can do so side by side with using Lemmy.
Agreed. To me, Lemmy (or the fediverse for that matter) succeeded because it offered me an alternative to reddit. It doesn't need to become the #1 to be worth something.
Yeah, I'd rather have a thread with a dozen high quality comments than hundreds of bot reposts/low quality buzzwords. I do hope that Lemmy sustains enough activity to have those nice, small conversations though.
This doesn't surprise me. Most people don't have the time or desire to keep up with tech news, and they just want to feed their addiction. It'll be interesting to see what happens 1~2 weeks after the new API rules are active, and people realize the app they use no longer works.
I never created a Reddit account, and only visited under duress, so I'm not really affected by this. So I'm just cooking up popcorn & watching the show.
The amount of content I'm seeing over here these days lets me know that despite whatever the numbers tell you reddit lost sizeable amounts of community members and content producers. What these statistics hide is the massive dent in reddits free labor pool of mods that are likely done with the platform.
Lemmy has beyond exceeded my expectations of quantity and quality of content. I will pass by reddit occasionally but its become clear that the Fediverse concept can actually work. It has issues that need to be solved, but the minds behind it are very smart and motivated to find a way to make it keep working. The rate of PR's getting merged into lemmy 0.18 are wild.
A ton of current content is produced by spam bots. As I understand it, the new changes will also affect these bots, so curious to see what will happen.
There may be some impact, come July, when the third party apps stop working. However, I have to imagine that the vast majority of mobile users use the official app. Quality may take a hit, with the loss of some mods and mod tools, but Reddit will be just fine. Sadly, Reddit rates too highly on content, users, and resultant utility (for many communities) for most users to completely abandon it.
I wonder if there are metrics anywhere about percentage of mobile users using the official app vs 3rd party apps. I’d be interested to see the breakdown.
Right, I expect most people will grumble but then just use the official app. You’re completely right that the network effects make it difficult for people to move to a different platform, and that outweighs the inconvenience of using the official app.
But who provides the content? Power users. Reddit follows the same curve as most social media where only like 1-5% of the users actually post the content, and the rest are consumers. When the content creators are gone, it’s just a platform with no content.
The only people who will stick to submitting content are the poor content reposters or various spammers, which the mods have been doing free labor to filter out. Heck, even the bots using the API will die too, so all you’ll have is the TOS-breaking bots posting content.
This will not end well when third party apps are gone. I didn’t realize it myself, but most of my time is reading Reddit when I’m bored in bed, or on the train, on my phone. I’ve been a redditor for 17 years, and my time now has mostly shifted from my desktop to the “RIF” Android app, and without that, I’m simply not using Reddit, and have already uninstalled.
Like circa 2007/8, Reddit was a community, and it was pretty great. I was friends with a big group of r/Chicago people, and we organized several awesome meetups. I still talk to some of them, and 2 of them even got married!
But then AMAs got Reddit national attention when celebrities started participating, things really blew up. Everyone came for r/AMA, but they stayed for r/funny and r/pics. Comment counts went from 20 to 100 top per post, to 100s or 1000s for all posts. Comment quality went from multi-paragraph, forum-like, insightful discussions that followed “Reddiquette”, to one line joke comments and downvotes for disagreements (whereas downvotes prior were only used to bury inaccurate/hostile comments instead). And then Reddit slowly turned into a boredom filler instead of a community site, where you just scroll to pass the time.
Yeah I joined in… 2013? When AMAs were already a thing, and like you said became a place for the same jokes and downvotes for innocuous comments. That’s why I lurked for several years before commenting at all - and even then I got made fun of (and downvotes) for not getting a ‘magnets, how do they even work?’ meme
There were a few niche subreddits that I visited a lot and had actual good discussions / got to know people, but yeah it was otherwise just another place to consume content when bored
From Lemmy perspective there’s been a huge influx of new users, but from Reddit perspective nothing changed. I do expect Lemmy to keep growing, but I don’t expect that it’s going to have any measurable impact on Reddit in the foreseeable future.
Yeah, I don’t think rapid growth is necessarily desirable either since it brings a lot of toxic behaviors from reddit along with it. The goal for Lemmy should be sustainability, as long as there are enough people to have discussions with and to bring content, enough people to host servers, and enough developers, then Lemmy will be fine. Growth for the sake of growth makes little sense.
Agreed. The only benefit I really see from sustained growth is the growth of smaller sub-communities. Something like /c/vivariums or /c/modeltrains. The larger lemmy is the more likely there will be fresh content in those smaller communities.
Im commenting before reading: I wonder if traffic'll go up a lot from r/place tomorrow. I dont plan to participate know some ppl even who are staying away from Reddit plan to participate in r/place to put a protest message. But what I wondered if Reddit trying to ensure the mothly activity for June look the same as other months so the dip was not so noticeable. But how much does activity usually increase when r/place happened before? (If at all)
But ik also some ppl said theyre leaving Reddit June 30th, so maybe itll look different then.
Large communities organizing for r/place to discuss what they'll paint is probably a lot of traffic.
I'm sure that most of the mods that haven't been removed yet have some plans for r/place to really fuck with the admins
I think it'll end up with admins skipping the 5 minute timer and banning users that draw over the flags representing those admins' political opinions, just like last year. But the admins have made enemies now so the outcry will be much bigger.
I'll personally going to participate and try to get myself banned without breaking any rules and if that happens, I'll make sure to post about it. Let's hope the front page will be filled with posts of that.
I've reduced my usage to ~3 subreddits also specifically to do with living in Japan. There's just nowhere else with this info or discussion and people are just not presently interested in moving over here. I mostly lurk (between two reddit accounts (I nuked my online presence because of a stalker and took most of a year off all social media), I had something like 13 years on reddit and maybe 20 submissions), so it's not like I'm producing alluring content on those places.
I also don't use facebook, meta, instagram, twitter, tiktok, etc. which further reduces any interaction I might have.
EDIT: also having to deal with government, legal, visa, etc. things are not fun when little to none is in English (and that which is in English is out-of-date) and a lot of the characters and grammar are not in the standard set. Living and working in another language and culture is also not without its own difficulties and having people to talk to is important. For further info on just the language, 2 sets of characters containing roughly ~50 symbols each are required (not hard), and then you need at least ~2100 Sino-Japanese characters (kanji) just to be able to read a newspaper. That doesn't include a lot of jargon used in legal, medical, and other things. I wonder if my downvoter /u/Veraxus has ever had deal with anything like this. I can speak conversational Japanese, know a lot of IT jargon, and can somewhat read Japanese and it's still very difficult at times.
It's cool man. I'm still gonna use reddit for a few niche communities too. Only to lurk though.
The important thing is continuing to build things over here, and hopefully it won't be too long until we can start some Japanese communities, along with everything else people are missing.
Good question! "Standard" In terms of characters refer to the 常用漢字 which are the -er- "basic" 2160ish (I will try to remember to update with the exact figure; it was expanded in the last 5-10 years) kanji that are the basis to be considered "literate".
To look at it a bit different for Americans (which is the only basis I have; other counties even within English differ), one could think of reading at an X-grade level. Many publications can be around 5th-grade level (though this comes with its own can of worms).
In English, we have 26 letters of the alphabet. I guess we could call it 52 differentiation lower- and upper-case. We could also double that to 104 for cursive. If we're feeling generous, we could add a couple of shorthand signs (such as an & that is more shorthand).
Now, for japanese, in addition to those 104ish, you now have to learn at least 2160ish Chinese characters (and, if you're japanese, all the latin alphabet as described above, but this isn't applicable to those of use whom are native English speakers looking to learn Japanese).
And, until here, we're only talking about the squiggles used to represent sounds. After this, we actually get into things like vocabulary and grammar and registers ( think something like manners.
Edit: oh! And those 2160isj characters! Unlike Chinese or something, they can have multiple readings (pronunciations) based on whether they are alone, in a compound, a person's name, etc. Some knaji have over 10 readings. Much like many languages, the most-used words and grammar patterns are the most irregular.
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