Don't know about you all, but I will continue to check reddit until Sync for reddit stops working. On July 1st, if it's no longer working, reddit is gone.
You provide your own API access key, so instead of using the developer's API access key you use your own, which as long as you stay under the request limit lets you use it with free tier. You still lose all access to NSFW content though.
I'm very curious how this is going to play out. This mostly concerns the core userbase, as in mods and the people who are the most active on Reddit. If a significant portion of those wanders off (or is straight up banned), I could see the platform desolate slowly and painfully.
I mean, they lose content and moderation. I would be very surprised if they can replace the volunteers and still maintain the quality of the moderation.
Enshitification doesn’t happen over night. It might be months before the needle moves. Platforms die because users seek alternatives, but everyone has a different threshold for when they decide to jump ship. Most people just are not paying attention and will only leave when they experience the shit of Enshitification first hand.
Twitter had to kill 3rd party apps twice in order for the mastodon migration to happen. First they did it in 2011 and then again after Elon bought the company.
I imagine a true Twitter > Mastodon level migration away from Reddit won't happen yet. But once they inevitably dump old.reddit.com, it might.
I also think reddit is still the overwhelmingly greatest source of human-written information and discussion on the planet. That will take a while to replace.
I have tried googling for things without adding on "reddit" these past two weeks, and it's... not good.
Idk their example search for “python exceptions” has the #14 link for Ruby exceptions, #15 for C++ exceptions, #17 for Make exceptions (no mention of the word python in this one).
It seems like many of the links at this point have zero mentions of the word “python” at all. Why are people paying for this?
Anyway their focus is quality over quantity. The first 13 results should have given you whatever you needed. There’s always junk at the end of searches.
My guess is that Reddit loses about 5% of traffic by shutting off API access. It isn't great, but it isn't bad either. Spez treats it as a win.
Mod burnout becomes a big thing in a year, with many major subs starting to lock threads and blanket ban harder as the more experienced mods leave and the new set isn't really prepared to handle the workload. A lot of the best of this new block are going to be alt-right, and you'll slowly see subs become more friendly to alt-right views. Mod abuse gets a lot worse.
As the entire site becomes r/conservative, expect the fights that happened with r/The_Donald to be worse and make the site more unusable. This will probably drive off more users as "everything is political". Reddit won't keep its promises on building better mod toolkits, and a lot of LBGT groups leave for other sites.
As the website starts to see a shrinking user base and still hasn't made money, either Spez or a successor goes full Twitter Musk and cuts staff to the bone in hopes of trying to keep some revenue.
Good observation about how enshittification tends to come with a drift to the far right. At the moment one of the refreshing things about Lemmy is that you can have a discussion in peace without all those people piling in. I hope this can last.
I look up my acct and see my deleted comments and posts being magically revived. Did screen caps of most of it and it is definitely a real thing. Is that a metric for traffic?
I should prepare a guide on how to take your data with you when quitting Reddit.
For instance when you want to be able to prove that it's your account without disclosing your legal name publicly on Reddit you may use keyoxide.org for cryptographic proof. I think I'll talk to keyoxide folks about a method of obfuscating those proofs so they are harder for Reddit to systematically delete.
I understand not everyone will be willing to go to court for this, but at this point I want enough of us to be able to to get them fined enough for every platform to notice.
As @JapanStar49 said, mass edit, don't mass delete. IMO this is just as good as a greasemonkey script at mass editing your history to remove your reddit paper trail.
Without my daily traffic that's a fact.... Haven't been back there now for 3 to 4 weeks and was a daily consumer / contributor. My relationship with Reddit has ended and zero intention of going back. I have drawn my line in the sand and I'm not supporting the recent shenanigans ! They can kiss my ass.
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.
the people still on reddit after the 30th when the third party apps close down, i personally believe can stay there indefinitely. these people, and i, do not exist on the same wavelength.
For me it is a different approach. I will continue to use old Reddit and RedReader (it got granted exemption, it is nearly identical to RIF, and I love using it) and keep extracting as much leftover value as possible. Some communities are just not going to migrate, like r/thinkpad or r/headphones. Also, the all time top posts on some subreddits have enough value from a decade plus of posting.
However, I will be using it far, far less because most communities’ moderators have decided to let the subreddits rot with a lack of moderation, and then to simply quit their thankless, payless job if Reddit boots them out, or if they do not want to be associated with the wastelands. I think this should have been the modus operandi of the protest right from the start, and taken to infinite time until Reddit admins kowtowed.
Most communities’ culture is formulated and fully understood only by a very few people in the world, even fewer of which can become moderators, even fewer of which can lead. Replacing them is going to be impossible. Every sizeable subreddit has years of culture and nuance behind it, not replaceable by any amount of money, unless existing ones were given bottom 6 figures yearly.
I’ve been slowly trying to transition to Lemmy with this in mind. After June 30th, RIF won’t be working and I don’t plan on installing the official app so I’m trying to get adjusted to Lemmy before then.
Some of them will just be using reddit on a computer, not a mobile device. To someone who has never used a third-party app, they might not seem very important.
I definitely agree. The vast majority of people still left on Reddit are those who are corporate bootlickers and those who do not care and just want to doom scroll.
I don't agree that the vast majority of the people left there are bootlickers.
Most of the people left there seem to be uninterested in technology from the arts and crafts related subs and that's what's really missing in Lemmy/kbin.
There is no /c/woodwoking, /c/printmaking or /c/embroidery and the people that usually visit these don't really care about the underlying tech. Most of the time they just want to share their crafts with their community and things to just work.
I'm almost certain I've seen a woodworking community when browsing all.
I also don't think it's necessarily a question of subject matter so much as that Lemmy's user base is simply not large enough yet to sustain active niche communities, and it's an open question if we can get to that point without degrading the quality of the less focused ones, like /c/crafting or /c/diy.
Will a critical mass be reached where we can create our own communities? At least at beehaw that seems to be handled top down, we had a poll asking what we'd want - does it work that way everywhere? I'd like a local area community, but as you say, who'd participate? I might be it.
I’m not sure it it’s just Reddit that makes me sick, or Google. It’s the way that society is getting dumber and more subservient.
I definitely get angry when I hear people are ‘googling’ everything they want to ‘search’ for. Similarly that people simply wish to protest Reddit - when they don’t really care, they’re just jumping on the RANT bandwagon.
With the advent of instant gratification, smartphones/internet access, I welcome the lack of need for a paper dictionary.
However, people go further - they love the way the big tech can aggregate their content and dish it up to them.
They don’t care that they are being spoonfed solent green, and increasingly denied the ability to find actual answers to their questions.
If you do disturb them, like a borg they will become disoriented. They start to drown until they can feel the comforting caste of blue light on their faces as they dive back into their familiar environment.
Reddit’s CEO is not stupid - he knows that most of it’s users are sheep, and the escapees will be a minority. The mods, addicted to their power trips, will return and take whatever shit they have to… what else is their life good for?
Reddit is not ‘crushing’ the protests. The protests were mostly a flash in the pan - now most folks got bored, and just wanna go back to reading their joke of the day.
Moving Forward
A couple of problems. Firstly, even if I’ve been talking on Fediverse somewhere about a topic - if I search that topic, it will not take me to the Fediverse - I get taken to Reddit.
Unless the Fediverse content is getting included in search engine data, it’ll never be driven from that direction.
I know personally that the reason I created my Reddit account is that I would find answers there, and then end up discussing them where I found them.
i try to push back against this notion when i see it: misanthropy is not the proper response here. people aren't sheep, they aren't stupid, they just aren't living in the same context as we are. for a lot of people (and a lot of older people especially), the politics of the internet are a black box, not because they're too stupid to comprehend this stuff, but because its simply out of scope for what they want to achieve online. there's tons of things to care about, and while the internet is a pretty important thing to care about in modern life in my opinion, lots of people simply don't live enough of their lives online to give a shit.
i dunno, i just get kinda pissed off with the whole "sheeple" bullshit. not everybody has your priorities, and not everybody knows what you know. that doesn't make them bad people, or stupid people, or subservient people, it just makes them people.
Most people, by default, are not sheep; you are not wrong about this. But most people have allowed themselves to be domesticated as if they were (relevant thread attached at bottom).
this is not a "we are forcing normal people to understand scary programming things" problem.
this is a "corporations are doing everything to make people so strongly anti-learning and so against trying new things that they voluntarily refuse to use anything except for their own product" problem
like, maybe that's true, but i'm unsure if we have enough data to back that up as the main explanation for why people are hesitant to changing platforms, or if they are. maybe people have been brainwashed into staying on Facebook or whatever else, or maybe it was the first of its kind, and all its competition has been subsumed into it by monopolistic business practices, and people haven't had any alternatives for a long time. maybe institutions and systems are very difficult to stop once they get going.
i dunno, i'm really just not convinced by arguments like this. its taken quite a bit of time for our understanding of social media and its impact to become evident, and movements like the fediverse are building up steam for a reason. its seems more likely to me that you and i are simply early to the party.
my position isn't "we are forcing normal people to understand scary programming things". that would imply i think that people can't understand this stuff. its "we are engaged in communities where the structure and function of internet infrastructure is a topic of concern, and most people aren't". they aren't being exposed to challenges to corporate infrastructure. they aren't engaging with critiques of for-profit industry. but that is changing. people are more aware of the ills of social media platforms today than five years ago. hopefully, that trend will continue. i think that the only problem really is that more people don't know there are other options.
Oh, man, I'm sure the traffic is up... It took me FOREVER to delete all my comments and posts across 18 accounts. That 5 second lockout on API calls is a total bitch!
Most of the traffic of any given platform will be created by people who interact with it only passively; they mostly lurk and, for good or bad, they don’t care about it. Admins this, mods that, who the fuck cares, my cat pics sprout spontaneously from the internet.
In the meantime the people who actually contribute with the platform will be a tiny fraction of it. They don’t add traffic, but they add value - because they’re the ones responsible for creating the content (posting), aggregating value to the content (commenting), sorting the content (voting and moderating). The admins’ decisions and the mod revolts affected specially bad this group. And… well, not even the stupid like to be called stupid, and that’s basically what the admins did.
Now consider the link. The lurkers are back to Reddit because there’s still content to be consumed there, but eventually it’ll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site. As such, you don’t expect the mod revolts to have a short-term impact on the site, but rather a long-term one: the site will become less and less popular over time, as the lurkers are looking for content there and… well, nobody is providing them jack shit. Eventually the site will be forgotten by the masses, just like Digg was.
So Reddit will die, mind you. But it won’t be a sudden death; it’ll be a slow bleeding.
I just wish that this process was slightly faster, specially before the IPO.
Thank you! (We need more content. Specially about other stuff than Reddit.)
That reminds me a caveat of the reasoning above: the “lurker” and “contributor” aren’t different people, but different interactions with a platform. Someone might be a lurker in one platform but a contributor, for example. The conclusion is still the same though, people avoid contributing to platforms that they feel to be hostile towards them.
The content will stay, at least in terms of posts. If the value-adders go to other sites, someone will just repost that value back to reddit.
It'll devolve into something like instagram, where it's literally impossible to discuss anything in the comments. Unfortunately that doesn't mean they stop making money.
The content will stay, at least in terms of posts.
Content loses relevance over time, and becomes increasingly harder to retrieve as noise piles up: pointless threads, re-re-re-reposts, “marketing opportunities” (i.e. spam), so goes on. Reddit Inc.'s actions pissed off specially bad the people who were removing that noise - moderators.
someone will just repost that value back to reddit.
Usually you’d have the contributors doing this; the lurkers don’t care about sharing. But even if someone/something (AI) consistently keeps posting stuff from other platforms back into Reddit, those newer posts will be further removed from the original source, and they’ll arrive later. Reddit stops being the “front face of the internet” to become “yet another bottom feeder of the internet”.
where it’s literally impossible to discuss anything in the comments. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean they stop making money.
In Reddit’s case, I think that it does. Reddit might’ve started as a link aggregator, but its main value was as a forum platform. Without the ability to discuss anything deeper than “two plus two equals GOOD! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD, KIND STRANGER!@!11ONE”, it’s just yet another link aggregator again.
I agree and those reasons you listed are why I don't have any issue parting ways with this platform, but I don't think the general public does. People do use instagram and tiktok to view what I (and I'm guessing you do too) consider noise.
And after all, the general public is who views the ads on their site and brings in the money.
As someone who spends time curating the content I view without any care given to what other people enjoy, I'm often shocked at how terrible the content on something like youtube's front page is when I get logged out. It's easy to forget that a lot of people just don't care and use the internet to turn off their brain.
You’re right that noise is subjective (it might be noise for one, content for another), but it’s only partially so. Most people don’t like old, repetitive or misplaced content; they don’t like spam either, so those things are almost always noise. And yet I think that they’ll become more and more common there over time.
You mentioned TikTok and Instagram; that’s less about noise vs. content and more about high quality vs. low quality. Plenty people have low standards, but even those prefer quality stuff; so once content quality drops down (I’m predicting that it will), they’ll have less reasons to look for content in Reddit instead of elsewhere.
Also, note that 47.58% of the traffic of the site is generated by “organic search”. Once creators are gone, those 47.58% are going away, too. They won’t be googling stuff like “how to shoot web site:reddit.com” if they know that Reddit will provide mostly junk results.
It’s not impossible, just inconvenient. Instagram was made to show off pictures, so when you open someone’s Instagram, all you see is a grid of pictures by default. If you want to read the captions and comment, you have to click on a pic and then click on the 💬 to view the comments and add your own. In a world where most places only make you click “send” to comment, it’s slightly more work than most people want for an online discussion.
The comments by people consist of nothing but emojis and occasionally one to five words.
Scattered around that, you'll also find a lot of bots spamming websites that either sell cheap stuff like LED lighting and swamp coolers with ridiculous markups (about 10x) or are straight up scams.
Those could be filtered out easily but instagram just cares more about the traffic than their users.
With moderators leaving en masse, reddit will move into that direction. They won't ever get this shitty, but definitely a lot closer than they are now.
No offence but I never understand this lurker hate.
Wasnt the hole idea of the web to have a website and be able to share your knowledge? Iam pretty sure that most people would just stop putting out content, if literally no one is reading it.
Just seems wrong to call those visitors of your publicly accessible site/blog/forum/whatever lurkers, or speak of them as if they would steal from your garden.
You're assigning a connotation to the word that I don't really agree with. There's nothing wrong with being a lurker.
There's encouragement to not be a lurker in the fediverse simply because engagement drives adoption and traffic, but I think the goal is ultimately to attract more lurkers
Lots of people are probably just waiting for better apps for lemmy + the drop dead date for Reddit 3rd party apps. I am, anyway. I'd expect a shift in activity in July.
“Lots” in relation to the Lemmyverse size, but not in relation to the Reddit userbase. This chunk of the Fediverse grew huge in a single month, but it’s still considerably smaller than Reddit.
There’s Thunder which is in the works, still missing some needed features for me, like media downloading, however it is decent for simple looking at Lemmy.
I agree in general with you, but AI adds a wrinkle. Wouldn't surprise me at all if AI generated content continues to amuse the casual doomscrollers and reddit serves up a lot of ads to those mindless suckers and makes money for years with that model.
Doesn't hurt us, though. We can move on and do our thing here in the Fediverse.
AI posting + low standards does throw a monkey wrench in my reasoning, but not a big one: that AI will be available first for Alphabet/Google, Microsoft and Meta/Facebook, as they’re the ones developing this stuff. And they happen to have services that overlap in functionality with Reddit, at least for people who are fine with AI-generated content.
eventually it’ll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site
I somewhat disagree… you haven’t considered the increased incentive for occasional posters to become more regular contributors as existing contributors leave.
As the volume of contributions reduces, each contribution is more likely to garner engagement - those sweet sweet endorphins released when someone upvotes or otherwise engages with your post.
Even if it does, it doesn’t really matter if Reddit can’t become profitable.
It doesn’t really matter what we think but what the shitty capitalists bearing down on Reddit think. They clearly pushed for it to move into crypto and NFTs and I wouldn’t doubt if they push it to chase the next hype of AI. I wouldn’t doubt if the restrictions in the API are AI related and Reddit has lots of archived comments and posts to draw from.
I'm not really surprised, I'd actually assume that sexy John Oliver and the other protests created a lot of additional traffic. People post like crazy and a lot of people want to see that, especially since it got some coverage on news sites. Add to that the big majority of people who do not care (remember that 80% of traffic was still reached) plus some who may have been sympathetic enough to join the two day protest but don't care enough to continue to stay away. It's really not surprising that we're back to normal numbers.
Thankfully this isn't the only impact people currently still make, so this isn't over. The real question now will be how else it might change Reddit.
Protesting Reddit by posting entertaining content to Reddit makes as much sense as protesting Bud Lite by buying lots of it to destroy in a high-profile stunt.
Protest is about generating attention. Sometimes that has to be within the system still. A lot of noise was made, and the people to whom spez’s behaviour (fuck u/spez) was poor enough to be worth looking elsewhere have started to do just that.
I think it's a little different, but not by much. Yes, it still contributes content and drives users to the site but it's not content they're looking for and it's inevitably going to die down and that's the part I'm looking forward to.
I don’t really get how people think Reddit
is winning. Sure traffic is back to normal or even higher, but that really doesn’t matter. They want to go public and for that to work they have to be lucrative for advertisers.
No one in their right mind wants to advertise like normal on current Reddit. Sure they still have users but now you advertisements are not targeted and you basically advertise on a shitpost site.
From a money perspective this is a huge problem for Reddit because for a investor in the current market situation that is not rly something you want to invest in. Remember it is a forum that hasn’t made a profit in nearly 20 years and a relevant percentage (active posters) of the userbase is trolling right now.
It currently looks like a lose lose situation (Reddit and the users don‘t get what they want).
Add comment