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.
I see an awful lot of people here who have quote left reddit, and yet they still go back to Reddit every day to see what's going on, or to grab popular posts so they can repost it here and try to get imaginary points or something. All they're really doing is helping inflate metrics like this.
Alternatively, they give Reddit one users worth of ads to make Lemmy a better alternative. I think many will continue using Reddit but attempt to reduce the usage (especially once 3PA are blocked). That means once you run out of content on Lemmy, you switch to Reddit. So more content on Lemmy means less time on Reddit.
The simple truth is that there are communities on Reddit that I care more about than about the API changes. And for those I will continue using Reddit until an alternative exists. So it is a gradual change for me and everyone that helps moving the good content to Lemmy helps me indirectly.
I guess it comes down to whether you consider highly upvoted content good content, especially when it comes to memes etc.
This here. I still check Reddit regularly, but I’m mostly just checking in on a handful of communities, not nearly as much engagement as last month, so if daily active users is their metric then I guess I haven’t moved the needle, but if it’s about actual API usage, number of posts viewed, votes given, comments made, etc. it’s probably 5-10% of what it used to be.
I believed the same, but in /r/piracy have seen people helping those inquiring about what lemmy is and how to get set up getting help. I thought it wouldn't help, but people visiting reddit from lemmy are actually assisting reddit users who need help moving. It isn't just meme posting going inside the comments themselves.
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.
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.
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!
Time to just look to the future. reddit will have a lot of traffic for a long time because of it's huge footprint. So instead of making posts and engaging there, bring good content to Kbin and the fediverse.
Make it so useful and interesting that the good traffic starts to divert.
There are still some niche subs that didn't come to lemmy that I engage in, but I spend more time on Lemmy now than I do on reddit. I think there are probably dozens of us like that. So while I might still show "traffic" I'm not spending near as much time as I did on it and since reddit is trying to go public they wont publish that little fact.
Anyone can buy an article, so I expect to see more of these "everything is just hunky dory at reddit" articles because again they have profit motive.
Meanwhile lemmy grows and grows. Hopefully people continue to engage over here to keep it interesting.
I'm not sure daily users is the metric we should be looking at here. How many users are logging on just to vote to close down a sub or post shit in protest?
I've only entered reddit this week when i was looking something up on search engines, but its hard to go around the content they've build up over the past 15 or so years. And i mostly did this on desktop where i can block all those filthy ads.
For my day to day, i've completely migrated to lemmy. I've enjoyed seeing it grow these past few days and I hope it continues to do so.
Same, just today I had a problem in a niche hobby and I couldn't find a solution. The only answer I found was an old post on Reddit with three comments. Sometimes there just isn't a good alternative.
I think it’s par for the course for user traffic to normalize since the platform gets visitors just by simply existing.
But if they actually matched that against old users of the site, then it actually means something. Most of the users that left are usually power users and have used Reddit long enough to use third-party apps and can’t stand the bullshit changes.
Not to mention a lot of 3rd party apps are still running.
I still go back from time to time, although quite a bit less than before, but after June 30th I’ll not be going back at all since my app will be shut down and I feel it will be the same for a lot of users. No way I’m downloading the official app.
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.
Now that i read it: i saw some ppl here wonder about bots posting comments or maybe downvoting, bc of apparently a lot of comments being against the protest suddenly more than before? And more downvotes on comments about it? If really bots are being used for this, will that also contribute to the traffic metric like a normal user would?
But that said im not sure if theyre bots, but i did see some people mentioned that they thought there's some false accounts speaking on Reddit's side.
You take away power users and people fed up with Reddit and the casual user who doesn’t care is left over.
If you look at blackout votes it was usually around 4 to 1 in favor.
During and shortly after the blackouts there were a ton of upset casual users calling the mods cunts, the blackouts don’t help, stop holding other users hostage, give me back my content!!!
Those users don’t care about third party apps, mod tooling and so on, they just want to browse the site. These angry users got the loudest while protestors took a break or left for the Fediverse.
If really bots are being used for this, will that also contribute to the traffic metric like a normal user would?
no: bots generally use the API and, even if they went through the web ui, bot traffic doesn't generally trigger tracking (you could write a bot that does that, but it would be extra work)
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