I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
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I was there, 10000 years ago. Now I’m asking you a question: “what the heck is Reddit?” Or “Why do you think it couldn’t get worse?”
I think it lasted for a couple of weeks.
It lasted exactly two weeks. No demands were met. No further action was taken.How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Following the original “protest” some subs remained dark to continue the boycott. These communities were either banned or had their moderators replaced with more compliant ones. Some subs saw their moderators banned for dissent, then the entire sub was banned for being unmoderted. After that, dissenting users were systematically banned, either explicitly for dissenting, or implicitly for various BS reasons. Now, Reddit is mostly AI bots with a handful of real people who either drink the kool-aid or have learned that the nail who sticks out gets the hammer.Reddit stood their ground and most of the userbase capitulated - me included.
Funnily enough, I’ve now quit Reddit because of their recent decision to stop people who aren’t signed in from using Old Reddit.
If they did it again we’d win. Second wave will kill it I think.
Most of the reasons people didn’t stick around are technical, there are some social reasons but they’d rapidly get drowned out by the incoming wave or find nice instances that respect their… values.
I mean, we are all here, in a community that as far as I know didn’t exist in a significant way before. Was it a sizeable chunk? we will never know because (a) Reddit needs to cook their numbers to look good to investors and (b) big social networks tend to have a lot of inertia and many people will just stay, I have many friends that are still in twitter because “is a good place to follow good programmers”.
IMHO reddit is the same direction of Facebook, so heading towards irrelevance, but no idea how far, and some people are even still on Facebook, so who knows.
The problem is that there are no real popular alternatives, and not many people want to be somewhere like fediverse, specially losing a significant amount of users. But also for the complexity of the decentralized nature. Coming from someone that tried making jabber a thing for the longest time as opposed to msn messenger: is not gonna happen.
Normies be normies 🤷♂️
Because most people on a day to day basis don’t give two shits about this type of internet drama over third party API’s as long as they have their entertainment that suits their needs and it’s still easy to access and provides them what they want at a price they’re willing to pay.
Most people who are using social media aren’t tech people who even know what a API is much less care and most people don’t care about whatever app they’re using to access social media as long as they have an app. As for mods, let’s face it, they weren’t and aren’t going to give up their little slice of power over an API in the long run, on reddit and here.
Also, while you say reddit has gotten even worse, which is a subjective opinion that you and most of us all share, their stuff still works for the users at the end of the day with their extremely large user base and still thriving niche communities which lemmy just does not have due to the much smaller user base.
Glad to be here and not on that bot-run place!
I arrived when the API protest hit (rip kbin.social). I think I’m one of the few active Lemmings who’s also still somewhat active on Reddit. However, I was always pretty mindful of how I set up Reddit, only browsed my subscribed subs, and unsubscribed from almost all the big defaults. I have since unsubscribed from (I think) all of the defaults, but I still go there to see AskHistorians, keyboard, sports, and local subs.
None of those things have a really active flow of news and discussion here, and by and large I think I’m still mostly reading comments from real redditors. To be quite honest it’s not bad. However, the bigger communities there are well and truly cooked, and the vibe here for general interest and shitposts is much more my speed. It’s not as easy to find people whose interests exactly align, but people here are cool and interesting.
Ultimately, I accept that even “Small-Reddit” like I’m using is on borrowed time and will likely be dead internet before disappearing completely. When that happens, I’ll be a little sad but I won’t be surprised. I don’t feel like it’s quite there yet, however, and until I’m ready to cut all the toxic tech-bro owned companies out of my life, singling out Reddit when I still find some value in it felt like cutting off my nose to spite my face.
To be fair I got banned multiple times and I also deleted my accounts because of how the mods and reddit operates, shadow banning my comments, banning my account without giving me a reason while actual bots roam the site. I also didn’t like the big communities because of their rules and hidden rules and the mods being horrible and power hungry. One of my account got banned, probably because I posted a picture of Charlie Kirk as a fountain and making fun of him. I liked some subs like r/embedded or r/arduino but it’s not worth keeping an account for them. I hated the mods of the big subreddits and i coudn’t make my own subreddit because reddit would ban me. I hate mods and reddit for their double standards, applying the rules for me but not for others.
Literally why I’m here. Never looked back
One thing you didn’t mention is a lot of mods didn’t capitulate and were removed from power and banned.
Also. aloy of older accounts got banned for no reason. I’m guessing reddit simply doesn’t want people who still remember how awesome it once was
Me 😭
It was awesome. I lurked for a while, signed up. Had a 10+yo account, banned last year ¯\(ツ)//¯
That’s a big part of why so many communities are full of bots and slop now. The bigger subreddits were already bad for that, but before I left Reddit (during the API protest), I at least was able to find quality discussions and posts in a bunch of smaller, more niche subreddits.
Lemmy doesn’t have nearly as many of those kinds of communities, so I found myself visiting Reddit a few times after the API stuff. I was disappointed to learn that many of the communities I had frequented were nothing like I remembered, and many of them had completely different mod teams. Whether it’s the mods or just the people who cared enough to frequently post and comment, a lot of the good people on Reddit left during the API fiasco. Although I enjoy Lemmy far more than I did Reddit (due to the higher concentration of meaningful conversations), it sucks to see how much has been lost at Reddit
I still go back for a couple of niche communities like Unraid. You can certainly see fall in quality content and genuinely user trends (remember the giant canvas, button, safe some guy was going to open, etc.?).
The quality has certainly gone down.
Genuinely reddit got a wholelot worse because of this and multiple other actions.
The quality of user dropped as the content became social media. You were less likely to get informative comments or even informed comments.
A lot of users jumped ship to fedi or gave up altogether. These older users would have been part of the selling point.
Popular feeds. Difficulty accessing r/all. Algorithmic feeds.
I actually did make an acount and revaanced the app to finish out a project I was getting advice from reddit on. The app sucks. Old was perfect. The app was showing days old stories on major subreddits, defaulting to “best” or “hot” but giving shit.
I remember when Victoria got fucked over and that was the highlight of the over commercialisation.
Do not use the app it sucks so much.
I’m another user who left during this and came to Lemmy. As a non-tech person, though, it really wasn’t the easiest migration, and I do think you can see through Lemmy’s content sometimes (love for Linux, well-upvoted IT memes, programming humor, etc.) that it is a different crowd that was able to make the migration in general.
My city’s subreddit is incredibly active, very human, and still gets a ton of traffic. I usually check it once a week just to keep up with what’s happening locally, but I don’t log in and just scan the feed titles. That type of valuable local platform is unlikely to ever exist on Lemmy, which is sad.
They didn’t work. Reddit pushed on with the change, their user numbers didn’t dip enough and well that’s that
I’m here! Still running and mostly personally paying for hosting a Lemmy server (25% partially funded by 2 donating users, which I appreciate a ton!)
2 donating users
Your parents are so supportive :)
2023 api was what led me here. Actually, might’ve been earlier. I was here since fuck spez protests.
Edit: actually, yeah 2023 was both api and fuck spez protests
After 3 years, I still hope for the worse for spez
