Gizmodo’s metric for success is that “The last major holdouts in the massive protest against Reddit’s controversial API pricing have relented, abandoning the so-called ‘John Oliver rules’ which only allowed posts featuring the beloved TV host in certain dissident subreddits.”
This doesn’t seem like a good metric to me. I’d like to see monthly revenue and traffic. I’m sure we’re not going to see revenue, and the sites I found that report traffic are conflicting. One shows a clear decline (https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/#traffic) and the other shows a clear increase (https://ahrefs.com/traffic-checker).
The traffic indeed increased. It was the same for twitter too. Elon did report that twitter usage is at an all time high now.
The main reason is probably people getting interested in controversy. E.g. me. I was visiting reddit maybe once a month, but after these changes, I was visiting it daily.
Anti-advertisement is also an advertisement.
They were always going to win. It’s their platform. They can do whatever they want. But… They lost my attention and paid subscription. I now only go to Reddit when I’m looking for something I can’t find elsewhere. It used to be my favorite platform.
Reddit’s main advantage is the historic number of contents and knowledge posted by their users.
It will take decades for this advantage to shift, if even possible, to similar type like Lemmy or other platforms.
Decades? Nah, but years yeah for sure
This can play out in other ways. Search platforms start indexing open platforms and more links start making reference to these platforms.
This is like a martial arts movie where the immotal fighter thinks that they’ve won, but doesn’t yet realise that they’ve been cut in half.
Damn that’s probably the best analogy here so far.
I mean, if they say so…
Meanwhile, I’m just going to have good time here on Lemmy.
And honestly I prefer the lemmy experience which has soo much less toxicity.
deleted by creator
The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
So say mediocre minds in constant need of a narrative that’s final and neat and wrapped in a little bow, all the time.
The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
By some short-term metric here and there, I guess, if you’re willing to squint while looking at the panorama. And just how does the
hackwriter define “winning” - as “not disappearing or sinking into irrelevance overnight”?
Because long-term nobody knows, as places like right here are continuing to develop and grow, are quickly becoming a viable alternative, ever more active, in a positive feedback growth cycle.The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
So say mediocre minds in constant need of a narrative that’s final and neat and wrapped in a little bow, all the time.
The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
By some short-term metric…
Did you intend to quote the same sentence twice?
I did. Because it felt like I was replying to the same statement in two different ways, from two slightly different angles.
Fair enough.
So many people said this whole situation wouldn’t end Reddit, like the end of Reddit would be some big huge sudden bang when the apps turned off.
They couldn’t seem to grasp the idea that it could be the end of the Reddit we knew with a huge injection of new users to potential replacements. Only time will tell.
Long term it gave a kick off boost to many alternatives, one of which is bound to grow viable
if you’re gonna comment by quoting only the title I’m just gonna respond to you by only reading the quotes
Fair enough, but I felt the need to directly address the clickbait title. This toxic, inescapable and ultimately unnecessary clickbait plague really, REALLY pushes my buttons in a bad way.
Reddit was always going to win that battle. But the fact that Lemmy now has a much larger user base (largely populated by many reddit OGs) is telling. At the very least, the online landscape changed. I for one am happy to be on a new platform away from the old corporate overlords.
Dead right, 100% agreed.
In late June early July Reddit was awash with people predicting a digg like doom for reddit. I got sick of commenting that 90% of reddit users wouldn’t understand what was happening and 99% wouldn’t care. Reddit was always going to “win” in that they would carry on, more profitable than before.
I don’t know or care whether the reddit “experience” has diminished in either the short or the long term. I expect it has in some way, but it’s more like a continuation of a long-standing trajectory.
In any case, as you say, the landscape has changed. Back in April lemmy was more or less non-viable to scratch that thread based news-aggregator itch. That’s no longer the case.
Yeah, I don’t mind that the majority stays on Reddit. I miss the old, tighter communities and conversations. When you couldn’t predict the top 2-3 top level comments because it’s not all jokes/memes, all the time.
Lemmy is still young, just needs some time and work to get it’s shit together and then it’ll be great! Honestly, I hope Reddit stays popular so that most people stay there. As long as Lemmy doesn’t turn into another escape for CP/Nazi’s/random shit groups.
As long as Lemmy doesn’t turn into another escape for CP/Nazi’s/random shit groups.
That’s quite the irony since there are Lemmy communities that originate from subreddits that actually got banned on Reddit, for being too toxic even by Reddit mod’s standards.
Like that recent drama about lemmy.world defederating from a hardcore communist instance.
Honestly, I hope Reddit stays popular so that most people stay there. As long as Lemmy doesn’t turn into another escape for CP/Nazi’s/random shit groups.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if various extremist groups end up setting up their own lemmy instances. The whole point of the decentralisation is you can’t stop them from doing that. I doubt the big instance will connect with those instances though. We might end up with a sort of alternate mini-fediverse for various groups that don’t get accepted into the main one.
This is also your solution if main instances start getting too popular and you don’t like them anymore. Set up your own instance and disconnect from the rest. The main selling point of lemmy is you always keep some control over the platform.
Yeah the fediverse feels more of a game that runs only on personal servers you join and less of a central server game that everyone joins. Lemmy is more counter strike and Reddit is more world of Warcraft
IMO, Reddit kept the people who didn’t care about third party apps or the things that made Reddit Reddit years ago, before it turned into generic social media. Everyone who did care, left. And that’s not really a victory.
“the things that made Reddit Reddit years ago, before it turned into generic social media”
Bingo. From a financial standpoint reddit doesn’t care about how it used to be. Being generic social media is worth more money to them
Reddit kept the people who didn’t care about third party apps
Which is important to note is like 90%+ of users, most of whom never participate and just consume content.
I felt many of the protesters had no clue how unpopular (by numbers) 3rd party clients were. The reason they seemed so prevalent in discussions is because reddit users who use 3rd party clients are power users who actually participate versus everyone else who just browses. These protests showed the ugly reality that they were always a small vocal minority.
I left reddit and edited all my comments/posts on principle, but I was never under the illusion that I was part of the majority or that the protests would lead to something.
Of course I hope Lemmy got some nice visibility and that something positive comes out of it, but I’m not clinging onto a pipe dream.
The fact that capitalism looks at it like winning against a customer is just gross.
Reddit exists to make money, so they definitely won
deleted by creator
Reddit lost a bunch of third party apps and those apps’ userbase
But most of these are small communities, and today only protesting subreddit with over 10 million subscribers is r/fitness.
Even if those subreddits never reopen, relinquishing the John Oliver rule officially brings the Reddit protests to a close.
These sentenences are literally right after each other. I have no idea how a 10+ million subreddit still protesting and many smaller ones means the protests are “officially over”. It’s died down quite a bit but that doesn’t seem like a state to declare “officially over”.
sure they won but i nuked my post history and stopped going in all but a few instances (still checked out a few links when i had to troubleshoot things). i was a regular submitter/commenter/voter. should/will they care? probably not. but i feel better about myself and the situation. so the way i see it, reddit won, the redditors who stayed lost, and everyone who left won.
I want to thank Spez for screwing up his platform. Reddit became to toxic for me a couple years ago so I took a break. Last summer Zuckerberg gave me a 30 day ban so instead of using a nerfed account I just went back to Reddit instead. So when the protest happened I had no issues with leaving the site.
Lemmy is fire, I’m enjoying this platform much more, every day it gets better.
Reddit became too toxic for me around 2014. That’s when they started replacing default subs with shit like r/sports, trying to court the most general audience possible, then forcing everyone to exist in the same space and expecting it to go well.
Same thing happened with Digg. Digg went from tech-news to general-news around 2007… 2008 we hit a US election year and the site became a cesspool. The Diggnation Podcast was hosted by the site’s founders, they had to talk about the top 10 digg posts each week… they repeatedly had to feign interest in UFO and Ron Paul stories at that point.
Leaving/left Facebook for Mastodon back a couple of years ago when the whistle blower revealed their dialing of the “outrage algorithm” and the true width and depth of data capture. This was when (and why) they rebranded to Meta. I’ve only gotten a few of my FB folks to give Fedi a try, but I’m effing loving it. Lemmy and Mastodon are growing and I am here for it. This is what social media should be and how it should work. I’ve found so many awesome people through Mastodon I would have never found on FB or Twitter. The cool things I’ve seen on Lemmy I probably would have never seen on Reddit. I just feel more connected on here than when I was jumping from corporate walled garden to corporate walled garden.
I tried mastodon before I found Lemmy, then I figured out it was a toss twitter, I have no interest in twitter so I’m done with that.
I don’t care anymore. I have to thank all those corporate zombies for all the time I’m spending in my workshop making furniture instead of being online . Gotta go now, a kitchen cabinet calls for the final touches.
Go gotta now, trying to grain fill and paint my shitty old red oak builder grade cabinets because I’m a cheap ass…
I’m transitioning to lemmy but it’s not easy. I can login to my account with an app, but not with any of my desktop browsers. Following users on other instances is unintuitive. Plus there are tons of fake “official” accounts I can’t filter away.
Lemmy is finally allowing me to login and comment!
I’m on .world and can log in on a browser, I’m also logged in with sync, jerboa, connect and liftoff.
Once you’re logged in, blocking users/communities/instances is pretty easy.
Why would you use a link aggregator to follow individual users? That’s literally what Mastodon is for, and you should be able to use your Lemmy creds to access it, meaning you have access to it.
Sure, reddit is still standing, but they’ve been poisoned and will die a slow but certain death. Lemmy however, will survive!
Reddit won the war because your stereotypical Reddit mod is a spineless narcissist who wields their banhammer as a coping mechanism for their real life issues. It’s like being an internet caretaker was the only way they could gain any kind of validation.
They could very easily have overwhelmed the site and brought Reddit’s admins to their knees had they collectively disabled automoderator, unbanned every user and just refused to enforce any rules (incl sitewide ones.) But the moment Reddit started threatening to demod people, they caved incredibly quickly, or tried to pull off alternative forms of protest to piss off the admins, but not to the point where they’d be immediately demodded and purged, á la AwkwardTheTurtle.
Anyone could have seen this coming from a mile away the moment we started seeing r/pics and r/videos push dumb rule changes like expletives in titles, text only, sexy pics of John Oliver, etc…
Honestly the only good thing that came out of the API protests were iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle being permabanned from Reddit, and it’s bittersweet that the hill Reddit chose to kill them on was over third-party apps.
iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle being permabanned from Reddit
Wait, wut? iBleeedOrange got it too?
I would not mind reading more if you have some links to share.
EDITED TO ADD: This is all I could find myself; I guess the admins couldn’t abide anyone not in lockstep:
Not sure why either. My guess is that it had something to do with when he changed the rules of r/interestingasfuck and effectively turned it into a porn sub to spite the site’s advertisers. But I only recall him and everybody else being forcibly demodded. Maybe he threw some incredibly colorful language at the admins and got banhammered.
As much as I loathe iBleeedBullshit and think he’s a power-tripping asshole who doesn’t even understand the rules of the subreddits he used to moderate (had a few online altercations with him in the past), Spez is acting even more childish, to the point where the power mod purge feels nowhere near as cathartic as it should have…
Cool, thanks for the info. I missed all that somehow.
Spez is acting even more childish
Ohhhh, yeah. No argument there.
But it’s not as straightforward a situation as it seems. Reddit is now partially owned by others, meaning that Spez does answer to a board. So, contrary to popular belief, being a total gaping asshole is actually NOT Spez’s sole skill. Turns out he’s also some other people’s very useful idiot.
To put it another way, an entire team of 1%ers who stand to profit off Reddit’s future IPO thinks that all this is a good thing and a means to a desired end, or he’d already have been tossed out. At this point I’m just waiting to see them tip their hand as to what they think that will be, because I have no clue myself, lol.
EDITED TO ADD this link, it’s an old but informative one in regard to the role of Reddit’s board: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3dcmr1/the_role_of_reddits_board_of_directors/
