I decided to take a peek at Reddit to see what kind of activity is happening, a good handful of the subreddits I am subscribed to are still super active with posts and commenters.
There’s quite a few news articles on the front page regarding Spez and the blackouts, I am surprised those articles are even still up for people to see.
The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit’s and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted…
Perhaps there is some AI activity going on, I mean it’s kind of easy to do in this day and age. You just prompt an army of AI bots to defend Reddit, and try to keep users engaged.
I am so happy I found Lemmy, and I am so happy that there is a comfortable level of activity. Sure it’s only a small fraction of what Reddit is activity wise, but it’s so much more hearty and welcoming.
Reddit has just turned into one big toxic mess. Lemmy reminds me of what Reddit used to be 10 years ago.
It’s funny reading posts that say something along the lines of “I’ve always used the reddit app and it’s fine, I didn’t even know there were third-party apps”. I get this might be astroturfing or bots but if not, congrats on not having a clue, I guess.
It’s probably not purely bots. My girlfriend is one of those people lol
She isn’t tech literate and doesn’t get things like FOSS or 3rd party. To her, the Official Reddit™ App is a mark of trust and safety. She doesn’t use an adblocker (despite my protests) and just avoids services like Youtube where ads are unavoidable.
I haven’t used an app for reddit since Alien Blue. I was just on the mobile website. I can still understand the problem with what they’re doing. I don’t know why so many people can’t understand a problem unless it affects them personally.
The lack of societal solidarity for the betterment of everyone is sad.
But that’s ok, reddit was never going to die after this protest.
I think what took place was a successful test of what alternatives exist out in the wild.
Now it’s up to those of us who migrated to post through the highs and lows of early adoption in order to encourage others to come and stick around when the next shitty move by Spez takes place.
For example, I migrated to Mastodon in late 2018 during an initial surge. And over the years tried to keep posting content so that when the next migration took place when Elon took the reigns, people were able to possibly feel more at home.
This shit takes time. A lot of time. But the internet is a big place and there’s plenty of opportunity for things to be better. We just can expect things to rush themselves
They can’t admit they’re addicted. I was a daily Reddit user. Stopped going there once the blackout hits. And now, the subs I care about are still private. Good.
And somehow, I turned out fine.
Addicted to reading comments, I can’t say I’m any better lol
But I do my best to contribute in a positive manner, share bits and pieces of my journey or what I observe in others that I find funny or imagine would inspire good 👍
I had to move the app from where it usally was and replaced it with jerboa so I can redirect the muscle memory
Same. I’m desperately hoping the Sync for reddit developer goes through with an app for federated, I think he mentioned lemmy.
Jerboa now lives where my Relay app was
It took a bit of work to subscribe to enough active communities from different instances to replace Reddit, along with other settings tweaks, but now I’m content with how many threads and comments I am getting.
I had only planned on skipping Reddit for 2 days, but now I’m disgusted enough with the backstabbing that I have a grotty feeling using Reddit. 12 years of daily participation and all of a sudden it’s not the same.
Yeah i deleted all comments and my account yesterday. I think I’ve been on reddit for 9 years, but fuck them. I will probably still use it in the browser when I am looking for specific info, but i am done with doomscrolling every few minutes.
Yeah for me it really just puts a sour taste in my mouth and I just can’t be bothered
Same here. Yesterday, I had a moment of clarity, logged off, deleted RIF, and came here. That quickly, this is my thing, now.
Same. It’s like a moment of clarity from detoxification. I don’t miss Reddit as much as I thought I would. I just read subs like news and worldnews through an RSS app now.
I actually comment a lot, at least one a day. Presumably these are lurkers who think they are owed content.
Surprisingly I don’t miss it. I have Discord and Kbin. I’ll probably cease browsing Reddit on mobile once RiF dies.
Interesting how a lot of people are going back to RSS in lieu of reddit, myself included
We have come full circle
I’m shocked by the content I’ve seen over there. I know quite a few reddit users IRL and none of them support what spez is doing. I think you are right about AI being involved in some if the posts.
It’s hard to believe people actually support corporate kicking mods out for protesting lol
Yeah pretty sure there’s some AI activity going on with that shit, either that or people from the company are making posts and using their powers to add a bunch of upvotes. It’s feels like the twilight zone
Same here. I’ve never seen this on Reddit, the historically most pro-protest site you’ve ever heard of.
I don’t know if this is legitimate users or not, but it made me delete my account in disgust. If the user base has changed that much then I’m truly a frog in boiling water.
Nah. All the pro-blackout folks left. So now only assholes remain.
Well, I hope they have fun playing with each other.
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Some reddit mods have turned their unpaid volunteer janitor gig on Reddit into a business without redditors realizing. For ex. Onlyfans was started by mods in NSFW subreddits who used reddit up votes to decide which models to recruit models who in turn would bring horny traffic over.
WSB and other trading subs also come to mind. I wonder how much actual market manipulation happens there.
you’re really bad at being an ignorant troll, you know. your comment history displays a deep level of self-loathing, and that’s just sad to see from the outside. i’d say that i hope you feel at least a tiny, fleeting, fast-to-vanish sense of reward from seeing your hateful crap, but it’s pretty obvious that you’re not actually capable of the emotion. i feel sorry for you.
I think it’s mostly a power trip like you said, or just a straight up passion project for those who want to have a community around their niche. As for the larger mainstream subs, yeah they’re just doing unpaid labor.
The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit’s and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted…
Thing is, all the people in favor of the protest left Reddit. So now pro-Reddit content is being upvoted.
Thing is, all the people in favor of the protest left Reddit.
Except the mods. Now they’re getting abuse from those that didn’t care about the protests.
I’m sorry but the protest was a complete failure that accomplished nothing. The real successful protest would be making a sub on here and redirecting their uses to it.
I wouldn’t say it accomplished nothing. I clearly motivated a bunch of people to start investing in other platforms. Platforms like Kbin and Lemmy now have a lot more mods and developers contributing. It gave alternatives MUCH needed attention. Mos of us had never even heard about these platforms a few weeks ago.
I deleted my reddit account years ago and lurked only because trying to interact there was a cesspool. Learning about the alternatives and seeing how well behaved it is over here on lemmy is a breath of fresh air. Sure there isn’t as much content yet but it’ll come. Reddit wasn’t an overnight success either.
I feel after the 3rd party apps get killed off we’ll start seeing a slow trickle of users after the initial flood once the ones that stuck around start realizing the content that’s left in reddit has become low effort bot posts and spam.
And that’s something that’s easy to forget once you’ve made the change. Uprooting something you use daily, to move to a new platform which feels new and different, takes quite a bit of mental effort and requires you to accept some anxiety, as you wean yourself off your habits. But when the power users go, and the new place becomes more familiar and understood, the rest will follow eventually as every step becomes easier to accept.
We will get a second influx on July 1st as well, so we need to work had at maintaining activity and community growth in the meantime.
What we have now is already fairly good.
Why spoil a good thing? The protest was basically the best they could do, got tons of attention and media.
Obviously time will tell if this actually is the downturn for Reddit, but belittling their efforts just because they didn’t redirect to Lemmy seems a bit entitled.
I actually found Lemmy from a post doing exactly what you said: subreddit went dark, with a stickied post directing people where to go. And here I am! Rock me like a hurricane.
Lemmy went from a few thousand users with very little activity to 100k+ with constant activity. It was a massive success.
For a website with over 800 million monthly users, 100k is nothing, barely even a rounding error. You can say it was a success for lemmy, but as far as the actual goal of the protest it achieved basically nothing.
As Lemmy grows reddit will shrink. Reddit might always be around, but that’s the same crowd that uses Facebook. Stragglers be damned, many users found a new home and that’s a big win in my books. The rest were shown how shitty and incompetent the management is at Reddit, and it’ll only get worse until they lose more and more users.
And when Lemmy becomes compatible with the wider activitypub network, we’ll gain another 9M users. (Its also closer to 200k now I believe.)
Over 800 million monthly users, really? :D
Different sources have different numbers. One says 800 million, one says 400 million, the point is that lemmy poaching a couple hundred thousand users is nothing to reddit. If lemmy has 200k users that left reddit, even if we assume the smaller value of 400 million reddit users then that’s only 0.05% of reddit users that left.
What percentage of Reddit users are actually contributing versus just showing up to consume? I’d suspect it’s a very small percentage of that total. If that smaller group migrates away in more significant number, then that’s the real impact. The consumers will show up wherever the content goes.
I’m willing to bet even if that were true a good portion of those are fake or a person with multiple accounts.
We don’t know yet. If it’s sticky then I would wholeheartedly agree. But if activity drops to pre protest levels in a month then eh…
I guess we will see.
Yeah, we don’t know yet. On the one hand, it’s still the early days of (some) people leaving Reddit - and who knows if they won’t go back.
On the other hand, the API payment structure and the shutdown of 3PAs hasn’t even happened yet. Even people who are completely oblivious to the situation but who are using a 3PA will have to decide if they’ll be able to deal with the shitty official app, if they’ll just stop browsing Reddit on mobile, or if they’re willing to take a look at alternatives.
Don’t worry too much about it. There’s still going to be people using Reddit. You’re never going to convince everybody about everything. My parents still use Facebook.
I still do as well. :D
Facebook has turned to adbook.
This may just an old interwebz man talking, but I’d say “Don’t worry.”
It’s not a 1:1, but this is similar to what happened with Digg in the mid 2000s. I was there. I migrated from there to Reddit - specifically because Digg had decided to ignore its vocal user base and fundamentally change what the site was.
It ultimately resulted in this :
The scale is so much larger now. Reddit could lose 1m users and its a blip.
Reddit’s actual daily users only equates to about half that number. While an interesting metric, Google search rates don’t equate to users. Heck, my searching for that information contributed to that and I didn’t click through to Reddit once.
That is a good point, today internet is mainstream, and heavily indexed websites are much more reliant on such type of interactions than forums and social media were when digg was big, so reddit has a comparatively huge influx of click from google searches alone. However, that might change as they are making the web inferface worse and worse to redirect the traffic towards the app. If reddit becomes app-centric, i don’t kno what may change given how it is so reliant on google searches.___
Not if the redditors that leave are the ones that do the majority of the moderating and quality posting. If the quality goes way down, people will look elsewhere. Also, I have a feeling we’ll see a much bigger migration once the third party apps all die on the 30th.
Well, “unfortunately” some of them will stay up since they are classified as open-source and non-profit by reddit. So, while I’m glad that these projects live on, it will certainly soften the blow for Reddit on 30th.
Thats true. I am continuing to keep using reddit to spread awareness of Lemmy so that people know it exists.
Iam not to use. Before I left reddit. Most of it was just reposted tiktoks and just general low quality posts on the big subreddits already
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I have noticed a huge quality decline on reddit. I hope people get fed up and search for other options.
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I’m new as well. Made my account a few days ago. First time participating in the fediverse and I am loving it so far. I love the vibe and building new communities. I wish I better knew how to spread the word because up until last week I never knew any of this existed.
There’s been so many threads I’ve read on lemmy where pretty much everyone was able to voice disagreement in some way, but the discourse refrained from being toxic. That seemed so very rare on Reddit. I wonder if this is due to the lack of the total karma metric or something.
I think that it’s because the bad users aren’t here yet.
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Worth noting that the main migration happened in 2007 and start of 2008, but look how it managed to drag on for another 4 years before really dying.
I think the same will happen here - like there’ll be a lot of users on Reddit still, but it’ll be heavily corporate controlled and moderated, and most comments will be on the level of “Putin small pp” etc.
I suspect that some of the main subreddits - funny, aww, and pics, for example - could be populated entirely by bots and a lot of people would still browse through them. If you’re just idling through looking for a little dopamine, then r/aww and r/pics are kind of like instagram or tiktok. From Reddit’s perspective, those are the important subs, where the smaller ones where you can find good discussion and insightful answers don’t get enough views to serve enough ads to affect their bottom line.
Those subs could just be replaced with random bot reposts from the last decade. Actually, I think that’s most of the content already. Tho r/pics going full Sexy John Oliver today was hilarious. I even broke my personal embargo to go and vote for the SJO format (and to do a daily re-delete of any of my comments which might have been restored).
Wow, I didn’t realize the Reddit to Digg migration was so drawn out. Do we know how big the initial migration to Reddit actually was in terms of user count? It seems like Lemmy/Kbin are seeded with a few tens of thousands of users, and I wonder how it compares.
The main migration was actually in 2010 after the v4 redesign. Digg wasn’t dying in 2007-2009, it was one of the hottest websites on the internet.
Hmm something happened in 2008-2009 though, as it was when I migrated and I remember loads of people were doing it at the same time.
It might have just been Reddit having a cleaner, more direct interface, and a better community.
The site started to go downhill around that period because of power users and some started to move to reddit, but it was still pretty niche.
I stayed on digg until v4, then I moved with the masses over to reddit. They lost over 30% of their users that month!
I mean, is it out of the realm of possibility that bootlicking comments are those made by Reddit themselves? Comment sections can quickly become echo chambers, I’m sure reddit knows this and uses that to their advantage.
Not to say that there aren’t plenty of addicts and general idiots all over reddit.
I’ve been on reddit for almost a decade and a half. Never have I seen so many users gilding pro corporate reddit/pro spez comments. It is almost always the former. It’s very unusual and makes me a tad suspicious. I’m not sure if reddit has evolved into a platform overflowing with users that I truly don’t synchronize with, or perhaps reddit is virtually augmenting these posts/comments, increasing bot posts to augment activity, etc. I accept either or and for that and many other reasons I have contently moved on from the platform. It’s just not for me anymore and has been fracturing into an environment that lost its luster. Too many common folk have saturated the platform, too many bots, too much corporate shenanigans, too many miserable users, too little civility, too much ignorance and a lack of analytical literacy. The fediverse has given a breath of fresh air and something of nostalgia from the early days of reddit. I do think this is the way forward with time and I’m here for it.
I curbed my use of Reddit about a month ago. I started getting low quality right-wing posts in my feed. Maybe it was an algorithm trying to egg me on, but it had the opposite effect and I left.
Scary thing is, if AI can take over Reddit, AI can also take over Lemmy.
I can litterally copy and paste this post, and then you comment, as well as other people’s comments and instruct ChatGPT to reply in accordance. Then, if I feel like the comment seems obviously AI written, I can tell it to write it in the style of a redditor with a few spelling mistakes and it I’ll do just that.
Now uses some script, and the prompt, and let the algorithm do all the work for you.
Don’t worry, it will become an even more toxic cesspool soon…
This is the truth, when I heard they were trying to kick out the mods who were pushing the blackout, I knew that whoever is left after all of this is not going to be worth reading. Reddit massively underestimates the value the power users and mods give to the site for everyone else to use. Without them, the site is just a bunch of software trying to push ads on whoever stumbles on it.
Even a few conversations I have on reddit in the last week (after many already migrated)-
Its obvious, lots more trolls. Lots more shittalk. Just- not pleasant.
It would appear it’s mostly bots, probably paid for by reddit (or interested groups) to muddle the waters.
I have seen countless posts trying to discredit the fediverse, how it won’t work because it isn’t financially backed (completely ignoring that email is still a thing), or how Mastodon apparently failed. On top of that, there are tons of comments in the threads for subs that went dark where the commenter argues “all this does is hurt the sub”. but when you look into the commenter, they have no previous history of being active in these subs at all.
But, i’ve seen this kind of activity all over reddit for the past 2 years. Especially when something unpopular is happening. There is a lot of the same type of crap you see during the presidential elections of the US. A lot of fake comments, posts, and statistics, and other things to try steer the public opinion in an engineered direction.
how Mastodon apparently failed
Saw this on my Mastodon home feed:
12,484,940 accounts
+2,493 in the last hour
+66,136 in the last day
+273,430 in the last weekFour time-based charts
Upper blue area: Number of Mastodon users
Upper cyan area: Hourly increases of number of users
Lower orange area: Number of active instances
Lower yellow area: Thousand toots per hourFor current figures please read the text of this post https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110554252061792575
Almost 300,000 new users in a week is a “fail” most other sites can only dream of.
The idea that anything that doesn’t reach Twitter scale is a failure is annoying as hell
lmao the claim that telegram is failing, and i’ll admit right here that i don’t use it and am not interested in doing so, but it’s going stronger than ever now that the loudmouthed chuds that made it popular have gotten bored and the hardcore nerds are all who are left. telegram ain’t dying any time soon, i’ll say that much.
Telegram should die. Why would anybody use it when matrix or signal exist?
People have been saying it but were being ignored for weeks: this blackout thing will not work. And we were correct. It was a useless attempt to try and win over the majority.
Plenty of people use the main app and are the majority of users, and it is what it is. The ones who care about the Reddit API fiasco should move away. That’s the only valid move.
I’ve done it, and everyone else who care should. Leave the ones who are fine with Reddit on Reddit.
I see the blackout as a nudge to overcome addiction. A few days or weeks without content, and people start looking around. The the network effect (downward) will make the rest.
I want to specify that I have no interest in all the userbase of reddit moving to Lemmy, but just an initial influx of people who care will help making it reach a critical mass. After that, reddit can even reopen fully, at that point it won’t matter.
Except those people went to twitter, Instagram, and tiktok for their memes, news, and funny moments. All the major subs that I subscribed to are back on and people are back as usual there. The blackout was useless and another lazy version of internet activism, and it made people hate the mods instead of Reddit for “power tripping.” Literally made people side with Reddit because of that lol.
I had a different experience, to be honest. The sub I am more active in, /r/Italy is open, but it has still a ridiculous activity, and most of the active users wanted an indefinite blackout. A sibling sub, italyinformatica is even more desert (yesterday last post was 4 days ago). I think that in principle the blackout is a very effective way to protest, it worked like a charm to keep me off the site, at least, but I agree that saying “we do it for 2 days” undermines the whole thing.
I don’t think it’s particular the main stream of Reddit that is protesting, it is indeed a small percentage. However, I think the discussion in the recent Waveform Podcast hits the nail on the head:
That small percentage that left Reddit are the people that care most about Reddit. Those are the powerusers. The users that generally contribute most to the platform, be that in the form of content, informative comments, moderation, writing tools or other stuff. It’s the people that are most valueble to the website. When those people leave there might others might not notice it instantly, but after a while the overall experience will deteriate somehow.
It is somewhat comparable to if when many of the big youtubers were to leave Youtube after bad management. They might be only 1% of the people uaing Youtube, but they are also the people that are important to the website for the experience of the other 99%.
Thing is though, only those power users are likely to care about the decline in content quality.
The people who just use it for memes and funny videos won’t even notice
Your username is way too cool
I’ve been thinking about changing my username. it’s the same one I’ve been using since 4th grade
. Minecraft fan at the time?
Yeaaaah . . . Still am tbh lol
Please crosspost to c/general@lemmy.world or c/reddit@lemmy.world or c/reddit@lemmy.ml instead of here. This is
intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server. That means announcements from the team, issues you see etc.
Also mod @sunspider@lemmy.world can you change the name of this community to Lemmy.world - Server or something?
Lemmy world meta?
My feed is literally filled with
Lemmy.world@Lemmy.worldposts because of this (not that I have a problem with that though lol).These nice discussions really should be in their dedicated communities as you suggest
Search for communities that interest you, subscribe to them, instead of Local feed, look at Subscribed, maybe even All, then sort by New or Hot. Because it’s still growing, New actually comes up with some good stuff without going by too quickly.
“How can people keep doing what they’ve habitually done because it’s what they’re used to?” ask all the folks who are posting in a community that’s clearly described as not being the place for those discussions but people are doing it anyway.
People are generally the weak link in any system.
