- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit::A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever
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“We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private,” he said.
They respect it so much they forcibly remove mods to make them public again. That’s so respectful.
Despite these concessions, dozens of Redditors promised to stop using the site altogether without access to their favorite browsing apps. But according to data from the website analytics firm SimilarWeb, traffic has largely remained consistent to the platform, aside from a pronounced dip during the blackout
Dozens of us!
I wonder if thats because most of the traffic was just bots all along who obviously aren’t going to leave in protest
I only go back to Resdit when my Google search doesn’t take me where I need to go.
Which, unfortunately, is far too often. In my recent experience…
I literally use Reddit to fix Google Search results when I actually need an answer. At the very least I’ll typically find the starting string. Though that’s less due to the quality of Reddit and more because of its longevity.
Sometimes Lemmy pops up on my google search! That always makes me smile
I’ve often found removed responses, which is a good thing, just makes my quest to find an answer harder.
At least use a redirect extension that gives you an alternative, lighter frontend. Teddit might be mostly gone, but there are still Libreddit instances alive and active. And on Android, Stealth still works.
…when my Google search doesn’t take me where I need to go.
Tried Kagi?
The data is coming from the reddit admins, they have an interest in not looking like the idiots they are. Basically I call bullshit, I think they’re lying for the IPO that’ll never actually happen.
Yep. Haven’t touched my account. Only time I go there is if a Reddit result is the only decent result of a search. But I don’t browse reddit at all.
That’s probably cause the userbase was flooded with bots to make up the difference
Not one mention of where said moderators who left went to…
Spend more time with my wife mostly
Is she spending time with all the former mods?
Hey! There’s a sign up sheet man, get in line
I also spend more time with OP’s wife wife. /s
Damn. I left Reddit to spend more time with your wife, too, but I’ve only been seeing your mom lately.
That poor woman.
The Granuiad has been pushing a lot of sideways shit lately. That’s a shame.
The what?
I don’t post on reddit any more but I still look there now and then. I don’t notice much change. From everything I’ve heard, the protest failed. A few snowflakes like me quit posting and/or moved to Lemmy, but mostly things at reddit were back to normal within a few weeks after the blackout.
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That’s true - it bums me out that more people didn’t follow through on their threats to leave, but I did and I don’t spend hours doomscrolling every day anymore. That alone is a good outcome. I learned to embroider to keep from picking up my phone over and over during the blackout and it’s one of my favorite hobbies now. Also a good outcome. For me, the protest was a success. Reddit can make every stupid choice under the sun, and it doesn’t impact my life in the least anymore.
I think I’m getting better at leaving, I was surprised to see today the last time I posted there was over a month. No so on Lemmy, though.
I took part in the blackout and moved to Lemmy and hoped that the blackout would be successful, but realistically it looks in retrospect like it didn’t matter much to Reddit. I still don’t post there. I avoided reading for a while, but found myself still wanting to check on things / lurk. At least I have all the ads blocked.
I think most people who stayed on reddit didn’t care about some disagreement between geeks, or (in the case of some moderators) too addicted to the attention that they got, or too full of self-importance about how their subreddit needed to be kept alive. I can sort of understand r/news being thought of as important and that’s a sub I still look at sometimes. But I mostly looked at niche hobby subs and sometimes a sub devoted to a specific brand of power tools (because I have some of those tools). And I mean, who cares if those subs dry up or move to Lemmy? Get over it, Reddit.
Well said. I’m not going to be a fairweather-ethical-decision-maker. Every time I make a right choice (and I decide what’s right for me) I’m rebelling against the machine of marketing and convenience. In fact, often the more inconvenient it is, the more confident I am in my decision.
People like to think that they’ve made some far-reaching change with what little actually happened. The painful truth is: they didn’t. There wasn’t a big hit to the userbase, most people on Reddit already hated moderators and didn’t give a shit if they got removed, and overall people caved far too quickly (how many people folded instantly when their internet moderator position was threatened? (I say this as someone who was one of those moderators that flat out quit everything and nuked my account rather than continuing to toil for free for a corporation that hates me)).
The actually important thing that was accomplished by the protesting was platforms like Lemmy getting enough of a userbase boost to become stable - in the future, Lemmy and others may be able to act as viable alternatives to Reddit, because there’s already a community here (however small). Reddit will continue to enshittify, and people will continue to leave in small numbers that may escalate to big numbers if they commit a truly massive fuckup. The more heavy Reddit users (read: more invested, not necessarily more active) are small in number compared to the vast majority who lurk, don’t give a shit about any ongoing meta-drama, and don’t particularly care about any changes to the UI or browsing experience as long as they can still get an endless feed of memes.
Even if it hurts to realize this, it’s important to make sure people get this message beat into their skulls so that we aren’t stuck with a bunch of Redditors (derogatory) with over-inflated egos that think Reddit will bend over backward to appease them, then cave as soon as they receive literally any pushback from the corporation running the site.
I think this is a good point. Lemmy pre protest sucked. There was just no content or activity. Post protest, it’s not too bad here. It’s viable. Slowly, hopefully more people end up here over the years. I still browse Reddit (not logged in, my account is kaput) and it seems the same as it was before though. However, digg too died, so there is hope yet.
Yeah, I knew of lemmy long before any protests, but it was more linked as a back up sub for like the rom sub in case a ban happened. But, activity was pretty nonexistent compared to now. For lemmy this is a success with it leading to many more consistent users of the platform.
I came to explore Lemmy with the migration after Reddit’s API changes. Baconreader was my app of choice, and it died with the change.
I didn’t have any anger against Reddit - there was no righteous “fuck you!” in my actions - but the reason I stayed on Lemmy and very rarely touch Reddit is because the concept of the fediverse really speaks to me. I want to see a more decentralized internet succeed and so that is where I will spend my time, niche as it is.
I totally agree.
There were definitely people who were trying to start a revolution there or proverbially burn the place to the ground. But for a lot of people who left, like me, it was just an appropriate time to move on. I had been on reddit for about 12 years by then, and I had seen the place change, especially over the last few years. And not for the better.
It happens to any organization or system that grows beyond a healthy critical mass. Quantity goes up, but quality goes down. And the atmosphere starts to get toxic.
I had been looking for an alternative to reddit for a year or so when the situation last Summer came around. I was disillusioned over on reddit, and aside from interactions with two or three of subs (and about two dozen awesome people on one of my mod teams, who I’m still in touch with thanks to other communication options), I didn’t really enjoy engaging with other users there. It was exhausting to have to frame everything to mitigate the trolls and the contrarians (who invariably still pulled that shit anyway). And the stench of hyper-partisanship was getting everywhere.
The Fediverse intrigued me, but the reddit variants of it hadn’t reached a critical mass of minimal usage (the other critical mass metric) to make it compelling to use. The June protests changed that, and regardless of whether reddit ‘won’ or not, I’m glad I found this place.
You can have multiple ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in situations like this. Even if reddit fought off the protests and won by not seeing their traffic stats drop off (which let’s be honest is all they really care about, no matter what touchy-feely smoke their spokespeople are blowing), I feel like those of us who landed here also won.
Yeah, Reddit became read-only to me after they killed RIF. I still check in on a couple subs, but all my comments and posts go on Lemmy now.
Same. I read a few subs that haven’t yet fully grown here on Lemmy, but I don’t post.
For now reddit seems fine (even though I feel a noticable deterioration of multiple communities). Though the important change is that alternatives have established themselves. Lemmy might not be big right now but from now on reddit has to be extra careful not to upset redditors. Every new step they take that worsens the experience will drive a new wave of users away from their site and now more of them will find communities elsewhere that have been established during the first exodus this year.
At the same time I’m unfortunately quite certain that the enshittification of reddit will continue as investors demand higher profits. So we will see more waves of redditors leaving. Such a migration in waves could also be observed with Twitter, after every new step that Elon took to ruin the site.
Yeah a lurk but I don’t post unless maybe it’s for work or something like that. I do feel like the quality has dropped pretty sharply. The home feed is absolute trash. Constant feed of random shit like r/decks, the ads were pretty bad before I discovered RedReader but overall it doesn’t capture my attention the way it used to. Even the comments feel dumber but that could be my imagination.
I’m honestly not at all surprised. Social media has turned into both an addiction and a way to feel like you’re doing something you’re not doing. Jessica changed her status to: “Black lives matter!” (Jessica continues to do nothing about racial injustice or inequality). “I stand with Paris!” “We are Charlie hebdo!” “Fuck spez!” (Continues posting on reddit with the title “fuck spez” on every post). Now, I know these all vary wildly in importance, I was just recalling every topical “i care” post I could remember.
People don’t do anything. Social media gave us an out to bitch and moan for the purpose of people seeing that we know enough to bitch and moan about the topical, popular issues (read: the “right” issues)—but only while they’re topical and popular and then never think about them again because now we’re talking about the new tragedy or war or injustice or crisis, etc.)
People don’t actually care about anything anymore. I know that sounds like an old person hing to say, but I mean that everything is superficial. We either don’t have the attention or the passion or the heart or the capacity for caring anymore. We care when other people care—we care when other people can see us caring. So the entire populace is incredibly malleable because if people are paying attention to a touchy subject for capital or establishment, well, manufacture another. Or, really, why even bother? It’s not like we’re going to do anything about it.
I thouht, for a brief moment, that Reddit was actually going to be hurt by a larger portion of people leaving. I thought, for a brief moment, that we were learning how to act as a collective to stick it to large companies treating us like the fuckin bottom of the barrel of capitalism that we’ve collectively become. We aren’t the customers anymore. Other goddamn companies are the customers. We’re the fuckin goods. And it’s so deeply disturbing to me that people just…don’t seem to care past recognizing this as the reality—if that.
I hate being a pessimist. But at what point is pessimism just realism about the bleak outlook for humanity?
I’m another snowflake but I feel like the protest did alot to slow down and water down reddit’s obvious money grab. Where I would have been a stockholder at their IPO before, I will now be warning others against it.
Yeah, nothing changed. People might say /r/all changed, but that place has always been crap and avoided by long time users in favor of subscribed feed.
It may be due to many different factors, but I’ve noticed a lot of content from my niche subs just downright fuckin sucks now. Like, a lot of posts are stupid af, either being a question that is very easily googled, or some sort of “pick me” bitch post try to low-key show off and humblebrag about something.
There used to be really good content like write-ups, visual guides, or discussion builders, but it feels like a lot of it is just grabbing at the low hanging fruit for fake internet points
Came to Lemmy because it’s FOSS and doesn’t fuck me in the ass
Meh the reddit software isn’t that important, and it was once mostly FOSS. It’s about the data, not the code. Spez has a ridiculous sense of entitlement.
The main thing I notice is how shitty the app is. Thats still my main complaint.
The reddit app? It never would have occurred to me to use that monstrosity. old.reddit.com still works (dk for how long), same with redreader, and my personal API client still works though they have been messing with that (certain endpoints no longer work through vpn’s).
Completely stopped using Reddit since they blocked third party apps in July 2023. I never accessed Reddit through other channels than smartphone.
Exactly. This wasn’t a protest as far as I’m concerned. They shut me out. So I no longer visit reddit or moderate any of my subreddits. It’s that simple
Yup. Both the desktop website and the official app are garbage UX. With no third party app option, I could not use Reddit even if I wanted to.
old.reddit is still usable, but I’ve also pretty much stopped using reddit since the blackout.
RedReader on mobile still works. You can find it in the fdroid app store. There’s also rtv for a terminal reddit client on the desktop.
Wait, how is it still working?
Just FYI, I can still access Reddit through the Infinity app on F-Droid on Android. I don’t have a clue why or how, but it works.
Same, my version of boost still works for some reason. No idea why but it’s useful if I’m trying to search for something
Leaving Reddit basically helped me use social media a lot less. And I’m proud of myself.
Yeah it has been nice. I definitely miss out on some news, but it’s worth it to avoid a lot of the other content there. I pop in with redreader every so often, but honestly it doesn’t seem worth it to ever fully go back.
Despite spending around 15 years on Reddit, I found it surprisingly easy to quit. I do miss some niche subreddits that just won’t get traction here, but overall my switch to Lemmy worked out for the best.
With that being said, Reddit is still going strong, and you’re deluded if you think this will change their IPO fortunes. The quality will plummet, but once the shares are owned and sold they won’t care.
It will definitely affect the ipo. Ipo’s are all based on expected growth. Any loss of users, mods, content, etc affects that. It was already in the news that whatever company wrote down the value of their holdings.
And people are getting wise to traffic numbers being inflated by bots.
As a moderator of a fairly large sub over there, I strongly suspect this is happening on a mass scale. According to our stats, we’re getting 120k unique views a month (dropped dramtically during the exodus, but has seemingly returned to normal now), but posts rarely get more than 20 upvotes or comments. I know most redditers are lurkers, but even still, that just seems like an oddly high number of views.
Give it time. Eventually the AI with learn to completely mimic human activity. Just not their actual spending habits.
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In fact, they’ve already failed their quarterly projections from ad revenue which has already negatively affected their IPO evaluation.
I’ve been having trouble finding another site with so many sub topics.
I’d use discord - but you have to manually find each room. There’s no generic search function (not that I’ve found on mobile anyway - feel free to correct me)
If there’s another large site I could use (other then lemmy which lacks the numbers) let me know. I’m watching reddit die and I genuinely feel the void it’s leaving in my heart.
Damn I hate Discord for information. It’s not open. It’s nice as a chat (except for the whole thing with using Electron), but not for having information available.
I used to be a daily Reddit doomscroller, but now I just vibe on Lemmy. I only ever visit reddit now to experience my niches that don’t yet have a community here, and that’s just to watch, not contribute.
I look forward to the future, where communities aren’t corralled into one website, where different interests can be free of anything overarching.
I somehow end up doom scrolling here on Lemmy. Seems all my feed is news and technology is doom and gloom. I wish there were more discussions and jokes in the comments like ask reddit had. I participate every once in a while but I miss lurking and reading this type of content on my phone.
Doomscrolling bad news is really bad for your health. https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/what-is-doomscrolling-and-why-is-it-bad-for-us/143139/
Bad news is also literally addictive and it is important to break that habit https://www.fastcompany.com/90269566/how-to-stop-your-brains-addiction-to-bad-news
I’d suggest subscribing to some of the more positive news threads on Lemmy. I ended up blocking those ones that only seem to post negative stuff. The world is a bad enough place as it is without Lemmy ramming it down my throat to. I’d also suggest regularly visiting other positive news sites to remind yourself that there is good news happening, you just don’t hear about it from the normal places. Certainly helps put things into perspective. https://www.groovnow.com/blog/where-to-find-good-news-online
It’s important to try and stay happy, friend, now more than ever.
Thanks for reminding - that is a good point. Do you have any good mood communities here on Lemmy to recommend?
Sure! There’s goodnews@kbin.social, lemmybewholesome@lemmyworld, goodnewseveryone@sh.itjust.works and upliftingnews@lemmy.world. They’re all small communities, but they’re worth checking out. I’d recommend those news sites on that link I listed to. Definitely eye opening to see all the good stuff that is just ignored by the mainstream media. Stay positive out there, friend! 👍
Thank you so much! I sincerely appreciate your suggestions and have already subscribed to the communities. I actually have already noticed lemmybewholesome, but I havent known there were the other ones as well, so thank you a lot for the information :)
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In response to such critiques, Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”
Never before has the sheer inevitability of enshittification been so aptly summarized.
I used to spend hours a day on Reddit, if you add up all the little time waster breaks I take just scrolling on Baconreader.
Now i rarely visit the site.
There are DOZENS OF US!
Author didn’t seem to have a clue. Many of us didn’t protest or leave because of the fact that they implemented charges for their API - nope, was totally open to that! - it was the way they started charging.
I don’t think I’m alone either here. So many were open to paying fair prices for usage. But reddit repeatedly promised it’d be fair and reasonable. For months. And then when they finally dropped pricing info it was outlandish and would be taking effect before third parties had a chance to make appropriate changes.
This amounted to a power play meant to drive mobile users back to the reddit app. Why? Money and control. Bad for mods, users, and developers, it was a selfish play I will never forgive them for.
How did the author not know this, or if they did, why was it not front and center? Feels like they were parroting company talking points.
And if you add how Steve Huffman(Reddit’s CEO, AKA u/spez) lied and manipulated information about the API talks, painting the third party developers as greedy, money hungry assholes, then got caught with his pants down when the recorded call was made public, shows how absolutely planned that move was.
Eh it failed in the most reddit way imaginable: Most of the users are too addicted to astroturf accounts posting heckin puppers and epic memes to organise a boycott beyond a few days. Reddit ownership knew how pathetic the “protest” was going to be from the outset and didn’t even bother trying to disrupt it beyond nudging out a few of the remaining holdouts on subs too small to matter in the grand scheme.
All the mods who thought they were irreplaceable just discovered their users are all the more happy to digest low quality slop moderated by amateurs who are more interested in the title than doing anything to protect the quality of said content.
People are even relenting and PAYING for access to the API to use previously-free apps.
…and yet, here we are. I left Reddit recently because of the drop in quality, and a lot of folks I know agree that it sucks even if they aren’t yet tapped into the fediverse. The internet still has a lot of friction and inertia. These things take time. But the momentum has shifted. These social media cesspools can’t last, even the most idiotic knuckledraggers will eventually smell the stink.
The downside is that they will find their way here. Lemmy will be bigger and less cool. Eternal September, am I right?
I found in recent years the quality was hit by spammers who were basically regurgitating content from other social media sites and spamming it to whatever subs would allow. Even though they’d get banned they’d have like a dozen alts, all co-mods on the same subreddits, and just make new accounts to get around it. You’d report them for ban evasion and nothing would happen. It would be political spam too, like you’d have accounts posting to “antifascist” subs and red pill subs just so they could cover all the bases.
Speaking of quality, it basically became the things your parents like on Facebook or Google Image results for “epic internet meme.” Political humor was reduced to AI images of angry Trump looking damp with captions like “oh no I’m going to jail.” For niche-interest subs it basically becomes people posting pictures of boxes of products they bought or asking which products to buy, people getting angry and debating about products and people who sell products.
Case in point that Oliver guy who would sell his books and shit on his subreddits and respond to every comment with links to his own blog posts, sold anti-Trump merch that hilariously looked like it was pro-Trump, posted ACAB stuff but also made racist copaganda comics, pretended to be an enlightened leftist but also wrote a red pill book about how rape is natural. Guy got banned for harassing mods of other subs and got his network of 20+ spam subreddits and dozens of alts banned, but the admins don’t do anything when they try and rebuild their spam network.
Gangrene is natural, etc., etc.
The pathetic-ness of the system stems within the fact that Moderators and Subreddit Creators cannot delete the Subreddits they created. I don’t know how we didn’t see this as a red flag.
/HFY did. A ton of authors including Hambone stopped posting there at all around 2018 or 2019 because we found out that Reddit was claiming that they owned our work, since we had posted it to Reddit, or something like that
What is /HFY and who is Hambone? Sorry for my ignorance.
Humanity, Fuck Yeah! It was a subreddit that focused on a subsection of Science Fiction, where humanity is frequently not the underdog at all.
Hambone is the author of The Deathworlders series, also referred to as The Jenkinsverse.
https://deathworlders.com/books/deathworlders/chapter-00-kevin-jenkins-experience/
That “chapter” got posted and Hambone forgot about it for five years, then came back and posted a chapter a month for seven(?) years to turn it into a book. It’s a long book.
He did this because at least three other authors wrote their own stories in the universe he created.
Salvage (this one is only canon until Adrian attempts to “blow up” a black hole. Something like chapter 73 or so. Jennifer Delaney, the main female protagonist, makes an appearance in The Deathworlders)
Humans Don’t make good pets ( Canon, but we never meet the unnamed main protagonist in The Deathworlders)
The Xiu Chang Saga (Totally canon, and Xiu becomes one of the main characters in The Deathworlders)
All of these can also be found as audiobooks, in varying degrees of completion, on YouTube. There’s also a guide somewhere as to when all this stuff takes place. A large amount of it takes place between chapters 0 and 1 of The Deathworlders.
Your passion for these stories is endearing. I’m going to check them out.
HFY = Humanity Fuck Yeah! A place for writers to post their stories about humans being awesome. Many of them were sci-fi space operas which is what I loved.
I deleted a 13 yr old account due to spez’s fuckery and I haven’t been back. I used to be very active in several subs but now I want fedi to happen.
On the note of traffic, I still browse Reddit because it has niche communities that I want to interact with. However, I don’t comment, post, or even up/downvote anymore. My interaction is now purely browsing, and I imagine it may be similar for other once-power users.
Unfortunately Reddit became such a database of niche information it’s damn near unavoidable when it seems to comprise most of my search results nowadays.
I redirect from reddit to lemmy in my main web browser. I wish there were some sort of proxy so I could read reddit without that information being lost - but that’s exactly the sort of service the API changes have killed. Fuck them for what they did to reddit.
archive team runs a distributed effort to scrape and archive all of reddit, it gets uploaded to archive.org, so at least a large amount of it is accessible through there
Well that’s good at least but ideally I’d like some way of automating it like through an extension. I try viewing an answer to a question on reddit, and I get redirected to somewhere that stores the answer without giving reddit any traffic.
Same here. I actually went a step further and decided to browse the site permanently logged off. I do not wanna access my old account anymore (which I still didn’t delete).
This is what I do. Also, I mostly access reddit from a RSS feed so I don’t even really visit the site much. I read everything I want in my feed reader, and maybe look at the comments on the site if a particular post looks interesting. Never logged in, never comment, never vote on a post.
Good.
This is the way.
I’m still glad Reddit actually lets you browse their site logged off.
That’s something that Twitter-I mean X doesn’t do anymore.
I am the same - I obliterated all my posts and comments, and try to see whatever answer I can’t find elsewhere, and run.
It was much easier than I thought it would be, which was a nice surprise. :)
I only use reddit for tech related inquiries, but besides that I quit it.
I went from 8 hours of screen time a day to an average of 2 to 3 hours and Lemmy often isn’t on the top. For me it has to do with a lack of content at some point, but I started enjoying it like that. If there’s nothing new, I shouldn’t have a reason to stick around in an app
Reddit having a huge audiences feels more like a disadvantage than a advantage
I was on reddit for 12 years. My time spent on that platform and posting directly correlates to when I first found it (posted a lot) vs. when I quit earlier this year.
Reddit in it’s infancy was great and the users and the subreddits, with a few notable exceptions were great too.
Once it got too big/popular… About 6 years ago you could note the decline and quality of the posting
Weird how it feels manageable to keep in the loop on Lemmy compared to Reddit. I like it a lot more.
Exactly. I still occasionally land there due to google searches for obscure tech issues, but that’s only to read and lurk. I used to be a regular poster, (I had ~1.2m karma between all my various accounts) but haven’t even commented since the API lockout.
Damn! That’s an insane amount of dedication lost to greed :(
Well that’s the issue. Reddit as a tool/service is fine. The only thing that I have an issue with is the api / third party app stuff and their leadership. Subs like Homelab , league , etc are ones I used heavily and they still function the same more or less. I just lurk more and use Reddit in browser with an extension that helps.
Lemmy and the various instances and apps are cool, but the lack of content(or content creators rather) is what makes it a little depressing. Outside of memes and discussions like this, it doesn’t replace Reddit because the user base is like 10+ years behind. I can show up and find posts from days ago which just leads me to keep using Reddit and rss for new content
