Advertising Lemmy on r/place
Advertising Lemmy on r/place
Reddit has decided to run another edition of r/place in mid July for some unimaginable reason.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/1387534
It seems to me that it would be stupid to not at least attempt to advertise for Lemmy given the perfect opportunity. Many have expressed concerns about giving reddit more traffic, but a few thousand users is less than a rounding error to reddit. However, getting a few thousand more redditors to move to Lemmy would be great for us.
Hopefully I can get a few sh.itheads to help in this noble endeavor. If not, at least I tried.
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Why on Earth would they run r/place not only in the middle of July but right in the middle of a massive fight with their user base?
To boost the active users numbers
And based on everyone’s excitement to participate seems like their plan is working.
Agreed... Feels like everyone is falling for this hook, line, and sinker.
The goal is to get people back on Reddit, doesn't matter what you're doing. For how many people are still on Reddit complaining, it clearly doesn't matter that much to people.
99.999% of people never left reddit in the first place... this is our chance to get some of those people that either never heard about Lemmy or were discouraged by the complexity of the whole thing the first time around, but might be primed to make the leap now
Yeah, Nah. Fuck the joint. Haven't logged in since the purge.
Are we sure about that? Many people exclusively used third party apps and wouldn't use it otherwise
It's too early know right now. We do know that a very small percentage actually came to Lemmy. My assumption is that most of the people who cared enough to stop using reddit would have looked for an alternative, and other alternatives like Tildes and Squabbles are much smaller than even Lemmy.
But I suppose its possible that a significant portion of users simply stopped using reddit without a replacement. I doubt it, but we don't know for sure.
I know a lot of people just use TikTok and Instagram and don't care to find an alternative, but I don't know what that number scales to outside of my personal circles
Yes I was also thinking of this scenario, which I believe is quite common. But those people also probably didn't spend too much time on reddit in the first place
I evaluated both and decided pretty quickly that lemmy was the way to go.
I bounced off of the sign-up and initial subscription setup a few times, unfortunately it was during that business with beehaw and I still have ‘pending’ subscriptions that will never be allowed or recieved :P
All in all, the things that made me pick lemmy were:
- The atmosphere in discussions (the agora on sh.itjust.works was having excellent back and forth)
- Documentation for self-hosting and openness of the code
- Selfawareness of problems the platform faced
- The boom in 3rd party apps
Even I have to admit, most of my reasons were lucky, timely and niche.
Even I have to admit, most of my reasons were lucky, timely and niche.
Very mature of you to recognize this. I also find myself thinking about how lucky I was to end up here. I easily could have bounced off beehaw and lemmy.ml and gone right back to reddit. I just happened to see the name sh.itjust.works with open sign-ups and the rest is history. Then there were dozens of exceptional posts and comments that drew me into the community immediately. Almost seems like fate.
Except I don't think it is, I think that the quality of discussion on Lemmy, which is of primary importance, is just that much better than reddit. All the bugs and lack of niche communities and everything else that people complain about here doesn't matter to me, as long as I know that I can come here and express my thoughts and really be heard.
No they didn't.
i'm sure at least one person did
Reddit's own number had 3PA users at 5% or something like that.
I think they made the bet that they will earn more from boosting the monthly active user numbers than they would lose from the bad image drawn by Lemmy trolls, and I'm not sure the outcome is obvious.
The outcome is obvious. Admins will remove anything they don't want people to see and they'll have accomplished their goal of pumping their engagement numbers.
Bread and circuses 🎪
Which raises the question: if the point is to raise the number of active users for July, what do they plan on doing for August? Like, a slow descent from June to July to August wouldn't look great to a potential investor, but surely a steady increase to July followed by a sheer cliffface down to August would look even worse right??
Shhh. Neoliberism doesn't worry about the future, neoliberism is only interest in the profits that can be had today. Questions like "what will we do next month?" or "what if our greed makes the earth inhospitable to life?" are not welcome.
Which is why their valuation had already halved. Do you guys consider your arguments even beyond the surface level? A company doing dumb things and then tanking because of it is not an argument against capitalism. If it were the only local option run by the community (as would be in the most unrealistic and ideal anarchist worldview), you'd be here same as it is currently but your local community production would still be supporting that option. Bad leadership and dumb incentives are not the sole domain of corporate structures.
Their valuation halved back at the start of June. Since then, they've tried every sleazy trick they can think of to claw it back before their IPO. All of those changes will have negative long term impacts but the staff don't care since they'll bail the moment they have their cash.
The rest of your comment is just you taking a wild guess at my political opinions and getting them wrong.
I'm not so sure that it will have negative long term impacts. The damage has been done. They don't see reversing it as improving their chances to turn things around. In terms of investors, if they are willing to shell out cash for Reddit right now, maybe they deserve their fate.
I'm terms of your political opinion, the only thing I know is you don't like capitalism. You either don't understand the definition of it, subscribe to what I addressed broadly, or believe in a former dead form of economic system. Really, it's on you to be specific.
So "the damage has been done" but also, "it won't have negative long term impacts", even as people leave the site and are openly hostile towards it's staff?
It sounds like you're awkwardly trying to reconcile "using predatory API pricing to increase ad impressions is bad, but corporations milking customers for everything they can is good and resisting that is pointless".
Also, I never mentioned capitalism at all, I mentioned neoliberalism. My bet is that you thought I was a tankie and this was your chance to show everybody just how clever and rational and realist you were.
Bettee luck next time I guess.
You mentioned an order of events, I followed it. The damage was done and then priced in. They have been attempting to do damage control to limit its scope and investors are betting on the likelihood of a cascade.
Now who's jumping to conclusions? Personal attacks are a logical fallacy but thanks for making your own bad faith approach blatantly obvious.
There are as many different definitions of neoliberalism as there are people that know the term. Your argument is a populist one.
Personal attacks are a logical fallacy but thanks for making your own bad faith approach blatantly obvious.
Which means that you're not inherently wrong just because you're an apologist dildo looking for any excuse to white knight for billionaires.
But you can still be wrong and you can still be an apologist dildo.
Shrieking "Ad Hominem!" when people grow tired of your ineptly masked bullshit isn't a magic "win argument" button.
It is however a good way to get blocked. So go nuts. Tell us all about how flawless capitalism is and pretend you won something when I don't reply.
I addressed your core points directly. Your attacks are rapidly devolving. Capitalism is not flawless which is why I mentioned the term externalities that you conveniently ignored. It means I am trying to get you to actually address problems instead of using intentionally vague but radical language. Does this normally work for you with anyone that doesn't already agree with you?
Launch their IPO? Get the capital while the numbers are hot?
I'd imagine there are a few reasons, but the TL;DR is... money.
- This year's April Fools event was terrible. Most people were unable to participate as they didn't understand it and those that did participate worked on the event in a couple of different Discord servers, not on Reddit itself (because Reddit is terrible for real-time communication). It was also largely unannounced so it was pretty challenging to find and that couldn't have been good for the site's revenue - as controversial as r/place is going to be this year, it's going to bring in a lot of money for the site (and increase the number of active users) because even people that have left Reddit will probably return to put "FUCK SPEZ" on the canvas.
- The API controversy is ongoing and shows no signs of ending currently. I think they're trying to distract people from the API changes and hope that people think "wow, Reddit is fun, I'll stick around" after r/place ends instead of becoming less active or leaving the site entirely. r/place will also probably be discussed quite widely for the next few weeks and Reddit probably hopes that this will lead to the API changes being forgotten about (like plenty of other controversies in the site's history - newer Redditors have no idea about the r/jailbait controversy or u/spez editing comments, for example).
Ultimately, Reddit are going to be collecting data from r/place and using it to encourage investors to invest in Reddit.
I don't even remember this year's April thing?
Yes, I never saw anything about it .. Then again I hate April fool's.