Question: People who still frequent Reddit, has it gone back to business as usual or are the protests still having effect?
Question: People who still frequent Reddit, has it gone back to business as usual or are the protests still having effect?
I haven’t gone back since Apollo shut down, and not planning to, but I am curious.
I love the sound and view of a good trashfire, so I sometimes go look and see how hard it's burning.
So /r/madlads Mods did what madlads do: They made everyone a moderator just like /r/politicalhumor did from the beginning of the protest. I brought the idea up to the /r/pics mod just to let them know. Would be funny as hell.
Postwise, Bots started reposting content from 2-3 years ago, ChatGPT was spotted multiple times as a replying user and smaller subs returned to normal, but are slowly drowning in spambot posts or switched to approval-only due to the failing tools.
EDIT: A major antispambot on reddit closes down today by unbanning EVERY SINGLE SPAMBOT on reddit. Did I mention that I love watching things burn down?
To me it feels like the whole ordeal shook reddit quite a bit and made maybe the top 10% of the users drop out of the bucket this way, going to the Fediverse (flavors: lemmy, kbin, mastodon) as far as I can tell right now. Tildes and squabbles got some users, too, but IMHO those seem to be not doing well so far.
I've only been back to visit a small, private sub, but I've seen a lot of posts here saying that a high percentage of bot content is obvious. The conjecture is that there's always been a lot of bots, but they were somewhat less obvious because there was more human content. With a lot of big content creators leaving, it's more apparent when a lot of posts and comments are from bots.
Plus some people think Reddit has increased bot usage to astroturf against the protests and to give the illusion that traffic isn't down.
I'm jumping between Reddit and Lemmy. Some subreddits have all of their mods booted out (r/GoCommitDie and r/OpenAI are two I can think of). Some subreddits have decided to flag their subreddit as NSFW but are being threatened by Reddit to reverse that move, and many have returned to business as usual.
Let's face it. We've lost the API protest. All we can do now is make Lemmy popular and make it attractive to other users. Give people an incentive to actually join here. Our job here is not to make Lemmy a copy of Reddit. We need to make Lemmy different (in a good way!).
And here's an unpopular opinion: we need to make Lemmy easy to use and understand. If normies find Lemmy difficult to use or understand, then we're fucked.
My personal opinion is that normies might get confused by the fediverse and might be turned away by thinking they need to make an account on every single instance in order to participate in them. I am not proposing that we get rid of federation. What I am proposing is that we somehow make it clearer to everyone that all you really need is one account and you can get access to everywhere. I don't know how we can do this, but I'm sure there is someone who knows.
Reddit has made it easy now that my mobile apps are gone. Also, my main account got permananned on Tuesday apparently out of comment posted 5 years ago about spez. Also, a niche sub I followed was taken over by a Nazi when the historical mod got kicked out by reddit and now that's gone too.
Reddit has slipped into being irrelevant very quickly.
I mean, half the good subs are still gone. I can't even use my home feed anymore, its half just video game subs now. Places like r/interestingasfuck were regular features in my feed that were pretty important to it being a pleasant experience overall. I balanced that shit.
Now its all fucked. I still have my account and still go there, to poke around and participate in some of those video game subs, where reddit is still clearly dominant. But hanging out has gotten kinda lame.
You can see a lot of communities being closed or not back to normal. My feeling is that this whole thing will leave a big scar on reddit for a long time, and it will probably never heal, because it was mostly hitting core users who were there for a long time. Maybe they calculated that most users are lurkers who use mobile, and the rest is people using old reddit?
The problem is that it's not a good idea to upset the mods, but reddit also works with content, and it's a complex chemistry between people who post new things and how the mods regulate it to make sure their sub has quality. I guess that a lot of mods don't care, or maybe they don't care now but will care later? Maybe new subreddits will open with other mods.
Eitherway, reddit is ready to sacrifice a good fraction of its quality and trust to extract money out of it, but reddit users are not instagram users.
It was more and more difficult to make reddit interesting by avoiding some subreddits and searching for subreddits that were more and more niche, but at some point you feel that something is lost after the whole "increase quantity, dilute quality" phase.
Reddit is also getting more polarized and politics have really poisoned the site to a degree never seen before, Trumpists were present there for waaaaay too long, and it attracted a lot of conservatives and right wing users who don't fit with the usual reddit crowds. It managed to survive after a looooot of drama, but after all this, maybe the core users of reddit are just tired, and might slowly quit the ship, and maybe reddit will see the same problems twitter is currently having, with conservative etc running rampant.
I wish reddit would have stood up with its core users who are mostly liberals/leftists, instead of compromising and letting fascists thrive there.
I use my country's subreddit and it seems the right wing phase is being felt more and more, I'm feeling even the mods start to get tired because of it. every month I'm surprised by the opinions of the comments I see on this sub. Maybe it also reflects world politics, but I'm not sure. Sometimes I get paranoid and I imagine that astroturfers are often around to leave a mean comment, or downvote things that doesn't fit their agenda.
The upside is that reddit still managed to hold up for much longer than digg.
R/cyberpunkgame turned NSFW since, you know, the game features such things as a dick slider for your character and fully rendered sex scenes with prostitutes, and reddit is hilariously trying to turn it back into being marked as SFW.
r/linux is turning into a noob subreddit where people copy and paste rule #1 (no support, it isn't a support forum) and then try to offer support because nothing else is going on.
You know, the way you tell your cat to get off the table by giving it a nice piece of chicken and telling the cat it can't get chicken by coming to the table again.
To those people who looked back and are shocked by how horrid that place is: yes, it was always that bad, full of hatred and despair, you just never realized it until you've experienced something good here.
The most important thing for us then is to keep this place good. It's not going to be easy, but we'll try.
IMO the protests are having an effect. I haven't been on there for 2 days (full disclosure: was given 1 week suspension under dubious pretense while I was mass editing + deleting all my comments), but, before then there was a huge undercurrent support for the protests but a lot of outright hostile naive complaints regarding them. At this point it feels like the majority of those that are willing to leave have left, and the rest is a dumpster fire of increased hostility. Everyone is angry for seemingly ridiculous reasons. You can't post anything without somebody saying something absurdly contrarian within a day or 2. TBH I really think there's a 'instill anger' bot program (and its replicants) running amok now and the moderators can't (or are unwilling to) keep up with it.
For me, I check reddit like once or twice in a day where I just check what on popular and on r/all for like 5 minutes on my desktop. Also to checkout r/OMSCS and that's about it. Lemmy is where I am at most of the time now lol. I used use the official app and its so garbage but it was so addicting for me to use before the Apollo drama. Now that addiction isn't quite there anymore and Lemmy hasn't been super addicting for me and I like this feeling a lot.
I have been going back to tell people about alternatives like Lemmy. It's weird, if you just visit surface level it looks just about the same but looking more closely things feel off. Things feel a little bit more stagnant and it seems that less content is being generated. Bigger subs that have made efforts to protest seem to be more missing from popular, but others are pretending nothing is wrong and largely are unchanged.
That being said my front page is completely ruined. Like half the subs I was part of have gone quiet or are full of protest posts so it's very noticable.
Hmm, i checked out the FP and a few of the subs I used to frequent. Front page seems to have more TikTok style crap than ever, like "guy gets punched!" or "someone makes annoying food!". Relationship advice: "get divorced!!".
City subs seem about the same as before. Medical subs I used to read seem about the same and holy shit, am I glad I'm not reading those every day. Same questions and memes that have been rotating through for like 5 years, and the confounding pattern where the community consensus on issues changes from week to week or post to post. One week it's "this term is offensive and I hate it" and 50 people are "YEAH! That's right!" and then the next, "don't you know about this term, it's perfectly valid" and 30 people are "YEAH! Use your brain if you have one broo!!". And the questions like "does anyone else with this condition suffer from these extremely common effects that are listed in every medical article about it?" So anyway whether reddit has gotten worse or not, seems like I was ready for something different.I have been enjoying Lemmy a lot that I did not even care for Reddit, seems that they finally killed Boost, and I was not even aware LMAO.
It had been steadily getting worse over the past month and since July 1st it’s fallen off a cliff really. It actually seems noticeably quieter imo.
The Finnish language r/Suomi is shut down so the Finn's have moved to the English language r/Finland, making it all confused with languages now.
I only used Reddit for reading, haven't had an account in a long time. I checked r/all the past few days and it's had basically the same top stories every day. After seeing all the same things again today, I decided I'm not going back, just a waste of time. Any interesting happenings in the world are making it to my All/Top Active Lemmy RSS feed. Let's keep it up!
Most subreddits are no longer private, but a lot of them are still protesting in various ways. If I were an advertiser viewing the chaos on Reddit, I'd hold off on buying ads there.
Permanently Deleted
I don't see much protest anymore on the subreddits I'm subscribed to. Just feels like it is overall more quiet than before.
I only visit from time to time to check if there are interesting links shared. If so I share this link here on Lemmy.
I'll be honest I revanced the RIF app so i can still use it like I always have for the time being until it breaks. I don't notice much difference, but since using Lemmy it's really made me notice how crap Reddit had actually become. I genuinely check Lemmy more and post more here. It's more engaging and so far the people are nice. I'm still new here tho and still finding my feet on navigation etc but it's making a lot more sense now!
I probably will still check Reddit on RIF whilst it still works as I do like the niche subs and they are still active for me. I did initially try the official Reddit app and jesus what a mess that is, I will not use it once RIF permanently breaks. So I'm still there but more lurking than posting.
Seems to be nearly business as usual. There are still fuck spez posts and some are still blackout or marked nsfw. Boost was still working fine until today so I kept using it
It’s had a noticeable drop in quality since the protests. Still has loads more content than Lemmy, but Quantity ≠ Quality. I still check it for news/worldsnews/politics, but there’s really nothing important even there that isn’t on Lemmy as well.
I'd signed up for an account here once the ridiculousness started, but didn't start frequenting until just now (first post) because Boost stopped working completely. Ah well, definitely not installing the official app. I was over there for 12 years or so too. I have a feeling lurkers won't really care and keep using the site just like there are people who still use Facebook and what-not, but it certainly won't ever be cool again.
I was wondering if what reddit did was on purpose to lower their pre-IPO valuation so insiders could get a better price before it goes public. After the IPO they entice people back with reasonable API policy and then they can demonstrate huge user growth to boost stock price... Nobody working with investors on preparing for an IPO is going to do something this stupid without major pushback from the investor advisors.
Watch this space...
Since so many decent folks have left Reddit, proportionally, there are more bigots now. I never log in anymore and when I am there it's to find something specific.
There ain’t really shit there it feels like. Scrolling through all feels bad and the Reddit app just spams adds and sucks ass. I’m here now, against my wishes 🤷♀️ but I want to see good news and shit. Not garbage
Deleted my 15 year old Reddit account yesterday. It’s the same shit over there as per usual.
There will be better things. I hope it’s here. I just worry once the corps realize a competitor what they’ll do to it. (Bots, law suits, what else?)
Many subs seem to have lost most of their activity.
I've been farming it for content for a few communities here. The last month worth of content is pretty bad. Where before 8 in 10 posts were on target now maybe two in 10 posts are on target.
Moderators are kind of over the b******* in many of the subreddits.
Feels like the type of content posted on Reddit these days are one of those low-effort meme-like posts that you'd often seen on Twitter.
I have not been entirely off reddit yet, party to message mods in communities I like if they haven't moved yet, to ask them if they will.
Business as usual there but traffic is down. Dumpster fire mods, bad taste, shitty discussions, everything you expect is still there.
Business as usual for the subs I frequent. I wish they'd move over to Lemmy but the infertility/IVF group is a super tight knit community and likely won't move over. I've known most of the users for 5 years. If it weren't for them I'd have deleted my Reddit account but all I did was delete the official app (I had the Reddit app and RIF).
I will go on to check the Ukraine subs as I have friends in Ukraine. I also check out some local ones, and also /PICS as it's now NSFW so Reddit can't get any money from that. In the Ukraine and Local ones, I do take a lot of posts and put them here to help out the communities here grow.
Sports, games, tech support subs I frequent all seem to have the similar level of activity.
Boost for reddit is still working so I still go there. Many subs are fighting, including /r/noncredibledefense. There are a lot of subs going NSFW but reddit is forcing them to go back to being SFW. /r/NCD is genuinely NSFW at times so i'm not sure what will happen to them. Once Boost for Lemmy comes out, i'm hopping onto lemmy fulltime :)
I still visit a few small, specialized subs. None of the population of the subs has had any interest in leaving reddit because there's almost no noise in the signal already.
It is very specific as to which subs died and which have continued without much change. My feed is mostly unchanged over at reddit minus maybe the startrek subs that made a hard move.
I still haven't found "ACTIVE" lemmy equivalents to a number of subs and search results still drive me back to reddit to read really good technical threads.
Also this community and other threads like it are somewhat annoying.. So much talk about Twitter and Reddit here instead of building other interesting content.
I visit some technical subreddits and many of them, particularly open source centric ones, kept up the blackout long enough that people went elsewhere. It's difficult to discern between having a slow week or the active posters moving elsewhere, though. Popular subreddits are mostly back to normal, but the more niche ones, whose diversity and quantity were the draw of reddit for me, are far from business as usual.
I might check it out once a week to see the dumpster fire using the Stealth app on f-droid. It's read-only, doesn't support accounts, and has a web scrape mode in the settings which still works for porn.
Even with ad blocking on maximum and Privacy Possum to twist the knife, the few times I had to, it felt... dirty. I'll make the extra effort of loading a cached version of the
old.subdomain, but even so.The protests are over and the methods of protest have actually worked against the spirit of the whole thing. John Oliver is being still being shoehorned into posts on r/aww and r/memes but its just bringing in more engagement and more views soooooo ya. Basically spez was right the whole time and ultimately made the best possible choice for profits. People want mindless entertainment and reddit will always deliver.
I have a few subs that I keep subscribed to but it is only a small handful. Basically I am done with that site. One or two refreshs and maybe a post. If I don't find the right communities here, I will just break down and create them.
Truthfully, nothing changed from my perspective. I mostly use some sports subs, a couple of technical subs, and book subs and they've fully gone back to how they were and seem as active as they were. Many mods in those subs received backlash after re-opening for even protesting at all, since many users didn't know or care about the issue to begin with.
I use it during work hours as a time waster, with uBlock on because fuck spez.
Totally dropped it on mobile tho, using only wefwef on my phone :)
Depends. For me, all the subreddits I care about have reopened. But I wouldn't say back to business as usual
My main page feels about the same, maybe a bit more sparse and slow. But I have about 650 subs in my filter list, which includes most of the big, popular subs, so if there was much impact on the popular areas I probably wouldn't see it.
The porn is still decent, but it does feel like a lower quality overall than I’m used to.
My app only really stopped working yesterday.
I wouldn't say massively different, but I do find it pretty stale content wise recently. Only started using Lemmy today and worry that it's just a bit empty content wise for the moment...
I went through the oficial app to check how r/pics is, for exemple.
It doesn't even show on the search bar. The only way to go to the subreddit is by searching on google.
They are hidding the protests. As for the content, it seems it has decreaded. I don't enjoy it as much. Right now I just lurk on some subreddits, but do not intereact (I refuse to contribut and create a new account).
I’m read only now. Haven’t logged in to my accounts since beginning of June.
I use “old.reddit.com”, but otherwise content/posts/comments are all on lemmy now.
I was on Reddit for about a decade. I scrolled around yesterday. Any good sub I followed is either abandoned or taken over by the same garbage the other generic subs post. It's kind of pathetic.
/r/casualuk seems unaffected and thats about all i go back for
Neither. The content is just gone. Whatever is there is just low effort garbage or botted reposts
I stopped posting after I nuked my posts and edited all my comments. If I am searching on Google for something and the answer is on Reddit I will visit it. Otherwise I just visit 2 country subs(from 100+ I was subscribed to), mostly for news but I use libreddit and I am logged out. You can pick one from here https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit-instances/blob/master/instances.md , I mostly use https://r.nf
It almost seems like business as usual, but there are definitely fewer posts, and people don't seem to be posting as often. And you can tell in some of the subs that the mods have taken a step back to some degree.
Sync user & 13 yrs using Reddit pretty much daily. I've deleted my account & can't see any reason to go back to that kind of usage but there are one or 2 niche subreddits that I do still occasionally have a nosey at via a browser.
It was going back to normal, but now they’ve made an even bigger fuckup (removing the ENTIRE AWARDS SYSTEM) so it won’t last.
Before complete migrating to here my reddit home feed got some random subreddits i never visited. Like random posts from r/doordash The quality of the feed just declined but reddit is still very usable I personally think this protest is an utter failure
