I don't think anything went wrong. Reddit decided it was time to fully close the garden. And that's that. You can take it or leave it.
The people in the Lemmy verse decided to leave it. Luckily lemmy is here and we're here with Lemmy.
I also noticed a significant decrease in quality of content on Reddit on the subs I used to enjoy. The people who used to post and comment on there just simply don't, and garbage posts get to the top of my front page much more. I consciously decide to use it less (even though my mobile app of choice, Relay, still works for free for now), and it's not even all that hard.
Nothing went wrong. Reddit's desire to monetize simply trumps everything.
We were witnessing enshittification process in full force.
Nothing "went wrong" with it. It was simply never possible. Reddit controlled whether those 3rd party apps could function, and Reddit wanted those 3rd party apps to cease functioning.
Ultimately, what went wrong is that most Reddit users were screeching at individual leaves littering their garden, without noticing the tree creating those leaves on first place. They failed to connect the dots between: arbitrary bans, subreddit suspensions, user-on-user harassment, the idiotic way that rules are enforced, the presence of powermods, then Reddit trying to get rid of the powermods, the 3PA being killed... while focusing too much on a braindead clown called Steve Huffman.
It's all about profits. You can't enforce any demand if you don't make Reddit lose money. Blackouts and John Oliver posting only go so far, you need to migrate out of the platform. And if you're staying in the platform you need to transform it into an advertiser-hostile shithole. But for that you need more coordination than just "HURR DURR WE WRITE FUCK SPEZ IN PLACE LOL LMAO".
The John Oliver thing was so dumb. Like, so what? Doesn't matter if you're posting John Oliver as a protest, you're still using the platform on a sub that allows advertisement.
The only thing that could actually go anywhere was making the subs NSFW, since those will actually hurt Reddit's finances, but obviously they forced the subs to revert and most easily gave up.
I think that the John Oliver thing was useful to raise awareness, but people eventually confused a situational strategy with an actual solution.
Besides NSFW-ing, mods could've also promoted ad blocker usage, the sort of consumption criticism that advertisers outright despise, scorched the earth (slowly removing content from the subs), and harshly restricting the scope of the subreddit, not just through a "haha John Oliver" but a permanent solution. Or just stop moderating at all, since all those clowns that u/ModCodeOfConduct is putting on the place of older mods are incompetent clowns and powertrippers.
Honest question: how is Lemmy safer against power tripping mods, user-on-user harassment and everything else? Sure it's a super nice place now but eventually the powertippers etc. will pop up. ?
The federation itself alleviates those problems.
In Reddit those problems backtrack to the Reddit admins giving no fucks about the users. Why would they? Even if the users are mistreated, network effect still keeps them in Reddit, as they don't want to lose the content.
Here in Lemmy however, if the admins of an instance are arseholes, negligent, stupid etc., their users will simply migrate to another instance. The users won't lose access to their content, and they know it.
And in some cases, admins of other instances might even defederate the instance with problematic admins, to protect their own users. (Specially useful when it comes to harassment, as harassers tend to gravitate towards the same places.)
So for example. In Reddit you got the powermods going rogue, being abusive towards the users, and the admins went like, "NOOOOO THEY'RE A PRECIOUS PART OF OUR COMMUNITY". Until the powermods turned against Reddit itself; then the admins took action. Here, the admins would need to act as soon as the powermods become an issue for the users, not just for themselves.
Additionally: it's hard to power-trip when you got a public modlog telling people what you did.
It contains the fallout of site-wide issues to some extent. Mods and user-on-user will still be issues. If one federation owner goes on a power trip everyone can just leave that server while continuing to use other Lemmy instances.
Essentially you'd only lose access to some subreddits instead of all of reddit in that situation.
You also would have 3rd party apps that would continue to work. Unlike now where apps like Sync are just down for a few months until they finish development for Lemmy.
But don't worry, reddit had a run of like 6-10 years there where mods weren't an issue so we have some time before that all starts.
Reddit already decided from the executive level they were gonna do it, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it
And nothing happened which caused ownership to override the executive leadership. A lot of people were mad, but they still used the site.
almost everyone I know that uses reddit just switched to the official app if they weren't using it already. Whether we want it or not a lot of normies started using reddit in the past few years and they just don't care.
Probably how a large amount of the subreddits participating in the blackout came back in a measly two days. Like Louis Rossmann said in his video describing the reddit api situation, all they see is that we'll put up with their bullshit 363 days a year...
maybe if all subreddits participating went dark or posted meaningless content (white squares,etc) there might have been a bigger inpact.
A lot of us moved to other platforms like Lemmy though, so I wouldn't say it was a complete failure.
Exactly this. All the f*** spez comments and complaints still generate discussions. Same as John Oliver photos. It needs to be meaningless noise
That being said, last I looked, the quality of discussions is now totally downhill there and as you mentioned, a lot of us have moved (and it seems to be mainly people you'd want to move too).
I'm happy that the psychopath crowd on Reddit didn't join us during the move
That and apathy/Ignorance of the issue. Especially with the younger generation (which is the majority of reddit now).
Tried to get a few smaller subs with a lot of Zoomers in them to join me, and their response was basically "bruh, who is spez?", "in your dreams", or "spez isn't a pedophile; quit making shit up". I mean just look at this. They straight-up attacked me:
You can see a lot of the sunk cost feeling going on in there.
Yeah I have never heard of spez being a pedophile. Unless he's been convicted you shouldn't be calling him that. It could be taken as defamation.
Also I fully get why people don't want to move. Lemmy is a great idea but it's a work in progress with a small user base. I lost my whole account not long ago. This a community which is already fragmented from moving platforms why would they go through that hell again when Lemmy might not even pan out.
Some people will, but I haven't installed the official Reddit app and only occasionally check it from my PC. 90% of my previous usage was based on the phone fro Sync Pro.
Nothing went wrong. Reddit knew from minute 1 they weren't going to negotiate this change (not in good faith, anyways).
Add to that, like everyone else is saying, the fact that they weren't actually pushed to change thier minds in the slightest by users when push came to shove; because yeah, some of us left, but a lot of us participated, said they weren't gonna back down...and went right back to Reddit when all was said and done.
(Not saying "the protests were a total bust" because, from what I understand at least, this happened to Digg in the past, and it wasn't immediately overtaken by Reddit. It happened in waves of users over time until it got eclipsed. Pretty sure it was bad policy change effecting users after bad policy change that made everyone start to pack up too, not just one. Part of me is hopeful that history is repeating).
But to circle back, basically the attempt was doomed to fail because the decision was made absolute long before any talk of protesting it was even a thought in anyone's mind.
The initial bust happened.
They screwed up with the most critical group. To cite Steve Ballmer: "developers, developers, developers, developers". Now tools like bot banning are gone.
Some moderators have stepped down or stayed till they were banned but in large they gave in. As nearly all posts in r/modnews have under 20% upvote ratio the mods are still not happy (e.g. 17% upvotes, 83% downvotes for the r/place announcement and comments are by large negative).
Btw. If you want to hurt Reddit: Post good content on Lemmy and cross-reference it on Reddit.
Btw. Lemmy won't replace Reddit. This might be hard but it's the truth and it might be the best for Lemmy as a big platform has a different flair compared to how Lemmy is right now.
Yup, that's the word for it. Initial burst. Definetly not the last.
That's gonna be fun for the new mods to deal with lol in fact, i think they already are.
Reddit had years to build up its content, and Rome wasn't built in a day (something i feel a lot of people easily forget, and not just in this case) so in some ways I can't blame them for not moving. It's like you said tho, the best way to hurt Reddit is to post good content elsewhere, and IDK, I feel like that could have been better than just bitterly staying.
That's not for us to decide, i think. Lemmy might be a whole different beast, but if enough people come in and bring the Reddit expierence to Lemmy, it just might. Maybe not a 100% replacement, it'll never be a 1:1 replacement after all, but just enough.
I'd say what went wrong was nobody did anything meaningfuk or cared. Nobody put their money where their mouth is and deleted their accounts, and staying off the site for 2 days was too much to ask of >80% of the users.
The Mods closed a few subs but didn't themselves do anything meaningful. They should have let reddit replace them if they actually cared. They should have moved their community to lemmy or kbin. The ones who did sick it out I'm grateful for, the rest cared too much about their own pride to bother trying to keep the admins in check.
Overall the reddit userbase since the pandemic are mostly entitled whiners who don't really give a shit as long as they get their twitter and TikTok reposts. There's literally only one piece of OC on the frontpage of reddit right now. There's not much value to going there anymore.
I'm done with Reddit, and honestly I haven't missed it. My time is now more full of hobbies and actual reading, I'm better off for deleting it.
I think this post, which is an attempt by mods to continue protesting, and its reception by users speaks for itself: https://np.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/158zf26/reminder_july_26_rworldbuilding_is_shut_down_no/
The hive mind went from "fuck spez we're staging an internet revolution" to "let it go already, nobody gives a shit, stop inconveniencing us with your real issues" in an instant. Basically, everyone's attention span has lapsed and if you keep talking about it people think you're killing their buzz. It's no longer a relevant problem for the vast majority of the userbase, if it ever even was.
So... how do you know what's on reddit front page again? I actually did leave and have no idea what's going on over there...
By just going on reddit once to see what's there, I would guess. Or by using a libreddit instance.
"meaningfuk" is a great typo! I'll see if I can start using it in real sentences.
This. The protesting subreddits should have been creating alternative communities at Lemmy and elsewhere while they were locked down or hidden for whatever, and then they'd have had real leverage when forced back open.
I've been using the Reddit app lately and it's absolute dogshit. It mostly shows me content that I didn't ask for. It trying hard to be tiktok or something. Very annoying. It functions differently from how most people use Reddit
More power to you .
The protests had a good run i would say. Had a critical mass, reddit needed to react in some form or another, it got good press coverage. Not bad.
IMHO the turning point was when reddit started to message automated threats to the mods. Instead of escalating it further most subs just folded. Even though the community, subs and mods still had the upper hand at the time. There was no way for reddit to replace the mods of thousands of subs. They couldnt do it in a timely manner with even a single subreddit(i dont remember which it was, interestingasfuck?). What followed was funny but had no meaningful impact in any way. NSFW, swearing, John Oliver. Who cares?Also a "fuck reddit" meme instead of "fuck spez" would have been IMHO a more impactful message since not only the ceo is a dickhead, the whole company sucks.
On top of just staying dark i think the community should have invested more time exposing the bullshit reddit was pulling off at the time. Like using bots powered by chatgpt. There was so much weird shit going on worth exposing.
I think part of the issue was that there needed to be a well promoted off-site hub for discussion and coordination established before action was taken.
It worked for me, I haven't really used reddit much since July 1st. That's good enough for me. It's not about bringing the whole thing down ad most of society dgaf about shit like it's been since the beginning of time.
Yeah, I rarely load it up these days. I have to admit that this site with the smaller base is much nicer to use. It actually feels like I have conversations with people rather than just throwing comments into a wall of noise.
Same here. It would have been nice if reddit changed their mind, but ultimately the whole situation allowed me to break my addiction. I feel much healthier on a daily basis now that I spend maybe an hour on Lemmy, Beehaw, or Tildes vs 5 hours pointlessly arguing with people on reddit. I have a ton more gaming time and reading time now and I feel comfortable checking reddit if I need to reference something (like, it really is the best place to access Destiny 2 community info, for example). It's honestly really great not checking social as much, I didn't realize how much life social media was sucking out of me.
Ultimately, not enough people had joined the protest, so it didn't have enough economical power.
Permanently Deleted
The protest wouldn't have done squat. So long as the protest was finite, spez knew people would forget and move on.
Also he tested everything with kid gloves till recently, when they booted mods. He could have gone that route earlier if there were bigger protests.
The protest was mostly the mods blacking out their subs to bring attention to the issue, but most users didn't care, and never would have.
Spez is hell bent on that IPO, and nothing would have stopped that.
Ot wouldn't have mattered if every single person had joined the protest. The decision had already been made, nothing was going to change that
This, here. Reddit is going the way of Digg, but trying to be more savvy about it. THey don't care that the specific group that's leaving are the content creators because they intend to charge content creators (paid API) who expect to profit from the traffic. They don't care that it's lower quality content creators. They want the money both ways, and don't care what percent of their "high quality" traffic disappears for it.
Since they're bigger than digg, they still have some high quality traffic. There's never a 100% protest with something as big as reddit. It's win/win/win for them.
The way this was pitched internally was almost certainly "we will see a drop in pageviews, but those pageviews will finally be profitable."
It was quite clear that they primed the relevant stakeholders for some turbulence.
Spez realized that he literally paid for other companies to harvest one of reddit's two greatest assets and that he needed to do something to recover. So he's been flailing around like a toddler, breaking everything in his desperation to stay on his feet, and in the meantime completely alienating reddit's other greatest asset.
What was that comment he made? Something like "reddit will continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive". Like the arrival of profits is inevitable and they don't need to do anything for them to arrive.
Also, he claims that reddit has never been profitable. How much has he spent chasing phantoms - reddit cryptocurrency, customizable snoovatars, reddit NFTs, special programming for a single day each year, buying an app then paying to make it worse, deciding to self-host images and videos, thereby drastically increasing the need for both storage and bandwidth, when they'd been perfectly happy to let others do the heavy lifting for well over a decade, paying to implement a drastically flawed video player (remember when it first launched and it was incredibly slow and we found out it was because it was trying to download every available resolution).
In 2022, reddit had $670,000,000 in revenue. There's a reason it's never turned a profit, and for the past eight years, that reason has been Steve Huffman.
There's something wrong with people who are so out of their depth like that who don't just find and hire someone more competent to do this stuff for them. Either just a complete lack of awareness that they are floundering or some weird stubbornness that it's only worth succeeding if they are personally holding the tiller.
i do miss rpan though
I miss it, kinda. I think it was uniquely poised to take advantage of lockdown, and there was some great stuff broadcast - I particularly remember watching a kalimba concert. But we all got tired of lockdown and online meetings and that's where it floundered.
I also STR that at least some of the feeds weren't viewable after the event ended (don't know if it was all of them or not). Which meant that it wasn't really a format for short videos (because people need time to find them), so they were more effort to set up and run, and for at least the ones that weren't viewable afterward, there was nothing you could point to afterward and say "I made that!"
I think if they'd kept it around, it could've found it's niche, but at the time I didn't really miss it when it went.
That quote grind my gears.
Reddit was profitable, then they took more funding and massively hired.
Profitability is a choice by the executives.
I think it was an uphill struggle and nearly impossible to pull off.
Spez had absolutely no interest in changing his stance on working with developers. The hugely ironic thing I read that made me give up hope (and stash my ~1 year in development Reddit App) was Spez saying "It was never designed to support third-party apps." -- yet no acknowledgement that the "official" app was literally a third party app that they purchased years ago called Alien Blue.
He's a fucking idiot or a liar. I'd believe either. Or both.
The entire point of having this free, public API is because a free, public API can be monetized, and content scraping cannot. If you are offering a free web app, and you don't have a free, public API, someone will create scraping tools to do it. So then, instead of spending money maintaining a revenue generating API, you spend money playing cat and mouse with content scraping bots.
The fact that reddit can't figure out how to push monetization over that API has nothing to do with third party apps, and everything to do with the site having shit leadership.
Wow! Is that what happened to Alien Blue? I remember people Praising Alien Blue Years ago... How did they mess that up so bad?
Yep it was bought back in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Blue
Not defending spez, but their business model was not designed to support third party apps, that much is true. They needed a proper model to share profits with third party apps.
How they went about "fixing" that was completely dilletantish and dumbfounding, though. Now they're not getting any of that potential extra profit and lost a significant amount of users on top
We’re going to go dark! No new posts, no old posts - not until you listen to our demands! Or at least until the weekend is over!
Nah it was a Tuesday and Wednesday iirc, it wasn't even a high volume day.
What went wrong is simple and clear as day: People did not commit to their protest. Only a fraction of those who took part made the important step of quitting reddit altogether. Because the protest was limited, reddit absorbed the hit.
If you're not willing to give up your abuser, you're destined to be battered.
It is important to remember that you owe these platforms nothing. There is life after an endless stream of dopamine hits. Just walk out.
I think most people knew it was a protest and nothing more - I doubt a lot of people thought, hey Reddit is totally going to back down.
It was a mass expression of user dissatisfaction which escalated from an initial 2 day blackout into something so much more, and so I'm pretty impressed with what it did, which was stirred up shit for the management and made the CEO say some ridiculous things in the press to boot.
What I am a little disappointed in is that not as many mods walked. I'm not a mod, but I was fed the line 'it's going to be impossible to mod my sub without the 3rd party apps'. Given the amount of subs that seem to have been ticking over just nicely since the API switch though I feel like I was fed some bs in that department
They are still struggling, https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/154bp7n/friends_we_are_far_beyond_drowning_in_bots_please/
They should just give up and leave, bless them for trying and all but haven't they learned anything...
Don't get me wrong. There's some support communities on Reddit I still visit. I don't want to see them burn down in flames. But there's no help from the admins coming. You might as well ask your cat.
I dunno. I think if the response has been a bit enough threat to their long-term goals they could have easily just walked back a bit by changing the pricing for API access and extending a grace period to developers already using the API.
The other claim is that "reddit doesn't care about blind people" which is the most ridiculous claim of all. The new site design is WCAG AA compliant. I did both an automated assessment with WAVE and used VoiceOver to confirm. It is useable for blind users with standard screen readers and other ATs.
Is it easier with apps? Sure. But it's not impossible.
I don't claim to be familiar with their issues but I thought the problem was that the mod tools were not usable for the blind. I recall posts that they had to get help from sight-capable users to moderate r/blind.
Reddit was goining the way of the other big tech players, removing API for third party apps, maybe will remove old.reddit.com next ? force everyone to sign-up using their phone number, using your real names instead of nicknames, verifying your identity using goverment issued ID.
the sign is on the wall but the majority of people are fine with that, look how facebook hit the record of 3 billion users a month. these corps are too big to fail.
I log onto reddit twice a month or so, but if they get rid of old.reddit.com, I won't be doing that anymore.
Nothing went wrong. We moved to Lemmy, Lemmy has 3rd party apps. Reddit can get fucked.
Reddit was the problem anyone couldn't solve. I'm glad I did witnessed the greateast ending on r/Place this year before decided to delete my Reddit account, and yeah fuck u/spez!
A limited blackout did nothing to change Reddit's mind. Periodically asking users if they want to end the Blackout did not help since as dissatisfied users left for Discord or Lemmy, the voters became biased toward ending the Blackout.
In the future, boycotting and demanding that advertisers cancel ad revenue would be far more effective. Lawsuits about Reddit restoring user content involuntarily may still do damage but not quickly enough to help the protest.
Autocratic platform CEO doing his thing. Nobody ask what went wrong with the peacefull protest in North Korea and why did Kim not step down or change his mind. We got digitally slaughtered and are now in heaven (lemmy).
It was never on the table. They decided to kill them, it was not a negociation. Now go play in /r/playplace and stop thinking about it !
RIF kinda still works for me, I can browse but can't post or upvote so that's good enough for me but I have cut down browsing Reddit loads since the protests
Yeah it seems to be working for logged-out browsing still. That means no easy way to get to subbed groups, and of course means no nsfw content now.
I think the only thing that could have been done better if for mods to more rapidly migrate to other plate forms and leave a detail message on the locked subreddit about why and how to move to the platform.
I’m not saying that it has to be Lemmy, but it would have been nice if it were.
As far as the protests go, they were quite successful. Reddit's traffic went massively down; users, especially power users who uploaded content and moderated subreddits, left the site; and Lemmy became a viable alternative to Reddit with the influx of users. Reddit is still struggling to replace the moderators who quit, and they've been forced to take desperate actions like reinstating r/place and paying users who get a lot of upvotes to keep traffic on the site. The decision was never going to be reversed, the old free API scheme legitimately cost Reddit money and forcing users to use the official app like every other major social media has meant they could collect more data on users to sell. But as far as what the protest accomplished besides reversing the decision, it massively hurt Reddit and bolstered Lemmy into being a viable replacement
Everything that has a beginning has an ending (perhaps with a long tail). Perhaps the only wrong thing is that we forgot about that. All of these Internet services tend to have a long tail, most of everything we remember once using is still around in some form barely being used but for a tiny and loyal user base that is still hanging in there for some reason.
None of these things were great in and of themselves, it was always the community.
Relying on centralised and business driven platforms was never a good idea. The war was lost years before it started.
Third party apps still seem to work still, just logging in is broken on some. Not sure if reddit just "forgot" to disable anyonymous access or if they realized doing so would probably result in DDOSing themselves like twitter did.
Some apps were updated to avoid using the API for anonymous access, instead relying on RSS/JSON + scrapping.
Wow. Yeah... Mine still works. Haven't tried it in weeks, but it works. That's nuts...
Not enough fuck /u/spez
The only thing I can think of was that the mods announced a time limit of 48 hours for the protests, but I'm not sure that making all the protests indefinite would have solved anything.
Spez was determined to copy Elon Musk even though Elon clearly doesn't know how to run a social media platform. Now both Reddit and Twitter are dying.
The fact that Reddit moderators quickly folded the moment Spez threatened to take their "powers" away made the whole thing quickly fail. Very few had the balls to go through with the protests and didn't care about those imaginary powers (honorable mention to the former r/interestingasfuck mods), but many were too addicted to that fake status symbol to even imagine letting go of it and Spez took advantage of that to kill the protests.
For those of us who left Reddit and mostly only use Lemmy now, I believe the 3rd party apps thing was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I think it's just that we already hated Reddit so much that when presented with Lemmy we immediately jumped ship.
For many other Redditors however the appocalypse didn't make any difference, many big subreddits are still very active and the Reddit moderators who folded realized they don't want to lose their control over those subs and all the potential that control gives them (monetization via partnerships with brands, sponsored AMAs, selling film rights like one former mod of r/wallstreetbets did, shilling your new app, website or crypto like again r/wallstreetbets mods did etc...).
The mistake in these protests was to assume that Reddit mods would align with the interests of 3rd party app users.
I think this places too much blame on mods. Reddit is a corporation and they were going to do what they’re going to do.
Power users cared about 3p apps, the average redditor probably didn’t even know they existed.
It was never going to “succeed” if success was that Reddit backtracked from their position. It would have made spez look too weak.
I think it did cost them a lot more than they suggested in the short term, and I think it’ll cost them more in the long run too.
Lemmy is going to become a real competitor. And it probably never would have previously.
what all is broken, tho?
I can still view without an account on Infinity.
Sometimes I hit rate limits but so do the official frontends.
Infinity didn't get hit yet for some reason, other than the porn. I assume Apollo was the main target and it will trickle down eventually. My usage has dropped enough that I probably won't notice when infinity does get the axe
