The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.

- I bet reddit paid for that article.
  
  They probably paid for the title but the article isn't actually that peachy, I'd say its assessment is accurate. The Reddit sub protest is over, and technically spez got his way, but the platform has been damaged and may recover or may begin to die out and be replaced.
  
  100% Made the title and everything
  
  Of course it did, spez has been unsuccessfully trying to spin this. He assumed since he’s a sellout who has
  , we’d all bend over.
  
  I doubt it given the way the article ends- it suggests that while reddit's leadership got it's way, that the incident might still have damaged the platform's reputation and that in the long term reddit might not be successful in it's attempts to be profitable either. I'd imagine a paid article would have a more positive or confidence-inducing message than that.
  
  I mean it's pretty damned true though. Reddit won their stupid fight. They were always going to. Yeah they lost a lot of users, but there still a ton of users left.
  
  Tell me you didn't read the article without telling me you didn't read the article

Good for them, but the damage is already done. They seeded this place with a lot of users. Will it be enough? Who knows. But Lemmy is probably a looooot further along than if they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.
This place obviously needs to continue with good content and active communities, but at moment I don’t really have the urge to open Reddit they way things are.
- Absolutely. I had never even heard of Lemmy or anything Fediverse prior to all the 3rd party API shutdown. Once Apollo died, I stopped using Reddit.
  
  I had heard of it, but was like "that's dumb, just use Reddit, there's no reason not to"
  They gave me and many others that reason to reconsider
  
  Same here. So far I’m rather enjoying Lemmy.
  
  That, and Reddit was getting pretty fucking annoying. The little annoyances had really begun to pile up for me personally and I know I’m not alone.
  
  When RiF died I deleted my accounts and found my way here. I still open a couple of niche subreddits from time to time just to check on updates but otherwise my time on Reddit is done. 2010-2023 (damn I hate to admit that).
  
  The host of a tech podcast I listen to has had a Mastodon instance for years. I knew of the Fediverse because of that, but I always thought of it as decentralized Twitter and not necessarily a way to decentralize all types of social media platforms.
- I lurked on reddit for years. I was lurking here for a couple weeks now but thought I should make an account to contribute. Reddit has gone down hill and I'll never go back.
  
  I'd say that's good news, everyone!
- Never would have heard of Kbin and now it's all I use.
  
  Me too. Can't even remember who mentioned Kbin but it's perfect for me.
- Yeah, even when I’ve had the urge to check Reddit for something I’m trying to figure out, I will do everything I can to avoid it. And if I can’t, I try to determine how much I care about what I’m searching before I even give them a single click. It’s a small, insignificant protest, but it’s a forever protest, for me. I’m happy on lemmy, I don’t browse as much, I interqct with more of the community and want to help build it. On Reddit, I felt dirty because of everything they’ve been doing the last 5 or so years. Tencent, killing third party apps slowly and then in one fell swoop, etc. fuck ‘em
  
  I've had to visit Reddit twice since the protests started, to get information from a specific user. Both times, I used Brave browser in Private mode. They didn't get to count me as a login, they couldn't serve me ads, and their trackers were blocked.
  I don't anticipate needing to go back to Reddit ever again, but for anyone who can't avoid it, I recommend that method.
- Lemmy, Kbin, Raddle, Tildes, etc. - there are definitely more alternatives that are becoming increasingly popular.
- Lemmy is so much more fun than Reddit. It feels like the old school internet before corporations took over.
  
  True.
  Also, not only are people nicer on Lemmy, I find that I'm nicer on Lemmy.
- I'm glad to have moved to lemmy. It feels raw and real, vs reddits polished curated feel. As if I'm actually reading posts by people. And I like that is doesn't get me scrolling too much.
  
  It feels raw and real, vs reddits polished curated feel. As if I'm actually reading posts by people.
  Because on reddit we were reading posts by bots.
- I went to reddit every day for over a decade, and now, I don’t. Zero desire to and in fact desire not to, same as Tweeter.

Reddit “won” but I predict it will never regain what it once was.
- For me I feel like reddit began declining when Victoria was fired in 2015.
- But the users will rise and the ad money will keep on coming.
  We’re just the ghosts.
  
  Personally I don’t really mind as I have met some pretty cool other ghosts to hang and talk with here.

I won, because I found lemmy.
- Exactly how I feel! I don't care at all what happens on the other site. This whole thing opened my eyes to what it has become, and it's not just the API, that place has become toxic af.

Well it cured me from checking reddit all the time, so I count that as a win.
- Me too but now I check Kbin all the time.
  
  Ah! A fellow kbinite!
  
  I've moved to using my time to watch more movies. I plan on reading but it's a process to get me away from a screen at the moment. I check kbin maybe two or three times a day for about 30min increments. I used to spend hours and hours on reddit, but I like not having to constantly check it. I'm not really active on any other social media site, and reddit was basically my one and only. Now I just pop on kbin from time to time.
- Yeahhh. Even if they reverted everything, brought back the apps, and released a scheduled weekly video of Spez crying as different mods whip him with a belt, I am not interested.
  Reddit can do whatever. I found an adequate replacement due to the protests, and I took it in direct response to Spez's clockwork PR disasters, so the protests did not fail for me.
  Interesting read that should have gone without saying to anyone trying to manage a company, what trust thermoclines are and how to avoid them.
  Judging the worth of the protests depends on what your individual goal was. If it was convincing reddit admins not to cut and run with a giant pile of free money, now you know better. Nothing in the company's history made me think they were the type, which is itself a warning sign.
  If it was reddit going down in flames, that's always a slow burn and seems nigh unavoidable for any company as the years stretch on and management grows complacent, but they visibly did damage themselves because you're reading this.
  And it was enough damage that several hundreds of thousands don't really mind making their home at a competitor instead. It's only going to get worse, not because they don't already have millions of users who didn't leave, but because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.
  The protest was a death sentence because their proven problem solving method is to ignore the problems as they mount.
  
  because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.
  Specifically, if you volunteer to moderate, create content, or build community on Reddit, you will be insulted and dismissed by people who are only in it for the money.
  
  I'd tune in once a week to watch that, but only through a web-scrapper
- Yeah but now I’m here…
- I’ve been pretty happy with the shift. I went to reddit all the time habitually but was very ready for something a little different.

I agree it's over, I moved here and don't care about Reddit anymore. :)

As I understand it, reddit has shattered its trust with its userbase and has hemmoraged users because of it. I can hardly view that as a 'win' for them.
- The remaining users have proven they'll all willingly look at ads and suffer an inferior UX. It's a win for reddit. There's not much they can do to get rid of this core user group of... What, 90% of their users? That doesn't care if they make things worse.
  
  Those were not the people who engaged in discussions though. Most of them are the lurkers.

They didn't win shit. What they did broke the site for everyone. It doesn't stop being broken because they seized control over the subs, something they could have done at any moment.
Reddit has detonated all its credibility, leaving a hole in the side just big enough for most of the site's users to escape as they decide reddit isn't worth it, or find good-enough alternatives. It won't happen all at once, but it'll happen.
- I'm sure reddit will limp along, Tumblr did, myspace is still technically running although I don't know anyone that would use it.
  Maybe a younger crowd will get attracted to the site, maybe it will live again on fresh blood but I'm just not going to be a part of it. I'm not going to endorse their actions with my presence.
  
  There's a trend of using old point and shoot camera instead of the mobile phone or a mirrorless cams. The older the camera the more prestige you get.
  Maybe they'll use MySpace to post those photos. Haha.
  Let's see. Retro websites being used by gen z to try and see what it felt like during the times of their elders. To get a feel of the nostalgia posts they keep seeing in social media.
- Yeah and they broke bots which actually were core to certain subs. The quality of say Buildapcsales isn’t what it was.

We're in such a shitty timeline right now where these CEO's realize that they have so many mainstream users who just don't actually care about the platform and just want the content, that even with significant controversy if they just ignore it, they can almost certainly weather the storm. Sure, their platform will be worse off, they'll lose users to other platforms, but it's a far cry from the Digg v3 -> Reddit situation when there was a much smaller user base who was more passionate about the site and community and they abandoned the old site as a result of those shitty decisions.
- Big platforms like Facebook, Digg, Twitter and Reddit don't fail in a day. Their decline is rather gradual. If you noticed any decline on Reddit's quality after the API lockdown, then that's the beginning of a gradual slide. Just wait for a while before judging the results.
  
  My wife didn’t really pay attention to the reddit controversy and frankly didn’t really care. She is about as casual ad you can get and even She has noticed a very steep decline in the quality of content shared on reddit. She barely uses it anymore. Now this is a person who doesn’t notice when her adblocker is on or not. If she noticed this, i can guarantee she is not alone.
  
  Digg, ... don’t fail in a day
  It depends on precisely what you mean by "fail" and how strictly you take "day", but Digg did lose 50% of its traffic within 30 days (and it never recovered).

I won't really call that a win,
Reddit lost the trust of many users, a non insignificant part of contributors and moderators left, the enshittification of the platform is not going to stop but they lost a big part of what made Reddit great. They damaged their image and popularity.
It's like saying Elon won by trashing Twitter. Sure he does what he wants with it but making your platform less desirable sure isn't a win for the platform.

Honestly, those still on Reddit are either lurkers or never gave a shit about the "protests" to begin with. The real measure will be the IPO. With that said, one tech group stroking off another means very little, anymore. Gizmodo can write their fluff piece.
The capitalists are concerned about the plebs using social media to organize and call out lies, doing everything they can to break up or muddy the waters of social media platforms ahead of the 2024 US presidential elections. The goal is to disrupt the platforms and drive away dissenting users who would use these platforms to organize against them and debunk misinformation/lies.
Musk buys Twitter (for far more than it was worth, lol) and drives it into the ground. Zuckerberg starts Threads to give people another "slowly boiling pot" to catch some of those looking for Twitter-alternatives. Spez and company enact changes to the platform, to artificially inflate their ad revenue ahead of their final valuation, which can't happen if users are allowed to skirt their ads with better clients. I didn't talk about Facebook, but it hasn't been relevant since COVID showed us how bat-shit crazy our families and neighbors are. Facebook is basically Nextdoor, but world-wide. We can't forget about the TikTok users. The parent company can't be touched or bought so they're just trying to outright ban the platform here.
The ultra-wealthy are showing us how scared they are of the up-and-coming new demographic of voters, who grew up on social media, know how to use it better than them, in ways they couldn't predict, and don't give a fuck about TV news, printed media, or corporatized websites. The last two elections have slowly been reversing the progress these regressionists have made using the gullibility and entitlement of the Boomer generation, the ignorance of the Gen-X generation, and the brittle corpses of the millennials to push their agenda.
The Arab Spring showed these wealthy fuckers how dangerous the people can be when they are allowed to use social media to organize and they don't want it to happen again at a time when we're finally starting to wise up to the "two-sides-of-the-same-coin" world we live in, and a new voting season has so much on the line for them.
Fuck the wealthy, money's made up, and may ass cancer rid us all of their kind!
- Thank you! Someone finally gets it! The rich fucks are scared of a new generation that sees the two parties as what fhey are: two sides of the same corrupt, owned by the rich, coin.

Was there really going to be any other outcome?
- Nope. And the goal of protests aren’t necessarily to force change, it’s often just as much about raising awareness and attempting to change the discourse with those who hold power. So I think these headlines don’t do the movement justice.
  
  Yeah. Idk why some people think the goal was to kill reddit.
- Depends on how one defines "win".
  We coulda gotten more people here. Reddit's kind of the perfect centralized service to decentralize. Major subreddits have millions of subscribers and mods with years of experience managing large communities. Many of them could have set up their own Lemmy servers and just said "we're over here now". You get a few large, but still not exactly mainstream r/all kind of subreddits doing that, and things could've been significantly different.
  At the same time, there are several ordres of magnitude more people here now than there was before, and the space isn't showing any signs of dying. That's kind of a big L for Reddit, as they're going to continue enshitifying themselves in the months and years ahead, and there's a legit, if somewhat underground, alternative space for people to go when they're finally fed up. Now with an insane amount of mobile app support, to boot.
  
  It's better for Lemmy to grow slowly and have a userbase that is small and in-good-faith for as long as possible, so there's time to build the necessary durability into both the software and the community.

Phyrric victory.
- I hadn't heard of this, but I feel like this is the case with most big social media companies atm.
  
  Yeah the article ends up pretty much making this point too:
  We’re at the dawn of a platform shift. As Google tunes its algorithms and incorporates more AI content into its search results, the business model of the entire internet is undergoing an unpredictable change. Over the long term, Reddit’s scrambling efforts at financial security may prove just as futile as the moderators’ attempts to fight back.
  I'm really glad to be out from under all that corporate social media bs.
  
  I guess you never played Total War games?
- Absolutely this.

The fediverse won
- We're too busy over here winning

fuck spez

But will reddit ever be the same as it was? I highly doubt it
- Yeah. Twitter survived all the backlash but everyone is looking for a way out. That's why threads gained so much traction on day one. Unfortunately they were missing a lot of key features (like hashtags for example) for people to stick around.
  
  Launching without hashtags was pretty weird, 0 discoverability. I didn't want to use my instagram account for threads so i made a new one and it was pretty much impossible to discover people to follow. Also the content was not great, I wouldn't really count on the instagram community to deliver good content especially in text form

Imo, nobody won here and the reddit user lost everything. The Fediverse wasnt ready for the influx of users and lost its chance to "win" for a long time. The sites couldn't support the load and there was a lack of polished mobile apps that felt familiar to people that wanted to browse and shit post.
Without content -- without interaction, a platform whithers; and my experience, so far, has been comment oasises while scrolling through pages of desert.
- It works fine for me. There was little to lose from Reddit at that point anyway because the quality had already gone through the floor. This was the catalyst to make people wake up and leave.
  there was a lack of polished mobile apps that felt familiar to people that wanted to browse and shit post.
  I'd argue that's a good thing, I'd rather have posts that aren't shit.
  Unfortunately that is starting to seep back in here now.

They didn’t beat me. I overwrote and deleted all my posts and haven’t been there since the end of June.

Lmao it was never about taking the site away from spez... it was about moving on. They are judging the score based on irrelevant metrics.

I'm not sure what's more disappointing. Spez and Reddit's actions or the people that are still hardcore defending them.

What did Gizmodo think might happen instead? That everyone, including those that were never impacted by 3rd party app changes, would just abandon the site, leaving it without users? "Peak journalism".

Don't care, Infinity is finally for Lemmy, there's nothing I miss anymore so I'm never going back to Reddit
- Last I saw, you had to compile it from source, can you drop a link?
  
  Here's the F-Droid link, you can also download the APK from the codeberg releases, too

Reddit has managed to end the overt protests, it seems. Whether they "won" will be determined in the future. I suspect that, at the absolute best, it's a pyrrhic victory.

Well, I only allowed Open Source software on my phone. Because the reddit website is pretty unusable compared to lemmy, I can't use reddit anywhere excrpt PC and just switched to lemmy. But I also use Jerbora Open Source app.

I ain’t going back to Reddit as I’ve found a nice place that keeps getting better and better on Lemmy.
The only thing I’m wondering is if you type a certain problem on Google/Bing/Ecosia, you can stumble upon something about it on Lemmy.
Personally, that’s what got me into Reddit as I was always stumbling on subreddits and I said « why not create an account »…

Huuumm, I don't know. This whole thing gave birth to that garfield picture. Personally, I'd call that a win.
- That garfield picture?

They have lost me tho

Ragebait garbage.

Reddit Won
M'kay Gizmodo, whatever you say.
- ikr the real losers are the ones who read Gizmodo.

I’ve got a Libreddit docker instance running on my home server and together with the libredirect browser extension, if I click on a Reddit link through a search or news article with a link to Reddit, my browser automatically goes to my Libreddit instance with the content on full display.
Now, whilst on my Libreddit instance the other day after being redirected from a news article I took a peek at r/all and the whole feed was pure shit, nothing like I’d seen before on Reddit.
For some reason, it was full of doordash posts, rateme style posts taking advantage of thirsty usersand shitty TikTok reposts.
They may well have won, but at the moment there is a glut of absolute shit on the front page of the platform. I’d guess quality content has taken a hit.

I'm happy as a pig in shit now that Sync for Lemmy is out! Already paid the $20 to remove ads, love it!!!

“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.” Sun Tzu

As long as my patched synch for reddit works, reddit is just still better than Lemmy in almost every possible way 🤷‍♂️

Part of me feels there woulda been a chance to sway Reddit if those stupid power hungry mods didn’t say “going dark for 2 days”