The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.

Bullshit. Nobody, or at least very few people, expected Reddit to revert the changes. A protest can be successful even if it doesn't lead to immediate change. I was here on Lemmy long before the API nonsense happened over at Reddit, and the difference over here is night and day. Lemmy has been around for awhile, but until these last few months it couldn't hold a candle to Reddit in terms of content or activity. Maybe it still can't, but now it has enough users to be viable. Reddit might go on like nothing happened, but in the background a competitor has been born.

It was to be expected, but I found Lemmy because of everything that happened, uninstalled Reddit, and now use Mastodon and Lemmy as my social media platforms of choice, so it’s a personal win.

Hopefully, as Lemmy continues to thrive, instances hold up to the pressure of growth and we see an influx of content that made Reddit so valuable to users and Reddit corporate alike.

They didn't win, they just didn't fail as badly some had hoped. What was accomplished was spreading out a fair portion of their user base. Maybe not a huge percentage of it, but enough that they don't have the same level of monopoly. People are more aware of other options (and Reddit's flaws), and more will depart in time.

In my eyes Gizmodo is not seeing the big picture. The protest didn't kill reddit, but that was not a realistic outcome to begin with. However it significantly hurt reddit and helped push lemmy as an alternative. Reddit will be around for a long time, until lemmy has more widespread adaptation. It's the beginning of the end for reddit and they'll experience that with a disaster ipo

Reddit won? Good for them. I'm still not going back.

Me reading this from lemmy

Nobody cares though. The reddit administration has dethroned their own site, it will never gain that back. They're done, even if the site hangs around like a bad smell for a few more years.

The incredible thing about these articles is that they don't make the slight mention of lemmy.

That one linked is a well written summary of what happened, but it's partial if they don't include the migration that happened, even if it wasn't that big.

Did they win, though? Everybody who actually cared left. It was clear in June that they were going to do whatever the hell they wanted to regardless of what anyone did or said.

Honestly I feel that this protest just showed me how uninteresting Reddit has become. Outside from small niche communities it's basically equivalent to any other news feed out there be it google news, Twitter or whatever.

Maybe it's not as good as we thought it was.

I’m here and I have an ad-free, troll-free, wholesome community to engage with on mostly the same topics I followed on Reddit. I declare myself the winner

Reddit won against its own users, the very people it relies on to stay relevant. In doing so, it showed a large number of users they don’t need reddit.

As the Lemmy apps get better, more and more people will check out the ad-free reddit. We can get their content without needing their platform, which is huge.

Reddit won the battle, but will it win the war?

Reddit won at building its own viable competitors like Kbin, Lemmy, and Squabbles and all the users of those platforms also won big from Reddit's hubris. The one thing I know for sure is that they have grown Lemmy by 7000%, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

Time will tell what happens to Reddit.

Really‽ I just checked and many of the small subreddits I used to follow became much less interesting/active if not dead.

Meanwhile, some of the bigger subs became a repost dumping ground of years old posts/images/videos/memes by fairly new accounts (i'm guessing those are bots karma farming).

The fediverse is the much better way IMHO.

In any case, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit have become too toxic to use I will keep away (though, I never had a Facebook nor a Twitter account)

Permanently Deleted

I am not really shocked because the only way to really beat Reddit is by leaving the platform completely as in what many did when Melon Husk took over Twitter. Mass exodus. Express displeasure by voting with your feet and GTFO.

it feels like a biased, paid and made up news for spez's money to try and revive this hole of a website. most of r/all posts are repost bots, as well as comments in them.

Let Reddit become Myspace. Lemmy wins, however we use it.

I never cared about the Reddit API war. For me, leaving Reddit was about how moderators have absolute yet arbitrary power to permanently ban users who do not agree with them. And I'm not talking about breaking their rules (racism, misogyny, transphobia) but simply having a disagreement of opinion that provides the mods an opportunity to ban you for life.

For the Reddit API thing, the funny thing was finding out I could have been using a better app the past seven years but didn't know.

I wonder how many users and how much traffic they lost in the process.

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.

That's not true. It may be true in r/technology, but reddit hasn't won. It's just that those still on Reddit didn't make it.

We showed that we care, and we showed that we can dump them. Reddit is currently dying. It may be a slow process, but I don't think the enshittification of reddit will stop.

Looking at the site recently it feels like half the content is gone. A lot of old stuff hanging around /hot on subs that I frequented doesnt seem like anyone "won" here. Reddit lost content creators, the users lost site functionality and content and half the mods got kicked to the curb for nothing.

They might have won but now that Rif doesn't work anymore I'm testing Lemmy. I've noticed that reddit content is less updated throughough the day so I suppose that some active posters have left.

Spez gambled that most mods would give up because they where power whores. He won because he was right.

The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented,

Some small subreddits are still protesting and planning on doing so indefinitely. Others have migrated to Lemmy/Raddle/Squabbles/Etc

My old time allocated to Reddit is now allocated to Lemmy (65%) Reddit (35%).

And Infinity for Lemmy is making Lemmy even more familiar than ever.

I dont know what you say, I transitioned to Lemmy 100% and deleted my acc at reddit.

The only super annoying thing is that they get to keep the cake whole and the dog full (my comments by deleting my name and my acc deleted). Which I despite them for that even more now and just make me avoid the platform even more and dis-advertise it.

I would be fully happy if I had my account, changed my comments first to "fuck /u/spez" and then had deleted my account, but I only knew so much. I was naive enough to think they would delete my comments too, since they're My Intellectual Property. Right? They came from my own mind, I took the time to write them, and I deleted them! But no! We will keep them, just delete your name.

And when you google my reddit username, you still get from the google's cache directed to threads with my deleted comments. Fuck you spez. Fuck you.

Time will tell if reddit won. It's not a short-term fight. I deleted my discord a Chinese Tencent's vessel and a product that makes no money but burns money for the sake of gathering data. My Instagram, my Meta account thus my FB too, my WhatsApp, every app that was there just to gather my data or exploit me now or in the future.

I do everything to keep off being fingerprinted. I use platforms that use more and more end-to-end encryption like Matrix. Or at worst Telegram which is not end to end but the best of the worst since my relatives still use it.

Just because you don't see it yet, doesn't mean that a movement against anti-consumer platforms like reddit don't exist. I inform my mom about it, I inform my relatives and friends about it. I move friends and friends move me to safer for the future to use platforms and de-centralized.

A battle may be short, but the war is long.

Permanently Deleted

Just If you consider the growth of 7000% of a competitor in the era when many players fight for the attention of the users a victory. Time will tell

Hey I'm here so guess what

So buying reddit coins and gilding every “fuck spez” comment/post didn’t work? I can’t believe it!

We did it Reddit!

There's two problems...

1. There is no easy to use singular Reddit replacement. (The fediverse is not easy to use to normal people.)

2. Reddit is such a large social media site now that all the nerds getting angry and leaving doesn't matter. 10 years ago this change would have killed Reddit, but now that normal people like my mom are on Reddit they don't give a shit about using the official Reddit app, in fact they were probably already using it.

"I'm bleeding, making me the victor!" - Reddit after losing half their valuation, alienating their user base, removing veteran mods, and revealing how shit of a company they actually are

I won because Im free of that site

They won, but hopefully the hit they took gives them pause. Lemmy won too, it's become a nice little community and I'm happy to be here.

Just a matter of time till majority of its users realise how easy it is to migrate to lemmy and how greedy and evil reddit has become.

Partly because the majority of the people didn't even know there were 3rd party apps lol. Many people don't even care about the protests. Reddit is too big for it to go down overnight.

The only thing we could do now is build better communities here.

News brought to you be [official news side totally not paid by spez]

Nobody is surprised. They strong armed all the mods with integrity off the platform and replaced them with the spineless willing to play the game. Somehow they’ve become even more of a vacuumed echo chamber than they already were, which I’m sure they’re pleased with anyway. But they lost even more legitimate users. I do have a “troll” account that I use to express my true opinions before I’m eventually banned for saying something that goes against the status quo. But it is nice to not have to worry about every comment I ever make getting me downvoted to shit and banned because I said something the hive mind didn’t agree to. Lemmy is my main now, but I also check out Tildes and Hacker News. Glad I found these places instead.

Reddit didn't win over me. I edited all my comments to "fuck u/spez", got suspended from a couple subreddits, and then never logged back in to my account. Been using Lemmy ever since.

The victor is not victorius if the vanquished does not consider themselves so

Never stop fighting, we will win!

Assuming that this is not just Reddit paying Gizmodo for an article to discourage people from using Lemmy by shaping the narrative that everyone is back on Reddit, then I would say it's just way too early for Gizmodo to make this call.

Enough people have come over to make a push/pull environment happen between the two sites. Time will tell which one pulls the most over to their side.

Dead to me 💁‍♂️

I don't think the war has been won. This might have been the biggest battle, but it's going to be the years that tell the story, not the months or the days.

This is like Bush's mission accomplished. Too early to tell. Thanks to that though I found this nice community.

A shadow of its former self but they managed to clear out the troublemakers

Can moderators on reddit delete the subreddits they moderate?

Well yeah because all the people who cared moved to Lemmy or kbin

If Reddit won, why are we here?

I agree that reddit won but it was a, pyrrhic victory the content quality has massively gone down. I still have a secondary account there but I only use it to spread the word about lemmy. Haven't used it in weeks because I don't want to attract too much attention and get suspended.

Lemmy won imo

No surprise here, just like Bernie Sanders, Mueller, and everything else, le reddit blindly overestimated what was going to happen. I'm willing to bet less than 10% of reddit even knows there were other apps, they just want cat pics and reposted tiktoks.

No they did not win. People just expect people to move out from an historic platform overnight. This just doesn't happen like that. Like Twitter, they'll be small events that will make users want to find alternatives and migrate here.

That crisis made Lemmy way more populated, just for that we won in a way

So, the API prices will go back to normal? Because if not, that's not a win.

Sadly, Reddit has won. Their traffic is higher now than before the API protests. It seems like the saying "All publicity is good publicity was true in this case. While one can appreciate a minimal downtrend in Twitter interest (as expected), Reddit interest is growing and even more after the protests. Google trends: