How social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit
A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever
"Despite these concessions, dozens of Redditors promised to stop using the site altogether "
There are dozens of us!! Lol
Fucking delusional on this writer’s part. It was far more than dozens and a lot of those people were power users with an outsized influence on the community.
I personally moderated two 150-250k user subs. Stepped down from both and wiped all my posts and comments and have not contributed a single thing since.
I modded a couple of million user subs, and ended up replacing all of my posts with the same text before never logging in again. Wonder if I've been removed from any of them yet.
Side note, my life has improved so much after not doing free work for reddit. The things I'd see everyday.. looking back I'd never do it again.
I tried to wipe my comments but I during the protest I couldn't access my user page, I could manually navigate to each of my comments via the posts but that would have been an impossible task. Soon after submitting a service ticket I was permabanned for a comment I'd made 2 years earlier.. and even more bizarrely they message me a few weeks later saying they'd taken action against an account I'd reported for CP 4 years ago
I didn't wipe my old account, but I have not been back since everything went down. I've looked at it occasionally but contributed nothing. It seems pretty shit atm.
i think most reluctantly have some use for it still. i only use it for gamethreads and the shittiest of shitposts, or for super niche things that don't have any equivalent on lemmy. at the end of the day, i think people would rather stay connected with their communities than abandon them, even if it means providing value for some of the stupidest and most malignant people in the world at the same time. look how many people are still using twitter
even if it means providing value for some of the stupidest and most malignant people in the world at the same time
This is so emblematic of the human condition. Poisoning ourselves to relieve stress, buying slave-made clothes to stay warm. Burning our skin to attract mates. Toxifying our own environment for convenience. Humans really are some dumb ass creatures. We are reaping what we sow.
I had to create a new work account on reddit as it has the by far best community for sysadmins I have ever found, and I needed help with an undocumented issue in a system we use at work.
Come to think of it, I don't think I've logged into Reddit since I started using Lenmy
I haven't really either. Apart from the the odd Google search results here and there, but not actually logging in.
I did a couple of weeks ago, after being off it for a couple of months...it was awful. I closed my account and deleted my saved login info. I only go to it now if it comes up in a search and seems relevant.
That link linked to /modcoord at perhaps dozens of moderators promised to leave, which is far more impactful than users. I know just from watching kbin, lemmy and other sites grow from this summer on that hundreds to thousands likely left reddit. Unfortunately it's probably a drop in the bucket but Web 2.0 was always probably going to win. The only real way I can see of us getting out of that en masse if when each site inevitably kills themselves through mismanagement.
I was a moderator of a minor misspelt subreddit. I marked it private when I left. That'll annoy about 700 - 2000 people. I haven't deleted my account, and I do visit every couple of months for a community that hasn't moved which I like (though it has gone downhill)
no need to exaggerate 😬
I didn't see you at the convention in Munich last summer.
I teleconferenced in. Did you go to the seminar on chafing?
I’m doing my part. 🫡
"Technical tweaks"? Did the author write this while sucking huffman's taint?
Did you see spez’s senior prom picture in the article?
Very certainly
In response to such critiques, Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.
(Emphasis mine)
This is the same tone deaf response I've come to expect from Reddit for some time now, and is why I'm happy to no longer be a user of their platform.
That same quote caught my eye. It's just bullshit. Of course they're no quantitative way to measure quality on a qualitative scale. Any long time user can see there's not much going on like there used to be.
I am of the belief that reddit just replaced leaving users with LLM drone users to fill the void.
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
Yes. Affirmative.
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
@foggy The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
Tom Cruise.
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now.
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
reposting the worst quote i heard all year - or perhaps all my life
“There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
fuck spez, fuck reddit
“We don’t want other AI to train on this data, only one we’re involved with.”
How corporate social media's biggest user protest, and exodus, rocked reddit, acccording to corporate media - FTFY
Honestly, Fuck Steve Huffman.
I'm excited to see where Lemmy, Mastodon and the Fediverse go as I believe that's what Aaron Swartz wanted Reddit to be when it merged with Infogami; a user curated platform about anything, and a great source of knowledge.
Haven't been on there since the event, though I do read some threads if they come up in a search. Not intending on returning, though I haven't gotten rid of my old account yet
dugg their grave
I’m surprised they didn’t mention us at all. I wonder how many people actually made the transition as a result. I think it’s fewer than many people here want to believe but surely it’s more than dozens?
A few tens of thousand of people. We can see that through the statistics of active monthly users since then. I think many just left Reddit though, but unfortunately not enough. But still, if I look at the content and comments through RedReader it feels all kinda different there. Even more reposts than before, much more bot comments than before, much less comments overall and /r/all just looks different because many previously big subs are not really there anymore, while a lot of more niche subs suddenly appear frequently. It sometimes also feels more toxic with al lthe disinfo and insults but that might just be because a lot of the moderate people left. So the lack of sane comments puts an extra highlight on the shit stains of Reddit.
Left reddit recently bc of the toxicity, massive noticeable uptick across most subs. Blatant racism, homophobia and hate in general with next to zero moderation. The ads were just cancer(without a blocker) with the sponsored "he gets us" ones being unblockable and funded by a christian hate group prominently showing up constantly. Kbin has been an alright replacement minus the server issues recently
So many comments/posts look like bots.
Reddit always had a "repost" problem. But this time, not only am I feeling like I already saw this post, but also all the top comments? Just regurgitation of posts from years ago.
Its karma farm, they wait to repost a popular post, then post the most popular comments from the old one verbatim. Its gotten really bad
Reddit's repost problem was brain doners posting rEPOsT!!!1!! on every fucking thread like everyone else was able to no life the internet as hard as them.
How many times did you see something new to you only for the comments section to be a shitstorm of people harassing op for not posting OC like reddit wasn't a fucking news aggregator designed specifically to repost crap.
Hey have i got a video of a tractor stopping a prairie fire for you!
Down with Reddit!
The entire "dozen" agrees!
So say we dozen!
[Huffman said,] "We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private."
Really? 'Cause that's not the impression I've been getting. :scepticalThor:
Agreed. It didn't feel respectful when they started replacing mod teams that refused to reopen.
Slowpoke image: did you guys hear about reddit
What's a reddit?
Small mammal with long ears, they run around quickly and reproduce just as fast
Whatever. Don't care. I left my account open but scrubbed twelve years of content, including hundreds (probably thousands) of answers to technical questions and dozens of posts (including guides) to which my reddit post was the only or one of the only search results.
If corporations want to profit from my knowledge, they can do so by exploiting the open source community, just like always.
Same. In the brief window when we still had the API, I deleted every thing I’ve ever posted. Every helpful comment, all the well crafted answers to technical questions. I know they are in the wayback machine somewhere but at least Reddit can’t sell them.
it's cute you think they didn't already sell them.
I used the API to scrub my comments and also did a GDPR request ... they still have plenty of shit the API didn't touch.
It's worth googling "reddit /u/username" and rechecking your post history (including changing between hot/top/controversial and different time ranges) every few months.
Googling will show up a lot of the posts/comments you have missed using 3rd party deletion tools.
Reddit caches sometimes pull older content from the database or whatever, and you get "access" to it again.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In June, thousands of Reddit communities plunged into darkness – making their pages inaccessible to the public in a mass protest of corporate policy changes.
With rumors of an imminent IPO swirling, the company is under pressure to make money – and CEO Huffman has acknowledged as much, stating at the time of the change: “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”
Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota who has studied Reddit for years, echoed these sentiments.
“It bothers me that social media companies are increasingly restricting our abilities as researchers who care deeply about these sites and who believe they can provide many benefits for people,” Chancellor said.
Reddit’s corporate overlords were ultimately unmoved by the massive blackout, and most of the thousands of dark subreddits went back to normal after a few weeks.
Users who have long been dedicated to the site, some of whom have spent countless unpaid hours working to make it better, are exhausted and resentful – and many have simply left.
The original article contains 1,685 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Can someone message the editor and share how because of this backlash, many moved to other platforms - like lemmy?
This is a Reddit circle jerk article, so no.
Ever since earlier this year I've had WAY more friends, family and news articles I've seen mention or link to reddit than the past. I don't know if it's confirmation bias since I left reddit or if it just gained popularity at the same time or what. But I used reddit for 12 years and few other people in my circle used it heavily. Now it seems like it exploded?
I was a long time user too and I even moderated a few small subs and I was active in the groups I was with. I was a user for ten years and I grew these groups I worked on. After the change I gave up all four of the communities I ran, deleted my account and never looked back.
I think the explosion of popularity came as a result of the API change fiasco and the protests that people created. Reddit became headline news all summer and I think new users flocked to it because of that. The problem is that most people don't care about creating content, they move over to find content.
Like everyone already said ... The Reddit change brought in new lurkers that only want to watch while at the same time most of the popular creators left. There are not that many popular creators or active users who like connecting people because it takes a lot of time and work to do .... for sure it literally becomes a full time job. When a website loses those core people, the content changes and becomes less interesting.
I go on Reddit once in a while to check in its status and if you notice, a lot of the popular subs have slightly decreased in activity but if you look at the forums, a lot of the content and activity is recycled from years ago. Reddit can probably live on recycled content for years but it will be a decline and the decline will take a long time before it becomes obvious.
I was in a very similar position as you. Thirteen year user, moderator for a few smaller subreddits, including one that provided support for a US-based mobile phone carrier, and deleted everything when the API change happened.
It took time and effort to coordinate and help uplift those who generated the great content for those subreddits, but Reddit, Inc., was unwilling to help us moderators who had developed and used the tools necessary to do it. I wasn't willing to put in the additional time since Reddit was themselves unwilling to, post API change.
I really notice it on Google. So many more searches point to Reddit in the top few results.
I actually used to rely on that, using site:reddit.com for most searches. Reddit had some of the best in-depth discussion and tech advice I could find. Compared to the multitudes of blogs, YT videos, and decades-old forum posts that normally came up, reddit usually provided useful info. And it's pretty much the only reason I'm ever on the site now: the only results for some searches are on reddit.
Eventually if the quality of the posts decline, their SEO presence probably will as well. But google has been absolute dogshit for about a year now so who knows what that field will look like in another year. =/
What crap. I was on Reddit for 12 years, and left with the migration, to land in the fediverse. Not going back. We are building a much better place. Onward!
I came back to Lemmy because of the exodus. Definitely stayed longer because of the awesome Lemmy apps that came out (Boost and Sync). I check like 3 subs on Reddit occasionally, but use the web version. It's so bad that it encourages me to get off pretty quickly lol. My only other social media is Mastodon, and my DNS blocks all the connections from other big social media.
