I decided to take a peek at Reddit to see what kind of activity is happening, a good handful of the subreddits I am subscribed to are still super active with posts and commenters.
There’s quite a few news articles on the front page regarding Spez and the blackouts, I am surprised those articles are even still up for people to see.
The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit’s and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted…
Perhaps there is some AI activity going on, I mean it’s kind of easy to do in this day and age. You just prompt an army of AI bots to defend Reddit, and try to keep users engaged.
I am so happy I found Lemmy, and I am so happy that there is a comfortable level of activity. Sure it’s only a small fraction of what Reddit is activity wise, but it’s so much more hearty and welcoming.
Reddit has just turned into one big toxic mess. Lemmy reminds me of what Reddit used to be 10 years ago.
The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit’s and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted…
Thing is, all the people in favor of the protest left Reddit. So now pro-Reddit content is being upvoted.
Thing is, all the people in favor of the protest left Reddit.
Except the mods. Now they’re getting abuse from those that didn’t care about the protests.
I’m sorry but the protest was a complete failure that accomplished nothing. The real successful protest would be making a sub on here and redirecting their uses to it.
I actually found Lemmy from a post doing exactly what you said: subreddit went dark, with a stickied post directing people where to go. And here I am! Rock me like a hurricane.
Why spoil a good thing? The protest was basically the best they could do, got tons of attention and media.
Obviously time will tell if this actually is the downturn for Reddit, but belittling their efforts just because they didn’t redirect to Lemmy seems a bit entitled.
I wouldn’t say it accomplished nothing. I clearly motivated a bunch of people to start investing in other platforms. Platforms like Kbin and Lemmy now have a lot more mods and developers contributing. It gave alternatives MUCH needed attention. Mos of us had never even heard about these platforms a few weeks ago.
We will get a second influx on July 1st as well, so we need to work had at maintaining activity and community growth in the meantime.
What we have now is already fairly good.
And that’s something that’s easy to forget once you’ve made the change. Uprooting something you use daily, to move to a new platform which feels new and different, takes quite a bit of mental effort and requires you to accept some anxiety, as you wean yourself off your habits. But when the power users go, and the new place becomes more familiar and understood, the rest will follow eventually as every step becomes easier to accept.
I deleted my reddit account years ago and lurked only because trying to interact there was a cesspool. Learning about the alternatives and seeing how well behaved it is over here on lemmy is a breath of fresh air. Sure there isn’t as much content yet but it’ll come. Reddit wasn’t an overnight success either.
I feel after the 3rd party apps get killed off we’ll start seeing a slow trickle of users after the initial flood once the ones that stuck around start realizing the content that’s left in reddit has become low effort bot posts and spam.
Lemmy went from a few thousand users with very little activity to 100k+ with constant activity. It was a massive success.
For a website with over 800 million monthly users, 100k is nothing, barely even a rounding error. You can say it was a success for lemmy, but as far as the actual goal of the protest it achieved basically nothing.
Over 800 million monthly users, really? :D
Different sources have different numbers. One says 800 million, one says 400 million, the point is that lemmy poaching a couple hundred thousand users is nothing to reddit. If lemmy has 200k users that left reddit, even if we assume the smaller value of 400 million reddit users then that’s only 0.05% of reddit users that left.
What percentage of Reddit users are actually contributing versus just showing up to consume? I’d suspect it’s a very small percentage of that total. If that smaller group migrates away in more significant number, then that’s the real impact. The consumers will show up wherever the content goes.
As Lemmy grows reddit will shrink. Reddit might always be around, but that’s the same crowd that uses Facebook. Stragglers be damned, many users found a new home and that’s a big win in my books. The rest were shown how shitty and incompetent the management is at Reddit, and it’ll only get worse until they lose more and more users.
And when Lemmy becomes compatible with the wider activitypub network, we’ll gain another 9M users. (Its also closer to 200k now I believe.)
I’m willing to bet even if that were true a good portion of those are fake or a person with multiple accounts.
We don’t know yet. If it’s sticky then I would wholeheartedly agree. But if activity drops to pre protest levels in a month then eh…
Yeah, we don’t know yet. On the one hand, it’s still the early days of (some) people leaving Reddit - and who knows if they won’t go back.
On the other hand, the API payment structure and the shutdown of 3PAs hasn’t even happened yet. Even people who are completely oblivious to the situation but who are using a 3PA will have to decide if they’ll be able to deal with the shitty official app, if they’ll just stop browsing Reddit on mobile, or if they’re willing to take a look at alternatives.
I guess we will see.
This may just an old interwebz man talking, but I’d say “Don’t worry.”
It’s not a 1:1, but this is similar to what happened with Digg in the mid 2000s. I was there. I migrated from there to Reddit - specifically because Digg had decided to ignore its vocal user base and fundamentally change what the site was.
It ultimately resulted in this :
The scale is so much larger now. Reddit could lose 1m users and its a blip.
Not if the redditors that leave are the ones that do the majority of the moderating and quality posting. If the quality goes way down, people will look elsewhere. Also, I have a feeling we’ll see a much bigger migration once the third party apps all die on the 30th.
Well, “unfortunately” some of them will stay up since they are classified as open-source and non-profit by reddit. So, while I’m glad that these projects live on, it will certainly soften the blow for Reddit on 30th.
Iam not to use. Before I left reddit. Most of it was just reposted tiktoks and just general low quality posts on the big subreddits already
Thats true. I am continuing to keep using reddit to spread awareness of Lemmy so that people know it exists.
Reddit’s actual daily users only equates to about half that number. While an interesting metric, Google search rates don’t equate to users. Heck, my searching for that information contributed to that and I didn’t click through to Reddit once.
That is a good point, today internet is mainstream, and heavily indexed websites are much more reliant on such type of interactions than forums and social media were when digg was big, so reddit has a comparatively huge influx of click from google searches alone. However, that might change as they are making the web inferface worse and worse to redirect the traffic towards the app. If reddit becomes app-centric, i don’t kno what may change given how it is so reliant on google searches.___
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I have noticed a huge quality decline on reddit. I hope people get fed up and search for other options.
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I’m new as well. Made my account a few days ago. First time participating in the fediverse and I am loving it so far. I love the vibe and building new communities. I wish I better knew how to spread the word because up until last week I never knew any of this existed.
There’s been so many threads I’ve read on lemmy where pretty much everyone was able to voice disagreement in some way, but the discourse refrained from being toxic. That seemed so very rare on Reddit. I wonder if this is due to the lack of the total karma metric or something.
I think that it’s because the bad users aren’t here yet.
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Worth noting that the main migration happened in 2007 and start of 2008, but look how it managed to drag on for another 4 years before really dying.
I think the same will happen here - like there’ll be a lot of users on Reddit still, but it’ll be heavily corporate controlled and moderated, and most comments will be on the level of “Putin small pp” etc.
I suspect that some of the main subreddits - funny, aww, and pics, for example - could be populated entirely by bots and a lot of people would still browse through them. If you’re just idling through looking for a little dopamine, then r/aww and r/pics are kind of like instagram or tiktok. From Reddit’s perspective, those are the important subs, where the smaller ones where you can find good discussion and insightful answers don’t get enough views to serve enough ads to affect their bottom line.
Those subs could just be replaced with random bot reposts from the last decade. Actually, I think that’s most of the content already. Tho r/pics going full Sexy John Oliver today was hilarious. I even broke my personal embargo to go and vote for the SJO format (and to do a daily re-delete of any of my comments which might have been restored).
Wow, I didn’t realize the Reddit to Digg migration was so drawn out. Do we know how big the initial migration to Reddit actually was in terms of user count? It seems like Lemmy/Kbin are seeded with a few tens of thousands of users, and I wonder how it compares.
The main migration was actually in 2010 after the v4 redesign. Digg wasn’t dying in 2007-2009, it was one of the hottest websites on the internet.
Hmm something happened in 2008-2009 though, as it was when I migrated and I remember loads of people were doing it at the same time.
It might have just been Reddit having a cleaner, more direct interface, and a better community.
The site started to go downhill around that period because of power users and some started to move to reddit, but it was still pretty niche.
I stayed on digg until v4, then I moved with the masses over to reddit. They lost over 30% of their users that month!
The lack of societal solidarity for the betterment of everyone is sad.
But that’s ok, reddit was never going to die after this protest.
I think what took place was a successful test of what alternatives exist out in the wild.
Now it’s up to those of us who migrated to post through the highs and lows of early adoption in order to encourage others to come and stick around when the next shitty move by Spez takes place.
For example, I migrated to Mastodon in late 2018 during an initial surge. And over the years tried to keep posting content so that when the next migration took place when Elon took the reigns, people were able to possibly feel more at home.
This shit takes time. A lot of time. But the internet is a big place and there’s plenty of opportunity for things to be better. We just can expect things to rush themselves
It’s funny reading posts that say something along the lines of “I’ve always used the reddit app and it’s fine, I didn’t even know there were third-party apps”. I get this might be astroturfing or bots but if not, congrats on not having a clue, I guess.
It’s probably not purely bots. My girlfriend is one of those people lol
She isn’t tech literate and doesn’t get things like FOSS or 3rd party. To her, the Official Reddit™ App is a mark of trust and safety. She doesn’t use an adblocker (despite my protests) and just avoids services like Youtube where ads are unavoidable.
I haven’t used an app for reddit since Alien Blue. I was just on the mobile website. I can still understand the problem with what they’re doing. I don’t know why so many people can’t understand a problem unless it affects them personally.
Can’t expect the millions of people who don’t even understand what an API is to care about the API changes. Hell, I didn’t use a 3rd party app or really care about the API changes but I’ve wanted to get into the fediverse and disliked reddit for a long time, so it’s as good an excuse as anything.
what made the switch easier for me, was installing an RSS feed widget to my desktop and adding lemmy instances to it. gradually, i start to notice topics that interest me more and more which are viewable straight from the rss widget itself and i am able to comment on it, thus i have interacted more on here in the last few days than reddit. though it is still hard not to add :“reddit” to my searches online.
That is a great idea. Sorry friend, I’ll have to steal it!
The more on here the merrier! I don’t mind at all. :p
often, when someone suggests lemmy, they dont get upvotes, but people replying that you can’t go there because its full of tankies, get many upvotes. I saw several times: this subreddit cant move to lemmy, that would exclude people like me, where lemmy is blocked at work.
What kind of firewall blocks lemmy but not reddit?
and which lemmy instances?
From the fediverse side of things, good. The bootlickers can stay there until the whole thing gets shutter, people with sense can come here.
most people dont care, they just want to click on their memes
Its such a weird complaint that these people are having right now. They’re demanding that unpaid people come back and labor for them for free and/or give away the tools they’ve created for free.
It’s like they have no idea how reddit works. People whining that the NFL sub is closed and demanding it to be reopened for instance. They can go make their own sub and moderate it themselves, but they dont. The entitlement to just demand that people do free labor for you is insane.
whats really funny/sad to me is how mods get no real respect right now or maybe ever
like are some mods lame, sure, but its a super thankless job that i dont think gets enough cred and thats the part that i think has disappointed me the most. mods are super needed online, and its a shame some people cannot see that
I can assure you it’s not AI, most people there aren’t even aware of what’s going on or just don’t care about the new reddit changes
Occam’s razor tells me this ain’t no AI. Just people who DGAF and want their fun website back.
There are a lot of people who don’t hate the mobile app or only use the website and they probably see this blackout as a huge waste of time.
Personally I’ve moved on. It’s time for the Fediverse to take over social media and forums. It really is the future and I’m here for it.
Occam’s razor tells me this ain’t no AI. Just people who DGAF and want their fun website back.
I would believe that too but at the risk of sounding paranoid, I’ve seen some of these subs open up in real time and it’s always accompanied by some really weird posting/voting patterns. I’ve also seen negative or questioning comments deleted in seconds.
I’ve spent enough time dabbling with AI to conclude that anyone with enough money, can generate enough AI content to drive product forward.
Reddit is now a product, if people are leaving Reddit in droves through the standpoint of a CEO I would think of all kinds of ways to keep the product interesting which means putting on an AI puppet show.
If you go shopping on amazon, often shitty products are reviewed positively by bots to try and drive sales.
Reddit is no different. The money is there, the technology is there, and above it all the greed is there.
It’s no longer paranoia, its more than plausible.
It would appear it’s mostly bots, probably paid for by reddit (or interested groups) to muddle the waters.
I have seen countless posts trying to discredit the fediverse, how it won’t work because it isn’t financially backed (completely ignoring that email is still a thing), or how Mastodon apparently failed. On top of that, there are tons of comments in the threads for subs that went dark where the commenter argues “all this does is hurt the sub”. but when you look into the commenter, they have no previous history of being active in these subs at all.
But, i’ve seen this kind of activity all over reddit for the past 2 years. Especially when something unpopular is happening. There is a lot of the same type of crap you see during the presidential elections of the US. A lot of fake comments, posts, and statistics, and other things to try steer the public opinion in an engineered direction.
lmao the claim that telegram is failing, and i’ll admit right here that i don’t use it and am not interested in doing so, but it’s going stronger than ever now that the loudmouthed chuds that made it popular have gotten bored and the hardcore nerds are all who are left. telegram ain’t dying any time soon, i’ll say that much.
Telegram should die. Why would anybody use it when matrix or signal exist?
how Mastodon apparently failed
Saw this on my Mastodon home feed:
12,484,940 accounts
+2,493 in the last hour
+66,136 in the last day
+273,430 in the last weekFour time-based charts
Upper blue area: Number of Mastodon users
Upper cyan area: Hourly increases of number of users
Lower orange area: Number of active instances
Lower yellow area: Thousand toots per hourFor current figures please read the text of this post https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110554252061792575
Almost 300,000 new users in a week is a “fail” most other sites can only dream of.
The idea that anything that doesn’t reach Twitter scale is a failure is annoying as hell
Millions of users are about to stop using the platform overnight when they nuke the third party apps. The culture is going to change dramatically no matter what.
Yeah, probably. I’m afraid they’re going to keep a few 3P apps up, though (they already have started this process) long enough for people to migrate to their official app (because of NSFW content no longer being accessible through the API). So this may take a few years.
The majority of Reddit’s 57m users do not use 3rd party apps. In fact I’d argue most don’t (or didn’t) even know you could use a 3rd party app or understand why you’d want to. To them Reddit is just the app. So yeah, of course they’re not participating in the protest.
I don’t expect Reddit to go away or to be adversely impacted by this movement. But I’m not going to worry about what goes on there, similar to how I don’t have a FB account and I don’t worry about what the 1B other users are doing. I left Reddit for myself, if other people continue to use it then so be it.
I’ve been on Reddit 14 years. One account. Never used an app. Still used old.reddit til the last.
Deleted all my comments and then my account yesterday.
You’re right on the FB thing tho. Did the same thing in 2012. Took a few years for the popularity of “delete your facebook” to catch on, but now the idea that facebook is bad for you is super mainstream compared to 2012.
I use a 3rd party app maybe 1/4th of my time on reddit, so I could’ve technically gone without it. But I think anyone keeping up with the current situation can see old.reddit.com is on the chopping block soon, if not next. When reddit’s admin team said half a year ago that the APIs aren’t going anywhere for at least the next couple of years, and now have to deal with being called out on their deception, and even adding new lies onto the pile like the whole Apollo debacle, you know they can’t be trusted in any capacity to keep promises.
If keeping an API accessible that does the exact same thing as their own app is too much of an expense to keep open, imagine how much maintaining a completely separate front end for their entire website must ‘cost’. And that’s in part why I’ve made this switch now and not when old.reddit.com gets killed eventually.
