The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

hedge@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 515 points –
The end of Reddit? Here’s why subreddits are still down – and what happens next
techradar.com
286

You are viewing a single comment

The subs going dark should have only been half of the protest. Users should have also stayed away from the site but I don't think that was really coordinated.

The number of new posts didn't drop much, the comments dropped a bit more but only by like 20%, which isn't a lot given the amount of subs that went dark. Reddit doesn't care about subs, they care about users and it seems engagement was still pretty high.

The next protest should be to all users to stop using the site. Drop the users and they'll start to listen.

Before asking people to leave, subs creator should create similar communities on Lemmy

Exactly this. A long term blackout, especially a user blackout, is not feasible without a replacement place to go to.

Create coordinated groups on lemmy and dump all comments in the sub they mod. Sure, Reddit could restore, but it would be just one more hassle for their IT staff

I'm pretty sure none of them thought about that because they're basically just doing this out of anger. They know it won't change reddits decision so they want to take it away from all the users that don't really care about third party apps or mod tools.

Indeed. Users should have joined in. I did my part at least, I haven't used the site in days and I've also removed all of my comments and submissions.

I think a non-insubstantial amount of the comment activity was bots to be fair.

I think this is true but I think it has always been the case. The question is were there more bots than usual and I'm unconvinced there was.

Honest question, (I don't expect you to know) how many of those were some form of bot?

Nobody really knows, but I personally don't think there were any more bots on Monday than there was a week earlier. It's a nice story that users dropped with the subs going dark, but I think it might be wishful thinking on our part. To my knowledge there's zero evidence to suggest that they were mostly bots.

The submissions remaining steady while comments dropped off a cliff is eyebrow raising, however given how much the site struggled to handle so many private subs from a technical perspective, I strongly suspect reddit didn't really do much ahead of the blackout. I think the steady submissions compared to the decreased comments tell us more about an average day of reddit how many submissions are bot submitted than it tells us about a change in bot behavior that day.

I tried to do my part and heavily restricted my visits to the site. I checked the state of my feed and user profiles a select few times but always left almost immediately.

I even redirected my reddit browser bookmark to a local website which acted as a warning wall, just to stop me from my subconsciously opening and browsing the site.

I did similar, I swapped my shortcuts/apps for ones going to Lemmy. The muscle memory has worked in my favour.

Yeah when the blackout started I disabled my Reddit app and haven't been back there once since. We need more people doing this.

I went back to post on the "We're back from the Blackout" posts to go let them know about the new communities that were started up.

all the subs I liked were dark anyways so opening my app showed super old posts that were cached or blackout notices. Couldn't go back of I tried