How reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history: Did it, though?

Frost Wolf@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 178 points – How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history
theverge.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1190537

How is reddit post protest, did it really win over protesters? Did the ones who left make a dent? Or like all things before, did it ultimately do nothing?

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Of course they're gonna claim they won. Most people don't realise the sheer amount of bot generated content on there anyway, which has only increased.

It’s going to dramatically increase. BotDefence, a popular moderator tool, is shutting down

I've seen way less quality content on a few subs I enjoy. And on the biggest sub I mod, there was barely anything posted.

bUt tHe bOtS wIlL hAvE tO pAy FoR tHe ApI tOo

i honestly wonder if they'll try to sell investors on this absolutely braindead take. after all, easier to ask for forgiveness five years later in court when you already appointed the right scapegoats

Before the protest, going to /r/all would show you posts with ages between 30 minutes and 3 hours. Today, on /r/all, there isn't a post less than 10 hours old in the first 40 entries. The content has changed from primarily trending news interspersed with memes to about 90% memes and shitposts padded with a few soft news summaries and opinion pieces.

In comparison, my Fediverse feed has exploded. The quality of content is at the level of pre-Digg reddit, and the commentary at a significantly higher level. There's still not as much of an audience, particularly in niche communities, but it feels like that's changing quickly. It's clear to me that the creative drivers of reddit - the mods, the content creators, and the engaged commentators - have left, and that the traffic is being maintained by a mostly non-participating readership that uses Reddit as entertainment, not a community.

Reddit crushed the creative spirit of its most active populations. Whatever wins Spez is claiming, it's come at the cost of what made the site worthwhile to begin with.

That’s an interesting take. If reddit can claim victory, it would be a hollow one, even if the remaining mods do cave.

Reddit has been careful to set the goalposts entirely in the realm they control, they ensured that in public communication "victory" means having the remaining subs open up. Ultimately, they do have final say over what is actually served on reddit.com. However, what they cannot control is their users, the contributors who built their empire for free. And they did a piss poor job of keeping us around.

They can force mods out, but they won't be able to force them back in. As for users, I have no doubt they managed to push away the ones most resistant to monetization, but if that really was their strategy, whichever moron came up with that really needs to google the 1-9-90 principle.

A note about niche community audience: the community count number only shows the number of poeple on your instance subscribed, not the total number. The only exception is if the community is on that server.

There is a PR for lemmy to make this a little more clear, but its not implemented yet.

Completely agree. I think it’s just going to become a very mainstream basic place for basic discussion, probably with a lot of mean comments, racism, bigotry, etc. It wasn’t that way when I joined and it had already fallen pretty far when I left last month.

It’s not going to die as a site but the community is already gone.

That's not important, we've already moved here

An incredibly insignificant amount of users migrated over, yes. Protest failed and got decimated. Reddit won. That's all there is to it.

Migrations take time, it was never going to be a flick of a switch. Reddit content will slowly get worse and worse, and Lemmy content (or some other competitor) will get better and better as more people move. it’s those core users that generate great discussion that matter the most and those people are looking for somewhere else.

Don't have to be the biggest -just the most fun.

Bigness and funness are related in the case of social media, though. Reddit's size means that it can support a lot of niche subreddits that cater to very small slivers of their userbase. Some of those niche groups have been replicated in the Fediverse but they're mostly dead still - there aren't enough people here to actually generate the content and conversation needed.

The users who left were often likely to be the most dedicated (which is why they were the most butt hurt). This is only the beginning and the exodus will continue and the content will decline, although I don't know why I'm even telling you this since you're probably a spezbot.

Reddit: we are going to make our site objectively worse for everyone

Everyone: fuck you reddit, we will stop using reddit in protest

Reddit: ok

Everyone: Oh... Wait... So like I actually have to stop using reddit?

Reddit: ...

Everyone: Fine, we'll come back but I am fake mad about it!

Nobody pushes over the coke machine first try. You gotta keep rocking it.

Insignificant? Putting aside the issue that it’s not the number that counts but the content the new lemmings create and the number of post shoot up by a million, I don’t have the numbers but we put a heavy pressure on Lemmy’s instances.

yeah but… who cares? we all won: there doesn’t need to be winners and losers

As long as we can keep up the content here, this has replaced Reddit for me.

The Connect for Reddit app is much more enjoyable to use than the official Reddit app. Heck, I even like it better than I did Sync for Reddit.

This place is feeling a lot like the Reddit from 2008. Just get some rage comics back and this place will be 🔥🔥🔥.

Lemmy takes a bit more curation to start finding communities and has some rough spots, but I’m super excited for this.

I personally think Jerboa is a the smoothest experience so far. But I'm planning to jump to Sync when it becomes available.

I've settled on Jerboa for now. The only thing i can't find is a way to share a link to a community.

I saw that article and i thought, "Reddit won? I lost? That's funny, because i kinda feel like I'm winning."

Yeah it feels like a useless competition. They felt the need to be bragging of ‘winning’ against their customers or products. I didn’t come here to win. I came here to not fight with that nonsense.

is it a competition?

how does an individual win this competition?

Nah, lemmy is still definitely the losing option. A fraction of the content for now and you can't post videos yet, hope that changes.

Whats wrong with posting a link to a video? Video hosting is expensive and YouTube is already a great option.

I'd just much rather it play in app, hoping Boost is able to play links natively without having to open them.

It's all about ease of use, I don't want to click on a bunch of links, it's easier to scroll, watch, scroll. Also, I haven't even seen links to videos, video posts are wayyyyyy down.

I agree in theory, lemmy becoming a capable scroll-when-bored service in general is gonna be the thing that increases the user base and retention. But hosting videos is dummy expensive and the fediverse is idealogically opposed to the advertising that would pay for that.

Offloading videos to YouTube or something similar and embedding them would be just fine for me, I like the idea of videos being on YouTube instead of being kind of orphaned in that liminal, unsearchable twilight zone of Social Media Video Hosting anyway

It's all a matter of opinion but personally I don't like watching videos and don't care if I can post them. If that's what you're looking for in a platform this might not be the best one for you.

You don't need to watch them, but the possibility to post is still better for the community. The porn side of Lemmy will be a shadow of it's former Reddit self without videos/ability to play redgifs videos in app. Then you have the dog videos, and then the TikTok videos which you might not like but it's undeniable they draw a crowd.

Thing is, with videos, which I'm assuming will come eventually, it will be the best one for me. Most social media feeds are awful, looking at you Instagram, TikTok and Reddit default app. Far too much soggested content.

I don't care what happens to reddit.

Ditto. I didn’t come here to win anything. I came here to get out of playing the game.it’s a stupid game. It shouldn’t be a game.if anything that article confirms I made the right choice. If the bully of the playground is yelling how he’s won just cuz I went to a different park to play, he can have the playground. I don’t need that toxic shit in my life.

Saw Lemmy, never looking back. I hated the mobile web interface anyway.

Yeah reddit won. But the whole fiasco led me to lemmy which I like much more, so they can have their cake

Lemmy and Kbin won.

Reddit came out of it possibly still standing, but obviously weakened in many ways compared to before. Meanwhile, over here there's now a bunch of activity and the development and servers seem to be well funded. And we (the Fediverse) didn't even participate in the fight - it was all Reddit punching itself in the face.

The consumers also won, as we now have viable alternatives to choose from.

Maybe the fact that Reddit is still alive and active could be considered "winning", in which case Musk's Twitter is also "winning" every day. But that's one hell of a low bar for what should be considered a victory in a fight you yourself started.

And didn't they lose like half their value in prep for IPO?

We're still waiting for actual figures, the 7% often cited was from weeks before the protest. Reddit Inc's behavior was extremely unprofessional, they did an absolutely terrible job at controlling their community, and the quality content that's the main driver for Reddit's success has took a massive hit as they alienated their core niche. They will undoubtedly vilify said core niche in their communications, in an attempt to fool prospective investors into thinking they just "got rid of a bunch of nerds who were against their totally sane monetization practices", but what they really did is they cut off the 1 from the 1-9-90 rule, they drove away their core contributors who kept the other 9% of users engaged and the remaining 90% lurking and still consuming ads.

The real impact to Reddit's platform isn't going to happen today or tomorrow, the damage will take months to set in as the reduced value of content results in reduced user engagement and retention. And by the time they see the charts, it will be too late to act. As for their valuation, it is up in the air due to the delayed effect, but any smart investor should see the clear signs shown here and exercise extreme caution about the valuation they assign to Reddit. The site appears to perform better for now, because it's easy to force dissenting voices off the platform, reign in unruly mod teams and force them to open up their communities to their specifications, but pulling the lost users back on the platform, especially their most valuable and connected contributors whose trust and buy-in is now thoroughly broken, is not something Reddit can force. And it's crystal clear that Reddit can no longer accomplish anything regarding its community without use of force. They lost the carrot and only have a stick now, and sticks don't bring value to your platform.

Yup, imagine starting a fight, after which the other person beats you with a baseball bat a few times and just kicks you while your down for a while and eventually gets bored and walks away... And then you get up and declare, "I Won!"

Elmo's twitter has taugh spez that you just take the hit and push through. Reddit has now alienated its powerusers, lost some historical content, and most of all decreased its potential for quality content. I believe that spez will even accept a decrease in MAUs. Any positive change now will have to come from other stakeholders.

So it WAS a game to him. Glad I stopped playing it.