Reddit is going public. Will its unruly user base revolt?

jeffw@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 215 points –
Reddit is going public. Will its unruly user base revolt?
vox.com
59

Most redditors who aren't willing to bend over and take whatever Spez wants to shove into their asses have already switched to Lemmy.

We'll get a few stragglers, but I wouldn't expect much of a reaction at this point.

Today? Maybe a few. A week, a month, a year from now? Reddit is going to get worse. People will leave.

Looking at Twitter it's clear some folks will never leave no matter how bad it gets, but plenty of folks will leave.

I have said it before, yes, people might leave. But the kind of people that stick so long to a dying platform are the ones that will never make it to Lemmy, Mastodon or whatever fediverse alternative you have.

None of these federated platforms employs any dark pattern algorithms to keep users engaged and clicking as much as possible. The kind of user that stays until the enshittification is not bearable anymore will not like the way the fediverse operates. So they go to some other place. Maybe its Facebook again, maybe Instagram, who knows.

The time is ripe for a new contender, so expect a bunch of The Next Big Thing (tm) apps that are almost identical, begging for your email address and contacts list so they can sign all your friends up too!

They don't deserve to come into our communities

I wouldn't say that they don't deserve something better, just that they're not capable of it.

Man i wish people would understand just how funny it would've been to just drop twitter literally the tay elon took over. Same with reddit. Of course you'll always have people who don't even know, don't care or even like it. But fucking imagine the twitter takeover and only elon and a few of his dick sniffers are basically a private discord server

Reddit users have always been revolting

Advisor: "Sire, the peasants are revolting!"
Blackadder: "Yes they are disgusting arent they"

Count DeMoney: “The peasants are revolting.”

King: “You can say that again, they stink on ice.”

—History of the World Part I

Maybe not right now, but when shareholders start demanding action over NSFW subs or subs that discuss illegal activities or subs that discuss the evils of capitalism or subs that just aren't profitable and those subs start getting shuttered, then they will.

Reminds me of Youtube. Guns and drugs, don’t make advertiser friendly videos, and that’s why the platform only barely tolerates those videos. From the predictive of YT, they demand resources without giving any direct revenue. I can see the reason why those channels tend struggle so much.

And when they do, I expect Fansly to drop a platform just for these users.

I doubt most users care about the IPO directly. What does it matter if the platform is owned by a few scumbags or many?

But as we know, pressure to attain profitability may push Reddit to introduce increasingly user-hostile features. This is where the possibility for the next revolt lies.

Let that sinking ship join Myspace and Tumblr already. Revolting may rise awareness of the problem, but it isn’t going to change the direction where Reddit is headed. They need to become profitable, and they’ve decided to do that by backstabbing the users.

The users and mods are already covered in dried caked blood from the many times they've already been back stabbed, front stabbed, side stabbed, thrown off a cliff and pissed on yet they're still there working away for free while those who care absolutely nothing about the site are all making money off it.

It's the pinnacle of capitalism.

Some of us are old enough to remember the demise of Digg. The same userbase that moved to Reddit over a decade ago will move somewhere else.

That user base is a drop in the ocean compared to most of reddits user base, and those people have all left already.

It's only a matter of time until they completely ban porn.

Because they're trying to monetize your third space.

I think that the ones who revolted against their preparatory enshittification aren't Reddit users anymore (hence why I'm here), and the ones who didn't revolt won't do it now either.

They already kicked out or scared off the most vocal last year.

Why would they revolt? I’d assume most of the people that cared enough to take the revolt over killing third party apps and all that have left or at least minimized their Reddit use. So that leaves bots, the apathetic, and niche community users who might complain but aren’t going anywhere.

Do another 2 day blackout. That'll show 'em.

Ooh. Imagine the content of the investor calls if there is another blackout.

There would no longer be any hesitation to ban or censor everybody involved.

the unruly userbase that largely rolled over and continued used reddit after its API changes with all but a meagre protest? Yeah im sure they'll be fine.

The only people left there actually engaging and not just checking out funny vids on their phone are drones, corpo bootlickers and scammers anyway lol

Sadly tons of subs are very active with real people. It's a lot of momentum to shift.

I have a 3p app that still seems to be working. I don’t log in, so I only read occasionally, but I have to say that the number of upvotes seem much higher than when I was using the site. I was a very active user who quit during the exodus (when Apollo went dark), but I don’t remember the number of upvotes being regularly in the thousands to tens of thousands.

It makes me wonder whether they’re artificially boosting traffic ahead of the IPO, to be honest. I mean, if they are, it probably would have leaked by now - but it still feels like it doesn’t line up with the third party traffic reports.

In any case, I think that going public is just going to increase the pressure for monetization, and Spez has already said how much he admires what Elon did with Twitter, so I think we know where it’s heading. It’s really just waiting for a replacement. Whether lemmy can be it or not is yet to be determined, but the enshittification has started and the migration will come as soon as someone drops a couple of billion building a service and app that’s a real substitute for the casual users.

Oh I'm not saying they aren't, I'm just saying they're corpo bootlickers who probably don't have ublock installed because they think piracy is wrong or some shit and I'd never want to be around them anyway

Don't forget about bots, when I occasionally find my way there because of some development problems, it's just super low quality content on new posts

The users who stayed are the chumps who rolled over and gave in. So no, they won't revolt.

Let's ask the same question in another way.

Can we make its userbase revolt? If yes, how?

It's always revolting.

Can we make it revolt harder, then?

More specifically: are there ways to encourage the current Reddit userbase to act so notoriously destructively towards the platform, that no sane investor would burn their money buying Reddit stock?

If you can control the porn, you control the internet.

So, if you can somehow trigger a revolt in all the NSFW subreddits, you win. Reddit stock will tank before it goes public.

"He who controls the spice(y content) controls the universe" - Baron Harkonnen in Frank Herbert's Dune

That's a fun idea - specially if we could recruit the Reddit "porn is bad!" crowds to raid Reddit NSFW subs.

You are asking the same question the somethingrotten forum users asked themselves when they came up with the answer of SRS (shitredditsays).

Designed to meta-criticise the users of reddit itself, it feeds itself as users submit their own, (curated), idea of what a shitty redditor is.

Let the snake eat itself

Good to know - I wasn't aware of SRS' origins.

I feel like someone could do better than SomethingRotten though, by playing both sides, and encouraging users from both to brigade and annoy the shit out of your typical user. To the point that the users start asking themselves "what am I supposed to do here? If I support [cause], Reddit screeches at me; if I oppose [cause], Reddit screeches at me; and if I don't do either, both screech at me! Perhaps I should stop using Reddit."

This could be based on porn (perhaps a good target for that; as @remotelove@lemmy.ca said, who controls porn controls the internet)), or even some ultimately pointless matter, like pineapple on pizza.

*not sure on who would "we" be in this sentence.

Reddit users are all bots and conservatives these days. They are programmed to obey.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Reddit, the launchpad for many meme stocks, could now become one: The social media giant makes its debut on Wall Street Thursday in one of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings of the year.

While AI search crawlers have been scraping data from websites including Reddit to develop their models without permission from those sites, lawsuits have recently put that practice under threat, so Google has been eager to secure licensing deals with major publishers.

The subreddit has previously made and ruined fortunes, temporarily driving up the price of stock in down-and-out companies like GameStop, the movie theater chain AMC, and Y2K smartphone maker BlackBerry.

Without doxxing myself, I thought my username was a clever allusion to one of my favorite books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; the mods derided it as “one of them high-brow classic lit references about your destructive nature as a journalist.”

Unlike X, where blue checks with verified identities have always driven the conversation, Reddit has a flatter structure where communities form around niche topics, giving way to an unruliness that doesn’t respect anyone because of their title (especially because many people go by pseudonyms.)

Reddit has historically had no shortage of such content, even if it was later banned: take r/thefappening, where photos of naked celebrities stolen from their private iCloud accounts were posted, or r/thedonald, a MAGA subreddit that often violated the social network’s policies on hate speech.


The original article contains 1,710 words, the summary contains 237 words. Saved 86%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Would anyone care if they did?

Sure, shareholders won’t pay if your product shits the bed. If there’s a repeat of last year, you’ll see the stock price dip

It's half dead best timing for IPO launch.

"unruly", lmfao, reddit users are some of the most cowed sheep on the internet