People discredit every type of protest, IRL or not. I think back to every major protest that’s happened in response to some major event, and the response every time is “That won’t ever work”, “You’re wasting your time”, “Imagine caring about that”.
This isn’t the death of Reddit, not even close to it. Reddit may even get more popular after this. However, that doesn’t mean all of this was pointless.
The Fediverse continues to grow, and that’s genuinely a good thing. Every time a platform fucks up, people give X ActivityPub app a new set of eyes and continue to help developers strengthen these platforms and build up the community.
A lot of times the things we want don’t happen in 1 big moment, it’s a lot of continuous smaller moments that eventually form into something greater.
It’s going to take a lot of effort to build out a new platform, especially one built off the concept of decentralization. I think we should continue to build our communities here, and do our best to help this platform thrive.
I supported the blackout not just because of the sudden changes to third party API usage (I only use Old Reddit so it does impact me less) but because this was clearly a change that severely negatively impacted the moderators on Reddit. The moderators on Reddit are unpaid and the work they do is mostly deleting spam. It’s not fun stuff and we are fortunate to have so many volunteers (even if some abuse whatever little power they have). They were the ones who organized this blackout. Reading some of their complaints, I empathize greatly. So even if the API changes don’t get reverted maybe the blackout gave Reddit’s corporate heads a moment’s pause to actually do something to help the people who do all of the work for them.
So even if things don’t get reverted, perhaps there was something positive to this whole event.
Also, being off Reddit for days has been really nice. I feel better, not being there. I might stay longer here.
Reddit has been on a steady decline for a while now, like years. But the mass and inertia made it still useful to find things out. More and more filtering was required to narrow down to content that wasn’t annoying or irrelevant. This recent conflict will tip the balance in such a way that you’ll have to spend much more time filtering unwanted content than enjoying wanted content. Mods will be less effective in the moderation tasks, and the overall quality of content will decline even more quickly.
A couple months ago, there was an announcement about RES, that it was not going to see any more development. It would continue to work (still is as of now) until Reddit changed something to make it not work, but at that point it would be over. I decided then that if RES stopped working, I was done.
For me personally, I was already a bit older than the target demographic when I signed up fifteen years ago. I am (obviously) fifteen years older now, and it feels like the demographic has gotten much younger. Slap that on top of everything else, and it’s just not for me anymore.
It’s already mostly memes and inside jokes and shitposting (oh my!), and it won’t be long until it’s 4chan with ads.