The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
  • Nurgle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    171·
    1 year ago

    Good for them, but the damage is already done. They seeded this place with a lot of users. Will it be enough? Who knows. But Lemmy is probably a looooot further along than if they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.

    This place obviously needs to continue with good content and active communities, but at moment I don’t really have the urge to open Reddit they way things are.

    • acceptable_pumpkin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      114·
      1 year ago

      Absolutely. I had never even heard of Lemmy or anything Fediverse prior to all the 3rd party API shutdown. Once Apollo died, I stopped using Reddit.

      • Kerrigor@kbin.social
        40·
        1 year ago

        I had heard of it, but was like “that’s dumb, just use Reddit, there’s no reason not to”

        They gave me and many others that reason to reconsider

        • Meltbox@lemmy.worldEnglish
          24·
          1 year ago

          Yep. I also didn’t think this would work as well as it does. Remarkably good platform so far.

          • TheSaneWriter@lemmy.thesanewriter.comEnglish
            21·
            1 year ago

            Thee developers really crunched over July. It went from a niche beta platform to fully featured third-party apps and a ton of platform optimizations in a month, which is really impressive.

        • livus@kbin.social
          8·
          1 year ago

          I’d heard of the fediverse too, and I liked the idea of decentralised social media.

          But it was way down on my list of “things I guess I should learn about but don’t have time for.”

          Reddit blackout gave me both motive and opportunity to learn, and I’ve never looked back.

          • fuzzzerd@programming.dev
            1·
            1 year ago

            That’s exactly what happened to me too. It was in the background until something disrupted my status quo and then there was no looking back.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          5·
          1 year ago

          Yup, I saw the paltry userbase and didn’t bother. Other alternatives like lobste.rs and Tildes were a bit too closed, so I just stuck with Reddit. When Reddit decided to be stupid, I tried out lemmy and haven’t looked back.

      • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world
        12·
        1 year ago

        That, and Reddit was getting pretty fucking annoying. The little annoyances had really begun to pile up for me personally and I know I’m not alone.

      • Dragontre@lemmy.world
        9·
        1 year ago

        When RiF died I deleted my accounts and found my way here. I still open a couple of niche subreddits from time to time just to check on updates but otherwise my time on Reddit is done. 2010-2023 (damn I hate to admit that).

      • Ganrokh@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        The host of a tech podcast I listen to has had a Mastodon instance for years. I knew of the Fediverse because of that, but I always thought of it as decentralized Twitter and not necessarily a way to decentralize all types of social media platforms.

    • Good News, Everyone!@lemmy.ca
      23·
      1 year ago

      I lurked on reddit for years. I was lurking here for a couple weeks now but thought I should make an account to contribute. Reddit has gone down hill and I’ll never go back.

    • Polydextrous@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, even when I’ve had the urge to check Reddit for something I’m trying to figure out, I will do everything I can to avoid it. And if I can’t, I try to determine how much I care about what I’m searching before I even give them a single click. It’s a small, insignificant protest, but it’s a forever protest, for me. I’m happy on lemmy, I don’t browse as much, I interqct with more of the community and want to help build it. On Reddit, I felt dirty because of everything they’ve been doing the last 5 or so years. Tencent, killing third party apps slowly and then in one fell swoop, etc. fuck ‘em

      • Hey_Bim@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’ve had to visit Reddit twice since the protests started, to get information from a specific user. Both times, I used Brave browser in Private mode. They didn’t get to count me as a login, they couldn’t serve me ads, and their trackers were blocked.

        I don’t anticipate needing to go back to Reddit ever again, but for anyone who can’t avoid it, I recommend that method.

        • Obi@sopuli.xyz
          5·
          1 year ago

          I’m nicer and more importantly, it doesn’t make me rage on a regular basis like I used to.

    • monsoon@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      I’m glad to have moved to lemmy. It feels raw and real, vs reddits polished curated feel. As if I’m actually reading posts by people. And I like that is doesn’t get me scrolling too much.

      • Sinnerman@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        It feels raw and real, vs reddits polished curated feel. As if I’m actually reading posts by people.

        Because on reddit we were reading posts by bots.

    • squiblet@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      I went to reddit every day for over a decade, and now, I don’t. Zero desire to and in fact desire not to, same as Tweeter.

    • Obi@sopuli.xyz
      18·
      1 year ago

      Exactly how I feel! I don’t care at all what happens on the other site. This whole thing opened my eyes to what it has become, and it’s not just the API, that place has become toxic af.

  • e8d79@feddit.de
    79·
    1 year ago

    Well it cured me from checking reddit all the time, so I count that as a win.

    • Nepenthe@kbin.social
      11·
      1 year ago

      Yeahhh. Even if they reverted everything, brought back the apps, and released a scheduled weekly video of Spez crying as different mods whip him with a belt, I am not interested.

      Reddit can do whatever. I found an adequate replacement due to the protests, and I took it in direct response to Spez’s clockwork PR disasters, so the protests did not fail for me.

      Interesting read that should have gone without saying to anyone trying to manage a company, what trust thermoclines are and how to avoid them.

      Judging the worth of the protests depends on what your individual goal was. If it was convincing reddit admins not to cut and run with a giant pile of free money, now you know better. Nothing in the company’s history made me think they were the type, which is itself a warning sign.

      If it was reddit going down in flames, that’s always a slow burn and seems nigh unavoidable for any company as the years stretch on and management grows complacent, but they visibly did damage themselves because you’re reading this.

      And it was enough damage that several hundreds of thousands don’t really mind making their home at a competitor instead. It’s only going to get worse, not because they don’t already have millions of users who didn’t leave, but because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.

      The protest was a death sentence because their proven problem solving method is to ignore the problems as they mount.

      • Sinnerman@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.

        Specifically, if you volunteer to moderate, create content, or build community on Reddit, you will be insulted and dismissed by people who are only in it for the money.

    • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been pretty happy with the shift. I went to reddit all the time habitually but was very ready for something a little different.

  • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
    42·
    1 year ago

    As I understand it, reddit has shattered its trust with its userbase and has hemmoraged users because of it. I can hardly view that as a ‘win’ for them.

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
      23·
      1 year ago

      The remaining users have proven they’ll all willingly look at ads and suffer an inferior UX. It’s a win for reddit. There’s not much they can do to get rid of this core user group of… What, 90% of their users? That doesn’t care if they make things worse.

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
        8·
        1 year ago

        Those were not the people who engaged in discussions though. Most of them are the lurkers.

        • boonhet@lemm.ee
          11·
          1 year ago

          Still plenty of discussions happening. Does it matter that much of it is bots if people still read it and see the ads?

          • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
            2·
            1 year ago

            It matters to me, which is why I left. At the end of the day, I don’t care one bit if the social network I use is financially successful, only if it provides me a good experience.

            • boonhet@lemm.ee
              6·
              1 year ago

              Sure, I left for the same reason. But the CEO is still laughing his way to the bank while the communities are worse off. I’d say he won this one.

              • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
                2·
                1 year ago

                Depends on your definition of “won”. I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that the real winners who were able to migrate somewhere better, and that those platforms got enough of an influx to actually become worth visiting.

  • xantoxis@lemmy.world
    41·
    1 year ago

    They didn’t win shit. What they did broke the site for everyone. It doesn’t stop being broken because they seized control over the subs, something they could have done at any moment.

    Reddit has detonated all its credibility, leaving a hole in the side just big enough for most of the site’s users to escape as they decide reddit isn’t worth it, or find good-enough alternatives. It won’t happen all at once, but it’ll happen.

    • Bizarroland@kbin.social
      14·
      1 year ago

      I’m sure reddit will limp along, Tumblr did, myspace is still technically running although I don’t know anyone that would use it.

      Maybe a younger crowd will get attracted to the site, maybe it will live again on fresh blood but I’m just not going to be a part of it. I’m not going to endorse their actions with my presence.

      • Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        2·
        1 year ago

        There’s a trend of using old point and shoot camera instead of the mobile phone or a mirrorless cams. The older the camera the more prestige you get.

        Maybe they’ll use MySpace to post those photos. Haha.

        Let’s see. Retro websites being used by gen z to try and see what it felt like during the times of their elders. To get a feel of the nostalgia posts they keep seeing in social media.

    • Meltbox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Yeah and they broke bots which actually were core to certain subs. The quality of say Buildapcsales isn’t what it was.

  • fourohfour@lemmy.fmhy.netEnglish
    38·
    1 year ago

    We’re in such a shitty timeline right now where these CEO’s realize that they have so many mainstream users who just don’t actually care about the platform and just want the content, that even with significant controversy if they just ignore it, they can almost certainly weather the storm. Sure, their platform will be worse off, they’ll lose users to other platforms, but it’s a far cry from the Digg v3 -> Reddit situation when there was a much smaller user base who was more passionate about the site and community and they abandoned the old site as a result of those shitty decisions.

    • intrepid@lemmy.ca
      27·
      1 year ago

      Big platforms like Facebook, Digg, Twitter and Reddit don’t fail in a day. Their decline is rather gradual. If you noticed any decline on Reddit’s quality after the API lockdown, then that’s the beginning of a gradual slide. Just wait for a while before judging the results.

      • PasswordIsTaco@infosec.pub
        15·
        1 year ago

        My wife didn’t really pay attention to the reddit controversy and frankly didn’t really care. She is about as casual ad you can get and even She has noticed a very steep decline in the quality of content shared on reddit. She barely uses it anymore. Now this is a person who doesn’t notice when her adblocker is on or not. If she noticed this, i can guarantee she is not alone.

      • duncesplayedEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        Digg, … don’t fail in a day

        It depends on precisely what you mean by “fail” and how strictly you take “day”, but Digg did lose 50% of its traffic within 30 days (and it never recovered).

  • regedit@lemmy.world
    37·
    1 year ago

    Honestly, those still on Reddit are either lurkers or never gave a shit about the “protests” to begin with. The real measure will be the IPO. With that said, one tech group stroking off another means very little, anymore. Gizmodo can write their fluff piece.

    The capitalists are concerned about the plebs using social media to organize and call out lies, doing everything they can to break up or muddy the waters of social media platforms ahead of the 2024 US presidential elections. The goal is to disrupt the platforms and drive away dissenting users who would use these platforms to organize against them and debunk misinformation/lies.

    Musk buys Twitter (for far more than it was worth, lol) and drives it into the ground. Zuckerberg starts Threads to give people another “slowly boiling pot” to catch some of those looking for Twitter-alternatives. Spez and company enact changes to the platform, to artificially inflate their ad revenue ahead of their final valuation, which can’t happen if users are allowed to skirt their ads with better clients. I didn’t talk about Facebook, but it hasn’t been relevant since COVID showed us how bat-shit crazy our families and neighbors are. Facebook is basically Nextdoor, but world-wide. We can’t forget about the TikTok users. The parent company can’t be touched or bought so they’re just trying to outright ban the platform here.

    The ultra-wealthy are showing us how scared they are of the up-and-coming new demographic of voters, who grew up on social media, know how to use it better than them, in ways they couldn’t predict, and don’t give a fuck about TV news, printed media, or corporatized websites. The last two elections have slowly been reversing the progress these regressionists have made using the gullibility and entitlement of the Boomer generation, the ignorance of the Gen-X generation, and the brittle corpses of the millennials to push their agenda.

    The Arab Spring showed these wealthy fuckers how dangerous the people can be when they are allowed to use social media to organize and they don’t want it to happen again at a time when we’re finally starting to wise up to the “two-sides-of-the-same-coin” world we live in, and a new voting season has so much on the line for them.

    Fuck the wealthy, money’s made up, and may ass cancer rid us all of their kind!

    • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
      7·
      1 year ago

      Thank you! Someone finally gets it! The rich fucks are scared of a new generation that sees the two parties as what fhey are: two sides of the same corrupt, owned by the rich, coin.

  • XLRV@lemmy.ml
    36·
    1 year ago

    I won’t really call that a win,

    Reddit lost the trust of many users, a non insignificant part of contributors and moderators left, the enshittification of the platform is not going to stop but they lost a big part of what made Reddit great. They damaged their image and popularity.

    It’s like saying Elon won by trashing Twitter. Sure he does what he wants with it but making your platform less desirable sure isn’t a win for the platform.

    • g0nz0li0@lemmy.world
      28·
      1 year ago

      Nope. And the goal of protests aren’t necessarily to force change, it’s often just as much about raising awareness and attempting to change the discourse with those who hold power. So I think these headlines don’t do the movement justice.

        • Bizarroland@kbin.social
          5·
          1 year ago

          The goal was to make Reddit sellable.

          Have they done that? I don’t know. Probably.

          Does that mean that they had to take their soul and dice it up, throw away all the juicy pieces and take the remnants and sell them on the black market to the lowest bidder?

          Yeah.

          Will I ever go back? Sources say no.

          • CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            True. That’s Reddit’s goal though, not the protestors’. I think they’d rather the protestors leave, tbh.

            I did go back for r/place, but I haven’t touched reddit since. For me, the goal was/is to find a decent alternative so I won’t have to put up with reddit. I found it so that’s a win for me. Although I’m not gonna lie and say i may still visit for some info that I won’t be able to find someplace else (reddit has acquired tons of useful information over the years, unfortunately).

          • Bizarroland@kbin.social
            7·
            1 year ago

            There were a couple of mods from what I’ve heard who shut their subreddit down until Reddit took it over and to those mods I tip my hat and say way to have some testicular fortitude.

        • davidgro@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          As far as I am concerned, the goal was to get them to renegotiate the API pricing and restrictions, at the risk of the IPO tanking if they didn’t - even if they would have to fire Steve Huffman first.

          So yeah, it was a failed protest. If Lemmy continues to grow I’ll continue to spend most of my time here, but that seems like it’s no guarantee.

          … Of course if (as in when) Reddit removes old.reddit then I’ll never return there beyond holding my nose when trying to access search results. But 90%ish of the users are already on new reddit/official app and just don’t care.

    • Kichae@kbin.social
      15·
      1 year ago

      Depends on how one defines “win”.

      We coulda gotten more people here. Reddit’s kind of the perfect centralized service to decentralize. Major subreddits have millions of subscribers and mods with years of experience managing large communities. Many of them could have set up their own Lemmy servers and just said “we’re over here now”. You get a few large, but still not exactly mainstream r/all kind of subreddits doing that, and things could’ve been significantly different.

      At the same time, there are several ordres of magnitude more people here now than there was before, and the space isn’t showing any signs of dying. That’s kind of a big L for Reddit, as they’re going to continue enshitifying themselves in the months and years ahead, and there’s a legit, if somewhat underground, alternative space for people to go when they’re finally fed up. Now with an insane amount of mobile app support, to boot.

      • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        It’s better for Lemmy to grow slowly and have a userbase that is small and in-good-faith for as long as possible, so there’s time to build the necessary durability into both the software and the community.

      • livus@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        Yeah the article ends up pretty much making this point too:

        We’re at the dawn of a platform shift. As Google tunes its algorithms and incorporates more AI content into its search results, the business model of the entire internet is undergoing an unpredictable change. Over the long term, Reddit’s scrambling efforts at financial security may prove just as futile as the moderators’ attempts to fight back.

        I’m really glad to be out from under all that corporate social media bs.