cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/25185
It started as an answer to a comment, but then I figured it might be worth a post on it’s own.
So here you go:
The blackout was not noticeable in terms of engagement. There were plenty of threads that still got tens of thousands of upvotes, so the frontpage didn’t look more empty than before. There were just some missing subs and an occasional reference to the blackout on the subs that were closed. The impact was much, much smaller than people here and over at lemmy suggest. Of course your personal frontpage is a lot more empty if you subscribed to the subs that are part of the blackout. It’s absolutely not the case for /all though.
Additionally, the blackout trackers are confusing. They show how many subs went black in relation to a total amount. Many people, me included, at first thought the total was the actual total amount of active subs, while in reality it was only the subs that pledged to close down. Reddit has up to 140,000 active subs, so in fact not even 5% closed.
The attempt to show that reddit is generally uninteresting without a certain part of mods and users failed.The API/3PA changes affect like 5-10% of users, so for most this isn’t even a problem. I was really surprised when I found out about that number yesterday, because i thought it would be more like 20-30% for whatever reason. Every time there is a discussion about 3PAs that fact is omitted, so that the problem seems larger than it is. Why should the overwhelming majority that doesn’t use 3PAs care about that topic?
The company doesn’t consist of total morons. The user base of reddit is known to have a certain amount of people who are able to organize a protest network (think back to the net neutrality protest). They knew this was going to happen and it was already priced in. They stay on their path because reddit will be more profitable than before. They are losing troublemakers (aka people who want to have a say in their company policies aka us) with this move and will probably gain a multitude of new users with whatever they are aiming for. Everyone is asking why they have 2000 employees. Well, a bunch of them are surely hired in the marketing department. I assume they studied that shit and know exactly what they are doing. They certainly have business psychologists, marketing experts, data scientists.
To reword what I’m trying to say here: Instagram et al aren’t that huge because they do what the users want, but because the companies know how to shape a service to cater to the majority of people. Reddit will do the same. In capitalism, going public is the logical step for a company to scale with their amount of clients. Catering to shareholders is inseparable from that, so rationalization is inevitable. The users who recognize that seem to be a minority. This minority is moving to the fediverse now, which, to put it in a more optimistic light, is kind of a win-win situation.
- I’m starting to care less about all that. I reflected about my reddit usage and figured that I mostly subscribed to smaller communities anyways. I rarely commented in subs that regularly got more than 1000 upvotes for their contributions. Having hundreds of comments under a post gets annoying fast, because you’ll be having a hard time being part of a conversation and there is no way to find out if the thing you wanted to say wasn’t already said anyways.
Posting was already starting to get annoying in medium-sized subs. I asked a question about fungus gnats in my plant pots, specifically pointing out that I want to use chemicals and not nematodes. Guess what? About 30 people recommended nematodes anyways. I don’t want this low quality spam, so I’d rather have a smaller community where people read before posting and not comment for the sake of commenting. I’m also okay with the Fediverse having multiple communities about identical topics. The mycology subs on reddit where flooded with ID requests of the same mushrooms multiple times a day, so people cared rarely to help identifying, because of course there is no incentive to write the same thing multiple times a day. Having that phenomenon spread out between multiple communities will take the load of a single community and their mods to handle these low effort posts. Yes, having really small communities is shit because nothing happens and it gets a self-enforcing effect until everyone leaves. Having huge communities sucks because of the reasons I named. Medium-size are the best. A few thousand subscribers, a few threads a day, a few dozen comments per thread. That’s my personal optimum for the communities I want to interact with.
- I don’t think the Fediverse will grow rapidly and I don’t think it needs to. We saw the rapid growth of mastodon after apartheid clyde took over twitter. The rapid shrinking of the active userbase a few weeks after was seen as a proof of its failure. But why is hardly anyone talking about the fact that the userbase three-folded compared to before? Sounds like a huge success to me, something any for-profit company would dream of. The same will happen to “reddit alternative”-services. We saw an influx of users in the last days (I was part of that), we will see another influx around July 1st and when old.reddit is shut down. Surely some decline here and there, but most probably constant growth when looking at a larger timescale the more the idea spreads and the more content is generated.
The shittification of for-profit platforms will continue indefinitely, users will always be driven away from them. Services come and go, there will be new trends, older concepts will be seen as outdated. It has always been like this, it will happen to services on the fediverse, too. But the fediverse as a general structure has huge potential, because it’s a perfect base to adapt to these changes. The widespread confusion about how it works will sort itself out by more and more people understanding it and explaining it to their peers. It had to be done with internet/email 20 to 30 years ago, it still has to be done with things like 2FA. I’m a tech-savvy person and still find a lot of functions on the Instagram app unnecessarily confusing, but its one of the most used apps worldwide. Confusion will not stop people from joining a cool thing.
So, I guess I got you until the half of my post and you thought I would only be ranting about the situation. But its the opposite: as a matter of fact I’m firmly on the optimistic site of things :)
I’ve stated this before and I’ll state it again, the API/third party app controversy is just a small chapter in a much larger story: Enshitification. A lot of us sought alternatives because of the protest, but we ultimately leave permanently because of enshitification and the compromise that happens to actively make the user experience worse because it is more profitable.
It takes time for both the user experience changes to happen and for users to experience the frustration needed to try something better. And that’s okay.
One thing is clear: Reddit’s appeal was from how it used to operate, not where it is headed. And it’ll end up in the enshitification graveyard just like the rest of them do. Eventually. The only question is, are you going to change platforms early? Or late?
I think this gets lost in the conversation a lot. The API change is a symptom of the larger problem of enshitification, which itself is worse for Reddit because 1) they haven’t been able to make a profit thus far, 2) the IPO push, and 3) Tik Tok exists and is far more popular. What was a slow and gradual process of enshitification (killing AMAs, secret santa, NFT bullshit, etc) is now about to hit hyperspeed.
One data point that is really worth highlighting is the Apollo dev said he had a call with Reddit at the end of January and they told him they had no plans to make changes to the API in 2023 and likely for a few years beyond that, and if they made any changes it would be to incorporate more features. Then in April Reddit annouces API changes with pricing to come within 2 weeks. Then 6 weeks later Reddit reveals the pricing, 30 days before it goes into effect. So this wasn’t some long term strategic plan. Something is happening in Reddit, there is some immediate pressure to make more money and quickly. This is almost a panic move, and I don’t think the IPO can fully explain that. Another data point is the recent (and likely just the first) round of layoffs.
And it won’t be the last big user-unfriendly change. The API is low hanging fruit, relative to the userbase. Reddit seems to be on a hard push to monitize in every way they can as quickly as possible. I’d expect a lot more changes that will annoy the userbase, and thanks to the blackouts the users are primed to recognize the further enshitification for what it is. Reddit would be smart to take a couple months of cooling off to lull users back into a sense of normalcy before implementing their next profit generating move, but nothing they’ve done so far strikes me as smart and strategic. I’d guess there will be further waves of Reddit refugees landing on Lemmy’s shores seeking asylum in the next 12-18 months.
It’s clear that this is just an exodus of higher quality users. I don’t need or want everyone to leave reddit. Let them ride the wave of shit that started with the eternal September. Kbin / Fediverse feels almost exactly like the beginning of reddit, when it comes to quality and quantity of content. Let it grow naturally.
What was the eternal September?
This is a cycle that happens over and over. Back in the beginnings of the internet, when USENET was popular, and it was mostly utilized by university students, this term was coined. In September, a wave of freshman would join the forums not knowing the culture, the rules, and generally making the place less pleasant and less useful. After a few months, they would get hip and things would return to normal.
But one day, the general population discovered the internet (AOL), and permanently flooded USENET. It changed the culture of the forums forever, and not for the better. This was the eternal September.
When Reddit started, it was tech and nerd focused with progressive values. This lasted a long time - years. But one day, Reddit’s popularity exploded. Diversity increased and content increased, which is great! Average quality of interactions became lower effort and more toxic. This was eternal September for Reddit. Since then, quality has deteriorated.
It’s the time during the 90s when Usenet (remember that?) opened up to regular home users and was therefore swamped.
Wow, 1993. I didn’t have internet until a year later.
I agree that my reddit experience was largely small communities. I did not go to /r/all ever. The downside, so far, to the fediverse experience, is that those small communities don’t exist here. There’s not enough people to create that same small, niche interest that I was able to find on reddit.
At first I was looking for a reddit alternative but now, after a few days in the fediverse, I made 2 observations:
- The experience is much more like what I expect from this sort of social network (smaller, less spammy)
- I’m positive I don’t want to go back to reddit because with hindsight I was just wasting time browsing and reading stuff that I mostly don’t care about.
The Fediverse feels like a breath of fresh air and I’m excited to contribute again and see where it goes. Even if this “fight” were to be won, Reddit will continue it’s trend into enshittification.
High quality users give platforms credence just like good people give credence to religions. I think this is a good thing in the long run, if shitty companies lose their reputation due to their user base gradually become shittier and shittier as they drive decent people away.
Even if we don’t have an immediate “win”, I think the loss of quality will be felt more and more as time goes by.
Agreed 100%. The fact we are communicating in a decentralized platform is already an early win for me. Reddit wasn’t built in a day and gradually we will build this network up.
The blackout might not be indefinite for everyone, but it will be for me because man I just kind of like kbin now.
I feel you. Deleted my reddit account today. Felt relieved and now enjoying the Federation.
even if it leads to nothing i’m all for the blackout cuz
- it’s funny
- it leads to the creation and population of places like lemmy
- it motivates ppl to create alternatives to the things that ppl think will be missed
- sabotage is fun
i also disagree that fediverse will not grow fast from this. will it reach mass adoption and a size equivalent to Reddit’s? Definitely no. Will it have 100k more active users because of this? Maybe / probably. It’s a net positive.
And I’m totally cool with it not growing as fast or getting as big. Reddit was too much.
It already has over 100k now
Notice I meant “more”. I also. Said “active”. I reckon many will be dead accounts in the near future. People who tried it and decided fuck this and left. Most of the accounts will be like this. We’ll have to check month by month how many were active. I think that a month after June 30th, the count of active users will be much smaller than what it is today and than what it will be on June 30 when the feeling of discontent will teach it’s peak.
But! I also think that overall the growth will be massive anyway. When I say smaller I think in percentages. If we have 30k active users now, I’d imagine even if the number stays the same, that will be “growth” because the current level of activity is not stable. And is instead fueled by active discontent and protest. Once the riot is over and people move to their comfort zone, if we still have 30k active users it is a great success.
All platforms become shitty once normies invade. And normies invade when the entry barrier is low. Then corporates take notice and complete the “enshitification” of the platform. My personal thumbrule is that if my dad can use a platform it’s time to leave. Facebook is a great example of this and I don’t know how many years it’s been since I even lurked there, let alone post.
Lemmy is hardly challenging to use already, and I would rather not have people who either cannot be bothered (or are actually stupid enough) to learn how to use Lemmy join. Let Fediverse remain a niche platform for those who are technically savvy and ideologically driven. In my experience, such people tend to have better opinions than the mindless doom-scrolling normies, even if I may not agree with all their opinions.
This may sound petty and elitist but I do feel it is better that the Fediverse remains restricted to the segment of population who truly cares about decentralization, internet freedoms, privacy and such things.
Here’s a list of reddit data available, including that there are 3,125,000 total subreddits on Reddit.
From https://www.redditinc.com/, they say there are 100k+ active subreddits. Maybe most of the existing ones are not active?
What constitutes an active subreddit? Is it a post a day? A post a month?
This is what concerns me. They are (somewhat) getting rid of the vocal minority that will actually do something when shit goes wrong. We, the troublemakers, have taken our toys and gone home. We’ve reduced our own ability to be heard… Don’t get me wrong. I am forever federation now. Reddit will have to find a way to survive without me, as difficult as that may seem. Just worried we’ve cut our own power to effect change, if we ever had any.
We did not. reddit has more than enough normies using it that they can milk them for ad revenue forever without us. Let them enjoy their poorly moderated, shitpost-laden site. I’m done with it.
The 3PA changes affect 5-10% of users directly, yes, but the users it does affect the most are the ones that give reddit the most value - mods and content creators/curators. I don’t use 3PA, but I relied on those that do to keep reddit tolerable to interact with. That’s why I left - reddit will unquestionably become a shittier experience once the changes hit, and I’m not waiting around for it to happen.
I think if you wanted to have fewer comments on Reddit, your best bet would have been to sort posts by rising or new.
I’ve long since grown cynical and given up hope of affecting meaningful change on such a massive scale, social networks are just too big and people are too contrarian and stubborn to change. The best you can do is foster community on a small scale, find a niche subject, a nice group to hang out with and make the best of it while trying to ignore the outside world as much as possible. The protest at reddit might not do anything in the long term but maybe it was enough of a boost to kbin and lemmy for them to take off in some smaller capacity.
This is why I’ll be trying to switch to the fediverse as much as possible, at least as an experiment. It’s very interesting and promising tech that I want to see work out even if it’s not perfect. As long as there are some other like-minded people here and steady influx of news that I’d otherwise get from reddit, I realized I don’t really need that site anymore.
I am too, however one of the differentiating qualities of Reddit was it’s scale. The “hive mind” of posts being visible to such a broad audience is that you’d sometimes run into insights into niche experts on obscure topics. If the audience is too small, those posters don’t encounter the question, and we lose the opportunity to see them share their insight into the topic.
I do hope the fediverse eventually scales to a point where serendipitous interactions like that can start happening again. It’ll probably take a fair bit of time after the Reddit diaspora for the public to make their way to one instance or another.
Yeah, the thing I’ll miss the most is that most of the niche gaming subreddits were often visited or even maintained by game devs themselves, you could interact with them and get fresh updates since they’d post them to reddit directly. From indie games to sometimes large games like warframe or guild wars 2 as well!
The subreddit was a community rather than just a link aggregator in this way. Fediverse is still very far from becoming that mainstream, not even mastodon has managed to pull people over in such a capacity and musk tried much harder than spez to make twitter a hellscape. But we’ll see, it has to start somewhere, reddit can’t last forever. I hope.
If 3rd party apps account for 5-10% of the userbase then it seems insane they’d alienate that 5-10% rather than just figure something reasonable out with the apps. There aren’t that many and they could accommodate them without impacting their desire AI scraping changes.
Part of what made Reddit great was that humans answered actual questions with relevant details, and these answers were searchable by Google, and people knew they could get at those answers by filtering their search with site:reddit.com. but if the community fragments into the fediverse how will that filtering take place? On one hand, it is nice that humans populate the content rather than SEO optimized ad-filled garbage that is the web now. On the other hand it is still subject to the capitalistic whims of a CEO. I worry that once Reddit goes the way of Digg we will have lost the golden age of the internet, where you could interact and ask questions of a human community, with experts listening to niche subreddits.
