I decided to take a peek at Reddit to see what kind of activity is happening, a good handful of the subreddits I am subscribed to are still super active with posts and commenters.
There’s quite a few news articles on the front page regarding Spez and the blackouts, I am surprised those articles are even still up for people to see.
The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit’s and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted…
Perhaps there is some AI activity going on, I mean it’s kind of easy to do in this day and age. You just prompt an army of AI bots to defend Reddit, and try to keep users engaged.
I am so happy I found Lemmy, and I am so happy that there is a comfortable level of activity. Sure it’s only a small fraction of what Reddit is activity wise, but it’s so much more hearty and welcoming.
Reddit has just turned into one big toxic mess. Lemmy reminds me of what Reddit used to be 10 years ago.
People have been saying it but were being ignored for weeks: this blackout thing will not work. And we were correct. It was a useless attempt to try and win over the majority.
Plenty of people use the main app and are the majority of users, and it is what it is. The ones who care about the Reddit API fiasco should move away. That’s the only valid move.
I’ve done it, and everyone else who care should. Leave the ones who are fine with Reddit on Reddit.
I see the blackout as a nudge to overcome addiction. A few days or weeks without content, and people start looking around. The the network effect (downward) will make the rest.
I want to specify that I have no interest in all the userbase of reddit moving to Lemmy, but just an initial influx of people who care will help making it reach a critical mass. After that, reddit can even reopen fully, at that point it won’t matter.
Except those people went to twitter, Instagram, and tiktok for their memes, news, and funny moments. All the major subs that I subscribed to are back on and people are back as usual there. The blackout was useless and another lazy version of internet activism, and it made people hate the mods instead of Reddit for “power tripping.” Literally made people side with Reddit because of that lol.
I had a different experience, to be honest. The sub I am more active in, /r/Italy is open, but it has still a ridiculous activity, and most of the active users wanted an indefinite blackout. A sibling sub, italyinformatica is even more desert (yesterday last post was 4 days ago). I think that in principle the blackout is a very effective way to protest, it worked like a charm to keep me off the site, at least, but I agree that saying “we do it for 2 days” undermines the whole thing.
I don’t think it’s particular the main stream of Reddit that is protesting, it is indeed a small percentage. However, I think the discussion in the recent Waveform Podcast hits the nail on the head:
That small percentage that left Reddit are the people that care most about Reddit. Those are the powerusers. The users that generally contribute most to the platform, be that in the form of content, informative comments, moderation, writing tools or other stuff. It’s the people that are most valueble to the website. When those people leave there might others might not notice it instantly, but after a while the overall experience will deteriate somehow.
It is somewhat comparable to if when many of the big youtubers were to leave Youtube after bad management. They might be only 1% of the people uaing Youtube, but they are also the people that are important to the website for the experience of the other 99%.
Thing is though, only those power users are likely to care about the decline in content quality.
The people who just use it for memes and funny videos won’t even notice