Reddit Blackout Crashes The Site As Reddit Users Realize They’re In The Power Position
www.techdirt.com
On Monday we wrote about the changes that Reddit was making to their API pricing, causing some services to shut down, and leading thousands of subreddits to choose to blackout (some temporarily, so…

From the article:

And this bumps up against another part of Cory’s enshittifcation concept: it only works when switching costs are high. Social media can make that work. But I’m not so sure that Reddit has the sheer gravitational pull that social media has. Yes, there are social media-like communities on various subreddits. But, on the whole, the communities are built around topics, and it’s kind of easy to just move elsewhere (again, fediverse options Lemmy and Kbin are already looking pretty nice for that).

  • Old Man FireEnglish
    29·
    1 year ago

    we knew we had the power position when lemmy’s world stood it’s ground and didn’t explode on the day before yesterday.

    • PenguinTD@lemmy.caEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      did anyone expect it to explode after 48 hours past? Like even 1% of reddit user says fuck this I am out going to other format, that’s enough to sustain a healthy alternative. (oh, and don’t forget these are actual human account migrate as well, not bots.)

      • Bowen@beehaw.orgEnglish
        10·
        1 year ago

        Human accounts and generally the main content creators on top of it. The ones who create posts, the ones who drive discussion and commentary.

        The bulk of their ad revenue probably comes from lurkers and consumers, but their platform is built entirely on the aggregation of a small subset of the power users. You need both. He doesn’t seem to really understand that. Sure you can replace mods, maybe they’re better, maybe they’re worse, but you can’t replace content creators and force conversation.

        He’s definitely sweating bullets by the way he’s throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

        • PenguinTD@lemmy.caEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, he is doing everything that contradict what he said or set out to do just to make quick bucks and maybe so that he can pull the CEO->CEO->CEO route like many past CEOs after successfully IPO reddit. If that ever happens, what happen to reddit is no longer his concern, that’s why he didn’t give anything a fuck to achieve that goal.

          IMO, reddit have 4 main components:

          • creator: bot, repost, actual human contribution, doesn’t matter who submit the link to an article. People or people that makes bot to generate enough engagement posts drive the traffic and follow comments, votes.
          • active user: people that actually participate in discussion, this is what kinda make or break a reddit like env, without meaningful comments(meme or not, something that engages you), the last group will feel bored.
          • mods: the people that cares for topic and sacrifice enough time to keep the community intact.
          • passive consumer: people who mostly only upvote/downvote and just read the post like rss feed looking for things to make their boring time a bit more interesting.

          Any user can be a combination of above when they visit different parts of the reddit, but what spez pissed off most are the “mods/active” aligned users. (if I category my reddit profile, I am like 0.5% creator, 29.5% active, 70% passive. )

          Simply put, reddit won’t survive with just creator and passive consumer, the community like features(asking questions/sharing tips) are essential for a sub to survive. It’s not going to implode and snap away, just slowly become a bot create/bot comment/bot mod/bot upvotes farm.