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.
I’d like to introduce the gizmodo.com writers to the term Pyrrhic victory. One look at /r/all and it’s become nothing but reposts and memes that are hours, if not days old.
Reddit drove out its most important users - the moderators and content creators. They have enough old content to keep their viewership for awhile, but they’ll never regain the community trust they’ve lost. And this will continue to kill their influx of new material, which will inevitably erode the viewer base.
Do I think reddit will die? No, it will continue on, just as have slashdot and fark and other staple communities from the same era, but the highwater mark of the community as the “front page of the internet” is long past.
To be fair, it’s been like that for a while. Just look at /r/videos. #11 sub on reddit. 30 million subscribers.
Right now:
I strongly suspect reddit is lying about the true numbers. If you factor in repost bots, porn bots, and bots which increasingly repost comments from previous posts or comments from off site, reddit often feels abandoned.
Subreddits like /r/videos? Everyone left for tiktok.
Just look elsewhere on the site. Supposedly they have 500 million regular users, but if that’s the case why is no one upvoting or commenting on anything? And it’s summer, so the kids have far more free time.
But of course they’re not upvoting or commenting, they’re all on tiktok or wherever. Reddit has become a legacy social media.
Obviously, the fediverse is even more niche, but we’re not pretending to be incredibly popular and don’t need to boost our numbers for a looming IPO.
Agreed - I think that the trend was in play already. The protests tapped into it and definitely accelerated it, but the decline in the quality of posting and commentary has been steadily increasing since 2015. I personally mark the sudden popularity of The_Donald as the point at which the community started to die - the influx of Russian trolls, bots, and their 4chan goon squads was the beginning of the end for intelligent discussion on the site in my opinion.
In addition, the fallout is not over. Until recently I was using a 3rd party app that was only barred from signing in to reddit, I was still able to read and navigate the website. Now it seems that they have cut that access off so that drove me to create an account here.
I’ll still use reddit whenever I’m at my pc on weekdays, but if content moves elsewhere I will likely follow and wean off reddit further.
Welcome!
Slashdot is actually a fairly active community that was never aspiring to be the “front page of the internet”. As far as I can tell, it’s about as popular as it ever was. And Fark isn’t much different…slighlty less users than in the past, but they have some active content creators.
The comparison you’re looking for is Digg. That was the previous “front page of the internet” before they committed suicide and handed the title to Reddit. Now they are a news aggregate site where almost all content is created by bots. This is the path Reddit is travelling down. Completely curated, AI generated, with bots commenting to create the illusion of engagement. It’s almost there now. The amount of reposted content and copied comments has increased substantially over the last few years. And with the availability of LLMs now, it will only get worse.
Wait until the IPO, if it ever happens. The site will transform into a news aggregator ran by bots. No one will care about it anymore once Spez cashes out, or if he can’t then the entire thing will implode dramatically. Just like Digg.
Lol - shows you how old I am. There was a point, pre-Digg and pre-Reddit, where Slashdot was the premiere news aggregation site (circa 2000 - 2004) followed closely by Fark.com as the premiere shitposting site… mainly because they were the first to use the post/commentary style that made Reddit and Digg so popular. Slashdot didn’t aspire to this point of prominence - they simply assumed it because there was nothing else out there at the time that was as good.
You’re correct that when Reddit and Digg came on the scene, they pretty much erased the concept of Slashdot or Fark being the “frontpage of the internet”. Neither site died, as you note, and Slashdot in particular continued to maintain an active community that persists to this day by keeping their content tech-focused and not fucking with the user experience that made them popular in the first place.
I chose Fark and Slashdot as examples because I think unlike Digg (which just completely collapsed), I do see Reddit communities persisting in a similar reduced form.