I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Well we’re here, aren’t we?
Yeah this is the most Ironic platform to post this.
I mean…my handle here is proof enough what happened.
I used Narwhal, IIRC Reddit made it official and then killed it when they started their own app, I bought Apollo because good app and dev, then reddit killed that one too. Along with all the other BS they did, that was the final straw. Been here ever since.
Damn I miss Apollo, such a well written app
RIP RiF
Genuinely reddit got a wholelot worse because of this and multiple other actions.
The quality of user dropped as the content became social media. You were less likely to get informative comments or even informed comments.
A lot of users jumped ship to fedi or gave up altogether. These older users would have been part of the selling point.
Popular feeds. Difficulty accessing r/all. Algorithmic feeds.
I actually did make an acount and revaanced the app to finish out a project I was getting advice from reddit on. The app sucks. Old was perfect. The app was showing days old stories on major subreddits, defaulting to “best” or “hot” but giving shit.
I remember when Victoria got fucked over and that was the highlight of the over commercialisation.
Do not use the app it sucks so much.
I still use Joey for Reddit somehow, though I only use it for local stuff since there’s no equivalent on Lemmy
And just to highlight this for OP’s question: “How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?”
A lot of users jumped ship to fedi or gave up altogether.
Basically, everyone who would protest have left.
People don’t value their data or freedom.
Everyone is saying people folded, but what I recall happening was Reddit gave an ultimatum. “Open your subreddit back up or we will replace the mods”. And that’s exactly what they did. Then after killing third party apps they enshittified everything in the web/mobile web version too to try and force people to the app. They’ve even removed r/all recently.
To me, it was a stark period in the decline of reddit quality. What little remained of the community at large died then. Reddit has been a ghost of its former self since.
Yeah it’s full of bots now, and without r/all you have to seek out specific subreddits or use their curated feed. Both of which kind of just sucks.
I mean, we are all here, in a community that as far as I know didn’t exist in a significant way before. Was it a sizeable chunk? we will never know because (a) Reddit needs to cook their numbers to look good to investors and (b) big social networks tend to have a lot of inertia and many people will just stay, I have many friends that are still in twitter because “is a good place to follow good programmers”.
IMHO reddit is the same direction of Facebook, so heading towards irrelevance, but no idea how far, and some people are even still on Facebook, so who knows.
The problem is that there are no real popular alternatives, and not many people want to be somewhere like fediverse, specially losing a significant amount of users. But also for the complexity of the decentralized nature. Coming from someone that tried making jabber a thing for the longest time as opposed to msn messenger: is not gonna happen.
Normies be normies 🤷♂️
Literally why I’m here. Never looked back
Because plenty of us who left are still here
People started calling out who wanted the better for reddit “tantrums” so the good part of reddit left, and many of them are here on lemmy networks.
As results Reddit’s quality today is basically Facebook. no difference.
Yeah, I think that’s basically it. Reddit was full of bots, and now it’s just bots arguing with each other and trying to shove whatever they are promoting in front of you. Add in the slow death of old reddit, it’s simply not worth going to the site any longer.
They have ads in boomer mobile games now saying you can get REAL gaming advice from REAL gamers. This tells me they’re hemorrhaging users and don’t care about the quality of user they replace them with. I haven’t been to that shithole site in like 3 years except for the odd search result to a post about a very specific topic. I shudder to think what the front page must look like by now.
Because most people on a day to day basis don’t give two shits about this type of internet drama over third party API’s as long as they have their entertainment that suits their needs and it’s still easy to access and provides them what they want at a price they’re willing to pay.
Most people who are using social media aren’t tech people who even know what a API is much less care and most people don’t care about whatever app they’re using to access social media as long as they have an app. As for mods, let’s face it, they weren’t and aren’t going to give up their little slice of power over an API in the long run, on reddit and here.
Also, while you say reddit has gotten even worse, which is a subjective opinion that you and most of us all share, their stuff still works for the users at the end of the day with their extremely large user base and still thriving niche communities which lemmy just does not have due to the much smaller user base.
I think most of this is spot on, but the hearsay was that the subreddits who did participate in the shutdown were threatened with an ultimatum, which while I don’t think is possible to prove either way, hints that it would have happened regardless. Tho I’m usually all-too-ready to don my tinfoil hat when it comes to reddit trying to look appealing to investors; I witnessed a number of hentai/porn subreddits get banned and users actively request to become new mods only to be ignored.
Even if you discount the mods, there’s definitely a certain inertia you see in groups like this (like what’s going on with Discord right now) – people don’t want to leave in part because they’ve got their little in-group and don’t want to have to go through finding or founding a new group elsewhere. I think it’s particularly prevalent with those niche communities that don’t ever really break containment; the community would already be small enough without fracturing to the eight winds. I’m liking Lemmy so far but as I am trying to drum up activity in one of those niche communities (RWBY), it’s kind of disheartening how little relative traffic there is across the place.
The enshitification is real and the way to fight this is by collective action and escalation. When the mods took action collectively it shook Reddit and forced them to ban the offending users. If the userbase maintained the pressure with a boycott there is no way Reddit Inc could withstand the pressure. However, the asset owning class have configured our society to prevent collective organisation and protest. Power is being concentrated in fewer and fewer white mens hands. This Epstein-class of people tend to be psychopaths and narcissists because those are useful attributes for amassing power. We see the effects of this everywhere we look in the form of censorship, punitive legal statute, lobbying, corruption, inflation and the rise of fascism. Open source projects such as Lemmy, Wikipedia, Mastodon, Linux, Signal, etc, form the basis of an antidote.
I’m another user who left during this and came to Lemmy. As a non-tech person, though, it really wasn’t the easiest migration, and I do think you can see through Lemmy’s content sometimes (love for Linux, well-upvoted IT memes, programming humor, etc.) that it is a different crowd that was able to make the migration in general.
My city’s subreddit is incredibly active, very human, and still gets a ton of traffic. I usually check it once a week just to keep up with what’s happening locally, but I don’t log in and just scan the feed titles. That type of valuable local platform is unlikely to ever exist on Lemmy, which is sad.
The brain and the heart left reddit back then, the gut and the asshole remain there.
As soon as reddit is fun stopped working I left reddit, the only reddit is good for now is weird porn.
Fuck you spez.
By the end of the day reddit is feudal property and the asshole can kick out anyone anytime, as he uses the data for, of course, AI mining.
