How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history
www.theverge.com
Users were outraged, but Reddit mostly won.

How is reddit post protest, did it really win over protesters? Did the ones who left make a dent? Or like all things before, did it ultimately do nothing?

  • Fishe_stix@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I have nothing to back this up and I haven’t spent any significant amount of time browsing Reddit since the end of June. Yesterday, a search result took me to a section of Reddit and eyebrowsed through a bit. I feel like the people that left were the people that contributed and a lot of the remaining traffic is the people that just browse. Social media and the internet are not like real world businesses that just tank. Online social media is made up of the people who view it and the people who contribute to it. Facebook became boomers, memes that aren’t as clever as people who post them think they are, You’re great and posting pictures of a family reunion you didn’t know existed, and a substitute for craigslist. It didn’t used to be that way, but I think overall they would say their numbers are solid. Social media evolves, and Reddit is evolving in a direction, that a core group of users who I speculate were some of the more useful contributors, don’t want to participate in. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow and find Reddit gone. But will it ever truly be the front page of the internet again? Will it ever be where I’m glad my search took me for a specific tech problem? Will information that used to be on individual bulletin boards scattered throughout the net which had centralized on Reddit remain on Reddit? Reddit will probably cash out in some way and we’ll be left with the Facebook equivalent of Reddit. If that’s something that quality contributors don’t want to participate in, then it will be even more akin to Facebook. So is it going to go away? Probably not. Could you argue that it’s basically already gone? I would say it’s at least headed that way.

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    No, it didn’t get crushed. The goal was never to move everyone off reddit, it is to trigger the death spiral by having the people who cared about and actively contributes to abandon reddit and being redditors.

    If this trend continues, reddit will get Facebook’d as their algorithms will make contents there get louder and dumber and angrier than ever before and cause more people to leave.

    Remember, reddit is cynicism and despair, and despair is the enemy of progress.

  • bonobi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I think more and more will make the switch once they experience more and more ads on the official app. Those who used 3rd party apps and are now using the official one will likely give up and switch after a little while.

    • JustSomePerson@kbin.social
      0·
      2 years ago

      The switch to where? Here, where there is almost no content except for discussions about how bad reddit, meta, threads, bluesky etc. are?

  • rayman30@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Now, if only /r/NoSleep would move here, I wouldn’t have to keep visiting Reddit. But I am just too addicted to the stories there

    • Frost Wolf@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I looked around and we have a nosleep here as well though. Admittedly there’s not much in it yet. It would be nice if more people will post here, but it’s only been week 1 of the great migration. I’m staying positive that overtime, communities will move or not, crosspost here. :)

      !nosleep@lemmy.world

      • whereisdani_r@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I missed a niche community of mine. It’s a ghost town, but I talk to myself and I see the lurkers lol one can hope. Post and the will come.

        • Frost Wolf@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          If you have friends from other social media, you can always invite them over, if you have a forum account or facebook, you can also link lemmy.world in the website or signature. :) or just work on posting interesting things to communities here in the hopes that it will get the ball rolling.

  • xkforce@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Reddit didnt crush the protest, redditors and mods did. Mods acted like mods (their stereotypes mostly deserved) and users were so addicted to the site that they lost their shit that their favorite sub went dark for 2 days. The mods never had leverage and 99% of the users have no desire to lift a finger to meaningfully protest.

    Reddit doesnt have any real competition (yet… hopefully lemmy does well) so they dont really care if what theyre doing pisses off users. The site is thoroughly in the enshittening phase of its life cycle and the apathy of its users ensure that reddit has no incentive to reverse this.