hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
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I don’t know how to make this not about me. So, I’m just going to say it. Friday I closed a 13 year old Reddit account. Saturday and Sunday I brought up multiple Fediverse servers. I now have Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, Owncast, and NextCloud working. I have yet to get Element Chat and PeerTube running. They will happen by Friday. When I opened my Owncast I killed my Twitch account. When PeerTube is up and running I drop YouTube. My point is, I want to thank Reddit for providing me the motivation to leave corporate social media and switch to my own platform. I’m not going back… I’m going forward.
Thanks for this, I hadn’t heard of half of these projects and now I’m also looking into them! Pixelfed in particular look amazing. I have a few friends that have been wanting to rid Instagram so will definitely be sending this their way.
Yah, me too. Maybe not quite 13 y/o (that must have been painful!), but mine was still an active one.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
was a big help.
Many subreddits are holding polls on whether they should continue the blackout. For those who are boycotting Reddit, I would highly encourage you to go vote. Even if you plan to leave Reddit for good, a longer blackout will drive more users here.
On many subreddits that have polls, it seems like a majority favor keeping their subs open. It seems like the userbase is generally ambivalent or even hostile towards the protest at large.
Makes sense considering everyone who is pro-blackout is not on the site…
IDK I also see plenty of posts supporting keeping subs closed too. I doubt a lot of people have left the site for good. But those voices are generally outnumbered by people who don’t understand what’s going on or don’t care about the protest.
Don’t get me wrong… Lemmy is fine, but I am finding that most of the active posts here are about the protest on Reddit… plus a few discussions on current news and gaming… but little else. I am still spending most of my time on Reddit.
The Reddit drama is still the hotness right now, but soon maybe 2 months into the future it won’t be as new and you won’t see it as much.
I think this newest wave of decentralization is a good thing. Though we might lose knowledge held in those niche subreddits that choose to not go back that knowledge will inevitably migrate somewhere else.
Because, while we know how shitty Reddit as a company has behaved, there are millions who have no idea (despite the popular posts by mods across thousands of subs) and now feel that the mods and subs which went private/restricted are the ones damaging Reddit, rather than Reddit shooting itself.
To be honest, not that many people seem to actually care and I think this would have gone better if they didn’t announce their “for 48 hours” bullshit. Imagine if the WGA said they were going on strike for two weeks and then getting back to writing. They would accomplish literally nothing.
Subs saying “for 48 hours” is the equivalent to that. If they just went indefinite from the start, they wouldn’t have to be polling people who are now mostly just annoyed that their experience has been unpleasant for two days.
Honestly, as much as I support the whole thing, it went about as well as expected. Mods kind of shot themselves in the foot, now the community blames them.
In a way, those users are right. Either go all in or do nothing. Middle-of-the-road shit doesn’t work for things like this.
Also, the constant image with the black background and large white text saying Reddit sucks (that’s at least how it appears to general users) is becoming literal spam. Regular users see it, and it becomes one of those things where it’s like “we heard you the first dozen times, please shut up”. Also, because it’s being spammed, it loses impact and people gloss over it or filter it out.
At best, they’ll annoy enough people to leave (kind of roundabout way of accomplishing things, but I guess it works). At worst, they’ve given reddit a reason to declare the mods as promoting and engaging in spam which “doesn’t benefit the users of the site, so we’re going to step in and get things back on track so everyone can enjoy Reddit” or some corporate shit.
Honestly, Reddit’s in a position where they may even have the upper hand now in terms of PR. Users angry, but not at them.
The thing is, the people who don’t realize what this is about are going to be having a really rough time in a couple of weeks when moderation slides. Of course, they’re going to blame the mods again and say they’re doing it on purpose because the “protest failed and now you’re just being spiteful and hurting the users”.
We know that’s not the case. The majority doesn’t and won’t care.
I think the real issue is that the protest coordinators were not able to succinctly explain why they had to protest to begin with. Charging third party app developers for API access is an esoteric topic. Most people don’t even know what an API is. Most people don’t use third party apps. Most people also don’t care.
Yeah, I was going to mention that as well.
Longtime users and especially power users and mods have been on third party apps for ages. And because third party apps are the most “visible” examples of the API, that’s what drew the attention.
As soon as they tried to explain “it’s not only about third party apps, but also third party tools”, that’s when they lost people because explaining what those tools are and accomplish to users who aren’t mods (or even familiar with tech at all) becomes a subject without much clarity.
To a massive portion of users, there is no “reddit.com”, it’s just the app. The fact that so many subs are still using titles like “save third party apps” is a bad sign. It’s not “save Reddit from spam bots and other awful shit” (which is one of the things this is mainly about), but you’re telling a bunch of people to “save” apps that they don’t use or care about.
There’s an added cog in the machine here. Every time someone tries (and succeeds) in explaining the issues, the astroturfing (or just regular bootlicking) begins and suddenly there’s seeds of doubt.
One thing we can count on is Reddit fucking up again. And again. And each time, it’ll lose the more active users. It’s not ever going to be a mass migration, but waves over time. Even then, what can we say Reddit will be in another five years? Probably different from what it is now, with users who expect different things.
There’s an added cog in the machine here. Every time someone tries (and succeeds) in explaining the issues, the astroturfing (or just regular bootlicking) begins and suddenly there’s seeds of doubt.
I am seeing many users (especially those who haven’t been around for as long) asking people what the big deal is and why their favorite subreddits are down. Half of the people trying to respond aren’t giving these people satisfactory and succinct answers. The protest is breaking down as soon as it began.
Most (60%) of Reddit users either use 3rd party apps (~30%) or old reddit (~30%)
You can’t throw out an enormous number like that without further explanation or a source at least. The only post I found on my first Google search is from a reddit post (6 days ago) where it’s said that reddit reports about 5% of its users coming from third party apps.
Apollo also reported having around 1.2M users while not being a small app at all.
So with 400M MAU as the lowest possible amount of users, somehow all others 3rd party apps have over 118M users between them?
I could believe 30% of users being old.reddit ones due to it not being axed after all those years. But for mobile apps, that 5% quote seems the most realistic.
Asking the people still posting/commenting if they want a subreddit to stay open seems kind of pointless. Of course they want it to stay open, they didn’t care for the blackout in the first place.
Every poll I voted on was overwhelmingly in favor of indefinitely privating the sub. And it was like 7 of them
It seems problematic to have a poll to about boycotting when those actively boycotting won’t be there to participate.
I just posted this in response to a frenetic YouTube video that claimed that the Reddit protest “failed”:
Get serious. It was NEVER going to stop the IPO. But it has accomplished something even more important: it has decapitated Reddit. A lot of the most passionate and involved users are gone, and more of them have at least tried Fediverse alternatives like Lemmy and kbin. Have you checked those sites out? They’re FLOODED with Reddit refugees, and the communities there are booming! They’re active and vibrant, with great discussions and content.
What’s more, they have hope. The members there aren’t subject to some psychotic money-grubbing corporation; if any one server goes authoritarian, there’s nothing stopping the users there from just moving to another. They’ll have the same access and functionality. And frankly, the odds of a Fediverse server going corporate and having an IPO are infinitesimal. It simply wouldn’t be worth it, particularly since there’s no way they could stop other instances from defederating with them.
So the outcome of the blackout has been twofold: First, Reddit has lost some of it’s best. The quality of content there is diminished, and will continue to diminish as poor quality drives users away. And second, the Fediverse alternatives have been given a huge boost. Almost all users of Reddit are now aware of the ugly truths that underlie that service, and that there are alternatives out there.
That’s not failure. That’s the seeds of success.
And by the way, I think that’s one thing we can all do to help bring down Reddit: mention the great alternatives out there as much as possible to spread the word. The more Redditors who learn that they don’t have to be a product to be sold by the pound for the stockholder class, the quicker Reddit will fall!
I also bet there are people who haven’t already left that will abandon ship once the TPAs stop working. It’s not going to be fun getting stuck with their mediocre app, particularly since they seem to be testing the end of the mobile site.
This. For a lot of people Reddit isn’t reddit.com, it’s Apollo or Relay or Sync or Reddit Is Fun.
After the apps stop working, they won’t be able to keep using the thing they’re used to. They can’t just go back, they’ll have to switch to something different.
I stopped using Twitter when they pulled this API crap, and as a Boost user, I won’t use reddit when I can no longer use Boost.
Currently using Jerboa for beehaw and I’m liking it so far, and the dev seems really responsive to user requests. Excited for the communities to get some traction moving forward!
not toot my own horn, but the 3d party app community for lemmy is quite active right about now… wink-wink
the community has risen to meet demand, and it’s a very exciting time right now!
That’s me, avid Relay Pro user, I’m not going back to the pos native app. Loving Lemmy and the Fediverse! Also, kinda psyched to see it grow.
I imagine there’s a meaningful amount of users that only exist in the context of the third party apps, that will disappear after the apps lose support. I’m sure most of them are lurkers, but that’s still something.
I wonder if lurkers are ad clickers
It’s disappointing seeing people cave so quickly when under the slightest inconvenience. It doesn’t matter for me, though - I’m not going back. If anything, this has helped me realize the unhealthy relationship I had with Reddit and was a good way to break that.
To new and better things.
this has helped me realize the unhealthy relationship I had with Reddit and was a good way to break that
Exactly, now that I have an unhealthy relationship with Lemmy I can’t put effort into the one with Reddit.
Same. Replacing doom scrolling on Reddit with posting on beehaw.
I started reading Reddit (and now Lemmy) through RSS feeds because I was exhausted from the constant scrolling. I think that’s really helped me cut back on my link-aggregator of choice. The RSS feeds here could use some TLC though – the feeds smoosh the title and url together and if there is any sort of post text, it’s not much to go on.
What RSS feed application are you using? I’m thinking of doing the same. Just pulling in everything from multiple sources into one interface
I use https://reeder.app/ with https://feedly.com account. Checks all the boxes between being able to access my RSS feed on any device (as Feedly has a website) and having a great user experience on my phone / laptop.
Here’s my top 3 in the order I would recommend them:
It’s disappointing seeing people cave so quickly when under the slightest inconvenience.
The whole protest was slacktivism of the highest order. Minimum effort, minimum results.
Well, give young people some credit, though. Mostly they’re the ones that have been closing their subs and migrating here and working to develop FOSS software like Lemmy. I say this as someone in my late 30s.
I wonder how much of this caving in was, because a lot of lame mods were worried about losing their past time and or control over large communities.
There are a lot of little Lukashenkos out there that will immediately cave to a bully as long as they’re allowed to remain in control.
Then we still win and Reddit still loses. Little Lukashenkos don’t make good moderators.
I’m probably going to delete my account or at least cut back drastically on my usage, but I’m currently the only active mod for a small fan sub for an old fantasy book series. I don’t really want to leave that sub unmoderated but I’ll have to find another user willing to take on mod duties before I feel alright abandoning Reddit altogether.
only active mod for a small fan sub
That attachment is what they (Reddit) are counting on. It’s your community, not Reddits; and they don’t care. But you do… while admirable in itself, its being used against you.
I don’t disagree with you, but I still feel a certain responsibility to that community. I’d like to start divesting myself of that responsibility, but it’ll take time if I don’t want to just abandon it.
How about you make a lemmy community or a kbin magazine and officially migrate your subreddit there? (including making a stickied announcement in the subreddit)
Since you’re its only mod, that should be possible and even easier to do than migrating a bigger subreddit like /r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk
I’ve considered it, but honestly I’m kind of tired of it lol. It’s an older series and so all of the arguments/discussions are just kind of retread endlessly, and I’m not as into it as I used to be. Also there are discussions about making a tv show and I wouldn’t mind being as far away as possible once that kicks into high gear. I saw what r/WoT was like when that show came out and I don’t want any part of moderating that crap.
Which series? My guess is Riftwar based on that description, but I’m curious if you’re open to sharing.
Not Riftwar, although I did love those books and even had a rogue on Ultima Online named “Jimmy the Hand”.
It’s a series called “The Chronicles of Amber” by Roger Zelazny. Great series but not without its flaws and never super huge in the public consciousness.
From what I understand of how this whole system works here - you can just host/create your own instance for that community. Make some mod post on your subreddit about how you’re migrating the community, if anyone can help host it if you’re unable, and if they want to follow over they can.
Yeah it’s an idea for sure. I responded to @curiosityLynx a minute ago that I’m really burnt out on that particular series so I think it’s probably time for me to find somebody else to take it on and just move on myself.
Yeah, the niche subreddits are what I really hate to leave behind. I could care less about leaving r/politics, r/AskReddit, etc. But I’ll miss r/EtrianOdyssey (niche video game series).
But we’ll just have to create these communities on Lemmy. I’m in it for the long haul.
Malicious Compliant Deep Thoughts : You could create a group here on Lemmy, start topics and discussions there. Then link those Lemmy posts on Reddit. The Reddit Users will figure it out. :)
…an old fantasy book series…
(My ears prick up)
An old fantasy series? I’m big time into old fantasy series. May I ask what it was?
The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny.
Cool! Zelazny is one of my favorite authors. I assume you’ve read his Lord of Light?
Incredibly, I have not. It’s on my TBR list, I’ve just never gotten to it. Pretty bad for somebody moderating a Zelazny fan sub but it is what it is, lol
It’s his magnum opus. Enjoyable as Amber is (and I wish he’d written more), Lord of Light is absolutely incredible. Although a lot of people get confused by the flashback that starts with Chapter 2 and lasts for more than half of the book.
What book series?
As the only mod, would you be able to export the data to lemmy and inform the users that they can continue posting here? I have no idea, genuinely just interested.
I have no idea whether that would be possible, but I’m also not sure I would want to do it. It would be one thing to encourage folks to move but I don’t own that subreddit (I’m not even the founder or the head mod, just the only one that actively moderates) and I wouldn’t want to grab other folks’ posts and comments and put them elsewhere.
That makes sense. It sounds like you are the right person to be that moderator, so I tip my hat.
I’m happy to stay on lemmy. Just like mastodon, it had a boy that will fade but then I think it will continue to grow.
Reddit’s always had inept management, Spez in particular can’t help but antagonise his users with a daft unforced error every couple of years. We don’t need to ‘win’, we don’t even need to actively do anything but exist. As long as nice places like this exist and Reddit does too Reddit’s inevitable cockups will provide a small but steady trickle of users.
Can anyone tell me what the “196” community is? If I sort my feed by All, it gives me a ton of memes from there but I can’t tell what it is.
Left wing queer safe shitposting
It began on reddit as the general sub for the college dorm #196 at some university, one thing lead to another, and now it’s a meme sub which exists everywhere.
The joke is “you have to post something when you visit the subreddit” so the content there is just all over the place, but there are a bunch of in-jokes that spawned (was they always do in situations like that).
I like reddit. I want its fun little spaces to thrive.
Reddit is making this really difficult.
The suits are all about their metrics and engagement and clicks and they don’t care about the user. They don’t even care about the peeps they hire to talk to the user.
I’m told sometimes admin employees find out they’re fired because they can’t log in to workspaces anymore.
I dunno.
Maybe this space is better. :)
*I like reddit. I want its fun little spaces to thrive.
Reddit is making this really difficult.*
Agreed, but I don’t think they’re going to be moving in a positive direction. I believe we have seen the best Reddit will ever be. When a company becomes profit driven in the way Reddit has, it forces the company to make decisions that aren’t beneficial to it’s users. I understand the decisions they’re making, but their “rip the band-aid” method at least lets us see that they’re unwilling to compromise on their position. It makes switching to a different platform much easier for me. It just sucks because there are small communities that I thoroughly enjoyed and I don’t know if they’ll ever recoup.
Holding strong on not returning to reddit. Using Jeroba for Lemmy for any free time I get, been enjoying it
For me its really exciting. it is like watching history happen. I am really glad the people have managed to come together for something important.
Yeah I don’t have a strong opinion about whole API access controversy but it does spark a greater debate about how we let centralized services like Reddit subsume the Internet forum culture of old. Of course, Reddit in many ways is a superior product to the decentralized forums of old (you only need one account to post) but at the same time, this whole protest has proven especially damaging to people who rely heavily on Reddit as a resource for support (like the mental health subreddits, the chronic disease ones, etc.).
This is just me, personally, but I hate Reddits stance on the API situation about AI learning, and how it’s not profitable to offer the data for free. Excuse me, the data doesn’t even exist without the users. I get we are all data-harvested, but to completely pull the rug like this is unforgivable. I mean the TPA’s were the only way I interacted with Reddit. For me, it’s not about the ads, the money or anything, it’s deliberately killing the TPA to drive their profits up. I mean fuck, I’d pay a subscription to access reddit if it kept TPA open. But nah, gonna act like they earned my data and are entitled to it, no thanks.
This is probably a dumb comment, sorry. I can’t word very well and I don’t usually get out what’s going through my head
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Didn’t reddit piss off a lot of the German users by making fake subs filled with poorly translated bots?
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Do you have any insights as to why I have german posts appeared in my reddit front page when I have none of the german subreddits subscribed?
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I went back into Reddit a couple times during the blackout as it’s so easy to click the Infinity icon on my homescreen. And I’ve got to say, the quality of posts on my feed were so much worse. Zero text posts, only images. I started unsubscribing from a bunch of those subreddits. Starting to realize how little value most of Reddit gives me. The only things of actual value are behind subreddits that have gone dark. I’ve been enjoying Lemmy so much more and having more meaningful conversation. It’s so much better
!remindme 10 years
Reddit refugee here, anime/manga nerd and mainly shitposting but I also like to engage in Machine Learning and C++/Python discussions.
programming.dev is a great instance for you then!
cool, just subbed to !programming@programming.dev
If you’re considering leaving Reddit, consider also salting the earth on your way out.
Check out PowerDeleteSuite, a Chrome* plugin that can edit/delete posts in a user’s history. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Just follow the install instructions on the page and let it rip. You can act on or exempt specific subs, act on age, exempt by status, etc. It will also export deleted and modified comments to a CSV for your own use.
I nuked my accounts, editing all comments to “This comment has been deleted in protest of the Reddit API changes of June 2023. Consider visiting Lemmy.world or Kbin.social for an alternative news source.”
I’ll probably go back in on the 29th or 30th and delete everything before closing the accounts.
worked on Chromium for me. Never had success with Firefox, and I don’t touch Edge.(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this project)
Discussion: I arrived at posting this after some soul-searching about destroying inforamtion. In the end, my contributions were derivative from still-extant and viable sources, while I consider Reddit to be a lost cause. I decided it was more abhorrent to me that they continue to profit off the back of my freely-contributed content than to reclaim my contributions, and rehost those contributions at a later date under a more friendly banner.
That was my calculus. You, reader, are welcome respectfully to disagree.
I for one, will most definitely not be doing this. Reddit was such a vital part of the internet during the mid-2010’s to early 2020’s… it would be a shame it all that history was permanently lost.
I will, however, likely not be going back. I’ve actually really wanted to take part in a decentralized social community like this for a long time, and I am very excited about what the federation brings to the table, and about the role that Lemmy fills in that network. In a world where the internet seems so much to focus on what is currently going on now, I reckon not contributing to Reddit anymore will have a much greater long-term impact than nuking my previous content, and will allow me to leave my piece of internet history intact on their archive.
There’s an argument to be made that it’s all been captured in the internet archive, but I still think that reddit gets most of its value from active users, not drivebys looking at posts from a decade ago. I’d rather those vital parts of internet history be findable in their original, SEO captured location, but I also understand the reasoning behind getting rid of all that and moving it strictly into internet archives. The thing is, the 2010s have taught us that the addage “once it’s on the internet it’s there forever” is patently false. The internet has turned out to be incredibly fragile with big chunks of history that wasn’t archived going away forever. Our collective memories have been edited by companies going out of business and deleting all their cloud storage to avoid incurring further cost.
From the perspective of preserving useful knowledge, I wholeheartedly agree that it’s a horrible thing to do. Especially when your comments relate important niche information rather than just being the millionth meme on the same template.
That said, I still edited everything (weren’t too many niche info things on my account anyway), because I read a couple times that Reddit’s big goal here would be to sell the immense amount of “real people conversations” to AI language model companies, thus possibly still making more money off what’s already there even if no new content would be posted again.
PS: I have no idea how or why my phone did this but while typing, a popup suddenly came “Report Created!”. If I somehow reported your (or any other) message here, please ignore this, whoever gets the report!
I’ve thought about deleting specifically noninformative posts
I had the same though. But then I started scrolling through my post and comment history and decided I’d rather do something else with my time than consider whether or not a comment I made will be exactly what someone searches for years from now.
But, I should add, that my valuable contributions on reddit are pretty few. I can see how that would be entirely different for someone who is/was incredibly active in answering r/AskHistorians posts.
Thank you, just ran this over my account. I didnt delete comments, just edited them to say I’ve moved to lemmy :)
Cool, I think I’ll do the same. I wasn’t popular or super active but hey, doin’ my part
For the semi-lurker like me there’s nothing holding me back to Reddit. Some current news, sprinkle of meme, some draft comments that I will never submit and some meaningful discussion from community, fediverse has all those.
I’m going to keep Reddit for specific interests like specific sports teams or specific game franchises. I haven’t really seen a replacement for decent engagement for those. But other than that I’ve already trimmed down my subs to almost nothing. There’s a lot less activity on those, so my Reddit time will be about like my Facebook time, which is a couple minutes a day to see any updates before closing.
I think it’s going to be a nice change of pace to not have those big subs taking up so much of my time doomscrolling.
Just got a big blue headline on old.reddit.com, trying to negotiate their way out of the modtool API debacle
I also really hate this.
Literally freeloading of the work of developers for their mod tooling.
How incredibly tone deaf can one be.
Crying that 3rd party apps make money and the time of “freeloading” is over only to try to literally freeload on the applications of 3rd parties.
Reddit can still and again just fudge off.
Especially because that’s basically a lie. The free tier right now is 60 requests per minute, per client, per user. The new free tier is 100 requests per minute per client. If for example you develop a bot or tool and you’d like to give others access to use for their own purposes you’re now sharing those 100 requests per minute with everyone else using it.
I do not cross picket lines. Later this week, once the protest is officially over, I plan on going on Reddit, backing up my data using the PowerDeleteSuite another user posted about, and then overwriting and deleting my comments and posts with a message about the protest, before closing my account entirely.
Lemmy has already grown a nice community of people, and I’ll be glad to contribute and watch it grow over time!
Overwrite all your comments with “move to beehaw!”
I considered that for mine, but given that replacing all my comments can be taken as hostile, I’d rather not associate them with Lemmy or Beehaw.
I just went with setting every one of my comments to [user data has been purged]
I’m going with the HD-DVD encryption key. It just feels right to go full circle.
That’s a great idea!
Yeah, I’m on the lemmy.world instance, but I was planning on doing something like that. I’ve heard that some bots have been going around deleting posts that mention Lemmy / the Fediverse though, so I guess we’ll see how it goes. :)
Anytime I’ve mentioned Lemmy directly I immediately receive 3 downvotes lol.
I don’t know what kind of comments and posts you’ve made on Reddit, but if any of them are technical how-to’s or something that may come up when people search for specific problems, then it might be good to leave those comments, or else just prefix each comment with your “purged” message instead of overwriting them entirely. I mean if it’s fun memes or discussions, then you do you 😅 I’m just thinking of the tale of DenverCoder9. Plus, it probably costs more for Reddit to store a longer comment than a shorter one! Pennies or less, but still!
