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‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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People like to think that they've made some far-reaching change with what little actually happened. The painful truth is: they didn't. There wasn't a big hit to the userbase, most people on Reddit already hated moderators and didn't give a shit if they got removed, and overall people caved far too quickly (how many people folded instantly when their internet moderator position was threatened? (I say this as someone who was one of those moderators that flat out quit everything and nuked my account rather than continuing to toil for free for a corporation that hates me)).
The actually important thing that was accomplished by the protesting was platforms like Lemmy getting enough of a userbase boost to become stable - in the future, Lemmy and others may be able to act as viable alternatives to Reddit, because there's already a community here (however small). Reddit will continue to enshittify, and people will continue to leave in small numbers that may escalate to big numbers if they commit a truly massive fuckup. The more heavy Reddit users (read: more invested, not necessarily more active) are small in number compared to the vast majority who lurk, don't give a shit about any ongoing meta-drama, and don't particularly care about any changes to the UI or browsing experience as long as they can still get an endless feed of memes.
Even if it hurts to realize this, it's important to make sure people get this message beat into their skulls so that we aren't stuck with a bunch of Redditors (derogatory) with over-inflated egos that think Reddit will bend over backward to appease them, then cave as soon as they receive literally any pushback from the corporation running the site.
I think this is a good point. Lemmy pre protest sucked. There was just no content or activity. Post protest, it’s not too bad here. It’s viable. Slowly, hopefully more people end up here over the years. I still browse Reddit (not logged in, my account is kaput) and it seems the same as it was before though. However, digg too died, so there is hope yet.
Yeah, I knew of lemmy long before any protests, but it was more linked as a back up sub for like the rom sub in case a ban happened. But, activity was pretty nonexistent compared to now. For lemmy this is a success with it leading to many more consistent users of the platform.
I came to explore Lemmy with the migration after Reddit's API changes. Baconreader was my app of choice, and it died with the change.
I didn't have any anger against Reddit - there was no righteous "fuck you!" in my actions - but the reason I stayed on Lemmy and very rarely touch Reddit is because the concept of the fediverse really speaks to me. I want to see a more decentralized internet succeed and so that is where I will spend my time, niche as it is.
I totally agree.
There were definitely people who were trying to start a revolution there or proverbially burn the place to the ground. But for a lot of people who left, like me, it was just an appropriate time to move on. I had been on reddit for about 12 years by then, and I had seen the place change, especially over the last few years. And not for the better.
It happens to any organization or system that grows beyond a healthy critical mass. Quantity goes up, but quality goes down. And the atmosphere starts to get toxic.
I had been looking for an alternative to reddit for a year or so when the situation last Summer came around. I was disillusioned over on reddit, and aside from interactions with two or three of subs (and about two dozen awesome people on one of my mod teams, who I'm still in touch with thanks to other communication options), I didn't really enjoy engaging with other users there. It was exhausting to have to frame everything to mitigate the trolls and the contrarians (who invariably still pulled that shit anyway). And the stench of hyper-partisanship was getting everywhere.
The Fediverse intrigued me, but the reddit variants of it hadn't reached a critical mass of minimal usage (the other critical mass metric) to make it compelling to use. The June protests changed that, and regardless of whether reddit 'won' or not, I'm glad I found this place.
You can have multiple 'winners' and 'losers' in situations like this. Even if reddit fought off the protests and won by not seeing their traffic stats drop off (which let's be honest is all they really care about, no matter what touchy-feely smoke their spokespeople are blowing), I feel like those of us who landed here also won.