Maybe all of those in favor of the protests kept their word and only those who are against it remain?
I don't miss Reddit. I checked some comment sections and holy hell is it toxic compared to here. I think part of that is because of what you've mentioned in your comment.
I used to work for this major company, biggest in my country by far.
Whether it was going well or poorly, they tended to offer severance packages to "cut back" on their staff, to appease the grotesquely overpaid consultants that analysed their finances.
What tended to happen, was that the most qualified people, who had no issues finding another job (often better paying), took those packages (I took home a one year salary after having worked there almost three, then had two months vacation and started a better paying job), which left those who didn't really have other options, those who did the bare minimum and had a lot of useless meetings.
I guess that's what reddit is heading for. They are alienating those who contribute the most, the content creators, the mods and the ones who like to engage others. They will be left with their bots, lurkers, racists, reposters and porn-spammers.
Good riddance.
I also think the Advertising subs don't care much. You know the ones that are content rich from the posters but actually modded by the organisation the sub is for.
For example /r/razer mods being linked to taking bribes and specific subs dedicated to a brand.
They have nice communities but they'll stay.
Ever tried having a discussion in any of the default subs? If your opinion differentiates from the hivemind you will be downvoted as spam, without any responses. It completely defeats the purpose of a "discussion"
I’ll be real. I miss it for very specific subs. It’s definitely more toxic but small game subs and stuff like that I miss
Literally. The people in favor of the protests are.... Protesting! Everybody else doesn't care.
“I’ll stand by you no matter what”
“Wait, I didn’t realize that I’d be sacrificing as well”
Standard motto today with people.
This comment is incorrect as well.
The people that cared left and what's left behind is people that wouldn't leave anyway and the strike only bothers them.
This person is living in a bubble and can't see further than their nose.
I think people are seeing Reddit as their only solution right now due to the lack of awareness of this place. It's been a bit sad to see all the news articles written about the event but very few plugs for alternate options to visit.
I just wonder if all the anti Lemmy posts I've seen have been Reddit employees
Funny you mention that, I found out about Lemmy specifically from a dude who was being downvoted to hell for even mentioning it as an alternative. So glad I decided to look into it I love this place and the whole idea of the fediverse in general.
I understand that the fediverse isn't the most intuitive thing to understand, and that many people won't immediately understand it, but I've seen so many comments saying that it's too confusing (even in response to direct links to instances with the simplest explanations). There has to be an astroturfing campaign of some kind going on
Probably written by AI even. Trolls can do that now.
investor class protectng its latest cash-cow.
Lazy people fearing change is more like it. I’m waiting to see if capitulation occurs. If things don’t get fixed by month end I’ll zero my main account and walk away.
I've been telling people, the only way this works is if communities migrate somewhere else. Every single blacked out subreddit needs to post their new location on a site other than Reddit. Otherwise people will just stay on Reddit and wait or visit/make new subreddits.
I noticed that. I made a comment saying something along the lines of me disagreeing with mods going public after only 2 days and got downvoted like crazy but not three days ago it would of been the other way. Just honestly done with that site anyway so going to download wikis from the subs that come back and be done with it.
I guess it might be because those of us who actually do support the blackout tries to keep staying away until things changes, while a lot of the people on Reddit right now have been content starved for a few days and just waited for the subs to open again (and thus does not want to see them shut down again).
Personally I quite like it here on the fediverse and am not in any way in a hurry to go back to Reddit any time soon.
I feel like a lot of people are forgetting about survivorship bias as well. If all the people who supported the blackout left Reddit, then the only people left would be the ones who aren't in favour :)
we have had the first wave - and its gone well. second wave is incomming on or about the 30th - probably smaller, but no less committed (long term). after that its a war of attrition.
Then the third wave when they finally kill off old.reddit.com
You say smaller, but I'm thinking a lot of people will realise that their clients actually don't work anymore on that date 😂
Yeah I think they're underestimating how many people just won't use the official app. The people who use Apollo, RiF, Relay, etc. are pretty attached.
I know for me reddit is just the app on my phone that I press when I'm bored now. I figured when the app doesn't work anymore I'll just find entertainment elsewhere, which is how I found the fediverse. Now that I'm here the whole concept of decentralized interconnected communities has totally sold me on the project.
The problem with reddit, Twitter, twitch, etc. as I see it is that they're all just trying to profit off their users somehow. That's not conducive to fostering healthy communities of people. I think this whole thing is the future of social networking, take the big corps out of the equation.
The fediverse is the way. I’m not smart enough to say if it’s the best option, but it’s a hell of a lot better than a profit driven monolith run by out of touch investors. Reddit won’t implode but it won’t be the same as it was even a week ago. This decentralized structure is what the internet wants to be.
The fediverse has one thing going for it that any other alternative lacks: a credible approach to dealing with the network effect. In isolation, it is very difficult to start an independent social media website. This becomes much, much easier when you have neighboring sites that you can interact with. Federation serves as a catalyst. I've been longing for the proliferation of open source social media for over 15 years. Nothing has changed the state of affairs more thoroughly than the introduction of federation.
It's certainly the best option that currently exists at least.
People are so weak when it comes to shit like this. Nobody cares about their obligations anymore and it weakens the fight for thoes that care. Not just talking about the reddit blackout. Feels like this is the case with many things in life…
Personally, I like the Lemmy community better. It's definitely possible to find great stuff on reddit (and in particular for news, I think reddit is superior to what I've been finding on Lemmy), but the overall ratio of content : crap is much, much higher here.
Now that I've broken the seal, I honestly am not sure what people are going back to so eagerly on reddit. Maybe just the dopamine of lots and lots of stories and comments to interact with, or maybe they're part of something I don't interact with there.
A mix of the ones who actually care not being active on Reddit, along with astroturfing from Reddit itself. Plus, there's always the counter-protest types that whine and scream about everything.
This is why I left, Redditors are just something else.
I'm getting downvoted in the /r/gis sub for agreeing with the mods that there should be an indefinite shutdown. It seems all that are left on the site are people simping for /u/spez. Some person even called me a "fucking idiot." Glad to be off that toxic dumpster fire of a website.
Under lots of the "we're back, let's talk what's next" announcements, comments pop up that say basically - "ah well, guess that's it, just use the app, it's great" and they get positive rating, where a week ago they'd be downvoted to oblivion.
I guess everyone for whom this was actually important, has already found an alternative and at most is waiting for their 3rd party app to break.
Reposting something I wrote in another community I hang out in, but it feels appropriate to the topic:
I won't pretend "Reddit is dying" or anything of the sort, but I have noticed something interesting (that is maybe something I should've noticed long, long ago), and that is that subreddits have an insane concentration of whiny entitled lurkers that seem to want content catered and spoonfed to them.
During this whole debacle, I've seen creators and enthusiasts that drive the traffic be perfectly content creating elsewhere because it was more about expressing their passion of a topic than cultivating some kind of audience. No matter the alternative they chose, they have plenty of outlets for their creation. But everyone else hates this. All of the bitching about blackouts that I've seen haven't been "man I wanted to post cool shit" but more "where am I supposed to get cool stuff from?".
In general, what I've seen is a slight decline in activity, but a sharp decline in quality. Comparatively, my experience in Lemmy thus far has been that people creating were fine moving elsewhere to do their thing, and while communities are still small, I've seen a lot more long-form, thoughtful and respectful discussion because everyone there was a creator and enthusiast about that topic. Looking at the profiles of people commenting, they've typically posted at least once in that community already.
Meanwhile on Reddit, since the blackout wore off on certain subs, I've seen a lot of this:
[In the original, here would be an image of a typical current comment thread in a blackout-related post, but the context of it is explained below anyway]
Where people who bitch about the blackout because "but I wanted to discuss x!!" are then invited to discuss exactly that, and the conversation goes something along the lines of
"I wanted to discuss x!"
"Oh cool, me too. I like x y z about it, though I preferred if x was like this instead, and maybe z could be polished a little more"
"Well, idk I like it"
"ok 👍"
or just
"i like this"
"i like this too 👍"
because they don't actually have any proper formulated thoughts or opinions on the subject beyond surface-level observations, brand identity or attachment, or if they do have them, they don't have the drive to create or lead conversations about it and just lurk waiting for said content and thoughts to be delivered for them.
Which makes the already bad state of egregious repost bots rising to the top because people keep upvoting the same topics over and over even worse.
In a way, I guess it's kinda similar to what happened with 9gag when that hit critical mass.
To expand on this, I also find it interesting and perplexing just how far that entitlement goes. Moderators are on the verge of losing critical tools, and they're essential in maintaining the quality of the discussions held. Creators create the topics of discussion, and are the main driving force in setting the baseline quality of said discussions, and as power users are more likely to be the ones to depend on third party apps to create the content people browse.
Both seem fine with the situation, and/or migration, and very understandably go "Hey we feel disrespected on this platform and are moving to x where we feel we can thrive better without external influences deriding our community" and lurkers, who contribute nothing and have the least barrier of entry because they essentially just need to change the url they search the same terms in, stomp their feet and cry "but I want you to discuss things for my entertainment HERE!!!" like two year olds.
Edited to add, here on Lemmy:
I'm hopeful that this situation will show moderators they can curate a dedicated community anywhere with similar (actually relevant) post flow and quality, but without enduring the abuse of the platform they host it in and a bunch of on-lookers. I really hope they don't buckle in the name of "but we're already established / have so many people / are such a good resource" because all these things can be true elsewhere without receiving death threats or mod mail spam for doing the right thing.
I used Reddit because I was bored and watching tv. I barely interacted. I am interacting on Lemmy. There was a lot of angry, toxic people on Reddit. So I am glad they are staying there
Man, this is true. So far my experience has been less stressful and more wholesome on the fediverse. It feels more like Reddit from 8 years ago than modern, angry Reddit.
You just made me realize I've been sitting here for two hours in a now-dark room and I haven't turned the TV on yet. Fediverse truly is like the old reddit.
For better or for worse, spez was correct in claiming that this will just blow over. People in general are shit at boycotts, redditors doubly so - there's barely any group cohesion or leadership there.
The people who see an issue with reddit's current behavior have left, the others will just keep going on a much shittier platform. As it has ever been.
The hardest part for me was realizing how shit Google search is without appending reddit.
Someone made a firefox plugin that redirects to archive.org Wayback Machine cache version of reddit:
Completely agree. We need to start building that stuff and contributing more in the fediverse so that can't be a thing in the future
Not going back to Reddit ever, too much bs.
I knew a lot of people would follow spez and toe the company line, just like they did with Twitter. I don‘t mind, I‘d rather hang out here without all them anyway.
