Nothing went wrong. Reddit's desire to monetize simply trumps everything.

We were witnessing enshittification process in full force.

Nothing "went wrong" with it. It was simply never possible. Reddit controlled whether those 3rd party apps could function, and Reddit wanted those 3rd party apps to cease functioning.

Ultimately, what went wrong is that most Reddit users were screeching at individual leaves littering their garden, without noticing the tree creating those leaves on first place. They failed to connect the dots between: arbitrary bans, subreddit suspensions, user-on-user harassment, the idiotic way that rules are enforced, the presence of powermods, then Reddit trying to get rid of the powermods, the 3PA being killed... while focusing too much on a braindead clown called Steve Huffman.

It's all about profits. You can't enforce any demand if you don't make Reddit lose money. Blackouts and John Oliver posting only go so far, you need to migrate out of the platform. And if you're staying in the platform you need to transform it into an advertiser-hostile shithole. But for that you need more coordination than just "HURR DURR WE WRITE FUCK SPEZ IN PLACE LOL LMAO".

Reddit already decided from the executive level they were gonna do it, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it

I'd say what went wrong was nobody did anything meaningfuk or cared. Nobody put their money where their mouth is and deleted their accounts, and staying off the site for 2 days was too much to ask of >80% of the users.

The Mods closed a few subs but didn't themselves do anything meaningful. They should have let reddit replace them if they actually cared. They should have moved their community to lemmy or kbin. The ones who did sick it out I'm grateful for, the rest cared too much about their own pride to bother trying to keep the admins in check.

Overall the reddit userbase since the pandemic are mostly entitled whiners who don't really give a shit as long as they get their twitter and TikTok reposts. There's literally only one piece of OC on the frontpage of reddit right now. There's not much value to going there anymore.

I'm done with Reddit, and honestly I haven't missed it. My time is now more full of hobbies and actual reading, I'm better off for deleting it.

Nothing went wrong. Reddit knew from minute 1 they weren't going to negotiate this change (not in good faith, anyways).

Add to that, like everyone else is saying, the fact that they weren't actually pushed to change thier minds in the slightest by users when push came to shove; because yeah, some of us left, but a lot of us participated, said they weren't gonna back down...and went right back to Reddit when all was said and done.

(Not saying "the protests were a total bust" because, from what I understand at least, this happened to Digg in the past, and it wasn't immediately overtaken by Reddit. It happened in waves of users over time until it got eclipsed. Pretty sure it was bad policy change effecting users after bad policy change that made everyone start to pack up too, not just one. Part of me is hopeful that history is repeating).

But to circle back, basically the attempt was doomed to fail because the decision was made absolute long before any talk of protesting it was even a thought in anyone's mind.

Probably how a large amount of the subreddits participating in the blackout came back in a measly two days. Like Louis Rossmann said in his video describing the reddit api situation, all they see is that we'll put up with their bullshit 363 days a year...

maybe if all subreddits participating went dark or posted meaningless content (white squares,etc) there might have been a bigger inpact.

A lot of us moved to other platforms like Lemmy though, so I wouldn't say it was a complete failure.

The protests had a good run i would say. Had a critical mass, reddit needed to react in some form or another, it got good press coverage. Not bad.
IMHO the turning point was when reddit started to message automated threats to the mods. Instead of escalating it further most subs just folded. Even though the community, subs and mods still had the upper hand at the time. There was no way for reddit to replace the mods of thousands of subs. They couldnt do it in a timely manner with even a single subreddit(i dont remember which it was, interestingasfuck?). What followed was funny but had no meaningful impact in any way. NSFW, swearing, John Oliver. Who cares?

Also a "fuck reddit" meme instead of "fuck spez" would have been IMHO a more impactful message since not only the ceo is a dickhead, the whole company sucks.

On top of just staying dark i think the community should have invested more time exposing the bullshit reddit was pulling off at the time. Like using bots powered by chatgpt. There was so much weird shit going on worth exposing.

Spez realized that he literally paid for other companies to harvest one of reddit's two greatest assets and that he needed to do something to recover. So he's been flailing around like a toddler, breaking everything in his desperation to stay on his feet, and in the meantime completely alienating reddit's other greatest asset.

What was that comment he made? Something like "reddit will continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive". Like the arrival of profits is inevitable and they don't need to do anything for them to arrive.

Also, he claims that reddit has never been profitable. How much has he spent chasing phantoms - reddit cryptocurrency, customizable snoovatars, reddit NFTs, special programming for a single day each year, buying an app then paying to make it worse, deciding to self-host images and videos, thereby drastically increasing the need for both storage and bandwidth, when they'd been perfectly happy to let others do the heavy lifting for well over a decade, paying to implement a drastically flawed video player (remember when it first launched and it was incredibly slow and we found out it was because it was trying to download every available resolution).

In 2022, reddit had $670,000,000 in revenue. There's a reason it's never turned a profit, and for the past eight years, that reason has been Steve Huffman.

Ultimately, not enough people had joined the protest, so it didn't have enough economical power.

We’re going to go dark! No new posts, no old posts - not until you listen to our demands! Or at least until the weekend is over!

It worked for me, I haven't really used reddit much since July 1st. That's good enough for me. It's not about bringing the whole thing down ad most of society dgaf about shit like it's been since the beginning of time.

Reddit was goining the way of the other big tech players, removing API for third party apps, maybe will remove old.reddit.com next ? force everyone to sign-up using their phone number, using your real names instead of nicknames, verifying your identity using goverment issued ID.

the sign is on the wall but the majority of people are fine with that, look how facebook hit the record of 3 billion users a month. these corps are too big to fail.

I think most people knew it was a protest and nothing more - I doubt a lot of people thought, hey Reddit is totally going to back down.

It was a mass expression of user dissatisfaction which escalated from an initial 2 day blackout into something so much more, and so I'm pretty impressed with what it did, which was stirred up shit for the management and made the CEO say some ridiculous things in the press to boot.

What I am a little disappointed in is that not as many mods walked. I'm not a mod, but I was fed the line 'it's going to be impossible to mod my sub without the 3rd party apps'. Given the amount of subs that seem to have been ticking over just nicely since the API switch though I feel like I was fed some bs in that department

Nothing went wrong. We moved to Lemmy, Lemmy has 3rd party apps. Reddit can get fucked.

I think it was an uphill struggle and nearly impossible to pull off.

Spez had absolutely no interest in changing his stance on working with developers. The hugely ironic thing I read that made me give up hope (and stash my ~1 year in development Reddit App) was Spez saying "It was never designed to support third-party apps." -- yet no acknowledgement that the "official" app was literally a third party app that they purchased years ago called Alien Blue.

Source

What went wrong is simple and clear as day: People did not commit to their protest. Only a fraction of those who took part made the important step of quitting reddit altogether. Because the protest was limited, reddit absorbed the hit.

If you're not willing to give up your abuser, you're destined to be battered.

It is important to remember that you owe these platforms nothing. There is life after an endless stream of dopamine hits. Just walk out.

Reddit was the problem anyone couldn't solve. I'm glad I did witnessed the greateast ending on r/Place this year before decided to delete my Reddit account, and yeah fuck u/spez!

Autocratic platform CEO doing his thing. Nobody ask what went wrong with the peacefull protest in North Korea and why did Kim not step down or change his mind. We got digitally slaughtered and are now in heaven (lemmy).

A limited blackout did nothing to change Reddit's mind. Periodically asking users if they want to end the Blackout did not help since as dissatisfied users left for Discord or Lemmy, the voters became biased toward ending the Blackout.

In the future, boycotting and demanding that advertisers cancel ad revenue would be far more effective. Lawsuits about Reddit restoring user content involuntarily may still do damage but not quickly enough to help the protest.

I think the only thing that could have been done better if for mods to more rapidly migrate to other plate forms and leave a detail message on the locked subreddit about why and how to move to the platform.

I’m not saying that it has to be Lemmy, but it would have been nice if it were.

RIF kinda still works for me, I can browse but can't post or upvote so that's good enough for me but I have cut down browsing Reddit loads since the protests