I have thoroughly enjoyed Lemmy and Beehaw over this weekend. I’m not expecting anything out of reddit.

Reddit was my home for 12 years and I really feel like it boiled down to three really uses of my time:

• cultivated communities
• niche knowledge
• scrolling through all

I have had a taste of being part of a community this weekend that reminds me of what reddit was like a decade ago. This really removed the sting of disconnecting all my apollo widgets and shortcuts. Lemmy, kbin, etc may lead to a new future for those of us looking for somewhere new.

Niche knowledge? I think that’s one thing that just will be on reddit for the foreseeable future but as communities move and shift away, it’ll disperse across the internet. I do see myself still searching through reddit results via google when searching for a personalized review or specific information. But it will become a get-in, get-out process.

Scrolling? Reddit leadership is so dumb. they’ve catered to this feature and this user base for all the marbles of their IPO. Scrolling is the least unique feature to reddit compared to other social media. And reddit’s scrolling was highly dependent on your feed and could sometimes not be that great. Scrolling can be replaced by anything from tiktok to instagram to other forums and new sites

Even this weekend on Beehaw, I’ve seen reviews of fountain pens, a storm over Scotland, trailers for new games on the horizon and little bits of people’s lives shared and connected. If I can continue to have an experience like this? I won’t even miss reddit.

It’s going to be an interesting new future

It’s laughable that the CEO of a 10 billion dollar (in valuation) company https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/technology/reddit-new-funding.html is saying that numerous solo and small group developers are more successful than he is.

This is an absurd statement. Small app developers making ends meet are in no way analogous with a P&L from a corporation and it is disingenuous for Huffman to position himself in this “woe is me” argument.

I'm missing reddit less and less with reach passing minute. At this point I don't know if I'll be going back after the blackout. This is already WAY more fun to use than the reddit app or mobile site, and I have no idea what I'm doing yet.

Kudos to the developers here for putting in the work.

How tf is reddit not profitable? When I first joined reddit it had a progress bar to the side that showed the percentage of server costs covered by reddit gold and it was always filled. Since then they started showing lots more ads, added reddit coins, awards and premium subscription to increase their revenue. The increase in their cost/user has to be from the native image/video uploads and redisigning the website/app. If YouTube manages to be profitable hosting 4k videos, reddit must be doing something very stupid to become unprofitable with their low quality videos.

If Reddit has not learned how to make a profit in 17 years, that is not the devs fault.

this article was from 2 days ago, hopefully there will be new light tomorrow. although, reddit's history of corporatising at the expense of users, and their respect thereto, is still significant. let's hope to see some awareness from the less technically & socially active reddit user-base tomorrow :p

I am disappointed that this article, in its apparent attempt to appear objective and neutral, didn’t do a very good job of explaining why people are so angry. I was hoping for more signal amplification to inform more people who may not yet know.

The first part of the article makes it sound like the point of the backlash is that Reddit will charge for the API at all, not the punishingly high rates or the very small window of time devs had to respond after pricing was finally communicated. It does ultimately say how much Apollo would have to pay to operate under that pricing structure, but the article seemed to be burying the lede a bit to me. It also conflates the 3rd party apps with big AI training use cases, which I think misses the point.

The article also really downplayed how unprofessional Steve has been, especially during the AMA, and how powerful the recording Christian released was in terms of causing the monumental backlash that is now happening. It didn’t really describe the magnitude of the backlash itself very well, either. It was mostly trusting readers to go look at the embedded links to understand what was actually going on, and the summary snips in the article don’t do much to encourage anyone to do so.

It makes me sad that a site as big as Reddit is letting down so much of it's userbase for a quick buck. At least it's making people look for decentralized sites like this more, I suppose

It’s truly sad to see a website that I’ve been on for 8+ years turn to an absolute dumpster fire. I suppose I’m not surprised by Steve Huffman’s (u/spez) behavior, he has been deplorable to say the least over the countless years and this just does it for me and so many other users.

The sub I mod on (r/Moustache) has gone private and will continue to indefinitely. I’ve deleted all of my posts aside from subreddit announcements and all of my comments on the site (all 4,500) of them.

If anyone wants to delete their user data on Reddit you can do so by using this tool PowerDeleteSuite. It took a while for the suite to delete all my comments (make sure you overwrite your existing comments with whatever you like first to prevent future AI scraping and Reddit making even more money off of you) but it was worth it.

Important to note that this article went up before the subreddits went down.

Of course they are. They had already done their projections and accounted for whatever melt they would incur over all this. The ad/whatever else revenue they expect to generate by forcing users to the official app outweighs the loss in users and collateral damage to subreddit moderation.

Reddit gradually became one of the single most important websites on the internet over the course of 17 years. Like Facebook, Reddit is functionally the ONLY website on the internet for a massive number of people. The IPO was always going to result in decisions that would tarnish Reddit in the eyes of the type of people who'd even consider migrating to a place like Lemmy. But that kind of user doesn't matter when we're talking about things like vaLuATioN.

I mentioned in another community yesterday that my most realistic hope is this whole ordeal fractures the power user base into various diasporas. I hope that people migrate to a bunch of different alternatives, and then they apply the community building energy there that they used to apply exclusively to Reddit. Maybe we'll be lucky and enough people get excited about enough other places that we'll have a [viable] diversity of choice online again.

Well, it was the kick in the ass I needed to get off of Reddit finally. Besides, I think at the end of the day I was only down to maybe 2-3 subs that I kept up with, the rest just got toxic as hell. So...hello to everyone on Lemmy, still learning how it works, but hopefully it'll be a better mature community.

This is a good article, but is says nothing about his position on subreddits going dark.

It's why I'm here, and I'm liking it so far

11 years on reddit and seeing its long slow decline its just sad. A return to the basics was very necessary. Removing subs from r/all, messing with the voting, "new" reddit, a clamp down on content...it just kept getting worse and worse. As long as I could use RIF and old.reddit it was fine, but the writing is on the wall at this point.

While most of their users are used to the newer layout from other social media, my goal was always to see the most number of posts I could on a single page and have a clean ad-free experience. Lemmy seems to get this

Cool, I guess it's time to uninstall boost then. Guess I'm on Lemmy for the foreseeable future!

At this point even if Reddit keeps going on, there's enough people on Mastodon, Lemmy, and Kbin that we can thrive as a new site with our own culture. Hacker News wasn't made obsolete by Reddit or Digg's existence for example.

well guys, looks like I have a new home then. reddit is toxic

Nobody asked Reddit to start hosting images and videos. If you want to turn a profit, maybe stop doing that? I think Spez comes out as very despicable in this whole situation.

It's not surprising, but IMO the shutdown is still worthwhile. It's shaking people loose to start looking for alternatives, and giving those alternatives opportunity to shake themselves down too. We're not quite ready for a Digg-style implosion yet. It may come more gradually this time.

I did the "change all my past posts to 'Fuck Spez and Reddit'" then delete my account thing today. I'm done with reddit. Maybe this here will work out for me, if not, whatever. I'm not going back to reddit.

This sucks for reddit, but I think this will be good for the internet in the long run. This is hopefully gonna push people into the fediverse and reduce reliance on these megacorp data mining operations.

That's the final move to help me change from reddit to Lemmy !

I think Reddit and spez are not very good in the head.

I've officially removed all traces of reddit this morning and going with lemmy strictly. I will go back to reddit on the 14th to assess the situation. I probably will use both but lemmy is growing on me a lot

So with all the subreddits going dark, is Reddit going to lose a lot of ad revenue? Will the subreddits going dark actually hurt the company? Because that would be great.

It should never be about profit. It’s always been about…

checks notes

Passion.

Steve Huffman is a cunt