That argument doesn't hold under scrutiny. Reddit employs about 80 people on their iOS development team. And the app blows fucking chunks, compared to Apollo, which was made by one guy.
I want to speak with Spez's manager!
Seems like we found turtle's ball licker's Kbin account!
Yup. Agree with everything OP said. Been saying it since last week. The 48-hour blackout wasn't going to kill Reddit. Hell, if all 8,000 subreddits had gone with indefinite blackouts, it likely wouldn't have killed Reddit either. The fallout from Reddit's decisions, and their response to the community, is going to take months, and probably even years, to really be visible.
I've been on Reddit for more than 10 years. I started using Reddit regularly after Digg went to shit. I've seen the drama, controversies, and protests that previously have taken place on Reddit. But what's been going on the last couple of weeks, I haven't seen before. As I mentioned in another comment, this is the first time I've seen a concerted effort to find alternatives, not just for a few undesirables (i.e. Voat), but for the community as a whole.
Yeah, the communities here are not going to be nearly as active as they were on Reddit, but people want communities, and just having a friendly place to gather will be enough to slowly attract others.
I don't remember seeing a single person objecting.
Depends on where you look, I suppose.
We did a poll in r/snowboarding (a subreddit that it's in its off-season, and currently just frequented by our most "loyal" users) about whether to continue the blackout, and after two days of voting, it was literally a 50-50 split, and the majority of the comments were against the blackout. On the week before the blackout, the vast majority of support was there for the 48 hour blackout. If we'd done that same poll in February, I have a feeling that the majority would have voted to not continue the blackout. In that sense, I don't think spaz is too far off the mark.
What the lying piece of corporate crap is ignoring is the fact that alternatives have grown considerably, traffic has gone down, and entire mod teams are quitting in protest. Reddit is going to be around for many many years, but this is the first time that I see a true push to create something different, not just for a few undesirables (i.e. Voat), but for the larger community in general.
Crayola knows a thing or two about this xD https://img.ifunny.co/images/3d5e79e75ba23a9eba1fed53236a111c383b7ebbdf95130cf8a37b52c22f4af2_1.webp
That it's just a bunch of internet weirdos running the instances, supplying content, and just generally wanting to hang out with each other. There's something very fun about having a place to grow with, instead of just jumping to whatever the new "it" thing is.
I'm gonna set up an instance just for my multiple personalities. What could go wrong?
At least from my quick test right now, it limits your home page to posts within kbin.social. Not sure if it works the other way around, too, preventing your posts from going out into the fediverse.
That's a feature, not a bug. If you find a worthwhile discussion, and have something to bring to it, just do it. No need to marry yourself to just the one instance. That's the beauty of federation, really.
The thing here is that we haven't really seen what the actual fallout from Reddit's decision is going to be.... and we probably won't for a few months, at least (or until they do their IPO, whatever happens first).
What will be a better indicator is how many 3rd party app users end up switching to the official app on July 1, and if they don't, how big of a dent they make in the volume and quality of contribution and moderation. Enough decline in contribution and moderation is going to result in less community engagement, but that's something that will take a while to really be noticeable.
As far as the blackout, I think it's a little disingenuous to say that a "two-day blackout" that lasted, checks notes, two days was a failure. Nobody realistically expected that the blackout would kill Reddit, or permanently cripple the site. Yeah, we hoped that'd bring Reddit to the table, willing to be more reasonable, which hasn't really happened; but also, now there's a whole community and team of moderators coordinating further actions, and new responses. The main goal of the blackout was to raise awareness of these issues, and I'm pretty sure that's been raised.
Furthermore, the consequences of Reddit's decisions and policies (not only this month, but for the last couple of years) are going to be felt in the following years, not days of weeks. While I love my 3rd party app of choice (RiF), and wouldn't browse Reddit on the official, I'd still have old.reddit + RES + toolbox to keep me sane for a while; however, me and others are more concerned about the long-term consequences of Reddit going all-in on monetization-only decisions, that don't consider the well-being of, or negative consequences to, the community. That's why I'm 95% sure, at this point, that I'll be deleting my Reddit account this month. Not because of RiF, or the official app, or the porn subreddits; but because I see this as a turning point of the admins of the site completely forgetting the principles of, as the EFF put it in the article, "free and open internet", in order to please investors and chase a good IPO.
So, wait... people who have a competing world view from yours are listening to demons? Now who's naive? xD