At a guess, he’ll try to spin it. Like “I’m being treated more unfairly than any leader in the history of the entire world has ever been treated anywhere, those meanies are harassing me when ALL I did was try to make the site profitable, that’s ALL!?”, and in combination with “Like everything else on the internet, people will get bored quickly and if you’ll just give it a moment, it’ll all blow over soon”. In short, he’s pushing to see exactly just how far he can take it.

And he may very well get away with it too. Unless someone actually does anything at all to stop it, by default he will reap the spoils of everything that he wants to get, b/c the VAST majority of people are just too lazy to care. He has caused US here to flee… but what does that even mean, overall? In the short-term at least, Reddit traffic has actually gone UP since the start of the protest - this “negative publicity” is still publicity.

Not all that many actually. Even traffic itself has only gone down by ~7-14% iirc, and by some metrics it has actually gone UP since the start of the protests!

One main reason is that the technology here is not the same as there - this place does not give that feeling that “daddy will take care of you” that Reddit does. Server outages, constant errors in trying to access content, or vote, or follow someone, you actually have to read a manual to understand stuff, things don’t work so intuitively especially for those wanting an exact replacement (making a “post” won’t work as expected, for that you need a “thread”), and perhaps worst of all, there’s that initial hump of which instance to even sign up to in order to get started (after which it gets much easier, but I bet that legit turns people away). People keep saying that you can transfer over to a new place if you want to later, but that conveniently leaves out how that functionality does not exist yet. So like if you accidentally signed up to lemmy.ml not really how shitty it is and decided that you wanted to join kbin.social instead - kidding btw:-P - you’ll have to leave all the posts and comments and such behind.

We are early adopters here - we like this feeling of “newness” - but we should not delude ourselves: this place is not for everyone, not yet. (and it is an open question whether it should be made to be thus, even?)

Other reasons include people replacing & then deleting their accounts still counts as traffic, and all those pics of sexy John Olivier still count as “content” atm. People have not yet started to feel the burn of subs that no longer have moderators, or that have objectively shittier ones, and many are content to wait out the blackouts for those that are still down (like r/firefox - oh wait that’s back up now, though pointing people to come to kbin, leaving the Reddit community to discuss cute “red pandas” aka “fire foxes” going forward). Until people actually EXPERIENCE the consequences of Reddit’s decisions first-hand, it looks like many have just decided to stay put.

Also, I’m keeping my account there. I’ll check it <1 hr per week instead of multiple hours a day (as a former mod), but I will continue to check in on both, to help my small gaming community deal with this ongoing crisis. Sometimes people will say like “it sucks but what are you going to do?”. For them, again, Lemmy/Kbin is not close to being an option yet. Until apps get better - happening RIGHT NOW - and maybe when old-reddit is killed off too.

Here’s a discussion about this, showing comments statistics. One of the participants’ conclusion was that “they were right to just quell the protest and stay their course. People don’t care about having to use shitty software if that gets them their network effect back and spez can anger anyone on reddit without repercussions for reddit”.

I predict that the effect of the exodus will be felt in the longer term; most users might not give a fuck about the changes, but as the place becomes less manageable and the content quality drops down, they’ll start leaving. Sadly this means that the current investors will get pockets full of IPO money.

There are certainly many here that are vocal about reddits animosity towards users and good apps that sent us here. I left for good when Apollo stopped working

I haven’t been back. Once Baconreader went dark it’s been all fediverse all the time.

Fark and Slashdot were always kinda centrally controlled. During the heyday of the internet frontier they were fresh and hilarious, but they never attracted younger people because it was just the same jokes over and over. And without building younger communities they died of irrelevance.

there, now you’re all caught up

Note how your quick summary skips a lot of information and views, that give people context on what happened. For example:

• how power users were gaming the system, and that the userbase was already pissed, even before Digg v4;
• what’s wrong with Digg v4, and why users hated it so much;
• the pressures that caused v4 on first place;
• the state of Reddit (and Twitter, and Facebook) when the Digg exodus happened;
• how people organised that mass exodus off the platform;
• how the news back then covered Digg’s downfall;
• who’s Kevin Rose again? (I bet that plenty people don’t even know who Kevin Rose is, let alone his role on Digg.) etc.

And yet it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to remember everything about the events. And we [people in general] shouldn’t even trust anyone in specific to begin with, because everyone [including you and me] is a bit biased and will cherry-pick a few details and ignore others. For that we’d need a central repository documenting the downfall of Digg, preferably from multiple users’ PoVs. I think that this is important, because better knowledge of the past allows us to guide better our future actions.

Same deal here with Reddit.

You’re leaving out that Digg had been hemorrhaging users to Reddit for years due to better features and therefore better content. Diggv4 was just the final nail