I guess it’s self explanatory but I keep seeing all this stuff about how everyone is moving from Reddit to lemmy and I’m wondering if anyone knows if that’s really what’s happening. If you have numbers that’s even better.
Thanks!
There clearly is not. Even people on here, who say they “quit” Reddit, often go on to say “I only go on it now for this one subreddit” or “I only go on it to check news” etc. Spez bet that people would either not care about him shitting all over the Reddit community for profit, or be too addicted to Reddit to actually do anything about it. And he was right.
These predictions that Reddit will collapse because the “power users” have left are ridiculous. It’s not difficult to find recycled trash on the internet to shitpost on Reddit. Hell, bots can do it, and have been. People just want garbage to mindlessly scroll through and leave their dumb comments on (“user name checks out, har har”).
I will personally never use Reddit as long as it’s run my Spez (or any other equivalent asshole), but it’s quite clear that they’ve survived this API debacle just fine.
It’s the same with Facebook. People are so addicted to it that no matter how badly they are treated they just can’t quit. No matter the evidence repeatedly presented with just how evil FB is, I have still never convinced a family member to get off it. At this point I just will have to be satisfied with them never referencing me or having any pictures of me on it. Reddit is the same, but not as extreme.
It’s the same with Facebook. People are so addicted to it that no matter how badly they are treated they just can’t quit.
Facebook is a very different beast. It exists and thrives because it convinced people to engage personally. It’s difficult to leave Facebook because family and friends are there. And Facebook also bought a lot of the competition and branched out: Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. It also has value to businesses, it has a market place, it truly is a monster.
Reddit has nothing. It doesn’t know its users and most of them are really careful to keep anonymous. It has shared interests communities, but not friendships/personal relationships. It’s really easy to quit Reddit if one decides to. It does not affect daily life.
True. But, the power users leaving will likely have a long term impact.
The thing that set Reddit apart from all the other spaces to settle down on the internet was that Reddit’s users made it work, not Reddit.
They had their faults; moderation wasn’t perfect. But, it was good in the places it needed to be. Reddit was also very good at attracting “experts” in niche topics. You could reliably trust askscience, askhistorians, whatisthisbug, etc.
Reddit has plenty of memes, porn and funny cats to attract the masses, but it was the power users that made Reddit what it was.
On top of that, Reddit was so customizable because of all the 3rd party apps that had polish. Apollo, BaconReader, etc., no ads and lots of options to choose from to suit your needs.
Cutting back your engagement from 30h a week to 30m is a huge shot against Reddit tho.
I kept my account alive but now only follow a handful of subs and am finding alternatives weekly. Discord. Lemmy.
This all results in a huge loss for Reddit because no one’s there for the ads or promoted posts. And that’s all they’ll have left after a while. And that’s not enough to attract a real base. Reddit won’t die overnight but look at what one fatal move did to Tumblr (when they banned porn). It tanked the site so hard that it’s losing money daily now. A stark contrast from when it sold for billions.
Corporations are far too flippant in thinking they are indestructible. And how they handled the API changes tells you that, like Tumblr, they made a serious mistake.
I’m not catholic so technically
I seriously doubt reddit has seen any significant drop in traffic or unique visitors. Looking back at some of the subs I frequented, they’re all business as usual. The mods all backed down the second that they had their mod status threatened, as expected. Almost all of the users I saw that said they were leaving on July 1 when their 3rd party app stopped working are still there.
I deleted my account and moved here, as clearly a lot of people did, but it’s a drop in the ocean and that’s not even to say that the people that moved here have stopped using reddit.
I can say that since Joey shut down my reddit use has dropped 95% at least. I hardly looked at reddit on the computer unless I was searching for an answer to something. I tried the reddit app, it runs like ass on my phone so I’m pretty much done spending time on that site unless I’ve googled something and the answer is in a reddit thread.
I consider it a win nontheless, people like me or you, who were actively engaged on reddit and did “what felt right” (deleting comments and leaving reddit) are probably the kind of people that might make for good conversation and good content (be it links to cool stuff, art, or just rants).
We might get some “bad apples” (trolls, botters, and such), but all in all, I see it as a far healthier alternative to grow gradually from a core of users that was either here from the start, or that moved to the Fediverse to take back a bit of the “old web” feel, where people come together to share cool stuff and ideas.
RIP Aaron Swartz, we’ll keep the old reddit spirit here on Lemmy.
I used RedReader which got an exemption, so it still works. So I still use it because I enjoy talking to people on Reddit despite the bad behaviour from the admins, and they don’t make any money off me so who cares. The day I’ll leave is the day they force me to use their unusable app (and when your non-tech buddy tells you he uses Reddit in desktop mode on mobile Firefox, you know it’s bad)
I’ve been using both services as there’s way more news and discussion on Reddit but Lemmy is improving rapidly. I do think Reddit has shot themselves in the foot by restricting NSFW subs to logged in / official app only though. I honestly expected this would result in a ton of content moving to Lemmy but that doesn’t seem to have been the case so far.
I think Lemmy’s biggest issue is community discovery on federated instances. Lots of active communities don’t show up unless explicitly requested on your own instance, and that’s going to confuse a lot of new users.
Reddit has been dying for a while.
Subreddits like AskScience, that it was famous for, are now shells of what they were because the real scientists who put serious time into that subreddit decided they were done wasting that time. This situation is at least a year old, it predates the protest.
You can see this same dynamic across the site. Places that were once vibrant are slowing down, the flood of posts becoming a trickle. Bots are making most of the posts on big subs. Smaller subs that used to hop with human posts are where you can see the truth. It’s not normal for a sub with 500k subscribers to see 10 posts in a week. You see that more often, now.
The truth is that Reddit was always small potatoes. It feels like a big deal when you’re there, but it’s not. The real user numbers are on TikTok, and Instagram, who each have up to a billion users depending on where you get a number. Reddit is barely there, as social media rankings go. There are people with more views on a YouTube video than Reddit has users. Reddit is an also-ran social media site. It’s really not a competitor. It’s just easy to steal from, because text.
Reddit has long had a bad reputation as a shitty, toxic place. Habitual Redditors don’t know this, not really, you have to talk to outsiders. People aren’t that interested in coming to Reddit, they just want answers to their Google searches. It’s not a recipe for growth.
Now the true power users, who provide those answers, are moving away from both Reddit and Google, speaking of a company who best watch its step. A lot of people are starting to talk about Google search the way they talked about Reddit search, which never did get good.
Reddit doesn’t have that far to fall, is what I’m saying. There isn’t a mass exodus, though. You’re seeing a late spasm from a steady tide that has been going out for years. 10 years is a looooong fuckin time for a social platform to be around, they start to rot after the first or second year. Reddit has been rotten for some time.
I see a lot of people, here, and elsewhere, trying to act dismissive about the protests, or about how important the moderators were, but the site’s entire business model depended on hundreds, even thousands of people doing a ton of real labor for absolutely free. If they’ve decided to take an “everyone’s replaceable” attitude and treat volunteers like employees, they’ll pay. It’ll be their IPO sagging down to a couple dollars as they limp to bankruptcy, or purchase, but they’ll pay. I swear I’ll have to buy a couple shares as a collectible.
I’m putting it down as yet another well-earned reminder that you have no business building anything that matters to you on a platform that other people own, it is worth the five minutes a day that it takes to post on it, and no more.
Do not make a job of it, ever, unless that job pays you and pays you so well that people think that you’re really a stripper and your job title is just a cover story. “Social Media Manager”, gotta be code for OF, bro.
That’s how much money you should be making doing labor for a multimillion-dollar corporation. It was fuckin Conde Nast for a hot minute. If the boss can just take your mod and your community away, then you only ever worked there, for free. You were never building a community, you were building their property, for free. You have to stop doing that, and you have to stop presenting it as a virtuous act, unless some fundamental things change.
If you’re going to put a lot of work in for your own reasons, then you owe it to yourself to do it under your own control, or not at all.
I see an opportunity on the Fediverse to start from the old model of internetting and jump off to something new that just looks old, where it makes sense to put that work in, but for now it is what it is.
Reddit still lives, like Theoden cobwebbed in his throne, but nobody will come and banish Wormtongue. It’s still gonna take years for that old man to die.
Fuckin Yahoo isn’t anywhere close to dead. Neither is Digg. Well, maybe Digg.
The thing we North Americans are always a bit too arrogant about is if Reddit somehow gets big in India, or Brazil, then they don’t need us, and we’ll never know because we don’t speak the language. So it’s gonna take time for Reddit to fuck that up, they got options.
But don’t be too dismissive about the idea of “mass exodus”. Digg lost most of its userbase, literally overnight, and it was because of shitty ads. If the only app you can use now is the app that sucks and serves lots of shitty ads in your face, that will do it. People aren’t that habitual. It is very, very easy to leave a social site.
I quit TikTok over one shitty post that was my last straw, you just delete the app and forget about it. Yet TikTok is social media heroin. Reddit is a bunch of dudes yelling about shit that isn’t worth yelling about. It is much easier to quit. The phone app era means once you delete, it’s gone, and it helps to break the cycle. It can and probably will happen, 90% of the remaining users will drop it like it’s covered in bedbugs, they just have to stick huge unskippable ads in everyone’s face, and they’re fucked.
I just don’t think that is going to make the splash you’d expect.
But no, no mass exodus, not yet. I’d keep the popcorn bowl close by if I were you, though. I will not put it past them to turn an IPO into a fail state.
I think the idea of all the content as their property is what’s fucked up to begin with. Legally, now, that would arguably be the case, but that shouldn’t be the case. It’s a body of knowledge constructed by millions of people and the legal system’s attitude should be that Reddit the company can fuck off if they just want to exploit it. Their role is to facilitate and foster that platform, not to seek the biggest payday that can get out of it. Same as the many people running Lemmy instances now. Law’s basis is in benefit to humanity and what’s happening with these corporate social media platforms does not benefit humanity.
