I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
RIF stopped working. Now I only end up on Reddit if the search results says something I am looking for is there, and if there’s somewhere else I try that source first.
Lemmy is okay, and I need to filter it, but that was the same on Reddit.
One the plus side I spend less time online 🎉
One thing that happened is that I left and have never returned!
Fuck you spez.
By the end of the day reddit is feudal property and the asshole can kick out anyone anytime, as he uses the data for, of course, AI mining.
I think it’s down to they kept or replaced enough subreddit mods that actually make reddit work. That and crucially lemmy or any alternative barrier to entry is/was still too difficult. Less users less content.
It’s a long difficult road to break people’s social media inertia and habits. Also reddit is obviously trying to become more addictive like TikTok, another barrier for alternatives that rightfully refuse to so that, but in some way they’re fighting biology as well.
Those that cared generally left the platform for places like Lemmy. That’s why I’m here.
The vast majority of people don’t particularly care though, and the people that do care generally overestimate how much everyone else cares. And they overestimate how many other people actually care at all.
The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’
Well, yeah. Why would he have to offer anything? It’s his site, and mods are not employees. They are just users and can be banned or replaced with another user at any time. Mods don’t have any leverage whatsoever.
The people who cared are also a big proportion of people that actually posted and commented there. I kept lurking for a while and the quality of content and discussion declined very quickly. Now there are a lot of bots fighting with other bots on big /r. The only communities that maybe stayed the same are the ones that were very niche to begin with
Commented maybe. But the vast majority of posts were bots, and have been for years at this point.
I had been on reddit since 2007 and have watched the quality decline year over year since around 2012.
The users had the leverage and always will, without them there is no content and no money. It shouldn’t have mattered if they replaced the mods if the users wouldn’t have given up.
Again, the VAST majority of users never cared about it. You’re overestimating just how many people actually cared.
Reddit has been garbage for years, with most content being linked to or created by bots. There’s been little organic original content for a while.
I was on Reddit since 2007 and watched it grow and become a shithole.
Yes, I complained a lot about the bots, reddit doesn’t ban then because it’s in their interest andIi pointed out that some are bots and that it’s impossible for humans to reply to the post I made in 3. Also reddit can know who is a bot and that no human posts every 3 seconds. They removed some features where you could see who is a bot.
Pepperidge Farms remembers the saydrah debacle
simpler times.
The users did give up. I moderated one of the subs that took part in the blackout, and we got a lot of complaints from users over it.
And what did the CEO learned? that he can do stuff like this and every thing will be alright and the users will just accept it eventually. “Bark but no bite”. The CEO held no actual leverage and still doesn’t have the leverage.
No leverage? I think having full control over the platform, the ability to boot out any moderators still protesting and force subs to reopen, is all the leverage.
There’s nothing any of us could’ve done to change the outcome. We voiced our displeasure, tried to protest, but Spez was able to quash all of it by forcing out anyone who didn’t accept it in the end.
The users would have won if they did actually nothing, it the sense that they wouldn’t interact with reddit at all, tf is Spez gonna do when the entire business model is based on user content? He would have given up because there was no way he would have accepted to lose his entire business or a large part of it.
I don’t think you realize how unrealistic it is to expect the entire userbase of Reddit to all collectively agree to get up and leave. Spez knew he didn’t have to worry about the impossible.
You don’t need the entire userbase or even close to the entire userbase. Just enough to make it lose more money then charging for the API. The shareholders are money driven.
I quit for 2 years, then spoofed the API to use RIF again, fuck Spez. Was there for about a year and finally got banned for saying nazis deserve to be dead. Hit a little too close to home for the admins with that one. I still lurk, but I wrote a program in python that bypasses the login requirements for old reddit, blocks all ads, and adds back features they removed, such as seeing number of points weighted. Again, fuck Spez. I’d have distributed the program if old reddit redirect didn’t just bypass the login themselves.
It doesnt anymore. Old reddit needs login now too
I don’t know what it does, but the extension “Old Reddit Redirect” recently updated to show the old design through www.reddit.com and it works without an account.
It creates a
redesign_optoutcookie and sets it to true, making reddit load the old UIPretty much exactly what my program does. It just displays it in a wrapper that’s identical to Old Reddit.
Reddit is not the same place it was in 2011. The average user in 2023 did not care or even know about the API changes, the vast majority were already using it on the official app.
So from the viewpoint of an average user there was maybe some news about reddit making some kind of change, then some confusion as a bunch of subreddits were unavailable, then after a couple days it went away and it was back to business as usual. And that was that.
Yea but why they didn’t protest again when reddit made the site and app worse for every user?
Frogs in pots… And the reddit communities that people liked were still active once the protest was bashes down. Reddit nixed and replaced every mod that continued protesting in their subs.
Yea, I don’t see reddit losing a lot of users or making any good decisions. Most likely reddit will continue to make terrible decisions for users and the users will get used to it and the loop continues. That’s what I like about Lemmy, by design if fixes a lot of problems that reddit has.
Because “they”, i.e. everyone who cared was gone by then. Didn’t you read all the responses you got?
Most of them stayed because they where already using the main reddit app so it wasn’t something that hurt them and didn’t care that much about the API, but with these updates it affects every user and made the experience worse for everyone.
Pure speculation on your part. I would claim the opposite and say most meaningful contributions to reddit came from PCs, not mobile phones. And those people preferred old.reddit.com to begin with.
Because the people that really cared have left. A bunch are here now.
- Reddit removed the ability for moderators to shut down subreddits the same way they did in 2023.
- New Reddit users outnumber Old Reddit users. The new folks never got a taste of the pre-enshittification era, so this is just the norm for them.
There just weren’t enough people who cared. Reddit is just another app to most people. If most any app on my phone made changes for a slightly worse experience, at most I would be a little annoyed and move on.
I bet they don’t even know what time the narwhal bacons
Many people already answered your question, so I’ll just tell my personal experience;
I initially left Reddit and went to Lemmy. Then figured it did not have the big community yet and still wanted to see some posts but not contribute to Reddit and so I used RSS feed for everything that’s on Reddit.
Then Apollo started to live through community and sideloading meanwhile Reddit started to fuck up RSS feeds. So decided to use the community Apollo app. So now using both Lemmy and Reddit.
for me was like leaving a dysfunctional family in a big house and moving to a smaller but better place
In many cases, the mod team was selectively replaced after the story ran out of steam. A number of smaller communities did go dark and stayed dark, but Reddit forced the opening of several of the major ones.
There was a significant migration to lemmy, but many didn’t stay, and ended up back on Reddit. We’re in the middle of a 2nd surge with the removal of old.reddit.com from the public (not logged in) front-end, but it’s more of a steady stream as individual users get fed up, not the big wave that hit with the API announcement.
I think this time folks are going to stay. Reddit’s content quality and frequency of OC has plummeted, while it’s been steadily rising on the Fediverse. And the dialog here is vastly better.
That’s the real driver as to whether people stay on a social media site - the conversations with other users. Reddit has started to heavily censor and manipulate that conversation, and is dying as a result.
On the Fediverse, that conversation is alive and thriving. And as long as it is, this place will continue to grow.
For me it was the removal of being able to see comment history, especially at this time while spam bots are flooding the site. I have no idea if any post at all on Reddit is authentic anymore if the post history is hidden. It made me just not want to engage with anything.
And the dialog here is vastly better.
AMEN brother
I migrated in june 2023, lemmy.world did not exist yet
The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal.
Well I think you just answered your own question, that’s exactly what happened to the 2023 Reddit API protest.
I moderated one of the large subs that took part in the protest. When the admins threatened us, that was the last straw for me to leave the platform.
The answer is in your post. They were forced to reopen. It wasn’t just a threat; mods got replaced. A lot of people left, but they just accepted the loss of traffic and moved on.
At this point, anyone still there has just accepted that the site is dying and are riding it out until old stops working.
I don’t think reddit is dying, it just enshittifies even more and somehow growing.
I can’t quite find the source, but I remember seeing a plot of the estimated fraction of posts and comments on reddit that were produced by bots (not estimated by reddit themselves of course). The conclusion from that blog post was essentially that, at this point, reddit is mostly bots interacting with each other, with some humans sprinkled in. Of course, this doesn’t matter to reddit as long as they can convince the world that they have plenty of users they can show ads to. Companies buying ad space largely don’t do the research needed to find out that they’re paying for their ads to be shown to bots, so they keep buying, reddit keeps making money, and everyone is happy.
Yes, I said many times that there are a lot of bots and reddit knows and supports them because it creates traffic. Many post are recycled with nearly the same titles and the comments are generic and obviously made by bots.
IIRC Reddit closed their API to everyone they didn’t explicitly allowed to use it, meaning independent research isn’t easy.
Requesting paid access for research purposes would probably get you there though. After all, they need to sell access to posts and comments through some API to make money off all that data.
Paying money ties your hands in a lot of ways, with no saying how much access and tools they provide, and if you can share everything you can find after that.
with no saying …
Well that’s the neat thing when paying money for something: You get a contract detailing exactly what access you get and what you can use it for. You typically read and sign this before paying.
So going back to your original comment, can there be any research concluding that reddit is useless for advertising for e.g. being filled with bots?
The simple answer is that the protest was not an organic movement, it was entirely driven by the moderators of some subreddits, the communities themselves never wanted to participate, some were OK to show solidarity, but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of users there weren’t being inconvenienced by the API stuff, some were even hostile to the mere mention of migrating elsewhere. Once the mods relinquished, everything went back to normal because it was mostly them being affected by the API changes.
I used to be a mod for r/streetwear (millions of subscribers). Before the blackout we’d constantly be getting posts throughout the day. Now when I lurk, I see 2 posts a day on average, sometimes none. The community is dead compared to before the blackout, but they didn’t migrate to lemmy. Maybe they shifted to discord or just quit reddit-like social media, idk.
P.S. shameless plug for !streetwear@lemmy.world 😋
I don’t know anything about fashion but joined anyway.
Haha appreciate it 😁
Subscribed
🤜🤛
