The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
The way I see it, all of us who migrated here won. Enshitification is eventually going to kill reddit, the only question is when. I’ll grab some popcorn when it happens, but for now won’t worry about it and just enjoy my time here on Lemmy.
That title is a bit misleading. Reddit mods might have stopped protesting, but the news of the implosion was quite significant. The existence of Lemmy is a testament to this. I don’t think their IPO is going to be as strong as they had hoped. That financial impact is quite opposite of the victory they claim to have achieved.
Also, the posts on Reddit and the responses have declined in quality in my opinion.
I think I won. I found a place I like more than reddit. Maybe we won even. We all got this place right here now. It's nice.
Maybe reddit won. Maybe they wanted to get rid of us and succeeded. Could be easier to milk the platform for shareholders after getting rid of anyone who would protest beforehand.
Maybe it doesn't matter because neither side needs the other anymore. Both sides changed and don't fit back together anymore.
Certainly declaring a winner in this situation is dumb.
At least personally i have not been on reddit for more than 10 minutes total since the middle of June. I am but one person, but i dont see how they can declare themselves the winners.
They were always going to win. It's their platform. They can do whatever they want. But... They lost my attention and paid subscription. I now only go to Reddit when I'm looking for something I can't find elsewhere. It used to be my favorite platform.
Reddit was always going to win that battle. But the fact that Lemmy now has a much larger user base (largely populated by many reddit OGs) is telling. At the very least, the online landscape changed. I for one am happy to be on a new platform away from the old corporate overlords.
To be honest I didn't really care about the API thing because I used the web interface anyway. But the fact that they had this outrage from users and their answer was "LOL who cares" made me leave.
If Reddit won, why have Lemmy and Kbin's userbases grown so steeply since June? Why has the quality of Reddit's content plummeted terribly? Why is /r/place just one endless ocean of "fuck spez"?
Reddit only "won" in the same way that Florida "won" against illegal immigrants and is now facing a massive workforce shortage in essential industries.
Reddit may not be dead yet, but it's mortally wounded already. It's bleeding out and will be dead in every way that matters soon.
Such a small amount of users on Reddit submit links or comment. The thing that they "won" was splitting a portion of their community of power users who maintain and create the content on their site from the masses who simply consume and doom scroll the main page. I am happy with the type of discussion that is happening on Lemmy, I don't need a post to have 7000 upvotes or a comment to have 1500 votes and a shit load of coins attached to it to make it valuable or interesting.
Reddit might have won, but i definitely did too. It made me finally leave Reddit and got me here. And who knows, perhaps one day Reddit will drown in its enshittification enough for it to vanish into nothing but the great history of the internet. Then, at last, we will still be here.
Tanked reputation, loyal user base gone like the window, no 3rd party support what so ever and the face of the company making a total ass out of himself. Yeah sure, if you call that a 'win'
Not really sure what Gizmodo thinks that Reddit "won". They damaged their reputation, degraded the quality of their site, popularized competition, and embittered a significant portion of their volunteer labor force.
Platforms don't rise and fall in a single day. Reddit used to be obscure. The fewer people go and make content there and instead just post her, the more Reddit dies through attrition. And as more active users are on Lemmy, the more it grows.
I don't see how reddit "won". They may have gotten their way by raking devs and users over the coals, but they didn't win. They got their way. Now it remains to see if any service will usurp them in the future.
IMO, Reddit kept the people who didn't care about third party apps or the things that made Reddit Reddit years ago, before it turned into generic social media. Everyone who did care, left. And that's not really a victory.
I want to thank Spez for screwing up his platform. Reddit became to toxic for me a couple years ago so I took a break. Last summer Zuckerberg gave me a 30 day ban so instead of using a nerfed account I just went back to Reddit instead. So when the protest happened I had no issues with leaving the site.
Lemmy is fire, I'm enjoying this platform much more, every day it gets better.
Did Spez write this article? Reddit didn't win. Trying to go back there has resulted in literally no answers for anything. It's just shills and that's it. I couldn't get answers to things anymore on some pretty major subreddits. So, glad I'm staying with Lemmy.
I dunno about winning. Lemmy user count is through the roof. And Im one of the people who left when they pulled the API nonsense. The way they gaslit and lied to the Apollo dev was just unacceptable. Couldn't participate there after that.
But most of these are small communities, and today only protesting subreddit with over 10 million subscribers is r/fitness.
Even if those subreddits never reopen, relinquishing the John Oliver rule officially brings the Reddit protests to a close.
These sentenences are literally right after each other. I have no idea how a 10+ million subreddit still protesting and many smaller ones means the protests are "officially over". It's died down quite a bit but that doesn't seem like a state to declare "officially over".
In all honesty, I can't see any negative impact of reddits hostile behavior towards their userbase on me personally. I can fully admit that I was browsing reddit an unhealthy amount of time. As in spending 4-6 hours a day in mindless scrolling paralasis, only to reward myself with a mild chuckle every 500 posts. I mainly used Boost for Reddit which didn't help to combat this behavior with it's user friendliness. The standard reddit app and website are so bad that I cold turkeyed my bad habit and was finally able to break it. I browse Lemmy to a much smaller extend (maybe 1 hour tops) and refuse to install any frontend app, to not fall back into the same hole as with Reddit.
I also don't get the people that complain. You basically got a free get out of jail card for social media addiction, and you try to immediately backpedal to old habits. This also goes for people that desperately want Lemmy to become exactly like Reddit. The reason why Lemmy in it's current state is in my opinion already better, is because there is basically no FoMo. Post hover on the Popular page for days, comment numbers are low, and if you want to engage in an actual conversation, you won't be drowned out by the 2.7K+ tounge in cheek one liner comments because everybody is a comedian on Reddit.
I try to enjoy it while it lasts, because I know its not going to stay like this forever.
So say mediocre minds in constant need of a narrative that's final and neat and wrapped in a little bow, all the time.
The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won.
By some short-term metric here and there, I guess, if you're willing to squint while looking at the panorama. And just how does the hack writer define "winning" - as "not disappearing or sinking into irrelevance overnight"?
Because long-term nobody knows, as places like right here are continuing to develop and grow, are quickly becoming a viable alternative, ever more active, in a positive feedback growth cycle.
They did not win. It’s like Twitter, users stayed and suffered through one poor decision after another. Then, something outlandish would happen and people would migrate to Mastodon in good size numbers. Reddit will do that and Kbin and Lemmy will grow. There are so many cool apps for both. Now when users come over there’s content and various client apps that will make their stay more enjoyable.
Reddit’s valuation is down from $15B when they closed their last round of pre-IPO funding. They were hovering in the $5B neighborhood before the APIpocalypse, and I find it hard to imagine that they’ve gained significant value since then. That’s a loss of 2/3 of the investments from their institutional partners and VCs. I hardly think they’re feeling like they deserve a victory lap.
The only reason why you wouldn’t pull an IPO due to a company’s value cratering by 2/3 is because people are looking to get whatever cash they can out of it before it completely collapses. If reddit were a healthy company, the valuation tanking would never have happened. If they were a survivable company, they would have pulled the IPO and made the organizational and policy changes necessary to restore at least some measure of value.
Spez is Musking the site because, like Musk, he is watching his business crash and burn and he has no idea what to do beyond making people pay him to be allowed to create and moderate content he can then resell.
The effects of the decisions being made will not be immediately obvious, especially when reddit doesn’t publish KPIs that show they’re hemorrhaging value. Twitter is notorious for releasing clutching-at-straws metrics in order to not have to address that the company Elon paid $44B for is now worth about $20B and falling.
Firing the mods and replacing them or bringing them to heel is at best a pyrrhic victory because they have not yet figured out how to stem the bleeding, and spez idolizing Musk’s moves at twitter shouldn’t instill a lot of confidence.
But wait, really? It does not sound like a real victory here. Lots of quality mods retired, people left for Lemmy, and F--K SPEZ written all over the r/place?
sure they won but i nuked my post history and stopped going in all but a few instances (still checked out a few links when i had to troubleshoot things). i was a regular submitter/commenter/voter. should/will they care? probably not. but i feel better about myself and the situation. so the way i see it, reddit won, the redditors who stayed lost, and everyone who left won.
The whole reddit thing aligned with other events in my life that pissed my sensibilities off, even more than i can usually stand, and i have learned to stand alot. It made me realize how much of my life was at the whims of greedy fucks who I don't agree with at all. Evolution through revolution I guess. woke me up in a way, a feeling that I've long forgotten tbh with you all. And that's mostly because of all of you and your ideas.
Lemmy is just good for me.
Those out for self interest are shortsighted, and what WE are doing is pushing in the right direction IMHO. Someone's gotta push and here we are.
They always were going to. Redditors have no backbone. Moderators moderate for power trips, which they need subreddits to be open for that. People go back when they want content since Lemmy is still immature to be a full on replacement. Same with the Twitter situation.
The silver lining is that this amount of disdain towards these social medias means it's a better time then ever to push new social media networks. People are eagerly waiting to jump to a viable alternative, so the network issue isn't nearly as big of a deal as it was.
Reddit won the war because your stereotypical Reddit mod is a spineless narcissist who wields their banhammer as a coping mechanism for their real life issues. It's like being an internet caretaker was the only way they could gain any kind of validation.
They could very easily have overwhelmed the site and brought Reddit's admins to their knees had they collectively disabled automoderator, unbanned every user and just refused to enforce any rules (incl sitewide ones.) But the moment Reddit started threatening to demod people, they caved incredibly quickly, or tried to pull off alternative forms of protest to piss off the admins, but not to the point where they'd be immediately demodded and purged, á la AwkwardTheTurtle.
Anyone could have seen this coming from a mile away the moment we started seeing r/pics and r/videos push dumb rule changes like expletives in titles, text only, sexy pics of John Oliver, etc...
Honestly the only good thing that came out of the API protests were iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle being permabanned from Reddit, and it's bittersweet that the hill Reddit chose to kill them on was over third-party apps.
Thats how a lot of people, including me, ended up here on Lemmy, so I'm still glad it happened.
Here I feel like im in the early days of the internet again and its great.
I check in about once a week or two to make sure comments haven't reappeared and take 5 mins to see if things are changing. I noticed a number of my old favorites that are small to midsized definitely have less upvotes on top posts and generally...I think that's a fair proxy for decreased user activity. I think declaring that "reddit won" ignores the degrading quality and lower activity levels...its a weaker platform now.
Reddit doesn't need to fall for lemmy to be a great plattform.
Why are some here so obsessed with Reddit? I'm not here to constantly read about Reddit! I understand that some of you are seriously upset about what happened and it's okay to vent for some time, but please move on for your own good.
I deleted my 12 year old Reddit account, and I’m here. I still go there, but spend minutes rather that hours. I tried Hacker News, but some posts are really technical. I hope this is a new home.
Nah, they didn't win, the results of these protests are going to be felt for a while and have shone a light on federated social media. Organic growth will always trump corporate growth and greed, that's the advantage of the fediverse.
Almost every subreddit folded after the management didnt collapse after a 2 days (!!!) protest, and then just went along with it with gritted teeth like Lemmy isn't a perfectly fine alternative???
This article is b*******.
Reddit didn't win, Reddit is a scorched Earth, with most of its useful quality data stripped from it.
I for one didn't know what was going on for about a month, and was wondering why all the good posts were gone, it wasn't until someone explained to me what Reddit was doing and how it would cause the rest of the internet to do the same that I finally understood why everyone trashed Reddit on the way out.
That's kinda what happens when you say "we're gonna protest for 2 whole days then go back to normal" lol. All Reddit execs and admins had to do was sit on their hands for 2 days and not say anything.
It's hilarious that whoever came up with the 2 day blackout thing thought that would make any bit of difference.
Just started using lemmy 30 minutes ago, because i realized reddit had become boring and stale since the protests, i guess they actually did do some damage.
Anyway im here to try out lemmy lets see hoq it goes
They can’t force me to use that place. calling it a ‘win’ it’s like a dismissive abusive ex saying they won an argument by default if you never talk or see them again. Sounds like the fact they need to make news articles like this is like how MGTOW obsesses talking about how much they are over women still.
Let them have it. We don't need this place turning into that shit hole, just enjoy what we have here. I swear every 10th post is either bitching about reddit or twitter, just move on.
I don't care anymore. I have to thank all those corporate zombies for all the time I'm spending in my workshop making furniture instead of being online . Gotta go now, a kitchen cabinet calls for the final touches.
Idk if this is true. there were fewer posts about voyager 2 on lemmy, but they were more comments on it and it was a better article. I found 2 or 3 posts about it on reddit, but very few comments.
I'm transitioning to lemmy but it's not easy. I can login to my account with an app, but not with any of my desktop browsers. Following users on other instances is unintuitive. Plus there are tons of fake "official" accounts I can't filter away.
A restaurant decides to go vegan because vegetables are cheap, so they can make better profits they believe. (API Price hike)
But obviously now many dishes can't be made. ( Apps for reddit )
So customers protest because they can't get their favorite dishes anymore.
The restaurant doesn't give a shit, and the owner simply walks out to the protesters and say they don't matter, because they will give up anyway.
After enough time passes, people find alternative restaurants nearby but some go vegan, and the protests finally stop.
The now vegan restaurant has "won", or have they?
They now have fewer customers, their reputation has taken a serious hit, and nearby restaurants have become more popular, and the restaurant is less attractive to new customers. So they now make less profits than before, and better profits were the whole point of going vegan!
So unless reddit makes more money or is in a better position to do it in the future, they did not win.
MySpace, digg, Yahoo, Mapquest, Hotmail, icanhazcheeseburger, Fark…still exist…possibly still make money even. But just because Reddit still has traffic and activism users doesn’t mean it won’t implode at some point. There are users and traffic because of content. Maybe it will go on fine without us but would not be at all surprised if it went downhill significantly in the next few years and the money dries up and people like Steve Huffman will have to get real jobs
Gizmodo's metric for success is that "The last major holdouts in the massive protest against Reddit’s controversial API pricing have relented, abandoning the so-called 'John Oliver rules' which only allowed posts featuring the beloved TV host in certain dissident subreddits."
What price victory? They've lost user confidence, they've lost the faith and trust of moderators, they've lost apps which made the site easier to use. Spez has abandoned any credibility he had with users and now just looks like another self-serving tech bro, willing to cut his own mother's throat to raise his company's stock price a half point. Whatever Reddit has "won" was not worth the sacrifice.
Reddit won in the since that Sparta lost. Nobody tells the story like they're LOSERS. Sometimes, being the protagonist in a tale is more important than winning.
I dunno - I'm here and about the only way I've interacted with reddit since they killed RIF is with Hermit using a suspended account (scrolling combatfootage once in a while).
Previously I upvoted and commented? Not anymore. Now I'm not important but I don't imagine I'm completely alone...
We got a head start for the future. We got in the lifeboats before the little holes slowly will leak in water so the ship will sink. It takes some time with smal holes 😉
Who cares about reddit or the people still on there? Afaic, everyone cool has already moved here, and ya'll have already built a beautiful community. Sometimes its not about destroying a corporate website, but the friends we make along the way.
I think no one expected Reddit to just fold in a month, if that was their terms for “winning” then… congratulations?
For a social media giant such as Reddit, it takes years to come down, just like it took years to get where it was. However, the seeds are sown, and for every decision that only benefits their pockets and not the user, they creep closer to that reality of their own demise.
It takes a long time for sites to die completely. Livejournal was wildly popular in its day, but after a couple of changes of owners and becoming a Russian government propaganda machine later, it still exists, but despite me being a staunch LJer I don't know anyone who still posts there. Nobody talks about it as anything but in the past tense. In time I expect Reddit to be another internet graveyard.
Unless we can agree on a definition of a victory, it's pointless to say whether they "won". For example as far as the FB users are concerned, FB might have won with Reddit ages ago.
We are here and I don't know about you but I'm glad to be here with you all.
To be fair, before the reddit crisis I was looking for a decentralised foss alternative but didn't find anything worthwhile. So, imo, the mere fact that this event may have helped put Lemmy in the spotlight and made it grow is in itself the victory to take away from this battle :)
Eh, who knows. You can buy a news story now so we'll never really know much of the truth. I know I haven't been back, and I don't even care about API stuff, I just disliked the way the CEO was so dismissive of what the reader/user base wanted.
Lol this has just started. Once they IPO and we learn how many tens of millions spez made off mod's unpaid labor, more and more mods (and power users) will wonder why they are doing unpaid work just so spez can get rich.
How many billions did that one company figure they lost on likely market cap? And they want to say they won.
Yeah, Reddit managed to suppress the protests, but saying they won is just not knowing the full story. From Reddit's point of view, this has always been about their IPO, but all this mess did nothing to help with it. In fact, we even got that infamous spez quote saying Reddit isn't profitable, which can only make things worse for them.
When they finally decide to push for their IPO and they aren't unable to provide the profits the investors want, then the enshittification will just accelerate and people will start leaving.
Of course Reddit won. Not to diminish the efforts of everyone who participated, but all we’re doing here is sowing the seeds for something that might compete one day. There was never a chance of a full platform shift within the set two days of protest or whatever. Give it time, we’ll see Reddit squeeze every penny it can out of its users after IPO. Then, maybe as time goes on people will be looking for other places to go and Lemmy or some other platform will be a more viable option. It took Reddit over a decade to get to where it is, so of course we shouldn’t expect an equal competitor to pop up in a few weeks.
Did they lose a chunk of userbase? Not as much as we would have hoped. However, quality != quantity. And, I am willing to bet they lost a more vocal part of their userbase.
In the end, they will prob still push for IPO. In the end Spez will still be swimming in dollars. But, not nearly as many dollars as he could have had....
They "won" short term. Let's see what Reddit is like in a year.
But as other's here have pointed out, those of us that left are the real winners. While Reddit will always be around, it's already going through enshitification. It's only a matter of time of when the majority abandon it.
I believe if there's one community that will take forever (if at all) to move to the fediverse, it's the manga/anime community.
Subs like r/anime and r/OshiNoKo are as active as ever especially during r/Place, pay attention and you'll see a lot of anime mascots in the canvas back when it was around. Anime/mangas also tend to attract the younger crowd which tend not to care about the protest anyways, from what I've seen.