The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won. [Clickbaity title, but be sure to check the article itself]
The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won. [Clickbaity title, but be sure to check the article itself]
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 title is a bit clickbaity but the article is worth a read. To keep it short:
- large subreddits stopped protesting
- 1.8k subreddits are still in the dark, but those are rather small
- [from the article] "Though the Reddit team likely caused permanent damage to the platform and its relationship with users, Spez got his way. But that victory might not mean much."
IMO it was a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, the protests ended, and most users are still stuck in that shithole... but the reputation damage won't be reversed, Reddit managed to seed its competitors (as this one) with the necessary userbase to make them functional, and odds are that Reddit will keep going in its death spiral. And that doesn't even take into account the amount of bad press that it generated, that will hurt IPO numbers for sure.
Reddit didn't really have competitors before this
It didn't, I agree. Lemmy for example was really slow; the type of site that you'd check once a few days. Nowadays however you can pretty much lurk nonstop here, and you know that you'll see more stuff that you want to see. Same deal with other sites.
Yep, i created my first lemmy account a little over year ago when i first heard about it. I tried it for a few days and ended up back on reddit. I came back about the time of the blackout and stayed this time. I even totally deleted my reddit accounts and overwrote all their content. Since then i have spent 10 minutes total on reddit and havent loaded it in weeks now.
Keep in mind the users left on reddit aren't really the cream of the crop. They're the ones who say stuff like "bruhhh this app is shit" fully unaware that reddit is a website first and foremost
Reddit is competing with Instagram and TikTok for the dumbest slice of the Internet. If you can think, you're no longer welcome there, and are probably a liability to their advertising efforts
A lot of the best mods left. Some made it over here to the Fediverse, but a lot of them just stopped. Which is probably better for their mental health.
You still have good mods left over there, but there was also a distinct brain drain.
Some of the best mod tools shut down, and overall the site is just a bit worse to use.
Now, can the remaining mods train up to the level of the ones who left? Sure, but there's going to be that doubt in the back of their minds now. Reddit Admins can no longer be trusted to let mods run their communities.
And the next time Reddit Admins do something that pisses off the community, more people will leave and not look back. The IPO is still looming in the future, and there are a lot of fuckups for Spez to make.
You still have good mods left over there, but there was also a distinct brain drain.
To add on that: even the good mods to be far less cooperative than before. Accessing the site only once a day, never reporting issues to the admins, plopping lazy automod rules full of false positives, never engaging with the userbase, so goes on. Until the mod suddenly goes missing in action - people noticed that the sub went downhill, but they never noticed that the mod was gone.
The standards of the "immigration leftover" might be low, but even those will eventually migrate once they get better content elsewhere. And at this rate even IG and TT will be able to offer it, not because they've become better but because Reddit itself is worse.
I don't think corpo websites will survive high intrest rates in the long term. They're already making rash decisions to quickly start turning a profit andbit's only gonna piss off users. Once the fediverse gets critical mass their days are over and we'll wonder why we didn't do this sooner
Reddit lost. Corporate won. Reddit was much larger than their CEO.
"Reddit" in the text refers to the platform, and who owns it. They won, but the victory was damn shitty.
"Reddit as the community and its userbase" lost hard.
Causing permanent damage to your platform is an interesting definition of winning. I occasionally do a drive-by on some of my old subs although I haven't commented or voted on anything in some time. The pace on big subs like r/news and r/politics is markedly slower than it was three months ago. There are fewer threads and I have the impression that there are fewer posts per thread as well. Looks like many of the mods who have been booted are being replaced with people who mod 50+ subs, so basically the subs will be completely automoderated. I'd expect to see a lot of bad mod calls and little in the way of a nurturing atmosphere which isn't going to help matters. The enshittification continues.
Causing permanent damage to your platform is an interesting definition of winning.
They won against the protests; the protesters couldn't enforce the demands. However the permanent damage that you're mentioning is what makes it a Pyrrhic victory.
If you look at the default subs maybe, but I no longer subscribed or had blocked most of the big ones over the years so my subs throughout the protests had normal nondisruptive activity. And I think for lot of long time reddit users it was the smaller subs that kept them around due to being able to find many different subs for their interest.
So I don't think the protest was as disruptive in the long run. But, it did at least create a small reddit alternative with a more broad appeal than the type of individuals that drew them to Voat. And I don't see reddit pushing away its current very large userbase away unless they do more crazy things. What comes to mind is getting rid of old.reddit and disabling RES functionality, but even that is a niche demographic of reddit's main target audience.
Reddit demographic in large is vocal but lot will not actually be a threat to leave.
Reddit has lost 2/3 of their valuation in less than a year, and that was before the protests. That’s not a success kind of metric. And that number is from the institutional investors saying how much they’re marking down their investments - it’s not like some people trying to tank the stock.
Basically, the metrics which have not not all been made public have made the people and institutions with a collective billions of dollars already invested in the company are the ones saying it’s in the basement.
Didn't the large subreddits get FORCED to come back? Or the mods were banned or something?
Yes to both. And that means that the mods who stayed are no longer going to trust Reddit Admins.
Also, the IPO is coming, and there will be stupid policies that are meant to drive up the stock price at the expense of the community.
Look forward to more waves of people abandoning Reddit in the future.
I can't speak for anyone else but I used to contribute content to reddit a lot, thanks to spez I will just lurk and consume there and save my posts for kbin and the rest of the feddiverse.
I was pretty much unsubscribed from or had blocked the major default subs long time ago, so while those subs got headlines and attention those that subscribed to the smaller ones may have seen not much difference. Lot of the subs I had been subscribed to functioned as normal under the explanation of we are too small to matter. And so my feed was mostly unimpacted.
The large subs have been the easiest to replace while the small ones which is what made reddit unique have been challenging. So reluctance of lot of those type of subs to do anything made it a loss from the start. Big subs setting the tone like nba and apple folding immediately afterwards didn't help either to convince the ones that had joined to follow through.
It was lost couple days in, since lot of the mods never wanted or were willing to leave reddit begin with and showed that hand immediately.
Anybody thinking this whole shindig was a “pyrrhic victory” is deluding themselves. The protest didn’t do shit outside of bringing people to the Fediverse - or rather, Lemmy specifically. Majority of people stop caring about things nowadays as soon as something is over a week old, and clever marketing and abuse of moderator/admin powers can pretty much cover this stuff up. Hell, there were users on the Fediverse that were going back to use Reddit for protesting on r/place - and some of those people were the same kind that went “I am gonna DELETE EVERYTHING OFF OF REDDIT”.
At the end of the day I’m glad I moved off Reddit as my go-to social media because I genuinely got tired of the hivemind on there, but y’all are lying to yourselves if you think this will massively impact Reddit’s IPO or anything else about them in the future - even their reputation. If Reddit crashes and burns, cool and Steve Hoffman got what he deserves after hiring pedophiles and keeping r/jailbait active for as long as it was active. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit chugs along just fine.
Anybody thinking this whole shindig was a “pyrrhic victory” is deluding themselves. [...] y’all are lying to yourselves if you think this will massively impact Reddit’s IPO [...]
I strongly disagree, for four reasons:
- Bringing people to the Fediverse hurts Reddit. Alts have a chicken-and-egg problem: not enough users to get content, not enough content to get users. Lemmy and Kbin managed to avoid this problem, partially, due to the protests.
- Bad press does impact the IPO. Investors are only willing to invest high stakes of money in risky businesses as long as they promise a great return on the investment; however, the press shows that Reddit doesn't have a bright future (less RoI), and the userbase is pissed (higher risk). As such I do believe that those lowered the amount of money that the "old" Reddit investors will get out of the initial public offering, as new investors won't be willing to pay as much for the shares.
- Disengagement. Profit comes from user visits, but value (ability to generate profit in the long term) is from the content. And yet the revolts disengaged the most the ones who would generate and sort that content on first place; even the ones who might not leave (like we did) won't be as eager to post their stuff there.
- Small subs. The article mentioned 1.8k subreddits still closed, right? And yet small subs are the ones that actually retain users - because they're about everything and a bit more. Those likely won't get new mods or threats from u/ModCodeOfConduct saying "mods, keep working for free or we'll put other suckers in your place".
Could the moderators get a victory? I don't think so; I believe that they should've scorched earth and migrated. Even then, the revolts did damage against Reddit, that Reddit could go without. Reddit might've won the war against the jannies but it didn't benefit from its own victory, well, that's a Pyrrhic victory.
and clever marketing
Clever marketing could do something but Reddit is not clever. (If Reddit was clever it would've killed the 3PAs without a revolt, by boiling some frogs.)
But I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit chugs along just fine.
I mentioned this in other threads, but my prediction is that Reddit will neither suddenly crash nor stay alive "just fine". It'll slowly go downhill.
Wouldn't say so. Reddit did loose a lot as well, a typical loose loose situation.