Did the reddit hivemind do a 180 or are the people left behind just the people who don't care. - RedditMigration to the "Threadiverse" - kbin.social
kbin.socialPrior to the protest reddit was in full support of the protest. Most polls on subs supported a shutdown. Now, seemingly every community cant understand why the protest was needed and they're calling it a mod power trip. There is a 3rd possibility. This is an unfounded conspiracy but reddit themselves could be manipulating...
Prior to the protest reddit was in full support of the protest. Most polls on subs supported a shutdown. Now, seemingly every community cant understand why the protest was needed and they’re calling it a mod power trip. There is a 3rd possibility. This is an unfounded conspiracy but reddit themselves could be manipulating scores.
See the NFL thread if you don’t mind sending traffic
https://reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/14b11kh/were_just_here_so_we_dont_get_fined/
You must log in or register to comment.
Tracking the lastest news and numbers about the #RedditMigration to open, Fediverse-based alternatives, including #Kbin and #Lemmy To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/
- 0 users online
- 1 user / day
- 17 users / week
- 102 users / month
- 3.27K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 552 Posts
- 8.76K Comments
- Modlog
- mods:
I’ve been on reddit for 13 years. My wife finally got an account last year. She cannot understand any of the fuss. She didn’t know there were apps outside the official app. She never used RES. She just scrolls and never comments or posts. I would be surprised if she even upvotes or downvotes. She’s not a monster, she just doesn’t reddit like I do.
95% of users are like my wife. 5% of users are like me. I haven’t even tried to explain this whole Lemmy/Kbin experiment to her yet.
But the thing is, if 50% of the 5% of us who are active posters (e.g., 2.5% of total users) are now over here on Kbin/Lemmy, the 95% who are left are going to notice a huge difference in the experience of the site. Conversations will be dull. New posts will be more ad-focused. They may not be able to explain what happened, but they will notice that Reddit is not as fun as it used to be.
Will this stop spez from getting stupid rich? Probably not. Will my wife switch to Lemmy or Kbin? Never gonna happen. But the people who want to be part of the old culture will find their way here. The stuff that made reddit great is already happening over here. Reddint will not die anytime soon, but it will cease to be relevant. Think of how long yahoo lasted even though no one cared about it. Reddit is going to be like that.
I haven’t yet deleted my reddit account. It will probably happen. But I also haven’t missed it. I’ve actually been excited to come over and see what’s happening every day in the fediverse! I’m posting more, and considering modding for the first time.
I pretty much agree with this. If you look at the accounts of the people complaining, how many of them have posts hitting the frontpage? I’m not saying I have any data, I’m just speculating that most people who are power users, whether they use 3rd party apps or not, can recognize how shitty reddit went about this and won’t complain about the protest.
deleted by creator
Helps that to a certain extent a fairly large portion are going to be at least moderately tech savvy (probably less so than 5+ years ago), so switching to the fediverse is a lot less daunting to them than to the average user.
deleted by creator
My biggest concern for the switch over was figuring out what instance I would like best. I think settling on kbin has been a good experience so far, barring some of the hiccups. Luckily, earnest has been crushing it with the fixes the whole time.
Yes, he’s really been putting in the work. Buy the man a coffee or ten, everyone!
Oh yeah, I completely forgot about doing that. Was gonna throw him $50. You have the link?
Yep!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
What would you say is the best way to get a kbin invite?
E: sorry, I mixed it up with tildes.net
You need an invite now? I didn’t when I signed up.
@J23
@Liontigerwings @yacht_boy @Blakerboy777 @Alto @digitallyfree
deleted by creator
Probably all the users who like me used old Reddit and apps. Those that joined recently only know the Reddit official app and don’t care
I visited Reddit for years when Google searches led me there. About 2 years ago I got into some niche hobbies/interests, and that motivated me to sign up. I almost always used the official app. I was doomscrolling and posting lots of comments ever since.
It takes me a long ass time to commit to a new technology. But I also heard and understood with the API issue that mods need the proper tools to do their job, and if you take away their tools, they cannot do their job. And once they can’t, they will leave and the entire experience of Reddit will change. I also understood that there are 3PA that the heaviest users and commenters use, and once those apps die, those people will not.come back, and with them will go their expertise and all of their posts and comments.
That told scaredy cat me that I needed to find.aome new place(s) for chat and entertainment. I like it here at kbin. I’m also enjoying Tildes, and I’ve been visiting Mastodon and Substack (I set those accounts up when Twitter went haywire), Hacker News, Fark and Metafilter. I’m enjoying the diversity.
Just mentioned all this to say that relatively new /official app using Redditors might also be making the jump.prior to Doomsday.
I mean your not lying. On Mastodon I saw posts about people deleting accounts with thousands of karma, lot’s of people with positive reputation in their communities left, and the people who remained either are not active posters or don’t really care.
I’m in the process of deleting all my comments but it’s taking a while.
I’ve got probably 100k karma over a few accounts.
I feel kinda bad about taking away all the technical help and collaborative type stuff I’ve done over the years, but… Reddit wants to use all that data to cash out on it’s users, so it has to go.
Yeah, I deleted my two year old account with around 150K karma yesterday. What having 150K after two years says about me, let’s not discuss… but they’ll not be getting my brand of snark ever again.
Same. I’ve been redditing since 2012 and have tailor made a select group of subs I follow for all of my hobbies. I was an avid commenter, with reply’s as long as your own. It was definitely my most visited site. It was as much for stupid pictures when I was going to bed as it was discussing things with fellow collectors or getting advice or tech support. Old.Reddit on my Desktop, RIF on my phone. I am one of the people this hooplah affects. And it makes me mad.
I know a lot of people who reddit in real life, but most of them might use it for 10 minutes a day on the toilet or while on the bus. They primarily lurk and stick to a lot of the easily accessible and fun subs. They also just use the official App, or they just look at it in their phone browser. Like you said, this whole thing doesn’t affect most of them.
I’m now spending a lot of time trying to find new communities in kbin and lemmy. But I have to admit the specialty subs I follow either don’t have a community here (like Moon Knight stuff) or very small communities (functional print, comic book collecting, etc). I’m sticking to the protest as long as makes sense to me (it still does). But I have a feeling reddit might die before these niche communities find purchase elsewhere.
Almost exactly same situation as you. I’m mad, it hurts, I’ve already purged my Reddit account of all content on it, multiple times since the most recent posts kept getting restored. The account itself isn’t deleted yet, I still think I’ll keep coming back for some stuff that just isn’t here on Lemmy or kbin yet… But as for participating in discussions and communities, I’m now 100% here.
It’s just sad. I’ve met the majority of my current online friend group that I chat with everyday on Discord, through Reddit. I hope at some point that becomes a real possibility in the Fediverse too. That we gather enough weirdos that are way too much into niche things that you can select which of them you’d like to be friends with.
Yeah a couple of neiches are yet to be filled. There are some forums for my ttrpg like enworld and RPG net it’s like going back to 2009. I am missing some of the Reddit about specific shows I watch though
Even if I’m not totally off of Reddit, recent events got me out of a rut for a bit and that’s good. Already, the threads on Reddit/all seem stale and even in the past 24 hours what I see on kbin and lemmy.world is starting to give me the tingle I hadn’t felt since the early Reddit days or even the period before when I used to browse multiple sites so in a way this is going back to my Internet roots, surfing across multiple sites for nuggets and truly browsing and not doom scrolling a single website aggregator. It’s a breath of fresh air.
It’s like having gotten used to a favorite diner with a massive menu but when the classic joint starts going off the rails, one decides to explore, finding new culinary niches, pop ups, and little shops with unique offerings. It’s no longer as convenient, but then again, maybe it shouldn’t be.
I’ve hard avoided Reddit this week to break the habit and help keep traffic numbers down for their metrics. Will I return to some of my small subs later? Maybe. Kbin and Lemmy have already done a great job at providing more content than I can really engage with already, so there’s not a huge need for me to go back. The only time it’s a struggle is when the Kbin servers are hugged to death, but I’ve been lurking squabbles during those dark times.
Yep this is the truth. The vast majority of users just go there and scroll and click through stuff. They don’t really care. They were inconvenienced by the blackout and want it back to normal.
The real consequences are that a significant chunk of the active and power users have left the site now.
I haven’t deleted my reddit account either. I have definitely noticed that my feed on reddit has less interesting content now.
So in other words reddit’s conversations will become as dull as Facebook.
This is a pretty broad assumption.
It’s well known that most social media, and very much so for Reddit, are primarily consumed by lurkers. There’s loads of daily users that don’t even have an account because it’s not necessary. The lurkers may be good for ad revenue, but they don’t make the content. You need the active community there to produce the content that lurkers consume. Without the community, the lurkers aren’t going to step in and do it themselves, they’ll just stop visiting Reddit. So yes, I’m sure the balance looks like 95% lurkers and 5% community.
think of it this way - back in 2008 100% of the users had accounts made on or before 2008
reddit has doubled something like 8 times since that point. after 1 doubling, that 2008 or earlier becomes 50%. after 2 doublings, 25%… etc
at this point it’s below 1~2% depending on where you get your figures
majority of people (and an increasing majority) will only know reddit through new.reddit or the app. my gf just joined reddit because of me a few months ago… and she only know the official app. that is “reddit” to her.
reddit has moved on past us, the original users. they’ve decided that we are such a small minority that we essentially do not matter anymore and therefore are sacrificing us to raise IPO price
It’s not only the original users that are against all these changes. I only started on Reddit <10 years ago and I’m here. But I’m sure the portion of new users embracing “the old ways” over “the new ways” has still decreased over time, yeah.
I honestly think this is shining a massive light on the core issue of freedom. It shouldn’t be “sure, you can use [the app] or not.” But that is how the majority of people think. It’s disheartening. I hate to bring politics into this, but it’s like people saying “don’t like what [party X] is doing in this country? Then leave!” Binary decisions suck in real life.
It could also be Reddit flubbing the number and pushing those posts higher.
Damn ++ making this comment so I can save this comment. This is the boat I’m in.
While it’s possible that Reddit could be rigging the scales, I think the simplest answer is that the people most critical of Reddit have already left Reddit. Vice versa, everyone here is clearly in favor of boycotting Reddit because well… we’re here now.
Its a classic case of people having no fucking clue about scale, bias, the vocal majority and silent minority.
For every loud reddit dissident, there is 100 people who just heard about reddit and grabbed the official app from the store. They dont comment, they dont post, they dont give a shit. If reddit went down they wouldnt question it, they would just grab a 9gag app or something and continue on consuming content. They dont block ads, they dont get invested in net neutrality or anything else the EFF are involved in, they dont mod the UX, they dont dig into dodgy shit going on behind the scenes. They dont give a shit.
In other words, they are the perfect community for a corporate social media.
I’m interested to see what happens when the third party apps actually die. And old.reddit.com obviously
I read somewhere that a shim was being developed to allow reddit apps to join a lemmy instance. Not sure how practical it would be, or how far off it is, but its an interesting idea. Would obviously need to be implemented by the original reddit app dev, or a forked version if open source.
I imagine at least a couple of developers will migrate over here. If they update their app to the fediverse, join in on other open source projects, or just leave the scene is yet to be seen though.
If Sync ever did that, I would be over the moon. That app made browsing a genuine joy with how good the UI is and how customizable it is. I really hope the devs for the existing third party apps repurpose them or make a version for the fediverse.
I assume you’re talking about this project?
My partner still hasn’t left Reddit yet, but because it’s a habit for her now AND Apollo still works… once Apollo is gone she’s already signaled she is moving on.
I wonder how many others are just waiting for the third party’s to be killed before moving on?
RIP Apollo my beloved
i use RIF and old.reddit with RES and have been doing so for almost a decade at this point. if RIF is gone, I’m not using reddit on my phone anymore. maybe i continue using the website… i’m not sure. but i think they will eventually kill old.reddit and RES just like they are killing RIF
essentially it’s probably gonna be my last 2 weeks on reddit
My wife hasn’t left either but she’s a once a week lurker anyway. Just hits up the drama subs for a quick hit of bullshit and then moves back to Facebook for some more drama dosing. She knows about all of this, but the drama subs like TIFU are already fully populated over there with content, so there’s no desire to see cat pics on Lemmy.
I mean the truth is 95% of redditors didn’t use apps and don’t care about this at all.
It’s like if your local street had a protest for sheep shearing, preventing you from going to the park or movies. It’s irrelevant to you and the large majority would want it over.
No it’s not like that.
It’s like the people keeping your city clean can no longer use tools and have to use their bare hands unless they pay a bunch of money. That’s what it’s like. Sure for a while it will be ok, but the shit will build up, it will get worse and worse, and the city you once loved will be a shit hole of trash. The workers are literally protesting to have better tools and access to keep your city clean, and you’re saying it doesn’t matter. OH BY THE WAY THE WORKERS DON’T GET PAID.
Yes this is a good analogy. Rome was neither built in a day nor destroyed Ina day.
We are thinking Reddit will turn out to be like MySpace or digg but it will be more like Facebook. It will exist but filled with clueless people consuming garbage.
I would agree but many sub reddits had polls before locking and the majority were always in favor.
One thing to keep in mind is that there is an active minority of users who are content generators who are much more likely to vote on stuff like that. Then there are a ton of mostly silent read-only users (most of whom don’t even have accounts). If you inconvenience the mostly silent users who are just there for cat pics on their lunch break, some of them will suddenly put in the effort to complain. But they’ll never build a community, you need the active users for that.
Yeah, good luck to the read-onlys when the content creators are gone.
I.e the 90-9-1 rule of internet culture.
If this was all over 5% of their traffic, they’re dumber than we knew.
Until there is a shortage of sweaters due to no wool being produced any more (akin to content creators and moderators who use reddit API)
I think the only people left heavily skew as the people who didn’t care. Case in point, the discord for my kebble sub saw a LOT of new members as those who didn’t like the way reddit was handling it prepared other ways to contact each other. That was and still is very much in favor of the protest and they’re still working out a platform to move everyone to.
The actual reddit sub for the kebble has turned on a DIME about it and is now infighting between the people who do care and are only using reddit so they can speak in that particular sub, and the ones that never cared in the first place and think the act of protesting anything in general is, and I quote, “childish.” Were an outsider to scroll through it, they would think we never supported it in the first place.
Before this, we were uncommonly civil towards each other, took as much text as we wanted to eplain our viewpoints properly, and usage of the downvote button was both frowned upon and extremely rare to even see. Now I’m seeing downvotes. The whole thing is causing a schism that doesn’t bode well for the site in general. This will be reddit’s main userbase going forward.
Quite disappointing isn’t it, I kinda wish that in preparation for the blackout an alternative forum was opened for popular subs (on the federation for example) so the community had somewhere to go instead of being annoyed at the lack of interaction
Unfortunately it’s a fairly common pattern among humans, people don’t prepare ahead of time for disasters that have “never happened before.” Or that haven’t happened in their lifetime. Especially when those preparations cost them something, be it time or money or effort.
It’s been long enough since Digg that this generation didn’t believe that it would happen to Reddit too. Maybe someday it might happen to the Fediverse, somehow - there’s only so much you can do with protocol design alone to proof against centralization, we’re already seeing some interesting cracks around the Beehaw defederation mess.
That would have made any kind of sense. They wouldn’t have gone a route that threatened immediate mutiny, I think, because the initial point was to get Spez’s attention, not to leave. For all the good anyone thought that was going to do in the face of an OpenAI amount of money.
From what I hear, all attempts to decide on a destination on the mod discord have fractured into a billion pieces. Which I guess isn’t surprising. If you know about anywhere else at all, you already probably have something set up there and would be averse to abandoning it in favor of someone else’s idea
Same here to say exactly this.
I assume it’s just a biased sample size? The people left on Reddit are the people that don’t support the blackout. The people that do care are here instead.
I think there is probably a mix of things going on.
First, the angriest people already did leave.
Second, people suck at protesting. I mean, the entire reason it was a 2-day protest instead of defaulting to indefinite is because the idea of sacrificing your own habits in a protest blows people’s minds. There is a reason “slacktivism” is a thing.
Third, there is probably a segment of the user base who basically got their addiction checked. Social media is addicting, and reddit is not exception, I mean, even I’ve kept habitually opening the site this whole week just cause that has been my browsing habit for over a decade. It’s just how I’ve check ed news.
And then lastly, the protest reached the more casual core of people who may have not even known about the protest before hand or understood the extent of it, and they are angry that this thing that didn’t affect them took away all their content.
I created a community on KBin for one of my favorite niche sub Reddits, which just came back from going dark. I shared it with them this morning and my post is getting downvoted to oblivion.
The inertia of the average Redditor.
Thing is, we need the power users who create content to be early adopters. The rest will eventually follow.
Which?
Seems shady. Maybe there is a legit army of reddit protectors out there. It definitely wouldn’t surprise me if reddit employees or software was down voting.
Back when it was first becoming known that Facebook was passively allowing human trafficking groups and was generating revenue from those groups, I asked around different anti-human trafficking collectives whether or not they would continue to use the platform given ad revenue from their users goes towards creating safe spaces for those bad actors. I received silence from every single one of them. They ignored that question and continued to post how we all need to fight for trafficking victims (very marketing style posts if that makes sense).
Some people are just so engrained in platforms that it doesn’t matter what a platform does. When faced with a choice between comfort and ethics, they choose comfort at the expense of all else.
It’s an unfair situation the charities and organizations are put into. They have to spread awareness using the platforms that give them access to people. They can’t control what the platform does.
Do you think it feels good for them to get that email from you and knowing they have no response to give to somebody telling them the ethical thing to do is to not spread their message to the most people.
Ah, but that’s point. What is more important: anti-human trafficking or the message of anti-human trafficking? They don’t get to decide what a platform does, but they do get to decide their use of that platform.
I think it’s mostly Reddit addicts being mad they can’t see their memes anymore. The support I think is still there and you can see it in the polls, but the ones mad about it are naturally a lot more vocal.
The truth is, most people will stay on Reddit, at least in the short and medium terms. But with each migration wave, there is a group that will stick around and make things just a little bit more active and interesting, and make it that much more appealing for the next wave.
I predict the next wave is when Reddit inevitably announces the shutdown of old.reddit. Now there will be a more viable alternative for that migration wave, and so on, until we hit critical mass.
That’s the hope, anyway.
I’d estimate that the next wave will be sooner, at the end of the month when the 3rd party apps shut down and a lot of people suddenly realise they have to use the official app and go “oh wait, is this what that protest thingy was all about?” It probably won’t be the critical-mass point (at a guess that would happen around the time old.reddit is closed), but it will likely make some big waves
Reddit will fuck something else up in the future and hemorrhage more users.
I’m not too concerned, they’ll figure it out. I’m enjoying learning this platform at the moment.
Of the four subs I moderate, two are restricted (i.e. read-only) with links to places off-Reddit. One support sub I handed over to my co-mod who wants to keep it going as long as possible, tho he understands Reddit is likely going down, slowly but certainly.
There’s only one of my subs that’s a bit problematic, with ~45% of voting users wanting to rejoin the blackout, but ~55% wanting it to remain open. There are some people really critical of my proposal to move to kbin.social, but they are largely people with very little prior activity on the sub.
Either way, unless Reddit reverses course and fires spez, I am leaving that platform.
In that nfl thread, is it an old mod or a new one who re-opened it? Reddit is replacing the mods who shut down their subreddits with people who will re-open them.
There was always a substantial number of people who didn’t care about the API. They probably only used the official app and are newer Reddit users. They were also probably not around for other mass migrations, such as from Digg to Reddit, so they don’t treat Reddit any different than Facebook, where they put up with whatever bad changes are made because they see it as the only option, as if it will always be the internet’s main news aggregator.
Anyone who’s been around for a long time knows that Internet communities are ephemeral, so what’s really popular today won’t be in 10 years. It’s more than people moving from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit. Search engines used to aggregate news on their home page, and lots of people used RSS feeds or StumbleUpon. The history of the Internet is splashed with sites like Reddit, and every time one dies, another pops up that is more popular.
I’m amazed that Reddit has lasted as long as it has. Whether this is its death or not, I cannot tell, but it seems clear that its days of dominance are waning.
I think this will be a 4-6 week process where people stop using their old Reddit apps and either migrate to the official app, old.reddit or to that federated sites.
I don’t think it’ll ever get as big as Reddit overall but so long as a good number of people come across to sites like Lemmy or kbin and are engaged, it’ll be a vibrant place in no time.
There is some hope though. I think those naysayers were simply the loudest because when I go to some subs like r/pics, r/askmen, r/apple, people are supporting the strike. On r/apple, people are even made and saying yes, reddit’s threat to remove mods is mostly a bluff as they can not replace what was 5000 subreddits of mods in a timely manner. On r/askmen (which I usually dislike but today I’m happy with them) people are wanting them to extend the blackout. On r/adhdmemes, their poll is showing overwhelmingly indefinite blackout.
On r/pics most people love the new mod rule put in place to only post pictures of this one public figure