Yup. Agree with everything OP said. Been saying it since last week. The 48-hour blackout wasn’t going to kill Reddit. Hell, if all 8,000 subreddits had gone with indefinite blackouts, it likely wouldn’t have killed Reddit either. The fallout from Reddit’s decisions, and their response to the community, is going to take months, and probably even years, to really be visible.
I’ve been on Reddit for more than 10 years. I started using Reddit regularly after Digg went to shit. I’ve seen the drama, controversies, and protests that previously have taken place on Reddit. But what’s been going on the last couple of weeks, I haven’t seen before. As I mentioned in another comment, this is the first time I’ve seen a concerted effort to find alternatives, not just for a few undesirables (i.e. Voat), but for the community as a whole.
Yeah, the communities here are not going to be nearly as active as they were on Reddit, but people want communities, and just having a friendly place to gather will be enough to slowly attract others.
I used to be a mod on r/snowboarding. I’m leaving Reddit, and today I purged my account, and left the mod team over there.
I created https://kbin.social/m/snowboarding/ a few days ago, if anyone wants to contribute to it.
Obviously, June is a terrible month to try and entice people to join a snow-related community, but that’s how things happen sometimes, haha.
To add a bit more context, this comment is from a former Reddit dev, who is now the creator and developer of Tildes, one of the Reddit alternatives that’s been gaining traction in the last week:
(I used to work as a backend developer at Reddit - I left 6 years ago but I doubt the way things work has changed much)
I think it’s extremely unlikely that this is deliberate. The way that Reddit builds “mixed” subreddit listings (where you see posts from multiple subreddits, like users’ front pages) is inefficient and strange, and relies heavily on multiple layers of caches. Having so many subreddits private with their posts inaccessible has never happened before, and is probably causing a bunch of issues with this process.
There are admins who are listed as mods in some subreddits, even if they probably don’t do any moderation these days. Spez is a mod of r/HighQualityGifs, for example.