I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of people who are continuing to stick with it + be supportive. I didn't expect anything beyond the planned end of the blackout, although I didn't expect thousands of subreddits to participate in that either. Either way I've basically cut Reddit out entirely. I used to scroll 2-3hrs a day and I'm down to maybe 10 minutes once or twice a week when I'm trying to find an answer to something. Attempting to fill my newfound free time has been.. fun
Even if reddit changes course at this point... I've found Lemmy. And it's just... better.
And beyond that, it would take reddit years to recoup the goodwill they've lost with this.
They won't go under. They'll just become a shell. If they truly approached bankruptcy, someone would buy them just for the brand.
I get why people are doing it, but truthfully the folks deleting all their comments are the ones truly destroying the data. Even if we all moved on, that data would have still been there for us to google, just like all those mostly dead forums.
It'll technically all still be there on reddit, right? We can treat it as an archive without actually being active users. Heck, you could even form a volunteer group to collate all the most important threads and key points into some posts here, or some google docs, etc.
Pushshift data might be a very good candidate for a reddit archive of data before may 1st but I'm not sure on the specifics of Pushshift access to the data
Reddit disabled api access for pushshift on may 1st over the claims of "user privacy" if I recall correctly which we know is bullshit because reddit are hypocrites and sell user data anyways
There are some people, who in the light of the protest and moving to Lemmy, have deleted their accounts. Of these people there are also those who have purged their data, as in removed all their comments/posts.
If the purgers were content creators or support geeks, then the communities they interacted with might become a little "moth eaten".
Luckily, r/datahoarder has been looking into archiving reddit before the chaos.
There's a couple of scripts out there not just to delete previous posts, but to edit them all into gibberish. Even random gibberish for each post/comment. That's much more destructive to reddit's value and hard for datahoarders to detect, unless they started before the uprising and track changes.
Weirdly enough it got me more engaged with social media. In the sense that now I'm posting and talking with people on lemmy and mastodon more than I ever did on reddit. Weird how a place can get so popular it stops being a real community after a while
I don't know that it has me engaging more but it feels more fun and meaningful now. Reddit had turned into man yells into the void for me. Now I feel like I'm talking to real people again on Lemmy. It's such a relief honestly.
I think the strange part is feeling obligated to interact more. I'll upvote more than I did on Reddit. I post more than I did on Reddit. The goal seems clear, to make this place feel inhabited. The more bustling it feels, the bustling it will become.
The other aspect is moderating communities. I'm not a mod, or at least I wasn't. But Lemmy lacks the breadth of oddly specific comms, and if I intend to eventually doom scroll again, modding a niche comm is a good start.
It's annoying that so much of my search results rely on community discussions from reddit. I've pretty much ditched the site entirely and am getting pretty comfy here, but a lot of historical discussions on reddit simply can't be replaced and likely never will be.
I haven't been on Reddit since June 11th at 9:30pm central time. That's when the first of my subbed reddits went dark. I deleted rif, and haven't been back. I've just been wasting time here, instead!
same here. still need to learn my way around, but overall it's very promising. I've not checked Reddit since the beginning of the blackout, however i might do it for some very niche subs. hopefully I'll find alternatives.