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.
Good for them, but the damage is already done. They seeded this place with a lot of users. Will it be enough? Who knows. But Lemmy is probably a looooot further along than if they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.
This place obviously needs to continue with good content and active communities, but at moment I don’t really have the urge to open Reddit they way things are.
As I understand it, reddit has shattered its trust with its userbase and has hemmoraged users because of it. I can hardly view that as a 'win' for them.
We're in such a shitty timeline right now where these CEO's realize that they have so many mainstream users who just don't actually care about the platform and just want the content, that even with significant controversy if they just ignore it, they can almost certainly weather the storm. Sure, their platform will be worse off, they'll lose users to other platforms, but it's a far cry from the Digg v3 -> Reddit situation when there was a much smaller user base who was more passionate about the site and community and they abandoned the old site as a result of those shitty decisions.
They didn't win shit. What they did broke the site for everyone. It doesn't stop being broken because they seized control over the subs, something they could have done at any moment.
Reddit has detonated all its credibility, leaving a hole in the side just big enough for most of the site's users to escape as they decide reddit isn't worth it, or find good-enough alternatives. It won't happen all at once, but it'll happen.
Honestly, those still on Reddit are either lurkers or never gave a shit about the "protests" to begin with. The real measure will be the IPO. With that said, one tech group stroking off another means very little, anymore. Gizmodo can write their fluff piece.
The capitalists are concerned about the plebs using social media to organize and call out lies, doing everything they can to break up or muddy the waters of social media platforms ahead of the 2024 US presidential elections. The goal is to disrupt the platforms and drive away dissenting users who would use these platforms to organize against them and debunk misinformation/lies.
Musk buys Twitter (for far more than it was worth, lol) and drives it into the ground. Zuckerberg starts Threads to give people another "slowly boiling pot" to catch some of those looking for Twitter-alternatives. Spez and company enact changes to the platform, to artificially inflate their ad revenue ahead of their final valuation, which can't happen if users are allowed to skirt their ads with better clients. I didn't talk about Facebook, but it hasn't been relevant since COVID showed us how bat-shit crazy our families and neighbors are. Facebook is basically Nextdoor, but world-wide. We can't forget about the TikTok users. The parent company can't be touched or bought so they're just trying to outright ban the platform here.
The ultra-wealthy are showing us how scared they are of the up-and-coming new demographic of voters, who grew up on social media, know how to use it better than them, in ways they couldn't predict, and don't give a fuck about TV news, printed media, or corporatized websites. The last two elections have slowly been reversing the progress these regressionists have made using the gullibility and entitlement of the Boomer generation, the ignorance of the Gen-X generation, and the brittle corpses of the millennials to push their agenda.
The Arab Spring showed these wealthy fuckers how dangerous the people can be when they are allowed to use social media to organize and they don't want it to happen again at a time when we're finally starting to wise up to the "two-sides-of-the-same-coin" world we live in, and a new voting season has so much on the line for them.
Fuck the wealthy, money's made up, and may ass cancer rid us all of their kind!
Reddit lost the trust of many users, a non insignificant part of contributors and moderators left, the enshittification of the platform is not going to stop but they lost a big part of what made Reddit great. They damaged their image and popularity.
It's like saying Elon won by trashing Twitter. Sure he does what he wants with it but making your platform less desirable sure isn't a win for the platform.
Imo, nobody won here and the reddit user lost everything. The Fediverse wasnt ready for the influx of users and lost its chance to "win" for a long time. The sites couldn't support the load and there was a lack of polished mobile apps that felt familiar to people that wanted to browse and shit post.
Without content -- without interaction, a platform whithers; and my experience, so far, has been comment oasises while scrolling through pages of desert.
What did Gizmodo think might happen instead? That everyone, including those that were never impacted by 3rd party app changes, would just abandon the site, leaving it without users? "Peak journalism".
Reddit has managed to end the overt protests, it seems. Whether they "won" will be determined in the future. I suspect that, at the absolute best, it's a pyrrhic victory.
Well, I only allowed Open Source software on my phone. Because the reddit website is pretty unusable compared to lemmy, I can't use reddit anywhere excrpt PC and just switched to lemmy. But I also use Jerbora Open Source app.
I’ve got a Libreddit docker instance running on my home server and together with the libredirect browser extension, if I click on a Reddit link through a search or news article with a link to Reddit, my browser automatically goes to my Libreddit instance with the content on full display.
Now, whilst on my Libreddit instance the other day after being redirected from a news article I took a peek at r/all and the whole feed was pure shit, nothing like I’d seen before on Reddit.
For some reason, it was full of doordash posts, rateme style posts taking advantage of thirsty usersand shitty TikTok reposts.
They may well have won, but at the moment there is a glut of absolute shit on the front page of the platform. I’d guess quality content has taken a hit.