How much of an impact is the protest really having on Reddit?
How much of an impact is the protest really having on Reddit?
I read The Verge's latest interview with Steve Huffman here and it seems as though the Reddit blackout is having little to no effect. It also seems as though the communities at large don't really care and will probably just use the official app or don't really know there are 3rd party ones. So it seems this will pass and be mostly forgotten about.
What are your thoughts?
This will end exactly the same way the Twitter -> Mastodon thing ended.
Reddit will continue. A slightly worse Reddit, with more bots, more low-effort content, and less quality OC.
Moderation will degrade slightly as the admins replace protesting moderators with more obedient ones, and/or communities lose interest and use the new "voting" (lol) systems to pick admins which will give them the reliable dopamine hits.
A small percentage of Redditors, especially the power users, will move on. A small percentage in Reddit terms is a tidal wave for any other platform. Some percentage of that number of Redditors leaving will come here.
Lemmy & Kbin will experience growing pains. Issues caused by scaling up infrastructure, instance to instance friction, etc. These will get resolved with time. When things settle, we will have a fraction of reddit's userbase, but neither will we need more. We'll have enough to have stable, engaging communities which will slowly grow.
In other words, a mirror reflection of the Mastodon story.
Twitter relies on celebrities, athletes, and journalists. All of them want to be where the eyeballs are so until Mastodon grows more, they'll stay on Twitter.
Lemmy just needs to continue to grow and improve. Maybe it never gets as big as reddit but the content has the potential to be just as good.
In the three or so days I've been using it it's expanded noticeably, and I'd say it's on the verge of being big enough already. Once it rounds that tipping point it has a decent chance of becoming sustainable on its own.
The louder they protest it's not doing anything, the more you can be certain that it is.
Considering the volume of bots spreading venom about it, I have to say it's doing something
I’m gone, that’s for sure. And it’s so much better. My blood pressure is lower.
Enough for them to refuse to comply with GDPR, restore user content against user's will and make deleting account hard/impossible. Not to mention bots set up to ban people who wiped their contributions to install second thoughts into anyone who did. They are absolutely affected. Let it motivate you.
Not hard deleting all of a user's information on request goes against the right to be forgotten AFAIK, I hope the EU screws then
We won't know until early July.
The protests aren't over yet, and Reddit is beginning to make demands to open up subs. You're beginning to see cracks in the system.
I don't think Reddit will change its mind, but I can see a lot of churn happening in subs happening based on those that are protesting and subs that aren't.
This could be Reddit's Digg moment, but it is going to play out a lot slower and we'll probably start seeing Lemmy posts on Reddit.
Personally I don't care if the protest is having an effect or not because it's been already said that it will not change reddit's policies. Reddit is over for me, I'm just waiting for the API changes so that i can't use my mobile client of choice anymore. In contrast, I'm finding interesting and vibrant discussions and comments on here, which is looking like the early Reddit days, and I'm very glad for this.
I'd guess there's impact if they're forcing subs to reopen via threats and generally acting like tyrants with the self control of a toddler.
They sure are trying really hard to put a stop to the blackout they say is having no effect.
It may be true that the disturbance has minimal effect on overall site traffic and advertising revenue, but it's caught the attention of the media which could have much larger effects.
But the blackout isn't really what's catching most of the attention anymore, it's the mishandling of the situation that's ending up in the news most of the time now. Spez is bringing most of this on himself.I don't really care. I'm here now, deleted my 12 year old account in the process. People thinking Reddit will die are delusional. The Reddit as us old people know it has died years ago, it just became unbearable now.