I've seen a few discussions about the "failed" protests and wanted to talk about it

The news, despite our perception, has largely never been about speaking truth to the injustices around us. Both historically and now, its used largely as a veiled mouthpiece of the powerful around us who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The examples that we think of when groundbreaking journalism comes to mind are almost always the exception and often end poorly for the brave who bring them to light.

Over the past 5 years this has become even more salient to me. I've been to protests and the coverage will produce an entirely different picture that gets presented to those not in attendance. There were protests in my city during the party primary debates and the footage was edited to make crowds look smaller and in the case of our DSA chapter, they cut to a different camera anytime they were about to be in frame.

Trying not be be tin foil hatty there, but was at the marches and then watched all the different feeds. Calling something so obviously curated "news" feels like the information dystopia has been here much longer than we give it credit.

It didn't fail, r/all is a shit show right now. Or, it's a porn show. Porn is all over r/all, r/popular is getting hit by it. F-u/spez made front page porn popular again. A lot of the porn pages have switched to other things; only fans being only fans, literally. Etc. you get the idea. I cannot imagine the board is happy.

I think it was a success no matter how mainstream news outlets or Reddit want to spin it.

The mods of subreddits very cleverly pointed out that the direction Reddit is heading in stinks and even all the masses who don't care about it still got the message though being inconvenienced by not having access to their favorite echo chamber for a few days. Just look at all the comments on "should we open up" posts from pissed off mouth breathers basically demanding they return things to normal.

At the end of the day, of cause Reddit was going to force mods to open up their subs or remove them. The mods never really had any power in the situation anyway and the precedent of Reddit just taking over subs was already well established. If Lemmy or Kbin was another 5+ years in development with a couple of much larger communities already well established then the exodus might have approached Digg levels again, but the lack of easy mainstream alternatives means that Reddit was always going to get its way eventually.

A couple of weeks ago, I realized how things were likely to play out, and that I'd end up leaving Reddit. I wasn't looking forward to it, but I knew it would be necessary. The shitty way spez has handled things turned me from a reluctant ship-jumper into an enthusiastic one.

It's going to be rough in a few weeks when even more Redditors jump ship, but we'll get through the chaos.

IMHO, it's still a success. Reddit's behavior has provided clear proof of the need for an alternative. Plenty have taken notice. The winds of change are blowing...and it is likely not in Reddit's favor in the long term.

I have a few thoughts on the situation:

1. The 'Oh we're protesting with a two-day blackout' was the wrong way to go about the announcement since all that says, as has been pointed out, is 'see you Monday then.' Yet it wasn't just a two-day protest. Some came back but many didn't.
2. The News, be it outlets or people like Rossman, want grand gestures. They want Results. Having people trickle leave isn't dramatic, and it's hard to keep track of especially if reports are true that deleted accounts are undeleted and posts are unscrambled for the sake of searchability. As of this writing my account is listed as deleted and posts I care to find are u/[deleted] but that doesn't mean it isn't happening. If that's happening then it's impossible to tell who's Quit quit, walked away, or deleted their accounts only for it to be undeleted.

While tinfoil; the undeleting of accounts would track for someone desperate just before an IPO.

1. The alternatives are still in their infancy, at least when it comes to lemmy, hive, and kbin. PHP forums never went away. Hell, Ye Olden BBS's didn't go away. However, there's no monolithic Giant emerging to come to eat Reddit's lunch. So it's easy to paint any dissent as ' Redditors are never happy.'
2. The stereotype of 'all Reddit mods are the same. cling to fake power and they all are neckbeard pear-shaped basement-dwellers who never bathe haha look at how pathetic they are.' That is seductive to fall into as a narrative because like it or not a LOT of people want someone they can kick down at. Mods flipping to back a fash like u/spez for the sake of fake power gives people someone they can point at. 'We didn't get results because of YOU.'

Yet these are the same people who are organizing malicious compliance reorganizations of subreddits and policies have changed. Mods have been told 'comply or be replaced.' We don't know if admins handed the old username over or not to both smear the outgoing mod and to preserve a false continuity or not. We only know some subs have unlocked after the gun got leveled at their heads.

As someone with a patchy at best history against authority in online communities my sympathies are actually with the mods. Unpaid, having to herd cats, get shit on from the userbase, shit on from on high, and without anything major and high profile? They're getting shit on by otherwise 'liked' personalities such as Rossman when they tend to be the people holding thigns together day to day.

1. This is not a game of instant results. Modern culture has shifted to NOW! NOW NOW NOW NOW! RESULTS NOW OR IT IS A FAILURE! This is a long game of bleeding reddit dry of relevance. Reddit won't be killed, but it will be a shell of itself and it won't be seen as The Place to go to for answers.
2. As others have stated, news outlets lie. They don't have a story here so they will make one. Protesters crushed. Who knew internet-addicted Millenials are too spineless to see things through. Millennials are killing protests. Etc etc. Boomers get to feel smug.

Turning mods and power users off Reddit, even casual users who are getting tired of the disarray in their subscribed subreddits are unsubscribing - I definitely think it's having an impact.

The big thing that everyone should understand is that there seems to be no negotiation ... no middle ground ... either you stay on Reddit and you suck up all the advertising or you don't

I wasn't quite sure what to do and I drifted in and out of my account for a while and thought protesting, sharing memes or trying to circumvent rules or something ... then I just realized ... the worst thing anyone can do to a social media site is to simply just stop using it at all

Once you abandon Reddit, you've done the most damage you could possibly do

Social media is built on human participation ... of all kinds, positive, negative, hateful, loving, inclusive, exclusive ... it doesn't matter what the participation is, as long as you participate

So once you leave ... you've severed a section of the site to let it die ... if enough people do the same, the rot of users abandoning reddit will turn the site into an empty billion dollar shell that will quickly become worthless

Reddit admins made it perfectly clear they're not interested in feedback or compromises, they've quadrupled down on that point.

The way they handled this situation clearly shows their contempt for their user base, they want you to create as much content as possible and farm engagement so it looks good for their IPO.

The best thing people can do is either quit entirely and migrate to sites like this one or at the very minimum only use Reddit for lurking, don't post, don't upvote / downvote, simply cost them resources as that's how they see their user base, a bunch of parasites

I have always appreciated the work of the moderators because I prefer lively content without nastiness. A busy, well moderated forum can be a delight. When the mods in my favorite subreddits told us how hard their jobs would become, I knew what I had to do. I'm happy to find such a worthwhile (if yet young) place to land. By the end of the month I will have put Reddit behind me. They can succeed or fail without me. I suspect it will be somewhere in between. Actually, what I think is that it will become much nastier in many subreddits, and overall less worthwhile. I think individual subreddit rules will give way to mere reddit rules, where for instance a woman who posts pics in a sewing subreddit of herself in the dress she made may find herself subjected to sexual comments which would previously be subject to moderation.

Like others have said, I think whether the protests failed depends on what you wanted them to accomplish. Yes, Reddit is largely trying to ignore the protests and forging ahead with its changes. No, the site didn't collapse overnight like some were hoping. But the fediverse has gotten a big boost in both users and attention thanks to all this, so there is a silver lining even if the protest didn't get Reddit to reverse course. What happens in the long term is anyone's guess, but there are already growing communities here and it's not like this is going to be the last time Reddit is going to screw something up.

You know, I used to be that guy. spez looks cool. He's great. Reddit is one of the good guys, defenders of free speech. They do things better than other big tech - like if you get permabanned you can still log in and see your history, you can still download and save your content, not like when FB or Google kicks you out, etc etc.

But what the protests taught me is that, even this isn't good enough. Reddit's not one of the good guys. It was a hard lesson to learn, but one that I needed to learn.

Rather than being the exception, I'd guess that there are a lot more like me who have had their eyes open. And now open and looking for alternatives.

my kbin feed is already indistinguishable from my reddit home page, voat never felt like this. I don't care if it takes ten years for kbin to get to that level, I'm here now and I can only see myself going to reddit if it's the only place that a solution to a problem comes up in a search engine

Honestly I feel that the outcome was optimal.

1. It created animosity towards Reddit.
2. It exposed major problems with Reddit.
3. It boosted fediverse's numbers.
4. It tapered off before the fediverse came crashing down from the influx of millions.
5. It reinforced the mandate to develop the fediverse, there's clearly something here and it's worth deving towards.
6. Reddit is guaranteed to shoot itself in the foot again, probably pre-IPO, definitely post-IPO, and now the fediverse is being given some much needed time to flesh itself out before they do.

If Reddit collapsed over this I don't believe the infrastructure exists at this time to onboard all those members, so it's a blessing in disguise.

Wasn't a fail to me. I moved on from Reddit after 12 years of daily activity. I'm happily settling into Kbin now.

Great article with much more detail than what I quote: https://lifehacker.com/the-reddit-blackout-is-over-but-the-protest-isn-t-1850539204

Critics of the blackout wondered how a two-day protest is going to solve anything. My friends, let me speak to you for a moment from my perspective as a person who has more than a little familiarity with taking collective action to get out-of-touch CEOs to do the right thing.

While a strike or a blackout may be the most visible action in a campaign, it’s never the only one. Leading up to both our 2022 strike, and our 2019 seemingly uneventful signing of a fair contract, we lived and breathed by something called an escalation chart (same idea as the one illustrated here). You start with small actions, and build on them, with a clear plan for how you’ll continue if your demands are not met. A strike is almost always preceded by dozens of smaller actions.

Fixed-length walkouts and strikes are one possible step on the chart. The idea is to send a message: This many of us are this committed. After that, you don’t stop. You keep escalating. Even on an open-ended strike, the idea is to become more and more of a problem to the company over time. You get more and more media attention; the company suffers more and more from lost business. Collective actions are effective because they are part of a larger escalation.

The article also mentions some successes the protest already achieved:

• “accessibility-focused apps” will be exempted from the new policy
• several advertisers chose to spend their advertising budgets elsewhere
• exempt certain tools used by “verified moderators” from the new API policy

A (quite impressively long) list of concessions and agreements can be found in /r/ModCoord

And as others mentioned in this thread, it spurred a migration and more people than ever (me included) finally engage with the fediverse.

My summary is: The protest had a huge impact. Sure, we did not (fully) get what we want, and reddit remains committed to becoming evil. But we won some battles, and the war isn't over yet.

It also brought people to things they might never have done before; to engage in protests and to discuss forms and strategies of resistance. Many joined the fediverse in the process, here to stay. I feel the importance of this exercise in self-efficacy and self-empowerment cannot be understated.

@Defaced Agree, I don't think Reddit was every likely to die from the protests, in that sense it wasn't a success. However, the fact that viable alternatives exist and more will pop up because of the protest makes it a success in my book.

The protest planted the seeds, it might take a while to see the fruit.

https://reddark.untone.uk currently shows 3430 out of 8829 subreddits as dark -- five days after the blackout's official end date.

"Failed" my ass; that's 39 percent -- still over one third.

Don't care now, found kbin & Lemmy and that works just fine for me!