The way I see it, all of us who migrated here won. Enshitification is eventually going to kill reddit, the only question is when. I’ll grab some popcorn when it happens, but for now won’t worry about it and just enjoy my time here on Lemmy.
Yeah, I agree with this suspiciously named man. Whether it happens sooner or later, Reddit’s death is on the horizon, as it will keep making the wrong choices and so steadily lose those communities and content that built it in the first place.
Reddit won’t actually die, it’ll just be a hollow shell of what it once was.
To illustrate my point, Digg still exists.
They were always going to win. It’s their platform. They can do whatever they want. But… They lost my attention and paid subscription. I now only go to Reddit when I’m looking for something I can’t find elsewhere. It used to be my favorite platform.
I think I won. I found a place I like more than reddit. Maybe we won even. We all got this place right here now. It’s nice.
Maybe reddit won. Maybe they wanted to get rid of us and succeeded. Could be easier to milk the platform for shareholders after getting rid of anyone who would protest beforehand.
Maybe it doesn’t matter because neither side needs the other anymore. Both sides changed and don’t fit back together anymore.
Certainly declaring a winner in this situation is dumb.
At least personally i have not been on reddit for more than 10 minutes total since the middle of June. I am but one person, but i dont see how they can declare themselves the winners.
Tanked reputation, loyal user base gone like the window, no 3rd party support what so ever and the face of the company making a total ass out of himself. Yeah sure, if you call that a ‘win’
They still have a lot of traffic. So yeah, they did win.
But you know who else won? The Fediverse. This place feels really active now and has the added benefit of feeling just a bit more wholesome.
Between the loss of original content and the genuinely obscure/questionable shit now dominating r/all, I’m pretty sure they’ve backfilled their DAU losses with bots.
I’d go one step further and allege it’s a deliberate scheme, because if repost and content bots are running it’s because they have unhindered access to API calls, and that comes from admin. Also, Reddit can actually analyze their traffic and know far better than we can what is likely human and what is likely bot, and use that to try to better hide the authorized bot traffic.
So yeah, they may well have traffic, but I would put money on some unknown yet significant portion of that traffic not being human, as a deliberate strategy to retain advertisers.
Reddit won the war because your stereotypical Reddit mod is a spineless narcissist who wields their banhammer as a coping mechanism for their real life issues. It’s like being an internet caretaker was the only way they could gain any kind of validation.
They could very easily have overwhelmed the site and brought Reddit’s admins to their knees had they collectively disabled automoderator, unbanned every user and just refused to enforce any rules (incl sitewide ones.) But the moment Reddit started threatening to demod people, they caved incredibly quickly, or tried to pull off alternative forms of protest to piss off the admins, but not to the point where they’d be immediately demodded and purged, á la AwkwardTheTurtle.
Anyone could have seen this coming from a mile away the moment we started seeing r/pics and r/videos push dumb rule changes like expletives in titles, text only, sexy pics of John Oliver, etc…
Honestly the only good thing that came out of the API protests were iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle being permabanned from Reddit, and it’s bittersweet that the hill Reddit chose to kill them on was over third-party apps.
iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle being permabanned from Reddit
Wait, wut? iBleeedOrange got it too?
I would not mind reading more if you have some links to share.
EDITED TO ADD: This is all I could find myself; I guess the admins couldn’t abide anyone not in lockstep:
Not sure why either. My guess is that it had something to do with when he changed the rules of r/interestingasfuck and effectively turned it into a porn sub to spite the site’s advertisers. But I only recall him and everybody else being forcibly demodded. Maybe he threw some incredibly colorful language at the admins and got banhammered.
As much as I loathe iBleeedBullshit and think he’s a power-tripping asshole who doesn’t even understand the rules of the subreddits he used to moderate (had a few online altercations with him in the past), Spez is acting even more childish, to the point where the power mod purge feels nowhere near as cathartic as it should have…
Cool, thanks for the info. I missed all that somehow.
Spez is acting even more childish
Ohhhh, yeah. No argument there.
But it’s not as straightforward a situation as it seems. Reddit is now partially owned by others, meaning that Spez does answer to a board. So, contrary to popular belief, being a total gaping asshole is actually NOT Spez’s sole skill. Turns out he’s also some other people’s very useful idiot.
To put it another way, an entire team of 1%ers who stand to profit off Reddit’s future IPO thinks that all this is a good thing and a means to a desired end, or he’d already have been tossed out. At this point I’m just waiting to see them tip their hand as to what they think that will be, because I have no clue myself, lol.
EDITED TO ADD this link, it’s an old but informative one in regard to the role of Reddit’s board: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3dcmr1/the_role_of_reddits_board_of_directors/
That title is a bit misleading. Reddit mods might have stopped protesting, but the news of the implosion was quite significant. The existence of Lemmy is a testament to this. I don’t think their IPO is going to be as strong as they had hoped. That financial impact is quite opposite of the victory they claim to have achieved.
Also, the posts on Reddit and the responses have declined in quality in my opinion.
