‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit::A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever
‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit::A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever
I don’t post on reddit any more but I still look there now and then. I don’t notice much change. From everything I’ve heard, the protest failed. A few snowflakes like me quit posting and/or moved to Lemmy, but mostly things at reddit were back to normal within a few weeks after the blackout.
Yaknow, i guess i get why people feel like it is hopeless to try to change the world, that trying to stand up against powerful corporations is useless, to "force their hand"impossible. and that’s because it is.
But i feel that is missing the point. When you tell a company that they need to treat you a certain way or you leave, and then you follow through, you win. Forget a large company, when in this life can you ever force anyone to treat you right? You can’t.
You tell em what they can do to keep your around, and if they don’t, you take your self respect with your on the way out the door, and your life, the one that matters, is improved, and the next step in ending that bad relationship is no longer caring who else they might be seeing.
I for one am happy with you cats. Me n reddit are quits
That’s true - it bums me out that more people didn’t follow through on their threats to leave, but I did and I don’t spend hours doomscrolling every day anymore. That alone is a good outcome. I learned to embroider to keep from picking up my phone over and over during the blackout and it’s one of my favorite hobbies now. Also a good outcome. For me, the protest was a success. Reddit can make every stupid choice under the sun, and it doesn’t impact my life in the least anymore.
I think I’m getting better at leaving, I was surprised to see today the last time I posted there was over a month. No so on Lemmy, though.
I took part in the blackout and moved to Lemmy and hoped that the blackout would be successful, but realistically it looks in retrospect like it didn’t matter much to Reddit. I still don’t post there. I avoided reading for a while, but found myself still wanting to check on things / lurk. At least I have all the ads blocked.
I think most people who stayed on reddit didn’t care about some disagreement between geeks, or (in the case of some moderators) too addicted to the attention that they got, or too full of self-importance about how their subreddit needed to be kept alive. I can sort of understand r/news being thought of as important and that’s a sub I still look at sometimes. But I mostly looked at niche hobby subs and sometimes a sub devoted to a specific brand of power tools (because I have some of those tools). And I mean, who cares if those subs dry up or move to Lemmy? Get over it, Reddit.
Well said. I’m not going to be a fairweather-ethical-decision-maker. Every time I make a right choice (and I decide what’s right for me) I’m rebelling against the machine of marketing and convenience. In fact, often the more inconvenient it is, the more confident I am in my decision.
People like to think that they’ve made some far-reaching change with what little actually happened. The painful truth is: they didn’t. There wasn’t a big hit to the userbase, most people on Reddit already hated moderators and didn’t give a shit if they got removed, and overall people caved far too quickly (how many people folded instantly when their internet moderator position was threatened? (I say this as someone who was one of those moderators that flat out quit everything and nuked my account rather than continuing to toil for free for a corporation that hates me)).
The actually important thing that was accomplished by the protesting was platforms like Lemmy getting enough of a userbase boost to become stable - in the future, Lemmy and others may be able to act as viable alternatives to Reddit, because there’s already a community here (however small). Reddit will continue to enshittify, and people will continue to leave in small numbers that may escalate to big numbers if they commit a truly massive fuckup. The more heavy Reddit users (read: more invested, not necessarily more active) are small in number compared to the vast majority who lurk, don’t give a shit about any ongoing meta-drama, and don’t particularly care about any changes to the UI or browsing experience as long as they can still get an endless feed of memes.
Even if it hurts to realize this, it’s important to make sure people get this message beat into their skulls so that we aren’t stuck with a bunch of Redditors (derogatory) with over-inflated egos that think Reddit will bend over backward to appease them, then cave as soon as they receive literally any pushback from the corporation running the site.
I think this is a good point. Lemmy pre protest sucked. There was just no content or activity. Post protest, it’s not too bad here. It’s viable. Slowly, hopefully more people end up here over the years. I still browse Reddit (not logged in, my account is kaput) and it seems the same as it was before though. However, digg too died, so there is hope yet.
Yeah, I knew of lemmy long before any protests, but it was more linked as a back up sub for like the rom sub in case a ban happened. But, activity was pretty nonexistent compared to now. For lemmy this is a success with it leading to many more consistent users of the platform.
I came to explore Lemmy with the migration after Reddit’s API changes. Baconreader was my app of choice, and it died with the change.
I didn’t have any anger against Reddit - there was no righteous “fuck you!” in my actions - but the reason I stayed on Lemmy and very rarely touch Reddit is because the concept of the fediverse really speaks to me. I want to see a more decentralized internet succeed and so that is where I will spend my time, niche as it is.
I totally agree.
There were definitely people who were trying to start a revolution there or proverbially burn the place to the ground. But for a lot of people who left, like me, it was just an appropriate time to move on. I had been on reddit for about 12 years by then, and I had seen the place change, especially over the last few years. And not for the better.
It happens to any organization or system that grows beyond a healthy critical mass. Quantity goes up, but quality goes down. And the atmosphere starts to get toxic.
I had been looking for an alternative to reddit for a year or so when the situation last Summer came around. I was disillusioned over on reddit, and aside from interactions with two or three of subs (and about two dozen awesome people on one of my mod teams, who I’m still in touch with thanks to other communication options), I didn’t really enjoy engaging with other users there. It was exhausting to have to frame everything to mitigate the trolls and the contrarians (who invariably still pulled that shit anyway). And the stench of hyper-partisanship was getting everywhere.
The Fediverse intrigued me, but the reddit variants of it hadn’t reached a critical mass of minimal usage (the other critical mass metric) to make it compelling to use. The June protests changed that, and regardless of whether reddit ‘won’ or not, I’m glad I found this place.
You can have multiple ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in situations like this. Even if reddit fought off the protests and won by not seeing their traffic stats drop off (which let’s be honest is all they really care about, no matter what touchy-feely smoke their spokespeople are blowing), I feel like those of us who landed here also won.
I dunno the front page seems way lower quality than it was before we left. Like not just a little.
I basically only go there for the two stupid flash games I play on my phone and sometimes a Google search ends up with reddit as the best answer. Otherwise I don’t go. I used to go there dozens of times per day.
I agree. The change in total Reddit users ended up small, but the drop in quality is huge. A lot of my favorite subs are now just memes, reposts, and astroturfing. There’s very little left of genuine worth. But it’s no great loss. The days of Reddit being the front page of the Internet and a hub of discussion are long gone. C’est la vie.
Personally I’m glad to see Reddit fading away. I have found so many more artist, makers, and thinkers on Mastodon, Lemmy, and Pixelfed than I ever did on Reddit. The fediverse is hard to navigate and has a higher barrier to entry. But those same qualities keep the influencers, astroturfers, and advertisers at bay. I love the experience of exploring people’s feeds and follow lists as a means of exploring. It feels so much more organic and engaging. It’s not for everyone, and the fediverse will probably never become a giant of social media. But maybe that’s for the best.
At any rate for now we have our own corner of the internet to explore and enjoy away from the some of the more negative influences wrought by social media. Enjoy it. It may not last. Just like old Reddit.
I use a work account there on old.reddit on the desktop only.
The content there is [Picture](dae think that XY or Z should have / have not happened?) Or some variation of a question meant to drive engagement. The Minecraft and marvel studios subs are prime examples.
That’s all it is now. No higher quality content except in a few niche subs.
Hopefully folks will continue to move away.
I’ve been noticing lately that the front page of reddit now only contains some posts from the last few subs I visited, even more posts from subs I barely even read before, and currently two posts from subs I’ve never seen but are now part of my subscribed reddits. And when I take the time to go through the posts that actually look interesting, those read posts stay on my front page for the rest of the day and no new content is brought up. At this point the front page is completely worthless and the only reason I visit is for r/comics and r/facebookscience, all my other content is found on lemmy and mastodon.
Try surfing on your porn account. Totally obvious when all you intend to browse is NSFW
People keep separate accounts for their porn? That just seems to suggest they are embarrassed by their kinks. 😄
I don’t want to see porn all the time. When I want to see porn that’s all I want to see.
I didn’t subscribe to any of the subs, rather I created a multi with a collection of the ones I was interested in, and gave it a generic-sounding name. Easy to click on but it never pops up on my home page and doesn’t stand out if I’m reading reddit at work. Gives me a nice bit of separation under a single account.
Honestly I wish lemmy would introduce a feature like multi-reddits. I have a pretty long list of communities here and would love to break them up into groups. That’s the only feature of reddit I actually miss.
My porn account was older than the devolopment of multi-reddits. The blocking, subscribing, and discovery of communities on lemmy is terrible. The average user will flounce before they discover anything they like because they’ll get overrun with creepy anime porn and foreign language communities.
Interesting. It never really occurred to me to look at the front page but I guess it is supposed to be popular. I look mostly at a few specific subreddits and afaict they haven’t changed much.
Haha. You made a comment about nothing changing on Reddit, yet you haven’t checked the main selling point of the site or anything outside your old sub bubble?
I’ve checked both, and believe that content and comment quality is much lower … but there was a steady decline in quality the entire time Reddits user base grew … because the majority of the human population are, quite simply, idiots.
Yeah, Reddit became read-only to me after they killed RIF. I still check in on a couple subs, but all my comments and posts go on Lemmy now.
Same. I read a few subs that haven’t yet fully grown here on Lemmy, but I don’t post.
I used to live on reddit basically. I left due to the API shit they were pulling but did eventually get curious after closing my account but when I took a look, it was hot garbage. I unsigned from many of the big traffic subreddits and engaged in a lot of smaller and technical forums. Those users seem lately gone, or the ones who remained aren’t as knowledgeable or maybe there’s just been enough site changes that discussions aren’t happening like they used to.
In the meantime I’ve found fallbacks that I enjoy more, this place feels like early day Reddit which is super fun.
For now reddit seems fine (even though I feel a noticable deterioration of multiple communities). Though the important change is that alternatives have established themselves. Lemmy might not be big right now but from now on reddit has to be extra careful not to upset redditors. Every new step they take that worsens the experience will drive a new wave of users away from their site and now more of them will find communities elsewhere that have been established during the first exodus this year.
At the same time I’m unfortunately quite certain that the enshittification of reddit will continue as investors demand higher profits. So we will see more waves of redditors leaving. Such a migration in waves could also be observed with Twitter, after every new step that Elon took to ruin the site.
I scroll through all/hot a couple times a week and I don’t find the content nearly as funny, interesting or engaging as it used to be. There’s definitely something different about the algorithm that is making the content more sanitized for a wider audience.
Yeah a lurk but I don’t post unless maybe it’s for work or something like that. I do feel like the quality has dropped pretty sharply. The home feed is absolute trash. Constant feed of random shit like r/decks, the ads were pretty bad before I discovered RedReader but overall it doesn’t capture my attention the way it used to. Even the comments feel dumber but that could be my imagination.
I’m honestly not at all surprised. Social media has turned into both an addiction and a way to feel like you’re doing something you’re not doing. Jessica changed her status to: “Black lives matter!” (Jessica continues to do nothing about racial injustice or inequality). “I stand with Paris!” “We are Charlie hebdo!” “Fuck spez!” (Continues posting on reddit with the title “fuck spez” on every post). Now, I know these all vary wildly in importance, I was just recalling every topical “i care” post I could remember.
People don’t do anything. Social media gave us an out to bitch and moan for the purpose of people seeing that we know enough to bitch and moan about the topical, popular issues (read: the “right” issues)—but only while they’re topical and popular and then never think about them again because now we’re talking about the new tragedy or war or injustice or crisis, etc.)
People don’t actually care about anything anymore. I know that sounds like an old person hing to say, but I mean that everything is superficial. We either don’t have the attention or the passion or the heart or the capacity for caring anymore. We care when other people care—we care when other people can see us caring. So the entire populace is incredibly malleable because if people are paying attention to a touchy subject for capital or establishment, well, manufacture another. Or, really, why even bother? It’s not like we’re going to do anything about it.
I thouht, for a brief moment, that Reddit was actually going to be hurt by a larger portion of people leaving. I thought, for a brief moment, that we were learning how to act as a collective to stick it to large companies treating us like the fuckin bottom of the barrel of capitalism that we’ve collectively become. We aren’t the customers anymore. Other goddamn companies are the customers. We’re the fuckin goods. And it’s so deeply disturbing to me that people just…don’t seem to care past recognizing this as the reality—if that.
I hate being a pessimist. But at what point is pessimism just realism about the bleak outlook for humanity?
Yeah, nothing changed. People might say /r/all changed, but that place has always been crap and avoided by long time users in favor of subscribed feed.
I’m another snowflake but I feel like the protest did alot to slow down and water down reddit’s obvious money grab. Where I would have been a stockholder at their IPO before, I will now be warning others against it.
It may be due to many different factors, but I’ve noticed a lot of content from my niche subs just downright fuckin sucks now. Like, a lot of posts are stupid af, either being a question that is very easily googled, or some sort of “pick me” bitch post try to low-key show off and humblebrag about something.
There used to be really good content like write-ups, visual guides, or discussion builders, but it feels like a lot of it is just grabbing at the low hanging fruit for fake internet points
Came to Lemmy because it’s FOSS and doesn’t fuck me in the ass
Meh the reddit software isn’t that important, and it was once mostly FOSS. It’s about the data, not the code. Spez has a ridiculous sense of entitlement.
The main thing I notice is how shitty the app is. Thats still my main complaint.
The reddit app? It never would have occurred to me to use that monstrosity. old.reddit.com still works (dk for how long), same with redreader, and my personal API client still works though they have been messing with that (certain endpoints no longer work through vpn’s).