Is Reddit Dying? (eff.org) 266
"Compared to the website's average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop..." reports Engadget (citing data provided by internet analytics firm Similarweb).
[A]s many subreddits continue to protest the company's plans and its leadership contemplates policy changes that could change its relationship with moderators, the platform could see a slow but gradual decline in daily active users. That's unlikely to bode well for Reddit ahead of its planned IPO and beyond.
In fact, the Financial Times now reports that Reddit "acknowledged that several advertisers had postponed certain premium ad campaigns in order to wait for the blackouts to pass." But they also got this dire prediction from a historian who helps moderate the subreddit "r/Askhistorians" (with 1.8 million subscribers).
"If they refuse to budge in any way I do not see Reddit surviving as it currently exists. That's the kind of fire I think they're playing with."
More people had the same same thought. The Reddit protests drew this response earlier this week from EFF's associate director of community organizing: This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge... Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to "spam"). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary...
Saturday the EFF official reiterated their concerns when Wired asked: does this really signal the death of Reddit? "I can't see it as anything but that... [I]t's not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course. The longer they stay in their position, the more loss of users and content they're going to face."
Wired even heard a thought-provoking idea from Amy Bruckman, a regents' professor/senior associate chair at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bruckman "advocates for public funding of a nonprofit version of something akin to Reddit."
Meanwhile, hundreds of people are now placing bets on whether Reddit will backtrack on its new upcoming API pricing — or oust CEO Steve Huffman — according to Insider, citing reports from online betting company BetUS.
CEO Huffman's complaint that the moderators were ignoring the wishes of Reddit's users led to a funny counter-response, according to the Verge. After asking users to vote on whether to end the protest, two forums saw overwhelming support instead for the only offered alternative: the subreddits "now only allow posts about comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver."
Both r/pics (more than 30 million subscribers) and r/gifs (more than 21 million subscribers) offered two options to users to vote on... The results were conclusive:
r/pics: return to normal, -2,329 votes; "only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy," 37,331 votes.
r/gifs: return to normal, -1,851 votes; only feature GIFs of John Oliver, 13,696 votes...
On Twitter, John Oliver encouraged the subreddits — and even gave them some fodder. "Dear Reddit, excellent work," he wrote to kick off a thread that included several ridiculous pictures. A spokesperson for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.
In fact, the Financial Times now reports that Reddit "acknowledged that several advertisers had postponed certain premium ad campaigns in order to wait for the blackouts to pass." But they also got this dire prediction from a historian who helps moderate the subreddit "r/Askhistorians" (with 1.8 million subscribers).
"If they refuse to budge in any way I do not see Reddit surviving as it currently exists. That's the kind of fire I think they're playing with."
More people had the same same thought. The Reddit protests drew this response earlier this week from EFF's associate director of community organizing: This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge... Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to "spam"). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary...
Saturday the EFF official reiterated their concerns when Wired asked: does this really signal the death of Reddit? "I can't see it as anything but that... [I]t's not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course. The longer they stay in their position, the more loss of users and content they're going to face."
Wired even heard a thought-provoking idea from Amy Bruckman, a regents' professor/senior associate chair at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bruckman "advocates for public funding of a nonprofit version of something akin to Reddit."
Meanwhile, hundreds of people are now placing bets on whether Reddit will backtrack on its new upcoming API pricing — or oust CEO Steve Huffman — according to Insider, citing reports from online betting company BetUS.
CEO Huffman's complaint that the moderators were ignoring the wishes of Reddit's users led to a funny counter-response, according to the Verge. After asking users to vote on whether to end the protest, two forums saw overwhelming support instead for the only offered alternative: the subreddits "now only allow posts about comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver."
Both r/pics (more than 30 million subscribers) and r/gifs (more than 21 million subscribers) offered two options to users to vote on... The results were conclusive:
r/pics: return to normal, -2,329 votes; "only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy," 37,331 votes.
r/gifs: return to normal, -1,851 votes; only feature GIFs of John Oliver, 13,696 votes...
On Twitter, John Oliver encouraged the subreddits — and even gave them some fodder. "Dear Reddit, excellent work," he wrote to kick off a thread that included several ridiculous pictures. A spokesperson for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.
Not a Reddit user (Score:2, Interesting)
The Google effect keeps it going (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: The Google effect keeps it going (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Google effect keeps it going (Score:5, Insightful)
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I thought google just returned TOP 10 BEST sites from blog mills with affiliate links
Re:The Google effect keeps it going (Score:5, Insightful)
If Google stopped them abusing SEO
[Citation required]. Only the other day someone here lamented that losing Reddit would be the loss of a wealth of technical solutions and answers to questions, and that has largely been my experience with anything which has shown up as a Reddit thread on a Google result: the actual answer I'm looking for.
That's not abusing SEO, that's the search engine doing it's one fucking job.
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You're confusing an egg with a chicken. The main reason why those technical solutions started to appear on reddit is because specialist forums where they used to be got buried by google under reddit in search results. Often to the point of getting pushed off the first page.
So after a while, techies moved to reddit, because you started finding actually useful answers there in addition to usual reddit garbage, and eventually a lot of techies ended up there. So now it has a massive bank of solutions.
But this w
Re:The Google effect keeps it going (Score:4, Interesting)
The main reason why those technical solutions started to appear on reddit is because specialist forums where they used to be got buried by google under reddit in search results.
Oh horseshit. People move around different platforms all the time. Forums didn't close and decide to move experts to a dedicated subReddit because it was drowning them out. Rather more new young people came along, a young audience who knows Reddit as the place where there's a sub for everything started using it for items of interest to them, and the following grew, and more and more people starting joining the discussion there because it was the popular place.
You're getting upset at new kids playing somewhere else and becoming popular, while your friends are aging out and not joining you in the pub. That's not SEO, that's just life.
Re: The Google effect keeps it going (Score:2)
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I have been playing Zelda Tears of the Kingdom and have been looking up how to get things I missed for 100%.
Most of the articles at the top are SEO garbage containing incomplete or plain wrong information.
I have found reddit threads to usually contain more useful information, but they tend to be buried down, or I have to do a site search on Google to see them.
So SEO or not,. I would say reddit threads sometimes deserve to be at the top, if they offer the information I am looking for.
Re: The Google effect keeps it going (Score:3)
They should merge with Twitter before the IPO (Score:5, Funny)
Win-win!
Case in point: Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Reddit's CEO seems not to get the point that he's actually selling user-generated content, meaning his customers and volunteer workforce are the users and mods.
Compare this to the days of IRC when IRCops were the "mods," and how quickly the ecosystem became fragmented (EFNet, DALNet, Undernet, and then all kinds of *Nets) ...and eventually became overtaken by Discord.
Re:Case in point: Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot has a few too many of the know-it-alls (who obviously don't), not a huge amount of traffic, and the interface could use a lot of work... but if you read with ACs at -1 and mark every idiot you come across as a Foe at -1, it's a much, much nicer experience in general than Reddit.
Slashdot is currently the only social media site I frequent.
Re:Case in point: Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
How is this social media?
Yes, we interact but where this site is distinguished from what I considder social media is the fact that you don't even get a note when someone replies to you. The discussions are organized in trees. Social media makes it very easy for you to find a reaction to yourself, get angry about it without remembering the context (since you can't find your own post that sparked the response) and does its best to make sure you get angry about EVERY reaction.
Here? You have to actually remember to check on your post and see if something went on.
While still not promoting "ideal" discussion culture, at the very least it isn't about pouring gasoline onto various fires.
Re:Case in point: Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Depending on what you mean, you should be able to control this under Account->Messages: Comment Reply. There are 6 options: No Messages, E-Mail, Web, AIM, Mobile, REST API. How well those works is another matter, but I have mine set to Web and get notifications for replies.
Re:Case in point: Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
. There are 6 options: No Messages, E-Mail, Web, AIM, Mobile, REST API. How well those works is another matter, but I have mine set to Web and get notifications for replies.
AFAIK AIM shut down some years ago, so that's a great example of legacy "cruft" left on websites no longer actively maintained or developed..
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Social media makes it very easy for you to find a reaction to yourself, get angry about it without remembering the context....
I laughed when I read this, because it's so true.
Re: Case in point: Slashdot (Score:2)
(I'll bite)
I would like this theory to be proven correct first, tyvm!
Re:Case in point: Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
you don't even get a note when someone replies to you.
Um... are you sure you know how to configure Slashdot's notifications?
The discussions are organized in trees.
Which is amazing.
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I've been on Slashdot for a long time so I might have forgotten that I deactivated it.
But that's just it... if you turn off comment notifications on Youtube... how will you find any kind of conversation you added your two cents to? Here I click on the post ID and get taken to the subtree of my post. I wouldn't know how to accomplish something like that on Facebook, Youtube or 9gag.
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It's way, way more social than a lot of the media that are called social.
Those I'd mostly qualify as antisocial.
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And I think it's due to size, tree style discussions but not so much Zeitgeist.
Just as on Reddit, people get offended more easily on Slashdot than they did 10 years ago as well. I just think the fact that it's easier to follow a discussion here helps as well as it being harder to vanish back into obscurity among 1M other people...
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The difference is, if people get offended on Reddit, you get a strike with a timeout or a ban.
If people get offended here, they get offended and that's that.
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Slashdot is currently the only social media site I frequent.
I hope you're retired then, because it's incredibly rare to come across someone working in tech these days who doesn't have at least a LinkedIn.
Also Slashdot really pre-dates the term "Social Media" and is really a previous generation of "Web Forums." There's key differentiators here -- notably the lack of being able to make yourself a profile of substance within the site.
Re:Case in point: Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate Linked In with a passion. If you need it for career advancement, then you're more likely into office politics than a technical person, and I probably don't want to have anything more to do with you than the job demands.
My resume and my references have done nicely for me when I wanted to change jobs, I don't need to be stalked by bottom-feeding headhunters.
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I have never used headhunters/recruiters, only at some companies internal recruiters, and share your aversion there.
But, you'll never know what opportunities you missed out on by not using the site.
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Linkedin, Xing and the like are advertising platforms for me. Not social media.
I advertise my services on those platforms. I don't really engage socially on them with anyone.
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LinkedIn is nothing more than an resume to me. I maintain my network so I continue to get leads on jobs but not much else.
There is to much risk from an HR point of view to be publicly socializing on LinkedIn in a professional sense.
I cringe everytime someone posts something political or personal there.
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Re:Case in point: Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
How this system would work for individual forums like reddit though I don't know. You can't actually ban anyone here, even the trouble posters although you can filter them down into oblivian and read at 1 and higher.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Case in point: Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen plenty of examples of moderation abuse on Slashdot ...
Really? I've seen a few questionable moderations, probably depending on my view in particular question, but little that I could categorize as abuse. You do know that there is meta-moderation with a rating of moderators decision? Anyway, I hope you posted your opinion when you saw abuse.
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Been here 20 years, moderation abuse is rampant. It used to be the favorite was using "Overrated" because it wasn't subject to metamod. More often than not it amounts to -1, Disagree.
Metamoderation doesn't work because metamoderation is boring. I got sick of doing it after a while and just turned the whole mess off.
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Yes, I probably am one of the few people that bothers using it.
Welcome to the club. I've been here over 20 years (a different user originally), and always run at threshold "-1 Uncut and Raw". I see that you are a frequent poster and often highly rated member, but I still don't understand where you see all the abuse.
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Indeed, the "Anyone can moderate" thing also devalues moderation as a proposition on Slashdot. People who have seen bad moderation may well do bad moderation in response ("Oh, my pro-NetBSD comment was modded down? Well I'm going to mod down the Anti-NetBSD people! For balance!") People consider it less important to be responsible because others are going to be irresponsible anyway, so what if it devalues the platform as a whole?
I have no idea how /. does QC now (/. QC - a bit of an oxymoron) but it used to have users moderate the moderations by reviewing mods and marking them as good or bad. The, I'm guessing, would allow /.'s selection process to weed out bad moderators and not give them mod points.
Re:Case in point: Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
By comparison, I've only seen a handful of cases of moderation abuse on the subreddits I frequent. Yes, it happens, but nowhere near as often as people like to claim.
If we are talking about up and down voting on both sites, then I have to disagree - Im a fairly new Reddit user (saw my use uptick after Twitter died for me), but in that short time I have noticed a trend...
Reddit has a "first mover often wins in setting the tone" issue.
The first few responses to a post or comment, including both replies and voting, can often set the tone for people piling on. If the first few people dont like it, its going to get down voted regardless. If the first few people like it, its going to get up voted.
Its easy to see this when the same content is reposted a few days apart - you see this a lot with Reddit. The two outcomes can often be diametrically opposed, with one post receiving a massive negative response to the OP or the OPs situation in their post, and the other having a similarly massive positive response.
Its funny to see when it happens, and it happens enough that its not a "thats odd" situation for me, its very firm in the "well, thats happened again..." category.
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It's not the Reddit moderators, it's the users:
Slashdot lacks the emotionally-driven dopamine-fueled "upvote" button which destroys other forums. In order to moderate on Slashdot, you have to be pre-selected to do so, you only get a few moderation points, and you have to answer the question "Why are you upvoting this? Is it insightful? Or just interesting?" This tamps down the stupid comments like "Yeah, political party X is full of poopheads, lol *grunt* *snarf*" that gets 57k upvotes and dominates all
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Man people keep thinking that the users are the customers of Reddit. But that is dead wrong. Any website that generates revenue via ad sales considers the users the product. Advertisers are the customers. I don't see how this is not 100% clear to everyone. Reddit (and every other website including Slashdot) creates a playground for us to play in. We are not "generating content" we are playing and entertaining ourselves and they're putting up billboards around the playground for us all to see.
Re: Case in point: Slashdot (Score:2)
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I'm sorry, but that's just a very poor and confusing analogy. All you're trying to say is that if Reddit becomes shitty people will leave. But what does that have to do with the users being the product?
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That's actually exactly what happened with the Oakland Coliseum...
In short, my point is that the users aren't actually the product, they're the main users of the stadium..the fans. The product is the shows that they host, just like reddit hosts the shows of various subreddits.
I'm sure the VP of
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I mean, that's just your point of view on it....but it's wrong. I have laid out the facts as to why the users are the product. Reddit isn't a sports team nor a sports stadium, that's just a bad analogy. Why do you think Reddit cares about the number of users it has? Why do you think these mods are blacking out the subs? They all are focused on Reddit's actual customers, which are advertisers. Spez isn't worried that the "product" is bad. He doesn't care about what the users do or talk about. He care
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I mean, that's just your point of view on it....but it's wrong.
May well be, but I've spent a lifetime in SaaS and have had small armies of product managers report to me. I've heard the oft-requoted "If you aren't paying for this SaaS service...you're the product" before, and I don't think it's accurate; but it is headline-grabbing.
While you're correct that DAU is a key metric for valuation, especially if the CEO wants to approach IPO, I still think it is not accurate to describe the customers as the "product." The product is the interface and the site, along wit
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Re:Case in point: Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
/., to me at least, is one of the few bastions left where you can actually engage with people who have a VASTLY different outlook on life than I do without it descending into namecalling and insults. I have no idea why, but this is one of the few places where you can find people from all over the political spectrum, even the extremes, who can actually provide conclusive arguments for their position without eventually having to resort to ad-hominem attacks because they're out of arguments.
If you know any other place where this is possible, please provide that information, because other than here, I have not seen it anywhere in the more recent past.
Re: Case in point: Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
Nah, Opportunist is right on this one. There are lots of different perspectives to be shared on this site. Sure, there may be a sizable portion that do in fact meet your description but there are many others as well. I'm definitely not a socialist and less libertarian as I get older. If you followed me, you see me argue with rsilvergun and opportunist as well. Sometimes they have, in my opinion, correct assessments of the situation and other times I think they are wrong and I'll argue my point.
Sometimes I even see a different perspective and have to really think about what they said. It really is the fun part of this site. Other times I get labeled a troll and that's okay also. I'll admit, sometimes I do just want to be difficult for the sake of playing devil's advocate.
The best part to me is some days I'll get a -1 and other days I'll reach the +5 but most the time I'm just coasting in the 2/3 range. I love that I can browser at -1 and see everyone's posts and often times I'll mod up a downmodded post if I genuinely feel it was unfairly targeted. Disagreeing with someone doesn't always mean their post is a troll. It just means I disagree with them.
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Re: Case in point: Slashdot (Score:2)
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Because there are thousands times more people on these places now versus then.
I'm fairly confidenold school IRC or forums or whatever with the userbase numbers Discord has today would also be a hot annoying mess.
Delete your content (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to support the effort to punish Reddit, the best way is to delete your contributions from their platform.
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If you want to support the effort to punish Reddit, the best way is to delete your contributions from their platform.
There's been at least a few reports from people claiming that they recently (in response to the changes) deleted their accounts and posts, and reddit reinstated them. It's hard to be sure that's true, though.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Delete your content (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two possibilities.
1. The goal was to try to increase the value before the IPO by improving the income short term.
2. The goal was to try to decrease the value temporarily in time for the IPO so that the CEO could buy a lot of extra shares cheap, then after the IPO just swap around and say "we made a mistake" and hope that the users comes back and the value goes up and the CEO will make a shipload of money.
So regardless of the outcome then this could be a potential insider crime. I'd stay away from those shares regardless because it's a "pump and dump" or a "dump and pump and dump" scheme.
is reddit still a thing in 2023?!? (Score:2)
Echo chambers are useful sometimes (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's say I enjoyed a film and want to watch similar films, reddit searches have proven to be one of my more helpful tools, because many cases, what I want is the help of similarily minded people.
You call it echo chamber, I call it collaborative filtering. As long as you make sure to only use it for matters of taste and not as a research tool or a news source, it's quite good.
It won't die. (Score:5, Insightful)
I spend a lot of time on redddit, and I really hope these protests succeed, even though they won't. This new move (intentionally eliminating third party apps by introducing comically high API fees) is incredibly anti-user and has pissed off most of their core users and mods. The mods are volunteer workers who basically make reddit able to exist.
So a lot of subreddits, big and little, are protesting. They are continuing to protest. That's great. But there are two reasons, IMO, that it won't ultimately work:
1) Reddit will simply replace the mods of those subreddits with ones who will agree to open them back up to business as usual. There's nothing the current mods can do to stop it. Yes, this will piss off some of the most active contributors and workers, but this leads us to the second point:
2) There's nowhere else to go. When Digg did something similar (implementing extremely anti-user policies that pissed off their core user base), Reddit already existed. It was a relatively easy transition for the users to slide over to Reddit. However, at the moment, nothing else exists for Reddit users to move to. There's nothing in the pipeline, no up and coming social post/discussion sites. There's nothing else really like it that can absorb the culture.
This is a shrewd move by Reddit. It was the right time, from a business perspective. However, while Reddit is not actively dying, I do believe this will lead to the ultimate downfall of the site. Driving users to the official app and new site is an effort to boost "engagement" is going to kill a lot of the appeal of the site. Reddit is actively trying to fight against the way that most users actually interact with the site, instead trying to boost popular "content creators," monetize views, and push sponsored content and ads.
Redditors don't want TikTok and don't want Instagram, but Reddit sees the money in those sites and wants to move in that direction. Reddit wants to be ready when TikTok is banned to absorb those content creators and sponsors.
Re:It won't die. (Score:4, Informative)
There is the Fediverse as a possible rival, and I've certainly seen an increase in traffic to the few web forums I subscribe to. Whether it's a short term drop or more sustained is hard to say, but any company that sits on its laurels and just assumes it's got some sort of lock in, and thus can make changes with impunity is going to, sooner or later, run out of runway.
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Mastadon seemed like a perfect replacement for Twitter. At least I thought it was going to be after Musk took over. I was all bought into it and moved over there. But then it all just died, like really quickly. I expect the same with Reddit.
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Fediverses unfortunately self filter out a lot of the normie folks though. After the purchase there were lots of posts of people confused by even the sign up process, selecting a server, where are the people I like to follow etc etc.
The "poster class" on Twitter is actually the minority. Go to the general trending and the top topics are almost always sports, music and current TV.
The best competitor for Twitter is going to be Bluesky whenever they open the platform up and even then it's a long shot but unf
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Fascinating. Not my experience. I was never on Twitter, but tried Mastodon because I was skeptical of a journo who said it was hard to use. It wasn't. I've had fun, enjoyed some humour and politics posts.
I watched the Mastodon counter bot, and it was gaining 300,000 users a week and more in the early spring, was down to under 80,000/week until the Reddit fracas broke out, and now it's 450,000 a week of added Mastodon users.
Perhaps for your interests, Mastodon "died", but mine is growing rapidly. I
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I use Twitter as a news source. I don't chat or post of anything that would be considered socializing. When I went to Mastadon to try and recreate this I was left with a feed dominated by NYT articles. Mastadon won't work for me if there's no one posting on it that I'm interested in reading.
Re: It won't die. (Score:2)
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1) We're not talking about some sub that 5 people read because someone created it for his P&P table as a convenient way to have some sort of realistic looking webpage. We're talking about subs that thousands, if not millions, of people frequent. These are primary targets for all sorts of trolls and astroturfers. And especially the latter, twice so if government backed, will jump on the chance of becoming the deciding factor who may and who may not tell these thousands or millions of people what they sho
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They're not even talking about "another moderating system." These protests are all community-supported. None of the protests I'm aware of are being imposed on the subreddits by power-hungry mods. Most have had, and are continuing to have, ongoing discussions within the communities and various polls and votes.
These protests are almost invariably community-supported. Replacing current moderators has nothing to do with overhauling the moderating system or getting rid of power-hungry mods.
Re: It won't die. (Score:2)
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You do know in the past those apps actually shared a part of their revenue with reddit, via a system which the current CEO stopped quite some years ago, and now suddenly without giving them any transitioning time is demanding a lot more money.
Re: It won't die. (Score:2)
There's a feedback loop (Score:5, Interesting)
People love drama. They love seeing people at the top get some comeuppance. The Reddit CEO is the poster boy for 'out of touch rich asshole casually abusing the commoners without a care'.
Now that he looks vulnerable, the crowd will be getting excited about his downfall, and instead of individual behavior you're going to start seeing the mob mentality kick in. Everyone's going to want to participate in the exciting humbling of Reddit... because the asshole loses.
Everyone knows Reddit isn't like food or housing, it's ultimately a luxury item that will inevitably be replaced by someone else. There's zero cost to destroying Reddit and hurting the CEO, and plenty of popcorn to eat.
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The users are owed something. It's their presence and content that forms the entire worth of reddit. They create literally all of the value. Why wouldn't they be owed something??
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If I dislike something, I don't just leave it.
I actually invest energy to promote its destruction.
Call it petty, but hey, I'm allowed to have a hobby, don't I?
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You know your entire post just makes you sound like an idiot and a fawning bootlicker defending someone who will never care or even notice you exist, right?
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I think someone with access to YCombinator funding is already in the 0.1% of the general pop. Put that together with decades in the SV tech bubble and it's fair to say he might be a little out of touch.
They already replaced the r/apple mods (Score:2)
The question is can the mods be replaced, and so far it looks like the answer is yes, there are enough scabs to replace them and those scabs will work for free too.
The Reddit community didn't have the solidarity that the Tabletop RPG community did when WOTC pulled a similar stunt. When somebody who owns all the infrastructure (e.g. "the means of production" if you wanna get spicy)
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The scabs will have a different moral slant than the current mods, and I'm certain they want the power as well.
It will be interesting, depends on how long tribal memory is and how the new mods act.
Re:They already replaced the r/apple mods (Score:4, Insightful)
Give it a while.
The thing with replacing mods is that, usually, mods and subreddits grow organic. Not necessarily slowly, but organic. The first owners and mods are in it because they like whatever the sub is about. They want to be part of this and want to contribute something to something they want to succeed. As the sub grows, you have to onboard more mods, but that's fine because if someone tries to get in that is just a troll, astroturfer or otherwise unwanted, the existing mods will quickly take care of that.
If you replace the whole mod staff of a fairly large sub, take a wild guess who will try the hardest to become one of those mods. Hint: Thieves would love to be guard staff because that way, they already have all the keys they need.
Re: (Score:2)
It would be even more interesting to see Apple supply its own paid mods through a secret deal with Reddit, then wait for people to notice how the discussions are being curated.
Of course... they're Apple users, if they noticed they'd probably be willing to pay extra to be more strictly controlled.
When your content is your users... (Score:3)
It's not a very bright idea to piss off the users at a point they no longer want to be your content.
Somebody's reading too much news (Score:2)
If you read or watch the news, you start to believe the whole world is going down the toilet. Parts of it certainly are, but other parts are thriving. The news focuses on doom and gloom, because that's what attracts eyeballs and drives clicks.
I have no idea whether Reddit is dying. But one incident, and one moderator strike, isn't by itself going to do in the company.
Eyeballs (Score:2)
Measuring reddit by hits/day isn't a good metric. Their stock value is a good metric though as it shows popular opinion.
The website is an eyeball service, the owners just found a way to turn some eyes away, more to the point, they also lost of a lot of free voluntary work. There's now a void, will that be filled by well motivated people? I doubt it now as there's been a great show of arrogance by the current owner.
This style of attitude was typical at MS, they shipped very poor quality software that arrogan
I logged out (Score:3)
Netcraft confirms it (Score:2)
Now where's my hot grits?
Re: (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia, Netcraft grits you.
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans, naked and terrified, covered in hot grits!
(ye gods, how old is this joke now?)
I quit reddit (Score:4, Interesting)
For a different reason, coincidentally, at the same time
I judged that it was becoming an unhealthy addiction
It fed me an endless stream of bad news and pessimism, yet I felt compelled to continue reading and posting
I had 500,000 kharma points, and was accumulating around 1000 a day
While it's good to be informed of major events, being constantly exposed to a flood of bad news is not healthy
Even worse is feeling the addictive pull to what I knew was a toxic place
Re: (Score:2)
I quit, with about the same amount of Karma, when I noticed that my interest was to offer informative, witty and thoughtful replies when that was not what was requested.
And I didn't just want to join the general 10 minute hate of whatever we hate today, be it Oceania, be it Eurasia.
Re: (Score:2)
It fed me an endless stream of bad news and pessimism
I really question how you ended up like this. Reddit feeds you what you've shown interest in. It sounds like Reddit only amplified something unhealthy which was already happening.
The only bad news I get on Reddit is through r/catastrophic failure. Otherwise I get a shitton of happiness. r/mademesmile shows up a lot in my feed, so did r/aww despite never subscribing to either. Reddit thinks I'm a happy man. What did you do to upset the algorithm?
Allow me to answer this with a counter question (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone care?
Every webpage, much like every other endeavour where people are involved for entertainment, be that clubs, be that MMOs, goes through the four seasons. There is Spring, with the hopeful expectations of what could be and the investment of energy because everyone wants the endeavour to succeed and see it bloom. Then there is Summer, where we see it prosper and grow, where we see it grow big and we are happy for its success, we see our investment warranted and we take a moment of rest, because it keeps going without our continued investment. Then Fall, where we get to reap what we sowed and where we can enjoy the fruits of our labor, but also where our energy is drained and we don't have the power to continue, we don't want to keep pushing, we just want to enjoy the fruits, we want to harvest, we may even start to look back wistfully for what we could have done to make it even better, which leads into Winter, where everyone is just in a reminiscent mood for the good old times, where everything was so much simpler and better and where there was growth, but now, it's just not what it used to be...
And then it dies.
And something new will come next Spring. That's just the way life, and the web, goes.
It's not dead (Score:2)
Until Netcraft confirms it.
Usenet? (Score:2)
Whatever happened to Usenet?
Betteridge... (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I think this applies .... so the answer is ...No
It's a company ... it's making money still (Score:2)
..So No ...
Unlike Twitter ... who hasn't made money for months now ...
Death of Reddit (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ll only believe it if Netcraft confirms it.
No (Score:3)
Other than the obvious Betteridge reference Reddit it going to make it.
Consider the precedents.
YouTube - At its core still just a video sharing site, lots of other sites duplicate the functionality yet Google was still able to crank up the number of ads and maintain dominance.
Facebook - Frontal assault from Google (Google+), scandals over privacy, some left wing controversy over spreading extremism and conspiracy theories, right wing controversy over the resulting moderation, bizarre Metaverse undertaking. Still dominant.
TikTok - Everyone thinks it's working with the CCP to spy and social engineer, still going strong.
Twitter - Some left wing controversy over spreading extremism and conspiracy theories, endless right wing controversy over the resulting moderation, then Elon Musk comes in and starts hyper-politicizing and breaking everything in site. Still going strong.
MySpace - Did get killed by Facebook, but Facebook did it not by stealing its users (teenagers). It did it by opening up an entirely different market segment (young adults and then adults).
The lesson? Once a social media site becomes ubiquitous it's pretty much unkillable by rivals. The only thing that can kill it is another service that does something similar in a very different way or finds an entirely new market segment.
Given Reddit's size and style I don't see a huge untapped market for users willing to do reddity stuff. They may eventually be replaced in their role as "frontpage of the Internet" and the general discussion forum, but it's not going to be by a Reddit knockoff.
digg, slashdot and reddit (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How the hell do you monetize your mod status on Reddit?