For me, no matter what Reddit is dead. Lemmy is enough for my time wasting and has enough content that I have not missed it one bit. I feel like the communities are smaller, less toxic, and I want to contribute more here. They could completely reverse their decision and I will not return and I hope there are enough like me to make a difference. It just amazes me a site that exists to link to other content on the web and store text comments about said content isn't profitable.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Lemmy is also ad free. Love that.
I'm always astounded at how few people use ad blockers. Fuck the entire ad-based system, it is cancer.
The whole internet can be ad free if you want it to be... even from your phone.
Any instance or community can include paid content, but the numbers are still a bit low for that now.
Thing is, if there was in instance or community doing ads, I now can simly block, mute or defederate them. With reddit I had to use an adblocker, scriptblocker and the reddit enhancement suite to be adfree. And I could not be sure it'd stay that way.
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Same here. Reddit had me going only on inertia for the past few years. Whether they revert their API lalala doesn't matter - the communities are broken and I don't feel like getting up again.
And even if through some divine intervention they manage to repair the communities, I'm like... eh. I went to sit over here now and it's comfy.
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Im pretty close to this as well. I think if they did a 180, and like, showed an ACTUAL attempt to right the ship, I would consider going back via Apollo.
But that said, I've been using Lemmy this week, and out of curiosity I've been comparing it with my reddit feed at the end of the day, and yeah. I really haven't missed out on anything important.
I mostly used Reddit as a way to waste time, or get info on the latest big things, like all the Trump stuff for example, and Lemmy is doing just fine getting me that kind of info.
If they allowed RiF to continue, I'd still use it. I'll pop over on certain subreddits occasionally after July 1st. But I'm enjoying various lemmy instances right now, especially Beehaw.
I'm currently refusing to visit Reddit on principle. If Reddit relented, I would stop actively avoiding them, but I would not go back to it as a primary social outlet.
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Right now it looks like it's a decisive victory for spez, contrary to the article's title.
Of course, the long-term consequences aren't clear yet, the moderator exodus might result in the whole platform becoming too low-quality to sustain the user interaction, leading to people moving away from it.
I think we're gonna see another huge blow to Reddit in a few days when all the third-party apps go permanently offline. I'll bet that a lot of people who haven't been paying attention so far are definitely going to start having something to say about it very soon.
Maybe, I'm certainly in that camp. Once RIF stops working I'll stop using Reddit. I don't know that there are a lot of people like me though (and the ones that are are probably here already).
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This will be when the true test for Reddit begins; if the outcry is large enough that spez ends up relenting in some way then he will have already alienated a lot of users. If the outcry is minimal then I guess he won, but the prize hardly seems worth the drama that has been spun up.
It isn't going to be outcry, it is going to be drop in traffic. Spez is gambling that third party app users will switch to the official app. I won't, and I hope most others don't.
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Or it becomes mostly unmoderated, near a major election, at the same time as twitter turns into disinfo central.
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Depends, on what you call winning.
Sure, he will get his way. He will make his changes.
But- I do believe the original goals were profit-motivated.
I'd be willing to bet- the mass exodus of users, is going to hamper his plans pretty significantly.
I think we'll see a exodus of experienced mods. Maybe even older (account age), more active users. I doubt we'll see a mass exodus of general users. The site is too big. Even if a million people left, there are still millions more.
Yeah an exodus of mods and more active users will hurt, but not enough to kill the site anytime soon. The site culture will change because of this, but the site culture is always changing. Reddit's not the same as it was 5yrs ago or 10yrs ago. Not saying it was better back then, just different.
If there's anything I've learned about social media users -- AKA everyone -- it's that people don't usually care too much about the platform and the company behind it, as long as content is entertaining. That they can keep consuming.
TikTok is the perfect example: the Chinese govt is potentially get all that user data. It's concerning enough that other governments have or are considering banning it. Have people left en masse? Nope. My coworkers still share TikTok videos all the time.
Or how about Facebook and Co.? Facebook has made all sorts of terrible UI changes over the years. That people got angry over. Hell, it's sold user data without user consent. It pumped out enough fake news that it swung an election! It's still probably the largest social media platform in the world.
Or about about Twitter? I'll admit, I'm still on Twitter as a lurker. And my feed is still just as active as it ever was. There's no mass exodus, even with that crazy CEO at the helm.
YouTube pisses people off, especially the content creators, with their algorithm changes and unknowing demonetization rules. They and the viewers are still there, pumping out and consuming content.
While I've been on reddit for nearly 13yrs, I didn't come from Digg. So I don't know why people did leave wholesale for reddit. But I'm starting to think that that was an outlier. And there is something to be said about Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok not really having good alternatives. Twitter does with Mastodon, but it's still nowhere near Twitter's userbase.
I don't know how much Beehaw and the Lemmyverse as a whole has grown in the last month, but something tells me it's still orders of magnitude smaller than reddit. I'm on Tildes -- which does have a restrictive registration policy -- and it's only grown by about 7000 new users in the last ~3 weeks.
I think this could be the beginning of the end of reddit. But it's still way too soon to tell and any results would be far off. It could also be nothing like Spez says. And historically, a massive social media platform dying off hasn't really happened unless the company pulled the plug themselves (Google+). Or it's Digg.
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Sure, and Digg got its way with the redesign back in the day.
Back then, there was an easy and viable alternative. Lemmy, sadly, is neither of those two.
I, for one, just signed up on this website specifically so I can leave reddit
Why isn't Lemmy viable?
Not enough people here (it's a network effect) and it's way too complex to sign up.
My signup process was like this:
- After going through the list of servers, I had to pick one of them. As someone who went through that whole situation with XMPP, I know that this alone is enough to make most people turn away.
- Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.
- Since the page told me that if I didn't hear anything back after 24h, I could consider my application rejected, I wrote another account application at feddit.de after waiting for about 48h.
- The feddit.de account was approved, but I only noticed by my login working a few days later. I didn't get any notification. That's what I'm using right now.
- After more than a week, I got an email that my beehaw application was accepted.
I don't know anybody with even half as much patience as myself. Every single step on this way would have been a dealbreaker for a regular person by itself. Creating an account on reddit takes a minute, not a procedure of several days.
Also keep in mind that most people don't understand what federation means in the first place.
I'd just like to say sorry for the experience you've had with Beehaw, we're trying our best at the moment to get through everyone but it's been a really hard time.. We think we might be able to reach 0 people left in our queue by the end of tomorrow (optimistically, there's about 2k left)
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Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.
Bro this is a skill issue
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It looks like it is going to be a pyrrhic victory for Spez. You're right in that we don't know the knock-on effects of this decision, including if Reddit can get long time users to jump to the official app and if moderators will continue volunteering time.
I suspect a lot of subs are now going to create contingency plans for leaving Reddit, even if they don't implement them.
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Fuck u/spez
(That was missing from this post.)
They did say he's "the Kmart version of Elon Musk" which I thought was quite funny.
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This article has so many inaccuracies… I haven’t talked with a single person that thinks Reddit shouldn’t charge for api access. And the final comment about being legally obligated to pursue profit is just factually incorrect. https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
You can find plenty of other sources just like that one saying the same thing. I’m pretty sick of this myth, because it gives all these companies a bogeyman to hide behind.
This point struck me too:
Reddit is under no obligation to make its API free. But, it seems, the company has overreached in enforcing the new policy. If its target is the largest AI firms, then it should focus on curbing their parasitic proclivities and not going after beloved and useful software its users and moderators depend on.
This is my feeling. I understand that it could cost something. But the eye-watering rates for the small fish and the speed of the extortion is the issue.
Reddit knows the rates it proposed are extortionist. They don't have the nerve to honestly state that 3rd party access will be stopped from July 1 and accept responsibility, so instead they tried to find a way to blame 3rd parties.
Because the point isn't the costs of the API. Reddit wants all its users to go through the official access points, the Reddit app and the redesigned web. This will allow them to hover the maximum data to sell and ensure ads flow.
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Reddit ceo Steve Huffman is an idiot, and also a massive prick.
It's his site. He will always win. Fuck him and greedy capitalists fucks like him.
PS: Enjoy Lemmy
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I do fee so much better now that reddit is dead to me. I check lemmy few times a week.
Feels like Spez won't be taking this one to the chin. Let's just see how deep the ship will sink with its captain.
I don’t think the ship is doomed yet but they’re definitely in ‘what is that ominous noise coming from the bilge’ territory. To carry on the analogy they’ll plug the leaks as best they can and try and make it to the safe harbour of the IPO (where she can sink at her mooring for all Spez cares) which they could still well do, but it’s also likely the captain and his officers being half-baked sons of lubberly farts will smash into several reefs on the way and sink their already damaged vessel.
I mean, Digg is still around. It didn't go under, it just lost a huge chunk of users, which is Reddit's most likely fate.
I think that is what counts as sinking for a large social media site nowadays. They’re technically still alive but they’re empty husks of their former selves and will never return to their heydays.
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Remember the house always wins. We can play at our casinos today thanks to fediverse.
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