Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
, we’d all bend over.Good for them, but the damage is already done. They seeded this place with a lot of users. Will it be enough? Who knows. But Lemmy is probably a looooot further along than if they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.
This place obviously needs to continue with good content and active communities, but at moment I don’t really have the urge to open Reddit they way things are.
Absolutely. I had never even heard of Lemmy or anything Fediverse prior to all the 3rd party API shutdown. Once Apollo died, I stopped using Reddit.
I had heard of it, but was like "that's dumb, just use Reddit, there's no reason not to"
They gave me and many others that reason to reconsider
Yep. I also didn’t think this would work as well as it does. Remarkably good platform so far.
Thee developers really crunched over July. It went from a niche beta platform to fully featured third-party apps and a ton of platform optimizations in a month, which is really impressive.
Same here. So far I’m rather enjoying Lemmy.
That, and Reddit was getting pretty fucking annoying. The little annoyances had really begun to pile up for me personally and I know I’m not alone.
I lurked on reddit for years. I was lurking here for a couple weeks now but thought I should make an account to contribute. Reddit has gone down hill and I'll never go back.
I won, because I found lemmy.
Exactly how I feel! I don't care at all what happens on the other site. This whole thing opened my eyes to what it has become, and it's not just the API, that place has become toxic af.
Well it cured me from checking reddit all the time, so I count that as a win.
As I understand it, reddit has shattered its trust with its userbase and has hemmoraged users because of it. I can hardly view that as a 'win' for them.
The remaining users have proven they'll all willingly look at ads and suffer an inferior UX. It's a win for reddit. There's not much they can do to get rid of this core user group of... What, 90% of their users? That doesn't care if they make things worse.
They didn't win shit. What they did broke the site for everyone. It doesn't stop being broken because they seized control over the subs, something they could have done at any moment.
Reddit has detonated all its credibility, leaving a hole in the side just big enough for most of the site's users to escape as they decide reddit isn't worth it, or find good-enough alternatives. It won't happen all at once, but it'll happen.
I'm sure reddit will limp along, Tumblr did, myspace is still technically running although I don't know anyone that would use it.
Maybe a younger crowd will get attracted to the site, maybe it will live again on fresh blood but I'm just not going to be a part of it. I'm not going to endorse their actions with my presence.
We're in such a shitty timeline right now where these CEO's realize that they have so many mainstream users who just don't actually care about the platform and just want the content, that even with significant controversy if they just ignore it, they can almost certainly weather the storm. Sure, their platform will be worse off, they'll lose users to other platforms, but it's a far cry from the Digg v3 -> Reddit situation when there was a much smaller user base who was more passionate about the site and community and they abandoned the old site as a result of those shitty decisions.
Big platforms like Facebook, Digg, Twitter and Reddit don't fail in a day. Their decline is rather gradual. If you noticed any decline on Reddit's quality after the API lockdown, then that's the beginning of a gradual slide. Just wait for a while before judging the results.
My wife didn’t really pay attention to the reddit controversy and frankly didn’t really care. She is about as casual ad you can get and even She has noticed a very steep decline in the quality of content shared on reddit. She barely uses it anymore. Now this is a person who doesn’t notice when her adblocker is on or not. If she noticed this, i can guarantee she is not alone.
I agree it's over, I moved here and don't care about Reddit anymore. :)
Honestly, those still on Reddit are either lurkers or never gave a shit about the "protests" to begin with. The real measure will be the IPO. With that said, one tech group stroking off another means very little, anymore. Gizmodo can write their fluff piece.
The capitalists are concerned about the plebs using social media to organize and call out lies, doing everything they can to break up or muddy the waters of social media platforms ahead of the 2024 US presidential elections. The goal is to disrupt the platforms and drive away dissenting users who would use these platforms to organize against them and debunk misinformation/lies.
Musk buys Twitter (for far more than it was worth, lol) and drives it into the ground. Zuckerberg starts Threads to give people another "slowly boiling pot" to catch some of those looking for Twitter-alternatives. Spez and company enact changes to the platform, to artificially inflate their ad revenue ahead of their final valuation, which can't happen if users are allowed to skirt their ads with better clients. I didn't talk about Facebook, but it hasn't been relevant since COVID showed us how bat-shit crazy our families and neighbors are. Facebook is basically Nextdoor, but world-wide. We can't forget about the TikTok users. The parent company can't be touched or bought so they're just trying to outright ban the platform here.
The ultra-wealthy are showing us how scared they are of the up-and-coming new demographic of voters, who grew up on social media, know how to use it better than them, in ways they couldn't predict, and don't give a fuck about TV news, printed media, or corporatized websites. The last two elections have slowly been reversing the progress these regressionists have made using the gullibility and entitlement of the Boomer generation, the ignorance of the Gen-X generation, and the brittle corpses of the millennials to push their agenda.
The Arab Spring showed these wealthy fuckers how dangerous the people can be when they are allowed to use social media to organize and they don't want it to happen again at a time when we're finally starting to wise up to the "two-sides-of-the-same-coin" world we live in, and a new voting season has so much on the line for them.
Fuck the wealthy, money's made up, and may ass cancer rid us all of their kind!
I won't really call that a win,
Reddit lost the trust of many users, a non insignificant part of contributors and moderators left, the enshittification of the platform is not going to stop but they lost a big part of what made Reddit great. They damaged their image and popularity.
It's like saying Elon won by trashing Twitter. Sure he does what he wants with it but making your platform less desirable sure isn't a win for the platform.
Was there really going to be any other outcome?
Nope. And the goal of protests aren’t necessarily to force change, it’s often just as much about raising awareness and attempting to change the discourse with those who hold power. So I think these headlines don’t do the movement justice.
Depends on how one defines "win".
We coulda gotten more people here. Reddit's kind of the perfect centralized service to decentralize. Major subreddits have millions of subscribers and mods with years of experience managing large communities. Many of them could have set up their own Lemmy servers and just said "we're over here now". You get a few large, but still not exactly mainstream r/all kind of subreddits doing that, and things could've been significantly different.
At the same time, there are several ordres of magnitude more people here now than there was before, and the space isn't showing any signs of dying. That's kind of a big L for Reddit, as they're going to continue enshitifying themselves in the months and years ahead, and there's a legit, if somewhat underground, alternative space for people to go when they're finally fed up. Now with an insane amount of mobile app support, to boot.
The fediverse won
We're too busy over here winning
fuck spez
Imo, nobody won here and the reddit user lost everything. The Fediverse wasnt ready for the influx of users and lost its chance to "win" for a long time. The sites couldn't support the load and there was a lack of polished mobile apps that felt familiar to people that wanted to browse and shit post.
Without content -- without interaction, a platform whithers; and my experience, so far, has been comment oasises while scrolling through pages of desert.
They didn’t beat me. I overwrote and deleted all my posts and haven’t been there since the end of June.