Technology

This has been absolutely wild. Sadly, it's not that surprising and the corporate speak is strong. While Reddit likely won't change, the "type" of users that will leave over this is the kind of users that made Reddit the community it is today. These are all likely active members from Fark, Slashdot, Digg, and others.

Good news though, we've got a group of people that are experienced in making fantastic communities. I'll bet we'll do it again. We'll see how this goes with the Fedditverse/Threadverse via Lemmy/kbin. I'm sure we'll figure this community/magazine thing out soon enough.

Sometimes all we can control is how we react to the situation.

I wish we as a species would just drop this trend of having to eventually ruin a good thing just about every goddam time.

I posted this on Kbin too, but I thought people might find it interesting here as well. I feel like maybe younger/shorter term users, and other people really don't fully understand what's going on with Reddit, and how it's been building to a crescendo for a while.

tl;dr: This shift in Reddit has been coming for awhile, and was heralded years ago by fundamental changes they made to how users engage with their platform, most specifically by turning "/r/all" into "/r/onlywhatwewantyoutosee".

I was a Reddit user for 12 years and change. I pre-date the Digg migration, and honestly I thought the years after that were its peak. There were warning signs that it was going downhill at many points in time, but I think the moment that really signaled Reddit was never going to return to what made it popular and successful is when they removed NSFW subs from /r/all...even though they'd rolled out /r/popular a year or two prior, supposedly for that purpose.

It's not because of the restriction of NSFW subs in and of itself, it's the implications/precedents that were set for the service as a whole. At that point, it became crystal clear that Reddit wanted to make sure the vast majority of users would be stuck with reddit recommended content only, and from there out it's felt more like user manipulation for maximum advertising. Think about it - probably 50% of the most popular posts are either thinly veiled ads, or posts LOADED with ads that Reddit is surely getting clickshare revenue for linking to. Then there's the sponsored posts hidden in with the normal posts, and the banner ads inserted between those.

The point of /r/all was to show everything, in real time, as it was growing in popularity. That's how people discover things they like that they didn't know existed - but finding those things, means spending less time in the controlled environment engaging with the content they most want you to engage with, and making them less revenue as a result. When /r/all turns into "/r/onlywhatcorporatewantsyoutosee", there's really no going back or improving. This API bullshit is just the next iteration of that same long term strategy - control what users see and interact with by forcing them to stay in their tightly controlled environment

Spez has told Reddit staff that the blackout “will pass”.

He’s right, it will. And that’s the problem.

A two day blackout means nothing to Spez and Reddit. What it tells them is “we can treat the userbase and developers like shit and they’ll still use our platform for the other 363 days of the year”.

The only thing that will force Reddit to the negotiating table is blacking out indefinitely. Not a single protesting subreddit opens back up until they realise what made the company so attractive to investors in the first place.

Only thing I’ve missed about Reddit is googling stuff by adding Reddit on the end of it! Ironically most of the stuff has been around server stuff for my Lemmy instance

I've checked both Reddit and Lemmy since I created my Lemmy account yesterday. Reddit has lost a number of subreddits I used to read and the feed seems decidedly less interesting overall. Although the equivalents to all the subreddits I used don't necessarily exist here, there is some good information here (particularly IT-related) and I think the overall feel of the community here is better - people seem (so far at least) largely pretty reasonable and there aren't the armies of contrarians or downvoters just wanting to spread their anger at the world to everyone else. So, overall, win some, lose some, and if I end up just here instead of Reddit, I think any losses there will be offset by gains here. Which if you think about it makes Lemmy look pretty good, given that it is (a) relatively new; (b) volunteer-run and funded; (c) much, much smaller than Reddit.