Reddit Migration

Honestly I feel that the outcome was optimal.

1. It created animosity towards Reddit.
2. It exposed major problems with Reddit.
3. It boosted fediverse's numbers.
4. It tapered off before the fediverse came crashing down from the influx of millions.
5. It reinforced the mandate to develop the fediverse, there's clearly something here and it's worth deving towards.
6. Reddit is guaranteed to shoot itself in the foot again, probably pre-IPO, definitely post-IPO, and now the fediverse is being given some much needed time to flesh itself out before they do.

If Reddit collapsed over this I don't believe the infrastructure exists at this time to onboard all those members, so it's a blessing in disguise.

my kbin feed is already indistinguishable from my reddit home page, voat never felt like this. I don't care if it takes ten years for kbin to get to that level, I'm here now and I can only see myself going to reddit if it's the only place that a solution to a problem comes up in a search engine

Great article with much more detail than what I quote: https://lifehacker.com/the-reddit-blackout-is-over-but-the-protest-isn-t-1850539204

Critics of the blackout wondered how a two-day protest is going to solve anything. My friends, let me speak to you for a moment from my perspective as a person who has more than a little familiarity with taking collective action to get out-of-touch CEOs to do the right thing.

While a strike or a blackout may be the most visible action in a campaign, it’s never the only one. Leading up to both our 2022 strike, and our 2019 seemingly uneventful signing of a fair contract, we lived and breathed by something called an escalation chart (same idea as the one illustrated here). You start with small actions, and build on them, with a clear plan for how you’ll continue if your demands are not met. A strike is almost always preceded by dozens of smaller actions.

Fixed-length walkouts and strikes are one possible step on the chart. The idea is to send a message: This many of us are this committed. After that, you don’t stop. You keep escalating. Even on an open-ended strike, the idea is to become more and more of a problem to the company over time. You get more and more media attention; the company suffers more and more from lost business. Collective actions are effective because they are part of a larger escalation.

The article also mentions some successes the protest already achieved:

• “accessibility-focused apps” will be exempted from the new policy
• several advertisers chose to spend their advertising budgets elsewhere
• exempt certain tools used by “verified moderators” from the new API policy

A (quite impressively long) list of concessions and agreements can be found in /r/ModCoord

And as others mentioned in this thread, it spurred a migration and more people than ever (me included) finally engage with the fediverse.

My summary is: The protest had a huge impact. Sure, we did not (fully) get what we want, and reddit remains committed to becoming evil. But we won some battles, and the war isn't over yet.

It also brought people to things they might never have done before; to engage in protests and to discuss forms and strategies of resistance. Many joined the fediverse in the process, here to stay. I feel the importance of this exercise in self-efficacy and self-empowerment cannot be understated.

Wasn't a fail to me. I moved on from Reddit after 12 years of daily activity. I'm happily settling into Kbin now.

Maybe it’s the news outlets I frequent, but I haven’t read anything describing the protests as a failure. Anyone want to provide a source or two?

@Defaced Agree, I don't think Reddit was every likely to die from the protests, in that sense it wasn't a success. However, the fact that viable alternatives exist and more will pop up because of the protest makes it a success in my book.

The protest planted the seeds, it might take a while to see the fruit.

https://reddark.untone.uk currently shows 3430 out of 8829 subreddits as dark -- five days after the blackout's official end date.

"Failed" my ass; that's 39 percent -- still over one third.

Don't care now, found kbin & Lemmy and that works just fine for me!