I mean don’t get me wrong, its cool a lot of subs have and still are participating in the blackout, but I think it wouldve been better to link a new home for the subreddits participating somewhere in the private message. Show spez, hey if you dont change, we aren’t going to use your site (or use it less).
No, not really. I think a lot of people just have wrong expectations of what the blackout could actually do. Your average Reddit user doesn’t care about anything that’s going on. They care about consuming their content in the most convenient way. If their main subreddits are closed that isn’t to migrate to a new platform but to a different subreddit. It took 6-7 months for Digg to lose a significant user base of their platform after their terrible changes. The same timeline will apply to Reddit. Expecting it over 2-3 days is just unrealistic.
It would also defeat the purpose of the blackout. The blackout wasn’t to get people to move to a different platform but for Reddit to change its decision. If this is done with a scorched earth strategy Reddit would still die even if they reverse their decision. Right now Reddit still has an easy out of their decision. Rather than being forced to change they can say they merely listened to their passionate user base. They can even come up with a new solution, for example, hiring the Apollo dev to rework their own app. Obviously, Steve Huffman would need to go first for that to be an option. But there are plenty of options available that continue for Reddit to be the most convenient way to spread certain content.
Let’s face it, the current Reddit alternatives lack content. Your average user would get bored here within minutes because there is not much here. It’s inconvenient to find new Magazines. And even if they find one that’s a copy of their favorite subreddit, it’s mostly empty with barely any new posts showing up. At least nowhere near the rate it used to on Reddit.
But luckily people who do create a lot of content are the ones most likely to get fed up with the changes of Reddit. They are more likely to use third-party apps or extensions because the default Reddit version is so bad. It will just take time. Because for now no change can’t be felt. Apollo is even still up and running and so is every other app/extension that uses the API. So the real decline will happen after June 30. That’s the date when users will start to feel the need to migrate.
The actual win is if the Google algorithm starts to deprioritize reddit results due to communities being privated.
Edit: I can even see Google or other big techs pouncing on the opportunity to take the community for themselves, or simply using search deprioritization to drive reddit to the brink and buying it out