It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.
I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.
Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.
I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.
I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.
I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.
I’m expecting the API change to happen exactly as planned. As a result all 3rd party apps will die by the end of this month, and the user count will take a severe hit. Many essential mod tools will stop working, so those who actually found the default app tolerable, will get to see all subs go downhill since they aren’t really being moderated anymore. As a result, the user count will continue to decline in the following months as people come to terms with Reddit sucking harder than before. Oh, but then it gets even worse when the spam bots and official ads start taking over every sub. Most likely the next year is going to be very rough in terms of user count.
Unlike other social media sites, where people stick around because of family and friends, at reddit-like sites, people stick around for the content and discussion. Once the content gets taken over by spam-bots, it’s over.
There’s some apps I hate like Instagram and WhatsApp, but stick around because it’s the only way I can contact some friends and family. The network effect is strong and I can’t really leave.
With Reddit, I don’t care. If there’s enough content somewhere else, even if it’s a fraction of the volume (there was no way I could get through everything on Reddit anyway) then it’s an easy switch.
I just revolted and said, if anyone wants to communicate with me, they need to use e.g. Signal.
I’m absolutely not installing this spyware on my phone
A good chunk of my close family all use iPhones and iMessage to communicate with each other - but they won’t add me to any group conversations because “green bubbles bad”… I spun up a Matrix server, created an account for everyone, pre-joined them to a room with all of us in it and sent everyone their credentials along with a link to Element for iOS so that all they had to do was download an app and copy/paste into two fields.
This worked great for about two or three months until most of them went back to their group chats over iMessage and I was back to being excluded. Only one of them still uses Element to communicate with me, but I suppose that’s still somewhat a victory since previously we were using Facebook Messenger (bleh) to chat.
I guess there are some sayings that still ring true, such as “Old habits die hard” or “Humans are creatures of habit”… 😮💨
It sucks, because it’s incredibly difficult for me to not take that personally as “They don’t seem to care about me to try to meet me half way to keep in touch”. I don’t know what more I could do aside from purchasing an iPhone, which is just not going to happen.
I’m sorry, that really sucks. :(
maybe I’m just very stubborn, but I already let the complete family of my girlfriend switch to Signal, because else I wouldn’t communicate with them.
I think, I’m just projecting some work frustration into my private life and don’t want to eat shit anymore. so, if I’m not work for them to choose a medium, I’m fine with, I accept, that they don’t want to talk with me. I do have no problem with less communication - it’s their problem, when I don’t show up to happenings.
But I understand you, I also take it somehow personally, when people tell me “what do you have to hide?”
As I was part of the founders of a pirate party in my country, I’m maybe more loaded with arguments, but I’m just fed up with this shit and I just don’t take it anymore.
in situations of being left alone, some lovely Punk music always helps me - and my girlfriend is on my side, so that’s a major influence as well of course
but hey, if everyone is just looks for convenience, I can do too
Oh, hey Punk is my favorite type of music as well! I get it though - honestly I feel like I’d be a little more at ease if I could just explain it logically. If there was a feature that iMessage had that no other platform had then as much as I’d still have some disdain for Apple and the situation they’ve created, then I could still explain it. But no, I specifically chose Matrix/Element because it could do what iMessage does (well aside from the weird “apps/games” thing they’ve got, which to my knowledge no one, let alone any of them, use…) and no one pointed out any issues with it. I wouldn’t even mind if they had another preference like Discord or What’sApp - just something cross platform…
I just hate it so much. One of my siblings just got married and I was the last to find out because of this. Another one just graduated from high school last month. I also have had so many issues with my health over the last few years and have had a terribly high amount of time spent in the hospital, and during those times it’d certainly be nice to talk to them and let them know I’m okay directly, rather than by proxy of one person.
Its so strange just how far we’ve come with tech, and yet still run into such simple roadblocks that should be easily avoided… but no.
That’s an exemplary effort, well done! Sad it did not turn out as desired in the long run.
What about this?
Ah that unfortunately requires a Mac in order to use, as it uses the Mac as a relay, which while I do have an older MacBook Pro - it generally runs Linux (Fedora) on it, and is definitely not always-online.
I only use Facebook to communicate with family
As far as I’m concerned, Reddit just died today. It’s game over now. Time to start over somewhere else.
Judging by the amount of activity on here versus even yesterday, I suspect you are right.
Just came from reddit after 12 years. Deleted all my comments and then my account.
Hoping Lemmy can continue to grow and doesn’t grow stale and stagnate. I’m really digging the whole Fediverse thing. Deleted my Twitter after Elon bought it and joined a Mastodon instance as well.
If we can realize this trend of decentralized social networks it would be huge.
Personally, I believe that keeping the social media platforms federated is the way to go in the long term.
Honestly, this does seem like the better way to go. Back in the myspace days, we probably should have gone down this route instead of jumping ship to facebook. It would have been really cool to see how things would have turned out if it had been federated between universities from the get-go
Still learning, but as far as I understand, that’s one part of the beauty of it. If Lemmy goes bad for whatever reasons, switching to another part of the fediverse is a much smoother transition than to/from reddit or any other monolithic service. It might be possible to keep your account, or to keep some content.
I didn’t reddit will go away for a while. It’s almost too big to fail. The large reddit run subs are still live and active. Users who don’t sub to any subs that went dark may not even know anything happened. I have to imagine reddit knew they would lose users of 3rd party apps so it likely isn’t a large portion of where they make money. I think there will probably be a decline in content for a short time, then we will see new subs emerge with people who don’t care about the API lock down, ads, Chinese investors, bots, and reposts.
Yep. My guess is that there’s going to be so much karma farming bots and reposts, that it’s going to be absolutely wild.
It’s already happening in the subs that are moderated by the admins, like r/programming. The comment sections are filled with replies generated by ChatGPT. It’s so blatant.
Agree, there is very low friction to switching off reddit onto another site offering a similar service with a better experience. Lemmy seems to be offering exactly that, and if we continue to see growth in posts and engagement, it will be very successful.
I can’t believe that they didn’t do at least some research on how many people use 3rd party apps and account for those losses. The question is really how many will leave vs how many will just switch to the official app. I suspect most will just switch. It’s sad really. Hopefully Infinity for Reddit (and other 3rd party apps) will support Lemmy. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I think they did do research and third party app users make up a small enough portion of their user base that losing them is okay to Reddit.
Keep in mind how popular Reddit is – for the most part the people left will be content with the karma bots reposting memes for the thirtieth time and there’s always going to be somebody racing to be the first to post some news to a related subreddit.
I doubt it’ll affect their bottom line too much and in a week it’ll be back to business as usual for most subreddits.
users maybe, but i don’t think they considered mods in that. of course they can just replace mods as necessary, but the mod quality will go down for sure.
Have they walked back the API costs for mod tools yet? Given they caved on the accessibility app, I’m anticipating them to cave there as well.
no, I really don’t think that’s gonna happen. I don’t think it would help to only do it for mods, the 3rd party apps would still have the same issue of figuring out a revenue stream to stay alive.
Sadly, I think you are right about that.