this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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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.

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[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 35 points 1 year ago (26 children)

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.

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 36 points 1 year ago (21 children)

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.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 13 points 1 year ago (7 children)

As far as I’m concerned, Reddit just died today. It’s game over now. Time to start over somewhere else.

[–] GrindingGears@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Judging by the amount of activity on here versus even yesterday, I suspect you are right.

[–] cobra89@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Personally, I believe that keeping the social media platforms federated is the way to go in the long term.

[–] zeldis@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Honestly, this seems 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

I've deleted everything as well. Deleted one of my accounts. Need to copy out some saved posts from the other.

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