this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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I've said it (with a different wording) on some post on reddit, I'm saying it again here: I want history to repeat itself. Not because I have a sadistic need to see reddit fail, but because this will ultimately be better for the users.
All of these protests are a nice sentiment, but I can't help but think the take I've read from some people is right: this is all a "door in the face" technique from Reddit to get people to accept a more reasonable compromise on pricing that they were going for all along, but without taking as much of a PR hit. So people will be relatively happy, and meanwhile reddit will have squeezed redditors just a little more, as they have been doing little by little in the last years. It's a boiling frog scenario.
So this protest may well "reverse" this specific situation, but it won't reverse the general trend on governance on Reddit that has been slowly going on for a few years already, mostly around the time that Victoria got canned.
So, to that end, I really want to stop using reddit regardless of the outcome of this debacle. Lemmy seems promising, although it does have its own set of problems. But it's still on its infancy, I'm sure it'll grow and at least some of these problems will be fixed.
I don't want to sound like an elitist, but I guess I will regardless: the most important number of people simply don't care.
I think it's safe to say that the people who will be affected by the new API pricing and other decisions, as well as the people who want to protest at least some of it at least somehow (be it boycotting for a few days or migrating to fediverse in any capacity) are simply not the demographic that the Reddit board really cares about. Not necessarily because they're evil, anti-privacy, Machiavellian moneybags (they still are), but because Reddit is a business, a big one, and big businesses care about money more than anything else.
I'm not really optimistic about the boycott and any other aftermath. I think the best we'll see is influx of users on lemmy and other instances, which is good, but that's about it, and I'm fine with it.
Part of me thinks that while a majority of folks will remain on reddit, the most active, engaged members will leave. ...the mods, the people posting original content, the people posting the most replies.
Over time, the content on reddit could become even more stale, repetitive, and low quality.
agree here. it will be like bots talking to bots.
Kinda feels that way already, honestly.
Right? I felt like all the top comments were always the same on all the subs, usually lame jokes that have been done to death on the rest of the site.
Whatever your political leanings are...this is ridiculous:
https://ibb.co/hCJWBBQ
It's just easier to separate on the political subs. But imagine something like that right there pushed out in subs you don't really think to look for it in, with a totally different message.
Oh yeah, left-leaning subs aren't immune to bots. The 2016 American Presidential election showed the power of using bots to push a uniform message.