Dont let anybody convince you the protest is not working, otherwise they wouldn't be doing all of this in response.
I left reddit and don't intent to come back, but for those protesting, I wish you all the luck
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
301 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
23 readers
2 users here now
This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the latest developments, trends, and innovations in the world of technology. Whether you are a tech enthusiast, a developer, or simply curious about the latest gadgets and software, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and more. From the impact of technology on society to the ethical considerations of new technologies, this category covers a wide range of topics related to technology. Join the conversation and let's explore the ever-evolving world of technology together!
founded 2 years ago
I personally don't think the protests are working. But they are getting reddit admins to show they have no interest in the communities on reddit and as a result, are helping push everyone to wonderful new communities that don't generate revenue for the owners of reddit. So I just may be misunderstanding the goal of the protest, but it's definitely doing something!
How do you define "working"? I think it was pretty obvious from the beginning they were never going to change their minds
However they accomplished
- A bunch of negative media coverage
- Completely crashing the site
- A terrible AMA that showed spez is not a good CEO and the company is not profitable
- A select few accessibility apps are whitelisted (for now)
- Free drama for all of us
The IPO is fucked regardless of what reddit does next, they are in a lose lose situation. Anyone who thought they would turn around and change their mind is delusional and doesn't understand how maniacal CEOs work
What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that there is no turning back. There is no reason for them to keep ANY mod that participated in the blackout or said anything negative about the API decision even if they reopen and try to appease them now. Might as well mutually self destruct
How do you define "working"?
Right, I think this is what people are misunderstanding. Reddit was never going to change their minds. I was hoping that maybe the API prices were negotiable, or maybe they were going high to start with then going lower later to make them look like the nice guy. But in no way were Reddit just going to say "oopsie, our bad" and go back to how it was.
So why protest, then? Well, exactly what you said: if Spez is going to ruin the site, lets help him do it. Let's create an absolute dumpster fire, let's demonize him in the press, let's spoil the IPO, let's make "fediverse" a household term.
If that is the point of the protest, it's worked with flying colors. Spez is losing his mind, entire mod teams aren't just getting kicked out they're getting out right deleted. More bad press, more people jump ship, fediverse exploding with activity, new Lemmy servers spinning up left and right.
It took Digg about 2 years to shed its users and it'll probably take Reddit longer than that because I think Reddit has become more entrenched than Digg ever was, but I think it'll happen. Twitter is a shell of what it was before Elon, and Reddit will become just as big of a joke. From cultural phenomenon to laughing stock in 2 weeks, because of one guys ego. Same as it ever was.
It took Digg about 2 years to shed its users and it'll probably take Reddit longer than that because I think Reddit has become more entrenched than Digg ever was, but I think it'll happen. Twitter is a shell of what it was before Elon, and Reddit will become just as big of a joke. From cultural phenomenon to laughing stock in 2 weeks, because of one guys ego. Same as it ever was.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
The IPO is fucked regardless of what reddit does next, they are in a lose lose situation. Anyone who thought they would turn around and change their mind is delusional and doesn’t understand how maniacal CEOs work
In fairness, the IPO was probably knackered already. One of Reddit's main investors, Fidelity Inc. dropped their valuation of Reddit shares by almost half some months ago, and I can't imagine that would do particularly good things to any IPO efforts that Reddit might have been trying to pull. Were I an investor, I'd probably steer away from Reddit if their valuation suddenly plummeted by that much.
Never mind the whole API changes lately, which both puts the users into an uproar, and makes a mess of things that could cause advertisers to pull out, dropping their revenue even further, and the AMA/Interviews with the CEO don't only show the CEO to be a liar, but have him admit that Reddit is unable to make its own first-party app profitable, unlike third-party apps that let users access the site, which smells like mismanagement. I'd have a lot of questions, and none of them are good.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the recent changes were an effort to try and salvage their stock price, by pushing AI, and bumping up their revenue by making AI companies pay to use the API to integrate their models with Reddit, and/or as a way to pump and dump Reddit, so that they can get out before the money runs dry.
That being said, this whole debacle is making Reddit stocks tastier for risk-tolerant investors; The more the valuation plummets now, the more potential it has to bounce back.
Most likely long-term outcome of this whole thing IMO: The valuation continues to go down for the next several months as the fallout from this API decision and subsequent protests drives away more users and advertisers and generates more bad press. Eventually the internet forgets about it (minus the "power users" who have already migrated elsewhere), and Reddit will wait until well after that for their IPO. Whether before or after the IPO, u/Spez will be replaced as CEO. While that likely won't change much, it'll be a symbolic move to say "we listened to the users/investors." After which, valuation will quickly recover to pre-debacle levels.
Only question from there is whether the loss of the "power users" was enough to send the site on a permanent downward trajectory. My guess is probably not; plenty of people left to fill that void. Reddit will continue on, as a slightly shitier, more investor-friendly site.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Yeah. I don't intend to go back there, but I still think the garbage fire is important. Mainly because it makes it impossible to be a bystander. Before the blackout, there was a some amount of naysayers. Now, those people don't get as much value out of Reddit, so they will be more inclined to cut their losses and leave the site.
Well, no, there is a way to turn back. The shareholders can fire spez and replace him with someone community-friendly. A lot of goodwill has been burned, but that would put out the fire pretty quickly, at least.
Except that it wouldn’t fix the fact that a lot of 3rd party developers are done. Even if Reddit sacked Huffman and rolled back the API changes, the odds of Apollo, RiF, Sync, etc. developers coming back is basically zero after all of this.
And now that they’ve shown their hand with the mods, the odds of getting their good mods back are slim-to-none as well.
If they brought on a new CEO who kept removing mods forcefully and telling blind people to get fucked I don't think that goodwill would last very long. They would have to give up something to get on everyone's good side.
I'm there until the 30th when rif dies mainly posting in defence of mods and offering alternatives.
I mean, yeah, they could.
They won’t. But they could.
Realistically, the damage is done, so it doesn’t matter. The people who have left aren’t coming back. The people who haven’t left, don’t care.
It also achieved bleeding users into other services like Lemmy and kbin, which wouldn't have happen if literal idiots weren't running Reddit.
A better way of phrasing it would be that reddit is saying the protest isn't having much of an effect. Which is clearly not the case. Or that the protest is working in the sense that it's dramatically disrupting reddit. The stated goals of getting them to change their policies seems unlikely to come to fruition though.
If the protests weren't working at all, reddit's admins wouldn't care and wouldn't be reacting to those protests. That they're taking such heavy handed actions to change things would suggest that the protests are working.
That doesn't mean they'll succeed in the end. I don't know. But they're certainly working to some degree.
Well, not "everyone" is choosing to see that, sadly:-(. I suppose I get it, they don't want to hear that what they love is gone. It IS sad, but it's also the truth.
I suspect the ones who will leave have already left. Most of the “content” repost bots or bots posting from other places (TikTok, news sites,)
I noticed it seemed that unitedkingdom was mainly bots or the paid troll farms e.g. for the American evangelical movement etc. pushing anti lgbt, anit abortion..... Or at least that or all the pro choice, pro lgbt have jumped and the scum has flaoted to the top.
(cont'd) will die with the API change
load more comments
(2 replies)
If the protest wasn't working, we'd all still be on Reddit.
Dumpster fire still burning. Throwing gas on the flames did not fix the problem. News at 11.
This is actually far more self-destructive than Digg.
The Digg Exodus was mainly down to just stupidity on the part of a whole team and the users deciding they weren't going to take it. Rexxit is due to pure malice on the part of one person.
We're calling it Rexxit now? Reminds me a bit of this classic every time I hear a term like that.
That’s so funny because it’s so absurdly true to most issues, on both sides. We are so screwed.
The incredible thing is that the July1 day-of-reckoning for every 3rd party app user is less than 2 weeks away. Like, the fires will barely be extinguished when they throw gasoline on a heap of tinder. No time at all to let things cool off.
I mean, to be realistic Reddit will remain a top 0.1% site for years. But they're really making sure that its all downhill from here.
Except for the part of it composed of John Olivier pics -> THAT part is freaking awesome!:-P
I haven't heard it called Rexxit yet, and I wholeheartedly support the naming convention.
Yep, I don't think it's made it's way to lemmy or kbin yet but I know it's been passed around on mastodon hash tags for the last week or so at least.
I started calling it that on Reddit as soon as the app shutdowns were announced and have been pushing it for broader adoption. I'm sure some other people came up with on their own, too, but I'm happy to see it spreading whatever the source. :)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Actually watching a place self-destruct in real time.
Amazing.
I had always heard about the great digg migration, and now it looks like it is playing out again.
I'm just waiting for the class action suit for back pay.
People are still people, I suppose. :-|
Maybe somehow even more so today. (moar?)
Subs that are coming up with creative ways to protest is everything that is right with the internet. I hope more of them continue to make Lemmy/Kbin their new home. A lot of these mods are showing their true dedication and it's only deepening my appreciation for what we had (before Reddit irrecoverably broke itself). We seem to be in the bust of the social media boom/bust cycle. looking forward to things growing around here!
I got over leaving reddit for good but I'm a bit worried about the hellhole it's seemingly becoming with all the exposure it's able to give horrible ideas. I won't be surprised if it goes full fascist next week Twatter style.
That's what I predicted in some of my earliest fediverse posts. It's the most likely outcome
Probably another replay of the parable of the Nazi bar. But as the end of the article says, people who don’t want to hang out at the Nazi bar will just go elsewhere.
At least if things get to that point, we'll hopefully have had some time to really build up places for those people to go.
Yeah I dropped back in to UnitedKingdom a sub that was already highly astroturfed by the Tory party social.media workers (you could see them come on shift) now every post is just right wing. The abortion conviction thread posta recently was practically written by the right wing evangelic think tanks from the US.
Its a bit of a paradox because having normal users there also legitimizes the platform.
No one worries about Truth social being run by the right wing, because everyone already views it as an echo chamber.
Reddits reputation with catch up to its content, just like Twitter's
load more comments
(1 replies)
I love that Spez is just pushing the most active members of Reddit over here. Bring on the good mods.
Damn they went all fascist already?
looks like "how to lose your website’s community while losing your Section 230 liability shield" will be one of u/spez's greatest hits.
I'm not surprised. To my understanding, IAF was only permitting people post hardcore pornography, for example, so... they flew pretty close to the sun, there.
Obviously a pretty effective form of protest, in terms of being disruptive, but I can't imagine a world where that doesn't bring down the boot.
not quite they basically said they would only enforce Site wide rules and let the users vote what content they wanted. bots came in posting only fans nonsense that mods keeps out then the community picked up and went with it. I am not saying they didnt encourage it but they didnt "only permit it". mods are a lot like many other hidden jobs from refuse collection to IT operations teams, everyone thinks they don't do a lot until they stop working and the shit builds up.
load more comments
(10 replies)
I’ve always wanted to watch the downfall of a social media platform. I missed digg so now is my chance haha
There was Google+, which happened a few years ago, but it didn't get used all that much to begin with, and Google tried to push it on everyone, making it even more unpopular.
load more comments
(1 replies)
More hubris at the Snoo Platform
And so, the popcorn still tastes good!
Replacing the leaders of opposition subreddits and silencing them by banning them?
Hmm... sounds like a certain political system employed by an asshole with a funny Kaiser mustache over a century ago.
view more: next ›