Technology

I don't care about fixing Reddit and I don't care about teaching Reddit a lesson. I don't care if the site buckles or continues to hold on and grow while they regulalry downgrade their service as they have been doing for the 10 years I've been an active user. No protest of anything Reddit has done has ever caused Reddit to reconsider what they're doing. Reddit does not care about anything because it's not a person. It's a business entity which will attempt by any means to maximise profit. Having a functional website or having human users or moderation at all are not strictly necessary to secure investment or generate ad revenue. Doing what investors want them to do, regardless of the actual effect it may have long-term, is what will get them investment now. That is more important to Reddit than everything else put together. There's no mastermind, no one's at the wheel, no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king. There's only the inevitable consequences of the collective decisions of businesspeople participating in corporate capitalism.

The main reason I don't care is that I don't have to care anymore. The Fediverse has been a breath of fresh air after a very long time.

AskHistorians is taking the approach of “blackout for two days, then read-only moving forward indefinitely.” I think that’s a good approach as it still removes the functionality of the subreddit while reminding people of what they’re missing out on due to the admins’ actions.

I know there are bigger subs, but AskHistorians is an absolute jewel in Reddit’s crown. For all the dumpster fire subs that raise controversy and drag Reddit’s image down, AskHistorians is the one sub that could always be pointed to as a sub with an inarguably positive impact. It’s also a sub in a unique position because its moderators are probably the hardest for Reddit to replace, because many of them are the historians that answer the questions, or have personal relationships with those that do. In addition most of the historians aren’t really Redditors, participating only on AskHistorians. Removing the current mod team and replacing them would absolutely 100% kill the sub forever.

Not that I have any faith in Reddit to do the right thing. I just think it’s interesting to realize just how different of a position AskHistorians in than the rest of the subreddits, being at the same time more impactful than their subscriber numbers show, while being fragile enough to be permanently broken if handled poorly. They are also one of the only mod teams I’ve see who have issued a list of actionable goals that Reddit can address.

Also it’s interesting to see that their participation in the blackout is almost entirely on Spez’s head. That’s some damn fine CEOing there, Lou.

This is just my personal opinion. The 2 day blackout for me, never meant for people to pack their bags and leave Reddit entirely. It's not a very easy task to do, and honestly, there is still lots of contents and friends back in reddit. Reddit can be sure that lots of people will simply come back, and spez will grinning while working his way to his beloved IPO.

However, the 2 day blackout has opened a new world of alternatives to Reddit. Now people know other places and other communities that can replace Reddit as a whole. Yes, Reddit will still be an influential website. Yes, Reddit will still be money driven. Yes, spez will not budge. But we can.

To me, Reddit will not crash, burn and crushed to ash. But rather, it's either went the FB way, relying to lots of ads and older demographics to sustain, or simply becoming Myspace or Digg, a distant memory that's only in name.

Just my 1/2 cents.

The blackout is definitely having an impact on Reddit traffic, especially the level of commenting on posts. Look at https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ and the posts and comments per minute. The comments are usually up to the top or above the number of posts and they are way down. Posts overall are way down as well.

I just checked reddark over 8400 subreddits are down, pretty much all of the big ones are closed down, that's crazy! I only had one reddit brain fart today and caught myself before, so I have no idea how things are there, but I do miss all the nature, castles and sculptures pictures from the stuff I followed.

Lemmy.ml is down. My main account is there, which is the one I use to moderate everything. I will try to migrate my account from one instance to another because lemmy.ml is not stable

I'm glad to see there's been more of a push for previously '48 hours only' subreddits to move to an indefinite blackout - but I wish that more of them had committed earlier. That leaked internal email shows exactly what I already expected; they just see the protesting Redditors as a bunch of whiny babies who they expect to give up after a couple days and forget the whole thing.

Only thing I’ve missed about Reddit is googling stuff by adding Reddit on the end of it! Ironically most of the stuff has been around server stuff for my Lemmy instance