Maybe all of those in favor of the protests kept their word and only those who are against it remain?
I don't miss Reddit. I checked some comment sections and holy hell is it toxic compared to here. I think part of that is because of what you've mentioned in your comment.
I used to work for this major company, biggest in my country by far.
Whether it was going well or poorly, they tended to offer severance packages to "cut back" on their staff, to appease the grotesquely overpaid consultants that analysed their finances.
What tended to happen, was that the most qualified people, who had no issues finding another job (often better paying), took those packages (I took home a one year salary after having worked there almost three, then had two months vacation and started a better paying job), which left those who didn't really have other options, those who did the bare minimum and had a lot of useless meetings.
I guess that's what reddit is heading for. They are alienating those who contribute the most, the content creators, the mods and the ones who like to engage others. They will be left with their bots, lurkers, racists, reposters and porn-spammers.
Good riddance.
Good for you! I recently changed jobs to a more stable position after asking for years to be put on full time staff at my old one. Once they filled a position with an outside hire instead of bringing me on full time, I knew it was the end of the road. Now I get paid almost twice as much plus amazing benefits to do about half the work.
Completely agree. I'm kinda hoping the substance of reddit just moves to lemmy and none of us will have to deal with so many tools and trolls.
Ever tried having a discussion in any of the default subs? If your opinion differentiates from the hivemind you will be downvoted as spam, without any responses. It completely defeats the purpose of a "discussion"
holy hell is it toxic compared to here
I cannot agree more! I went to reddit (wirhour an acc) and just... wow. Did it got worse or was I always blind to how awful that place was?
I think you are seeing some withdrawal symptoms honestly. People are addicted to scrolling for their next dopamine hit. When that's taken away they get cranky. Add the anonymous nature of being online and things get toxic real fast.
I think you are exacly right.
Cranky
is the best word to describe it and your explanation as to the reasons sounds reasonable. I believe that people will also get more frustrated when they notice less quality posts and comments...
I was IP banned from Reddit so I only got to use it without an account for the last few months. It's very toxic. The front page (not logged in) is so fucked.
I don't miss Reddit.
I miss my smaller and niche subs. I don’t think I’ve waded into the default subs in a very long time.
Oh well, to everything there is a season, right?
I think this might actually be the case. Let's see how things work out. Lemmy surprised me as a proper alternative it's just not as content rich as reddit at the moment. Something about chickens and eggs.
Let's just expand and improve it further than the original lemmies did. Don't be afraid to post content, heck scrape content and make this the better option. People will follow content.
I just switched over to lemmy from reddit, and it is much nicer here isn't riddled with ads and toxicity. I just hope that more users do join over here, since there were a few subreddits/people I followed and would still like to see there updates/posts
This comment is incorrect as well.
The people that cared left and what's left behind is people that wouldn't leave anyway and the strike only bothers them.
This person is living in a bubble and can't see further than their nose.
we have had the first wave - and its gone well. second wave is incomming on or about the 30th - probably smaller, but no less committed (long term). after that its a war of attrition.
You say smaller, but I'm thinking a lot of people will realise that their clients actually don't work anymore on that date 😂
Yeah I think they're underestimating how many people just won't use the official app. The people who use Apollo, RiF, Relay, etc. are pretty attached.
I know for me reddit is just the app on my phone that I press when I'm bored now. I figured when the app doesn't work anymore I'll just find entertainment elsewhere, which is how I found the fediverse. Now that I'm here the whole concept of decentralized interconnected communities has totally sold me on the project.
The problem with reddit, Twitter, twitch, etc. as I see it is that they're all just trying to profit off their users somehow. That's not conducive to fostering healthy communities of people. I think this whole thing is the future of social networking, take the big corps out of the equation.
I feel like a lot of people are forgetting about survivorship bias as well. If all the people who supported the blackout left Reddit, then the only people left would be the ones who aren't in favour :)
This is a very good perspective. I haven't been on Reddit since the blackout started. Probably would have gone back as well but the AMA comments were the final straw for me.
Honestly Spez's attitude in general towards the entire community is what drove me away. I don't really care that much about the 3rd party apps personally. I do use one occasionally, but I primarily use the website. However, I don't think the users, mods and developers are being unreasonable here in what they're asking for and he basically just spat in their faces, lied to and about them, and then pretended he was willing to discuss and work with them while his actions pretty clearly showed that he actually had no intention whatsoever of actually doing anything of the sort.
If you're not willing to budge, just say that. Don't lie to my face while very clearly doing the exact opposite of what you're saying. If you don't want 3rd party apps anymore, just say that instead of promising to work with developers and then basically giving them the middle finger when they try to communicate with you about it. That sort of thing shows exactly what he thinks of the community that has built his company for him and that's the reason he can shove what's left of reddit right up his ass as far as I'm concerned.
I think people are seeing Reddit as their only solution right now due to the lack of awareness of this place. It's been a bit sad to see all the news articles written about the event but very few plugs for alternate options to visit.
I've been telling people, the only way this works is if communities migrate somewhere else. Every single blacked out subreddit needs to post their new location on a site other than Reddit. Otherwise people will just stay on Reddit and wait or visit/make new subreddits.
I just wonder if all the anti Lemmy posts I've seen have been Reddit employees
Funny you mention that, I found out about Lemmy specifically from a dude who was being downvoted to hell for even mentioning it as an alternative. So glad I decided to look into it I love this place and the whole idea of the fediverse in general.
I understand that the fediverse isn't the most intuitive thing to understand, and that many people won't immediately understand it, but I've seen so many comments saying that it's too confusing (even in response to direct links to instances with the simplest explanations). There has to be an astroturfing campaign of some kind going on
The hardest part for me was realizing how shit Google search is without appending reddit.
Someone made a firefox plugin that redirects to archive.org Wayback Machine cache version of reddit:
All of these subs should have been linking to a comparable Lemmy community instead of just saying they were protesting. The simple fact of the matter is that the lemmyverse is not mature enough of a platform to actually be a reddit replacement. It needs to get a lot of the kinks worked out and it needs a much better onboarding. Hopefully it can take these new users and steadily grow and while they grow they can fix these issues.
The fediverse is the way. I’m not smart enough to say if it’s the best option, but it’s a hell of a lot better than a profit driven monolith run by out of touch investors. Reddit won’t implode but it won’t be the same as it was even a week ago. This decentralized structure is what the internet wants to be.
This person can suck it. I was a big time Reddit fan (mostly a lurker) but I decided to continue my boycott of Reddit as long as u/spez is in play and even when he leaves they would need to do a lot to get me to go back. The Fediverse still has some work to do with QoL features but overall it is a less toxic world than Reddit and refreshing to take part in. When mlem and other phone apps really get going I think it will really attract a lot more users as a lot of folks are phone only users and we'll see the Fediverse really take hold.
I used Reddit because I was bored and watching tv. I barely interacted. I am interacting on Lemmy. There was a lot of angry, toxic people on Reddit. So I am glad they are staying there
Under lots of the "we're back, let's talk what's next" announcements, comments pop up that say basically - "ah well, guess that's it, just use the app, it's great" and they get positive rating, where a week ago they'd be downvoted to oblivion.
I guess everyone for whom this was actually important, has already found an alternative and at most is waiting for their 3rd party app to break.
I have noticed this so much today. I pretty much lived in r/hockey for the past 5 years. They had a vote and decided to black out for the 48 hour protest. Once it was clear that the vote was in favor of blacking out (and that the championship deciding game could be played during the blackout), people started pleading to move the blackout to after the championship was decided, which completely defeats the purpose of the protest.
Well, during the blackout, the championship was decided. Now that it's open again, everyone is again flipping out about how pointless the protests were, and how we ruined their experience of watching the championship game.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I generally watch hockey because I like watching hockey. I feel like you might have a social media addiction if not being able to browse reddit ruins the experience. Crazy stuff.
Eh, I used Reddit daily for 14 years, and quit cold turkey. The first few days were rough, but between the feddiverse and inoreader, I'm doing fine.
Sure the communities I left behind were much larger, but honestly the responses I get here are of much higher quality.
Not going back to Reddit ever, too much bs.
Reposting something I wrote in another community I hang out in, but it feels appropriate to the topic:
I won't pretend "Reddit is dying" or anything of the sort, but I have noticed something interesting (that is maybe something I should've noticed long, long ago), and that is that subreddits have an insane concentration of whiny entitled lurkers that seem to want content catered and spoonfed to them.
During this whole debacle, I've seen creators and enthusiasts that drive the traffic be perfectly content creating elsewhere because it was more about expressing their passion of a topic than cultivating some kind of audience. No matter the alternative they chose, they have plenty of outlets for their creation. But everyone else hates this. All of the bitching about blackouts that I've seen haven't been "man I wanted to post cool shit" but more "where am I supposed to get cool stuff from?".
In general, what I've seen is a slight decline in activity, but a sharp decline in quality. Comparatively, my experience in Lemmy thus far has been that people creating were fine moving elsewhere to do their thing, and while communities are still small, I've seen a lot more long-form, thoughtful and respectful discussion because everyone there was a creator and enthusiast about that topic. Looking at the profiles of people commenting, they've typically posted at least once in that community already.
Meanwhile on Reddit, since the blackout wore off on certain subs, I've seen a lot of this:
[In the original, here would be an image of a typical current comment thread in a blackout-related post, but the context of it is explained below anyway]
Where people who bitch about the blackout because "but I wanted to discuss x!!" are then invited to discuss exactly that, and the conversation goes something along the lines of
"I wanted to discuss x!"
"Oh cool, me too. I like x y z about it, though I preferred if x was like this instead, and maybe z could be polished a little more"
"Well, idk I like it"
"ok 👍"
or just
"i like this"
"i like this too 👍"
because they don't actually have any proper formulated thoughts or opinions on the subject beyond surface-level observations, brand identity or attachment, or if they do have them, they don't have the drive to create or lead conversations about it and just lurk waiting for said content and thoughts to be delivered for them.
Which makes the already bad state of egregious repost bots rising to the top because people keep upvoting the same topics over and over even worse.
In a way, I guess it's kinda similar to what happened with 9gag when that hit critical mass.
To expand on this, I also find it interesting and perplexing just how far that entitlement goes. Moderators are on the verge of losing critical tools, and they're essential in maintaining the quality of the discussions held. Creators create the topics of discussion, and are the main driving force in setting the baseline quality of said discussions, and as power users are more likely to be the ones to depend on third party apps to create the content people browse.
Both seem fine with the situation, and/or migration, and very understandably go "Hey we feel disrespected on this platform and are moving to x where we feel we can thrive better without external influences deriding our community" and lurkers, who contribute nothing and have the least barrier of entry because they essentially just need to change the url they search the same terms in, stomp their feet and cry "but I want you to discuss things for my entertainment HERE!!!" like two year olds.
Edited to add, here on Lemmy:
I'm hopeful that this situation will show moderators they can curate a dedicated community anywhere with similar (actually relevant) post flow and quality, but without enduring the abuse of the platform they host it in and a bunch of on-lookers. I really hope they don't buckle in the name of "but we're already established / have so many people / are such a good resource" because all these things can be true elsewhere without receiving death threats or mod mail spam for doing the right thing.
I don’t understand. Maybe it’s my adhd and lack of object permanence, but I have been so unbothered by the lack of Reddit.
I bought a plant today. I’ve never bought a plant. I bought cats before buying a houseplant. I’m pretty stoked—and it’s mostly because I was scrolling through Reddit that I got up to do it.
I'm getting downvoted in the /r/gis sub for agreeing with the mods that there should be an indefinite shutdown. It seems all that are left on the site are people simping for /u/spez. Some person even called me a "fucking idiot." Glad to be off that toxic dumpster fire of a website.
I knew a lot of people would follow spez and toe the company line, just like they did with Twitter. I don‘t mind, I‘d rather hang out here without all them anyway.
I noticed that. I have been really had made a comment saying something along the lines of me disagreeing with mods going public after only 2 days and got downvoted like crazy but not three days ago it would of been the other way. Just honestly done with that site anyway so going to download wikis from the subs that come back and be done with it.
I guess it might be because those of us who actually do support the blackout tries to keep staying away until things changes, while a lot of the people on Reddit right now have been content starved for a few days and just waited for the subs to open again (and thus does not want to see them shut down again).
Personally I quite like it here on the fediverse and am not in any way in a hurry to go back to Reddit any time soon.
