cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/25185
It started as an answer to a comment, but then I figured it might be worth a post on it’s own.
So here you go:
The blackout was not noticeable in terms of engagement. There were plenty of threads that still got tens of thousands of upvotes, so the frontpage didn’t look more empty than before. There were just some missing subs and an occasional reference to the blackout on the subs that were closed. The impact was much, much smaller than people here and over at lemmy suggest. Of course your personal frontpage is a lot more empty if you subscribed to the subs that are part of the blackout. It’s absolutely not the case for /all though.
Additionally, the blackout trackers are confusing. They show how many subs went black in relation to a total amount. Many people, me included, at first thought the total was the actual total amount of active subs, while in reality it was only the subs that pledged to close down. Reddit has up to 140,000 active subs, so in fact not even 5% closed.
The attempt to show that reddit is generally uninteresting without a certain part of mods and users failed.The API/3PA changes affect like 5-10% of users, so for most this isn’t even a problem. I was really surprised when I found out about that number yesterday, because i thought it would be more like 20-30% for whatever reason. Every time there is a discussion about 3PAs that fact is omitted, so that the problem seems larger than it is. Why should the overwhelming majority that doesn’t use 3PAs care about that topic?
The company doesn’t consist of total morons. The user base of reddit is known to have a certain amount of people who are able to organize a protest network (think back to the net neutrality protest). They knew this was going to happen and it was already priced in. They stay on their path because reddit will be more profitable than before. They are losing troublemakers (aka people who want to have a say in their company policies aka us) with this move and will probably gain a multitude of new users with whatever they are aiming for. Everyone is asking why they have 2000 employees. Well, a bunch of them are surely hired in the marketing department. I assume they studied that shit and know exactly what they are doing. They certainly have business psychologists, marketing experts, data scientists.
To reword what I’m trying to say here: Instagram et al aren’t that huge because they do what the users want, but because the companies know how to shape a service to cater to the majority of people. Reddit will do the same. In capitalism, going public is the logical step for a company to scale with their amount of clients. Catering to shareholders is inseparable from that, so rationalization is inevitable. The users who recognize that seem to be a minority. This minority is moving to the fediverse now, which, to put it in a more optimistic light, is kind of a win-win situation.
- I’m starting to care less about all that. I reflected about my reddit usage and figured that I mostly subscribed to smaller communities anyways. I rarely commented in subs that regularly got more than 1000 upvotes for their contributions. Having hundreds of comments under a post gets annoying fast, because you’ll be having a hard time being part of a conversation and there is no way to find out if the thing you wanted to say wasn’t already said anyways.
Posting was already starting to get annoying in medium-sized subs. I asked a question about fungus gnats in my plant pots, specifically pointing out that I want to use chemicals and not nematodes. Guess what? About 30 people recommended nematodes anyways. I don’t want this low quality spam, so I’d rather have a smaller community where people read before posting and not comment for the sake of commenting. I’m also okay with the Fediverse having multiple communities about identical topics. The mycology subs on reddit where flooded with ID requests of the same mushrooms multiple times a day, so people cared rarely to help identifying, because of course there is no incentive to write the same thing multiple times a day. Having that phenomenon spread out between multiple communities will take the load of a single community and their mods to handle these low effort posts. Yes, having really small communities is shit because nothing happens and it gets a self-enforcing effect until everyone leaves. Having huge communities sucks because of the reasons I named. Medium-size are the best. A few thousand subscribers, a few threads a day, a few dozen comments per thread. That’s my personal optimum for the communities I want to interact with.
- I don’t think the Fediverse will grow rapidly and I don’t think it needs to. We saw the rapid growth of mastodon after apartheid clyde took over twitter. The rapid shrinking of the active userbase a few weeks after was seen as a proof of its failure. But why is hardly anyone talking about the fact that the userbase three-folded compared to before? Sounds like a huge success to me, something any for-profit company would dream of. The same will happen to “reddit alternative”-services. We saw an influx of users in the last days (I was part of that), we will see another influx around July 1st and when old.reddit is shut down. Surely some decline here and there, but most probably constant growth when looking at a larger timescale the more the idea spreads and the more content is generated.
The shittification of for-profit platforms will continue indefinitely, users will always be driven away from them. Services come and go, there will be new trends, older concepts will be seen as outdated. It has always been like this, it will happen to services on the fediverse, too. But the fediverse as a general structure has huge potential, because it’s a perfect base to adapt to these changes. The widespread confusion about how it works will sort itself out by more and more people understanding it and explaining it to their peers. It had to be done with internet/email 20 to 30 years ago, it still has to be done with things like 2FA. I’m a tech-savvy person and still find a lot of functions on the Instagram app unnecessarily confusing, but its one of the most used apps worldwide. Confusion will not stop people from joining a cool thing.
So, I guess I got you until the half of my post and you thought I would only be ranting about the situation. But its the opposite: as a matter of fact I’m firmly on the optimistic site of things :)
I’ve long since grown cynical and given up hope of affecting meaningful change on such a massive scale, social networks are just too big and people are too contrarian and stubborn to change. The best you can do is foster community on a small scale, find a niche subject, a nice group to hang out with and make the best of it while trying to ignore the outside world as much as possible. The protest at reddit might not do anything in the long term but maybe it was enough of a boost to kbin and lemmy for them to take off in some smaller capacity.
This is why I’ll be trying to switch to the fediverse as much as possible, at least as an experiment. It’s very interesting and promising tech that I want to see work out even if it’s not perfect. As long as there are some other like-minded people here and steady influx of news that I’d otherwise get from reddit, I realized I don’t really need that site anymore.
I am too, however one of the differentiating qualities of Reddit was it’s scale. The “hive mind” of posts being visible to such a broad audience is that you’d sometimes run into insights into niche experts on obscure topics. If the audience is too small, those posters don’t encounter the question, and we lose the opportunity to see them share their insight into the topic.
I do hope the fediverse eventually scales to a point where serendipitous interactions like that can start happening again. It’ll probably take a fair bit of time after the Reddit diaspora for the public to make their way to one instance or another.
Yeah, the thing I’ll miss the most is that most of the niche gaming subreddits were often visited or even maintained by game devs themselves, you could interact with them and get fresh updates since they’d post them to reddit directly. From indie games to sometimes large games like warframe or guild wars 2 as well!
The subreddit was a community rather than just a link aggregator in this way. Fediverse is still very far from becoming that mainstream, not even mastodon has managed to pull people over in such a capacity and musk tried much harder than spez to make twitter a hellscape. But we’ll see, it has to start somewhere, reddit can’t last forever. I hope.