Let's see if it continues through July and August.
I'm hopeful, but there is still a lot of content engagement over on Reddit. It doesn't seem like it's struggling all that much from a surface level observation.
It will probably drive away a lot of adults, though. Even if they are unaware of the Fediverse or don’t consider it an acceptable substitute for Reddit, they won’t stay if the threads are dominated by bored teens screwing around.
It’s already bad enough. On my single visit back a few days ago it struck me that the largely ignorant and unperceptive comments I was reading were probably written by kids who were just killing time and didn’t actually have much interest in the topic at hand.
A flood of children at the same time as an exodus of the type of users who actually upload good content to Reddit could definitely set up the conditions for a steady bleed of users away from the site, though. Especially with moderators' ability to actually do their job being impacted by the API changes.
Also worth noting that reddit control the metrics that they release for a lot of this.
There's no real measure of good engagement vs shallow engagement, so they can find a way to show that user visits are up even if the worthwhile content is starting its slow slide. Shit, i probably used to visit reddit once a day for 12 hours, but now i visit 5 times a day when i instinctively enter the URL.
So the metrics that reddit controls are showing that things are going down. How bad must things be that even reddit can't hide it from their metrics now?
If we could truly measure good vs shallow engagement, I wonder how much worse these numbers would be.
I think most of these are third party metrics collected from ad services, we've seen a few choice ones from reddit about how little traffic has dropped but of course Reddit will find ways to express an ever rising metric until they can't.
Facebook somehow reports near magical user growth, but 90% of the people I'm connected to it barely seem to be there.
I strongly suspect, but can't prove, that the 80/20 rule applies to reddit. I expect 20% of the users create 80% of the content and engagement, and that even if only 1% of reddit leaves it's almost certainly coming out of the productive 20%. However i'll bet Reddit will never start openly sharing stats about how engaged the top quintile of their users are, because that provides too much insight. Much better to talk about monthly active users and count those of us that flip over there by mistake or for one community we can't replace here.
The largest ones like r/pics are still protesting iirc (protest engagement seeming to bring in less ad revenue than normal traffic) and some large ones like r/Minecraft have shutdown. (Someone else made a good point about the biggest subs not having particular tribes and thus the mods are theoretically easier to replace than a smaller knit community - but the ones currently in charge are still trying.)
Engaging over protest content seems to still be hurting reddit where it counts. Some subs have gone completely to normal (and this is what reddit is trying to promote on r/all) but it seems not enough.
This is (maybe) the "beginning" of the end for Reddit, not the "end" of the end. The big change isn't Reddit, but here.
When Digg fell, everyone moved to Reddit. When this API situation started there was not an obvious new solution to move to. Lemmy/KBin were mentioned but not readily accepted due to concerns with the content and capabilities of the fediverse. That is changing quickly, and the next time Reddit screws up, we will have much more active communities, quality apps, and fewer bugs.
@abff08f4813c The main thing about all this is that there were no alternatives to Reddit until now. We needed a good push and reason to leave but never had a tangible alternative with nothing even showing up in Search results worth checking out. Now we do, All these big corps are screwing themselves, and we now have a BETTER alternative than all of them. So keep screwing up, Reddit, we have a place to go now. Keep screwing up, Twitter, Google, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Imgur, and all others that will soon follow suit.
They are seeing a decrease in usage since ChatGpt came about. They had implemented a network wide no AI generated answer policy, but after seeing their number declined decided to blame the mods for removing and banning users who were posting AI answers.
They refuse to show any data that supports their claims (that the mods banning users accounts for the decrease in usage), have told mods in private that they can no longer enforce the rule, but still want the rule to be in place.
They have continuously said one thing and done another, slowing eroding moderator and user trust. You can checkout the meta stack overflow site for the entire situation.
I usually criticize these journalists for being a step or two behind the actual news with regards to social media movements. In this case though, at least they clearly state they are simply reviewing the past events.
As a result of that one little disclaimer line, this is actually a decent article and a reasonable bit of reporting. Even managed to be pretty impartial. 8/10.
Eh… They chose to use the email protocol to send each emoji?! So external users or third-party clients (or school and work accounts for some reason) will be spammed. Won’t a bunch of gmails get marked as spammers then?
Thanks :). I’ve actually been looking for the RSVP stuff and I wasn’t sure which RFC to look through (wasn’t sure if it was in the CalDAV one or the iCalendar one… and they’re weirdly huge). I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction!
Also was curious how they were implementing reactions in e-mail. I actually think it’s a good feature, and it’s one that’s slowly been making it into XMPP and stuff. Emoji reactions and stuff sound kind of dumb and like a “whatever, who cares?” feature, but I find that on platforms like slack they’re actually a really good way to deal with quickly confirming something / finalizing decisions / quickly gauging the opinion of a group. I think a huge problem with e-mail and instant messaging is that they can be quite noisy, so having a “quiet” way to respond without having a thread explode is actually pretty welcome in my opinion.
Wow if there’s one thing I really want to pay extra for is to have a computer randomly pick my music based off what I like. That’s way better than what Spotify has already been doing: randomly picking music based off what I like! True innovation. Will the service also come with some sort of slider or bar that I can use to change how loud or quiet a song is? Maybe some other buttons that can let me skip or go back to a song, even pause and play it to my liking?
They don’t think these features are compelling. The purpose of this is to create a new pricing tier so that later they can make it the (not-actually) ad-free tier and make the current (not-actually) ad-free tier have (more) ads.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.
In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.
I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.
What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.
Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.
But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.
And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted.
I’ve noticed this too. Almost all of the subs I regularly go to have been filled by obvious “seed”-content posting by brand new and never before seen in the sub accounts, with upvotes equaling some of the highest voted (for the sub). It actually pushed me to migrate to Lemmy more.
I’m really fascinated at how in the lead up to this they consistently alienated moderators and users so into reddit that they looked up 3PAs. Like they really went ham on the users that make their site work and go all shocked pikachu when people leave/disengage/protest. That’s a level of social incompetence I can’t conceptualise when the stakes are this high.
Extremely well said, and I would repost you to the bestof magazine if I didn't think bestof communities were lame.
As I keep reading about all of this unfolding, a phrase that keeps rattling around in my brain: oppositional defiance disorder.
I am not a doctor or psychiatrist so I am not being too serious by bringing it up, but I am facetiously curious about who has the worst ODD among all the players of this drama.
Is it Steve Huffman and his refusal to back down? Is it the rexxitors who jumped ship on June 12? Is it the redditors who stayed to troll Huffman and his edicts? Or is it the redditors who stayed and are crafting a bespoke cesspool in snoo's carapace?
Huffman has always been a narcissist, and notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to people challenging him - the fact he'd go in and edit other users comments critical of him speaks volumes as to both his sensitivity to criticism and the levels to which he'll stoop. I think these tendencies and Reddit's slow turn towards autocracy were exacerbated with the Tencent investment, and has only accelerated as the site attempts to become profitable.
So, I was on reddit for over 11 years, but I didn't arrive there from Digg. I remember a big kerfuffle surrounding Huffman and his willingness to change critical comments, but I was fairly oblivious to the ramifications of all that. I think I was just largely enjoying the halcyon days of Pao where you didn't have to think about reddit's corporate structure too far beyond how skivvy Conde Nast was.
This current controversy I guess seemed more relevant to me because I exclusively used 3PA to access reddit. Back when I had iPhones, I was paying for one of the tiers of Apollo because I liked it so much. I am pretty sure I used to use alien blue way way back in the day. I used these mainly because reddit didn't have an app on offer at all at these times and reddit for mobile was just inoperably clunky to use. As a share of the market, I was already brand loyal by the time reddit finally saw the writing on the wall that there was a need for an app. Now that I'm on Android, I was using Infinity (mixed feelings there about the fact that Infinity kept operating and I've since migrated and deleted my reddit accounts). I still feel resolved in my decision to leave reddit out of the principle of it all, and solidarity with Christian's mistreatment even though my app of choice is apparently staying online.
You refer to the Tencent movement as a notable moment that shifted the course of reddit. Any other pivotal moments that come to mind for you @arotrios ?
"the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13" - what does that mean?
In the article, the full sentence is,
That "blackout" movement, which briefly caused Reddit to go down, dropped daily traffic by about 7% and the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13, according to the data shared by web traffic analysis firm Similarweb.
So basically the amount of time people spent on reddit dropped 16% between June 12 and June 13.
"Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million" - 52 million ?
Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it's about the number of visits.
Again, the full sentence is,
Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million on June 13, compared with averaging nearly 56 million in the days prior.
Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it's about the number of visits.
Looks like that number lines up with their reported DAU (daily active users) metric rather than site visits.
52 million DAU is about where Reddit was in the summer of 2021, per data on Statista. It also tends to vary up or down by a few million at each sample point, so we'd really have to see a long-term trend-line rather than a 2-week data snapshot to know whether the blackout had any real effect.
“Am I so out of touch? No… It’s the audience that are wrong”
I haven’t been to a traditional cinema in about 5 years. Home theatres are much better value. Can pause and rewind for bathroom breaks, don’t have to wear pants, can drink and eat anything I want. I don’t have to contend with people incessantly talking throughout the movie, there are no bored kids kicking seats and crying, I don’t have to pay for parking, and I can start and stop the film whenever my company and I want to.
I was excited when Disney+ started offering premiers at home. Them removing them wasn’t “training me”, I’m a patient person and I’m happy to wait to have my movie experience the way I want it when I want it.
Biggest example for me was waiting ~10 years to play Heavy Rain. I never owned a PS3 so I knew I’d have to either wait for a PC release (which I honestly thought would never be a thing after a while), or wait until I had a powerful enough PC to emulate it.
I don’t need to consume any media so desperately I can’t wait until it’s more convenient for me. I’ll be quite happy in the corner with some popcorn watching the inevitable shit show that will be GTA VI. I can’t wait for the neglected single player experience in favour of online cash grabs! I’ll pick it up on the cheap later on, thanks.
Well said. The disadvantages of going to the cinema far outweigh having to wait a few months to watch a movie at home. The studios should be leaning into this trend, not kicking and screaming that people aren’t going to the cinemas without fixing any of the downsides.
Honestly, while I'm happily settled here in the "threadiverse" and all that, I've seen that the main subs I used to visit and have now reopened, are all working about the same as before the protests. They were all basically niches, so they weren't as badly affected by bot comments and the such. We will see, however, if their moderation can still keep up after the 1st tho.
I feel like I'm seeing way less posts moving through Hot. I'll have articles from 13+ hours among my feed, where that used to not happen. A 6-7 hour gap would fully refresh the feed just about, whereas now if might be closer to 2/3s new.
Won't have much to compare to now, account wipe starts tonight.
Oh my gosh, I so hope they shot themselfes in the food, healed with an underlying infection, develop sepsis, recover from this and fetch mrsa in the hospital just to die from falling down the stairs.
@PenguinJuice Even if they were to back track on their decisions, they’ve shown us they can destroy it all just because they want to. The threadiverse will allow a bit more of checks and balances. I’m storing Reddit along with MySpace, in the hood memories I had there until the fire nation arrived.
It's a lot like Twitter. Twitter was doing alright prior to Musk. Their user base was as strong and plentiful as ever. There have always been shitty users and toxic corners but Twitter did their best to downplay that and highlight the better parts of their platform. They did their best to walk that fine line between moderation and censorship.
But with Musk spending $44bn so that he could meme without consequence and restore accounts of politically powerful people to gain favor, along with him gutting all of the departments that did the moderation, the site has gone from a legitimate place to interact to a well known cesspool of toxicity that users and corporations are starting to shy away from. Turns out that getting rid of moderators might not be such a good idea.
There are still a great many users on Twitter who are actively participating and that won't change anytime soon. But the ratio of good content to bad has changed and Twitter's reputation both as a company and as a platform has been tarnished. Twitter isn't going anywhere, but many people have grown weary of the antics and moved on. And that's what we're seeing of reddit right now. The only difference is the simultaneous mass, organized exodus of users from reddit vs the more gradual enshitification of Twitter.
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