And saw a bunch of posts about the third party apps closing down, and lots of negativity about that whole fiasco.
… And I realized I hadn’t been there for a week… And frankly didn’t miss it. I am really loving the beehaw (and Lemmy as a whole) community. Thanks for being open, welcoming, responsive, engaging, and just generally nice people. I’m happy to be here. :)
I’m gonna stay on my 3rd party app until the June 30 midnight close… I want to try and witness one of the biggest tech crashes in modern history.
I really think reddit hubris has massively underestimated the user loss they’re about to feel.
FUCK Em’!… (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
You overestimate how many people use third-party apps. They are the (very) vocal minority. They may represent a majority of the content submitted, but there’s an arbitrary number of web users who don’t have an account (hi) in addition to all the casual users who just use the app.
Yes it’s vocal minority, but that local minority is the reason why silent majority have content that keeps them on reddit.
Not just content creation, but moderation / free labour
Yes, it’s also important, but lack of high quality content will hit way earlier.
I don’t think this is the death of Reddit, but I do think it’s the dumbing down of Reddit. A lot of the power users that spend all day interacting and posting are going to be the ones leaving. Reddit will turn from a social community back into a simple link aggregator with people posting articles and having the same discussions over and over again in the comments.
That’s basically what it is already on many of the largest subs. Hell they even recycle/repost the same content every 6 months or so
You are not wrong, but Reddit will never be the same. This whole IPO business is effectively the death of Reddit as we know it, to be replaced with a mediocre TikTok clone. It takes strong leadership among execs and ownership for profit-driven corporation to stay the course and remain successful.
Reddit has neither. Just a legacy and incumbency.
I think the key thing that will screw them is violating the trust of the volunteer moderator force that basically makes reddit what it is. I don’t think reddit appreciates how much of their business relies on a completely volunteer, unpaid workforce.
If the mods decide to quit en masse and and either stop moderating or turn subreddits private on their way out then reddit is done for.
Yeah. Though the third party users are probably are the heaviest users so probably have an outsized impact on the content of various subreddits. So no, I don’t think the lack of 3rd party clients and those users will kill Reddit, anymore than its killed twitter or Tumblr shennanigans has killed tumblr. That said I did just join today, and I do actually wonder given the death of 3rd party clients and the IPO when reddit will try to squash NSFW subreddits and posts. Thats the kind of thing I’d expect as they IPO and chase advertisers.
Average third party user creates more content than average redditor. Most mods use third party applications. That makes it different from Tumblr, where only nsfw communities were killed, so rare people that were there not for porn weren’t affected. On Twitter, it’s Twitters administration that moderates Twitter. On Reddit - it’s users who does it. And as i’ve said, most of them use third party apps. That’s how it’s different.
I share this attitude. Been on reddit for 17 years but am super sad to see Apollo go. That said, I use reddit on desktop with Enhancement Suite and it’s tolerable, after all the curation I have done on my subs. So it may be hard to leave, if I’m truly honest with myself. Dipping my toes in elsewhere to see what resonates, though. I’m super frustrated with the capitalist money grab and centralized social media problem reddit personifies. :(
old.reddit is definitely going soon too unfortunately. I thought I’d just use that, but reddit’s actions in the past few days have convinced me that after 10 years it’s time to go.
Ehh I doubt it’ll crash. Most major subs are modded by their own people. Worst case scenario they’ll overthrow the mods that blacked out, prop up some puppets and continue as if nothing had happened. Worst case scenario they lose 6% of their audience and recover it back in a few months of ads.
Honestly, even if it’s not a huge crash, it’s already shown a lot of people the better way of handling social media. Closer groups with access to a larger community. Seems far better than the monolith that is Reddit or Twitter.
The problem is default subreddits grow too big with no way to make it better once critical Mass is reached. I think federation solves Thar problem entirely, since it encourages interaction across more niche spaces.
You can handle growth, but you need to be strict about moderation, and a lot of people don’t want to do that for some reason.