“Protest and dissent is important,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the AP. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything.”
“Protest and dissent is important,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the AP. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything.”
Yep. Because them forcing/strong-arming subs to reopen definitely speaks to the Reddit admins believing this is not changing anything.
Even if a vast majority of people don’t protest because they’re simply lurkers, the problem is it’s the power users, the ones who generate quality content and moderate their subs for free who are protesting.
If I were Reddit, that’s the bit I’d be worried about.
I actually think they’re being realistic to say this will blow over, but from their perspective, not ours.
Power users are looking for alternatives, but inertia will keep a lot of users for them, and I’m sure many of the lazy “I have nothing to hide” people that think user tracking and targeted ads are just fine don’t even care about this. And moderators are replaceable, even by dictatorial fiat. I expect there must be a lot of would-be “little kings” ready for the “prestige” of moderating subs they like.
I expect Reddit to lose a lot of their best users, but they don’t need them. They just need eyeballs to serve ads to. As a business, it’s not necessary for Reddit to have good content, just to serve a lot of content of any quality. A large shithole is still a profitable shithole, and I think they’re fine with being a profitable, lobotomized shithole.
Long term it will be harder to keep people around if the quality content is somewhere else. At this point, it’s probably too early for most people to be interested in joining this space, but if over time this is where the content is, then more people will switch. Otoh, repost bots will keep things looking alive, so casual lurkers might not even notice. But if someone is just worried about quarterly bonuses, so what if they website dies a slow death over the next couple years?
Now its well established, like facebook, i think it’ll just settle to a rump of users who want the convenience of downloading an app and just getting straight on.
It’s not like reddit’s main characteristic was quality if the first place, it was the massive size and momentum that made it the de facto place to go to if you need to find a community or any info. It is definitely not going to die, especially if it’s just the users rioting and not the actual content creators that add OC to reddit. I’m just hoping this whole thing is enough of a kick to get alternatives like kbin and lemmy started, reddit doesn’t have to be gone for us to have a nice community here alongside it, it’s just a question of whether we have enough people to make it so.
I agree. I’ve left reddit and ended up here in the fediverse, i wouldn’t use official app and hate adverts.
My wife, who’s a regular lurker and occasional poster, uses official app and didn’t even know any protest was happening as it didn’t disturb her little corner. She and those groups will just carry on.
Plenty of us are done and out. But enough will stay for it to ‘blow over’ as well, as u say
Until all of us slowly put the pieces together, get content going, and then you tell your wife hey this is actually really good now you should check it out, and then she too leaves in a year or two or three or whatever.
You’re not wrong about inertia. Short-term nothing will change, but with a much less stable foundation of power users generating and moderating good content, quality will drop.
In the long-term a significant drop in quality will mean a drop in users, particularly if something else of better quality shows up.
If your strategy us being a shithole, then you’d better hope nothing better shows up, because that’s the bet you’re making. Historically that’s rarely the case - something better always comes along eventually.
Honestly, that would be similar to the Twitter Migration. A lot of the good users left, and a ton of eyeballs remained at Twitter. Twitter became worse, Mastodon got better.
Reddit will lose a lot of the best users, keep a bunch of eyeballs. If the best users come to the fediverse, then it’s still a win for the fediverse because they’ve made it better here.
In the end it seems like Lemmy is going to be like Linux. A small userbase but dedicated one, and the community and website should hopefully catch up soon the same way Linux improved over the last few decades.
And like Linux on desktop, our marketshare might be small, but it should be more than enough to keep us going. Linux don’t need to dominate the desktop market for us to use it, neither does this website.