178
How reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history: Did it, though?
(www.theverge.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
178 points (94.5% liked)
Fediverse
27805 readers
230 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Before the protest, going to /r/all would show you posts with ages between 30 minutes and 3 hours. Today, on /r/all, there isn't a post less than 10 hours old in the first 40 entries. The content has changed from primarily trending news interspersed with memes to about 90% memes and shitposts padded with a few soft news summaries and opinion pieces.
In comparison, my Fediverse feed has exploded. The quality of content is at the level of pre-Digg reddit, and the commentary at a significantly higher level. There's still not as much of an audience, particularly in niche communities, but it feels like that's changing quickly. It's clear to me that the creative drivers of reddit - the mods, the content creators, and the engaged commentators - have left, and that the traffic is being maintained by a mostly non-participating readership that uses Reddit as entertainment, not a community.
Reddit crushed the creative spirit of its most active populations. Whatever wins Spez is claiming, it's come at the cost of what made the site worthwhile to begin with.
That’s an interesting take. If reddit can claim victory, it would be a hollow one, even if the remaining mods do cave.
Reddit has been careful to set the goalposts entirely in the realm they control, they ensured that in public communication "victory" means having the remaining subs open up. Ultimately, they do have final say over what is actually served on reddit.com. However, what they cannot control is their users, the contributors who built their empire for free. And they did a piss poor job of keeping us around.
They can force mods out, but they won't be able to force them back in. As for users, I have no doubt they managed to push away the ones most resistant to monetization, but if that really was their strategy, whichever moron came up with that really needs to google the 1-9-90 principle.
It'd be a pyrrhic victory.
A note about niche community audience: the community count number only shows the number of poeple on your instance subscribed, not the total number. The only exception is if the community is on that server.
There is a PR for lemmy to make this a little more clear, but its not implemented yet.
Completely agree. I think it’s just going to become a very mainstream basic place for basic discussion, probably with a lot of mean comments, racism, bigotry, etc. It wasn’t that way when I joined and it had already fallen pretty far when I left last month.
It’s not going to die as a site but the community is already gone.