Why Reddit Will Win

> And in those 48 hours, where have you gone for information?

There's lots of alternatives, even if they aren't reddit shaped. For tech news I came to HN. For political/national news I went to my preferred news site (it doesn't have comments and honestly that felt healthier). I suspect TikTok got an uptick in people looking for memes, xvideos got an uptick in people looking for porn, and so on. Reddit isn’t the best place for most of the things it offers.

Switching off reddit fully is harder. It took quite a lot of time and effort for my to find my preferred subreddits, moving off will be the same. Besides the point of the protest was for Reddit to survive so people who love it can keep using it. Killing third-party apps feels like an unwanted deal breaker for many. That's why it was a short term black out instead of a permanent farewell.

And in those 48 hours, where have you gone for information?

I have been testing this using uBlock Origin with -> Preferences -> My Filters

    # Block Reddit Experiment
    ||redd.it^
    ||redditblog.com^
    ||reddit.com^
    ||redditinc.com^
    ||redditmail.com^
    ||redditmedia.com^
    ||redditstatic.com^
    ||redditstatus.com^

Thus far I have only ran into one search result that was blocked though perhaps I may not be in the primary audience or use-case of search engines.

Blackout of any serious length will eventually get to their ad revenue. This will impact the IPO materially. Users leaving will eventually leave the site as a shell of its former self. Post IPO won’t be pretty. Personally I can’t wait to short it and also watch the WallStreetBets crew begin the immolation.

what does “win” even mean in this context? i think there’s about a 0% chance that reddit reverses course on API access.

reddit is obviously not going to cease to exist. the only question is how much, if at all, the blackout and departing users costs them.

if very popular subreddits stay private, reddit either has to accept that or depose the existing mods and open the subreddits again. obviously, this has the potential to reaaaallllllly piss off folks.

it’s a loss for all parties imo. but whatever, most subreddits are a cesspit of low-effort repetitive content where actual conversation is promptly downvoted.

i don’t know what the answer is but i’d happily give up reddit in favor of a few high-quality narrower communities.