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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on an article on this, but I'll just chime in here also... this Reddit protest has accomplished absolutely nothing. If you went on a holiday for two weeks during early June and came back - you wouldn't even know that there was a protest in the first place.

Lemmy got some exposure, as did Mastodon. But that exposure is very small. We're living at a time where people's attention span and focus is entirely depleted and nobody wants to move away from that which is already comfortable and familiar.

It's also a great example of how a whale can just swallow up the consequences because it is that big and that deeply rooted. Reddit is going full steam ahead towards its IPO with a huge (and it's clear now, a conscious) "fuck you" flag waving in the turbulence.

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I would have agreed with you based on the comment/post metrics, but on a personal level I've noticed that a lot of subs are the walking dead. Places like Not The Onion which have always had (too many tbh) submissions and reposts are suddenly basically dead.

I'm starting to suspect that whole comments, votes and views are driven by many people, it's actually a fairly small cadre who gather and post conte nt for everyone else to view, comment and vote on... and a lot of that seems to have stopped.

The impression I get is that Reddit is walking wounded at the very least, and that while the protest didn't accomplish much, it was in fact a small outcropping of a deeper issue. The blackout was the iceberg above the water, people just saying "screw it, I'm done" is the other 90% below the waterline.

Same in my experience. The tech scene, as with Twitter, has changed the most -- all of the tech subs I used to follow have slowed down considerably in the last couple of weeks. I suspect that we'll see another big hit July 1 when the API dies, and maybe a couple of days before when the big third-party apps kill their API keys.

Meme subs will rage on as always, but I honestly wonder how much of those are majority bot-generated content at this point. In the last couple of years there's already been a serious uptick in recycled content from prior years, same or similar subs, to harvest upvotes on accounts.

Much like Twitter, I suspect certain communities will linger on. Local city subreddits, cesspools that they are, seem to be going strong still. But I don't consider that much of a loss, it's basically a (slightly) better Nextdoor.

I suspect third-party apps make up a huge portion of power user interactions, simply because the alternatives on mobile are really crappy. I guess we'll see for sure on the 30th.

The subreddits that are more advice-seeking based (i.e. self-post only, no link submissions) seem to be okay and I have not found anything similar in Fediverse yet.

Nothing, really? I've been following "popular" and it's all low quality rage bate and reposts. New stories are molasses slow in showing up, the same stories will be there the next day or even the day after rather than a few hours. The subs I follow are mostly ghost towns. I'm thinking the research for your article is sub-par...

On the other hand, if you ever want to karma whore, this is your moment. The most bottom of the barrel submissions are getting crazy karma.

> I've been following "popular" and it's all low quality rage bate and reposts.

In my experience, that’s been the case for the big subs/most of the stuff that makes its way to r/all for the last several years. Like all other social media, anger seems to get the most engagement. But I haven’t used reddit since the end of April (when I got sick of the ragebait posts myself and uninstalled Apollo).

There's two effects of the protests.

There's the effect on reddit, I don't feel qualified to quantify it, but it's the smaller of the two.

There's the effect on every single competitor, it's a huge positive one.

Competitors can only grow so fast, infrastructure takes time to scale, communities take time to organize and build. The most similar reddit alternatives (kbin, lemmy, specialized forums) have been growing as quickly as they possible could under the circumstances.

There still not big enough to absorb all of reddit, but they are a lot closer than they were, because of the protest. That's a huge accomplishment, and a long term existential threat to reddit.

To say the "protest has accomplished absolutely nothing" is highly ignorant.

So, what has it accomplished? As I said, I am working on an article so getting all the perspectives would be great.

A lot of moderators have an over inflated ego and coupled with delusions of grandeur they think they can enact change when the reality of it is they are unpaid employees subservient to Reddit management.

When push comes to shove a majority of these moderators would rather hold onto their perceived fiefdom for some form of semblance of power and control in their life than growing a backbone, standing up for what they say they believe in and deleting their account in protest.

I think I made my point in the post you're replying to.

If you want quantified numbers I suppose you could view charts like

https://the-federation.info/platform/184 <--- Bunch of tabs at this site

https://the-federation.info/platform/73

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/commit-activity

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/activity/daily <-- Not sure how to generate nice charts from this one

But frankly, if you need me to tell you this, you aren't remotely qualified to write that article.

I get it if you have some personal issue with Reddit, but I don't think it's fair that you're pointing a gun at me and emptying the whole clip just because I asked a question.

Would you like me to retort to saying that I am incompetent to write this article? I don't think you would like that very much.

I mod /r/Scala and created /r/CanadaUrbanism and to be honest I didn't care all that much about the API changes, but the reaction to the mod protest by Reddit Admins has motivated me to block Reddit and not visit the site anymore. Specifically, the actions they've taken to remove mods that take the subs private, restricted, or allow NSFW content. There had always been the notion that the subs are owned by the creators/mods. Obviously not in a legal sense, but that so long as mods aren't violating sitewide rules they own the board they create. With Reddit admins removing mods and replacing them with their own it for me has changed the whole dynamic where I feel like I'm just doing Reddit's work for them rather than creating something myself when I create, maintain, or contribute to a sub.

For me it's just a last straw on the camel's back. The site has obviously gone severely downhill since pivoting from the old.reddit.com desktop-based site that focused on links and discussion, akin to a forum, to what it is now, an infinite scroll of half pics and gifs, half rage-bait. There is not much interesting discussion going on on Reddit these days, the change of the UX to prioritize mobile use has changed the entire nature of the site to favour short quips and less thoughtful posts. People on this board will often say things like "oh well at least if you go to your specific niche subreddits there is still good discussion being had", but even this is much reduced. Go to any long lived historically discussion-heavy board like say /r/Coffee, /r/LetsTalkMusic, /r/TheoryOfReddit, etc. If I look in the internet archive and go back 10 years, I generally find much more interesting conversations being had back then.

Reddit coasted for a long time on goodwill from the early 2010s, even though the current site and company seem pretty poorly run and stagnant.

This latest debacle killed that goodwill for a lot of us. Why bother contributing -- through moderation, posts, or even upvotes/downvotes -- to a site that clearly doesn't value the rest of us?

On the bright side, HN has continued to host decent conversations for years running now. There are a few decent communities growing on Lemmy, Tildes, and Squabbles as well. I'm excited for the distributed future, I think the Fediverse is going to provide a lot of decent competition in terms of hosting, UI, and moderation over the next couple of years. It's much needed after almost two decades of stagnancy from Reddit.

I'm just changing all my comments to the story of Streetlamp Le Moose, it'll at least take up resource space, and provide no real value for Reddit, and is kinda the Redditor thing to do.

> The most similar reddit alternatives (kbin, lemmy, specialized forums) have been growing as quickly as they possible could under the circumstances.

I'm a mod in a niche forum which suddenly got more popular due to Reddit's BS and trust me, it's a mess. We went from "not even I remembered to log in every month" to "multiple crashes due to excessive load".

We won't ever be a threat to Reddit, but the protest is definitely going to become a threat to my sanity...

Ok, maybe for some competitors it's a negative one, but for competitors interested in growing quickly it's a positive one.

I don't consider that space a competitor, it's just a fan-run forum for people to discuss some gaming stuff.

I still consider the growth of the forum as a net positive (because it's a cool space which has produced cool things in the past), but since it's running on spare time and money, our ability to absorb new users is limited. And won't scale really quickly, because we don't plan on making money out of it.

"Competitors can only grow so fast, infrastructure takes time to scale, communities take time to organize and build"

Are you using an IT structure from the 1990's? Are you funding it using mail in contributions?

If not the only restriction on how fast a platform can grow is entirely down to how fast it can draw attention and acceptance from the masses.

If I'm being honest here these other platforms are a significantly smaller threat to reddit than reddit is. The way the platform reward low value posts and punish any dissenting opinions in discussion threads does more damage to their brands than any wpuld be competitor.

Maybe in a world with an unlimited budget. I'm sure you're just thinking you spin up AWS with a million nodes and handle the traffic.

Not that database scaling can be an issue, or funding, or finding limits in your application.

Probably a junior dev without the required experience to really understand how hard it can be to suddenly and unexpectedly scale.

Why don't I strap on my money helmet and squeeze down into a money cannon and fire off into moneyland where money grow on moneys?

a platform with 50 million users doesn't die as a result of a 2 day blackout. MySpace and digg are still technically alive

this is probably reddit's biggest PR nightmare and this will make a permanent stain on the company.

Lemmy/kbin getting increased development is probably the best case scenario.

with the reddit sync dev and other devs making 3rd party clients we're going to see Lemmy be a viable alternative in the coming weeks or months.

I've already stopped using reddit on mobile. if they kill old reddit then my usage drops by over 90 percent

Digg was bought out for the name and is a news aggregate site without comments.

I'm trying to like Lemmy but it really needs a data dense "old.lemmy" interface. I doubt I'll stick with it...

Better chance than Reddit keeping old.reddit for another 2 years.

Also, with a non-hostile API, it's very much possible for somene to design such an interface

Well, Lemmy generally doesn't use much custom CSS outside of the standard Bootstrap 5 stuff, so writing one isn't too crazy.

You might find something here that floats your boat (you need the stylus extension): https://userstyles.world/search?q=lemmy (you might need to adjust on which pages these styles apply tho)

Have you tried kbin?

Have you tried customizing the compact layout to look like old.reddit?

- https://programming.dev/post/135335

- https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey

I'm only one person, but I'm currently on week 3 of abstaining from visiting reddit. I'm giving Lemmy a shot right now. It's tough for me to find the same quantity and quality of engaging communities, but hopefully that improves soon.

I’ve also been in the same boat but haven’t really given Lenny a shot because some of the instructions makes it unclear on where to go (federated, instances) for the experience I want.

I’ve genuinely been missing the “news” on communities I frequent. I’ve been spending way more time on HN, but it’s not the same when the specific communities arent represented here.

Genuinely curious on how your Lenny intro went.

Ditto on spending more time on HN, which is great for [semi-]serious discussions but not so great for bass guitar tabs and zelda totk autobuild recipes and japan travel advice.

When I search Lemmy, I see depressingly meager results like communities with only 23 members. That's smaller than my BBS days in the 1980s! I must be doing something wrong?

Nah, that's just the state of a new website and an age of internet that has been consumed by the top 100 sites, leaving scraps for the outskirts unless you look real deep. You go too niche on reddit and you'll find those triple digit communities as well with maybe one post a week at best.

Growth will be slow, and perhaps at some point previous browsers may become creators themselves to facilitate this.

It took me a while to understand Lemmy/Kbin but this is how I now think of it. ActivityPub is basically a tool for people to start clones. It's as if someone can just download the code and start running "reddit" on their own server. Their server then has it's own users and "subreddits".

This is where the ActivityPub comes in. It lets the server graft in foreign "subreddits" from other servers and work with foreign users. This is where the federation/defederating comes in.

Basically you want to join a server that has a server local community you like and that also has a good reputation amongst other servers in the fediverse.

Ultimately, the fediverse seems to be little more than not having to create a new account on every server. So picking your "home" server seems to be a little more important than the "pick a server, any server" hype.

Beyond that the main difference in servers is whether you prefer the lemmy or kbin user interface. (You can use kbin communities on lemmy and vice-versa)

I ended up signing up at programming.dev, and I have subscribed to a few communities on beehaw.org (much more established communities) and kbin.social. But so far it seems to all be tech related.

I was a super long time lurker. Never made an account but was on there hours each day for the past +15 years.

I stopped going during the protest and haven’t gone back since. It was the straw for me.

I suspect I am not alone in this.

At the same time Reddit seems to be worried people will delete their accounts and content - it's now impossible to delete anything, as it simply comes back.

Yeah, this I don't understand. It seems pretty stupid to do it but I don't know what their lawyers are saying.

As a form of nuisance I did request all my Reddit information[0] under GDPR and they're obligated to deliver on it.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

The idea of the protest ending after 2 days regardless of outcome always sounded fishy to me. It's like a strike that lasts 2 days regardless of whether the employer gives the employees the rights and/or pay the strikers were "demanding." The only thing a strike like that would do is convince the employer that the employees demands were not serious

In the beginning it wasn't meant to be a protest. It was meant to be a blackout to show everyone 'this is what reddit is like when the people you depend on leave' and make everyone aware of the issues, and it accomplished that in a massive way.

The protestors were the ones doing it until the proposed API changes were called off, but of course reddit smashed that by shutting down communities and replacing mods.

> It was meant to be a blackout to show everyone 'this is what reddit is like when the people you depend on leave'

Sorry but this is just revisionist history. If this was the intention them the mods and third party app users would have just taken 2 days off. They didn't do that, they set their communities to Private. It was a protest.

It's not "revisionist history", it's what happened. I was on Reddit for 3-4 hours each day and watched the entire thing very close. It was a way to show reddit admins who they're giving the middle finger to, and what reddit will look like when those people are gone. There's a reason it was called a "blackout" and not a "protest"... The protest wording only came up once the blackout had already started.

So really, the "protest" is your revisionist history.

I'm not the person you're arguing with, but I'm a decade old user that hasn't been on Reddit since before the blackouts started. As far as I'm concerned, the blackout and protests have always been the same thing.

I mean, some subs are still private, I believe others are still in malicious compliance mode, and in another week if you used a 3p app you will find it gone or paid only.

But sure, unless reddit mods were ready to walk en masse (because it would take a few weeks to get everything in order, and maybe months to re-stabilize reddit) this wasn't going to be some coup de grâce. It was always going to be either nothing or a slow death by 1000 paper cuts as the creators moved elsewhere.

>Lemmy got some exposure, as did Mastodon. But that exposure is very small.

I say that is a good thing. very small for reddit's scale is more than enough to create a network effect if all the cards are right. I don't think they were but I've seen worse hands in lieu of these blackouts.

I don't think the goal of any people leaving should be to pretend that there will be a 100% perfect replacement with all the bells and whistles and none of the bullshit. Rebuilding will take years and the best time to start was yesterday. If that sounds like work, then you see why "a whale can swallow up the consequences".

If I went on a holiday for two weeks and came back I wouldn't be able to tell you if there's still a reddit. That's how unimportant reddit has become over the last couple of years.

Are you perhaps looking at the wrong time scale? I wasnt around for it but as I understand the digg -> reddit transition took over a year.

My memory is of a week, maybe a couple.

It was less than a week into Digg v4 when the front page was just a ton of Reddit links. I think that was pretty much the end, but don't have traffic/user numbers.

IIRC there were always small exoduses but the biggest flip happened when a major version update happened and Digg started shilling paid posts at the top of the page. Folks moved over to Reddit en mass and Digg essentially died in a matter of weeks.

At least in my experience I've noticed some things. I don't check general subreddits anymore. I only check my own locale-specific subreddits (town, country, etc). For my niche hobbies, I already moved off reddit into other communities, like discord is immensely popular for this.

I stopped reading Reddit during the protest and haven't come back. I don't want to support them at all. I found out about Lemmy and I love it.

So it worked for me, even if everyone else stays on Reddit I don't particularly care.

> I'm working on an article on this

for your substack?

Mate, I would absolutely destroy your soul with a rebuke comment but I will spare you from it. I have to follow HN's guidelines which don't encourage snarky comments.

Oh no not the soularino!

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