The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won | Hacker News Reader

The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won

gizmodo.com

47 pointsCharlesW33 comments

It won by:

- losing it’s most passionate advocates and users;

- driving whole communities to its competitors (federated and discord specifically);

- just utterly shredding managements credibility with their users;

- and inspiring a generation of entrepreneurs to engage in building platforms to supplant replace them that definitely would not otherwise exist.

So much winning. Gold star for everyone involved. Case study on how to manage community forthcoming.

I know this is only anecdotal, but since the blackout started, my engagement with the site has plummeted to almost nothing. The few times I check my feed out of habit I simply don't see anything worth clicking on or engaging with in any of the dozens of subreddits I'm subscribed to. Old content also seems to take an absurd amount of time to be replaced with something new.

The only traffic I send Reddit's way is through search engine SEO, and if I can't find a good enough answer I simply join a Discord instead of creating a post in the subreddit. I have a hunch that if Discord ever decides to prioritize its communities being discoverable through search engines, Reddit is in even deeper trouble than it already is.

The blackout was just long enough to break my habit, and I found I didn't really miss it. I still drop by reddit every day or two, but there doesn't seem to be much going on anymore, and I don't stay long.

The blackout was the nudge I needed to finally break away. Reddit has been getting worse and worse and the blackout made me finally jump ship to lemmy.

And yet I have not noticed any change in my subs or my usage of reddit.

I personally still use old.reddit, but no longer browse reddit on mobile, which was by far the largest usage of my screen time.

Same here. I even uninstalled the apps - they don't work anymore. I installed a HN app instead. It's lowered my screen time. Win win, I guess.

I just modified the Apollo app with my own personal API credentials and went on my way as if nothing happened.

Oh, is there a guide somewhere out there on how to do this?

I was trying to figure out how to do that, any recommendations?

- losing it’s most passionate advocates and users;

How many users left? It also might be filtering some of the more obnoxious users. Once a brand hits a critical mass that doesn't always matter. Think of everyone valve and facebook "alienated" over the years. Did it matter at all?

Reddit quite literally wants it's users to be "alienated" like other social media sites, because it goes with the territory of making money.

It's not like the reddit utopian dreams are still alive. Don't moderate, and you get racists, molesters, etc., and they tell everyone to drink the poison... what's the point anymore?

- driving whole communities to its competitors (federated and discord specifically);

Are these anywhere close to viable options? I haven't heard of federated, and discord is pretty bad for organizing public forums. It excels at group chat, not news discussions with very large groups.

- just utterly shredding managements credibility with their users;

I'm shocked it had any left to begin with. I suppose these are teh "noob users"? If you started ~2008-2012, none of this is surprising at all, and you have limited respect remaining for the platform... this was clear after the redesign, at the very latest.

- and inspiring a generation of entrepreneurs to engage in building platforms to supplant replace them that definitely would not otherwise exist.

How many new social media platforms have you seen of late? I wouldn't be surprised either way, but don't count on it.

- So much winning. Gold star for everyone involved. Case study on how to manage community forthcoming.

Case study that you should not try to be the good guy. These types of unpopular decisions should be made earlier. Reddit lost out on a lot of money by delaying the inevitable. Now it's very likely that it will take a greater reputational hit, because it didn't give up it's college fantasies quickly enough.

We all know the least successful companies are the ones that make these unpopular decisions... you know like: Apple, Facebook, Valve, insta, twitter, etc., etc. Wouldn't want to be like those losers!

Apple, Facebook, Valve, and most of those other companies you're outlining had successful business models built on their habitual users _before_ alienating a portion of their customer base.

Reddit has never been profitable and was never able to properly monetize the userbase they had. Killing their mobile app ecosystem only makes sense if they not only think that most of those users will be willing to switch to the dire official Reddit mobile app, but that doing so will turn Reddit's horrendous reputation around in advertising circles in time for their IPO.

I'm undecided on what the realistic attrition rate on the mobile side of Reddit is, but I think the chances of them becoming attractive to advertisers is almost nil. TikTok seems to be where social media managers are heading these days, and Threads/BlueSky are new opportunities on the horizon waiting to be pounced on. Meanwhile, Reddit is known as the legacy platform filled with users who hate advertising - why bother?

10+ year old account, ~7K comments, ~1K posts, ~30K votes and I have no intention of going back now other than search engine results. I was a daily user and involved in a number of small communities but I'd feel so gross if I went back after what they did.

Do I matter? Probably not but I'd go out of my way to reply to weeks/months/years old comments to give updates and hopefully help the next person than landed there via a google search and I won't be doing that anymore. I'm sure reddit will be just fine without me but at some point you have to draw a line and here is where I drew mine.

> Over the long term, Reddit’s scrambling efforts at financial security may prove just as futile as the moderators’ attempts to fight back.

I wish this lede wasn't buried. Reddit was always going to "win" any battle with the moderators - it's their platform, and they can be as nice or as nasty as they please. They might have trouble finding replacement moderators, especially if recent reporting is anything to go by, but the elephant in the room is that Reddit might not be viable as a business.

Twitter was at the very least treading water until it was loaded down with debt that put it in its current death spiral. Reddit seems to have lit a decade's worth of investment money on fire with precious little returns to show for it.

Right, what everyone is trying to discern is whether this outcome is a legitimate win or a pyrrhic victory.

Personally I used Apollo, and when Apollo stopped working I never looked for an alternative. I’d like to say it was out of principle or solidarity but the truth is I know the default Reddit app is horrible and I don’t have the patience to find an alternative. I’m just lazy.

Reddit isn’t that valuable to me. I’ll probably download my comments from all my accounts and maybe train an LLM on them or something, but overall I’ve basically accomplished nothing on Reddit other than a couple posts to Data Is Beautiful.

I’ve found the setup of account-less browsing on mobile with Sink It and Wipr to be enjoyable. Sink IT removes the annoying attempts at forcing a sign in and the “use our app” banners, while Wipr is a general purpose adblocker. Seems to also hide sponsored results from the feed which is great.

I installed Sink It, seems like a good extension. But when I went to Reddit I discovered I was just not interested in it anymore. Maybe I’m getting old lol.

Alternatives to Reddit and Twitter won a much greater relevance and audience than they would have had if a whole generation of early adopters hadn't been gifted to them.

But the eternal September people will remain on the enshittified legacy services until it's clear to them which direction to follow early adopters.

And do we even want that exodus to happen? Reddit and Twitter were never as good in recent years as they were when they were smaller.

Not certain I'd call that a win. A lesser loss than the opposition if you will.

Reddit had really pulled off something fantastic in building what is essentially a self-regulating community which is quite a feat. They caused significant damage to that foundation in the process of "winning". It's not immediate apparent or headline grabbing but the damage is there.

Replacement moderators are a dime a dozen if you ask for volunteers. But the skillset (and for lack of better word a certain obsessiveness) is not as common. Calling it a skillset is a bit rich, but can't think of a better word. It's a bit like walking into a canteen asking "who wants to be CEO" gets you lots of hands in the air, but concluding from that therefore CEOs are easily replacable doesn't quite follow.

Moderators aren't CEOs obviously but my point is the good ones tend to have something hard to quantify about them. Running roughshod over that was a strategic mistake imo that will impact long term quality.

Or maybe it'll remain below the surface long enough to IPO in which case perhaps it's not a strategic mistake for the existing investors...

The vast majority of the interesting and older users left years ago, soon after the redesign and mobile app. The majority of these valuable contributions did not migrate to nor were not replaced by any new public online service.

This summer's loss wasn't as big a deal as the proportion of genuinely valuable contributors leaving is much smaller then the last exodus, and nearly all the affected subreddits are closer to the internet average, which being 2023 is filled with far more low value spam then the mid 2010s.

>The vast majority of the interesting and older users left years ago,

Where did they go?

The current wave of interesting users went to lemmy/kbin by the looks of it.

As expected. I thought Reddit was going to win.

However, I also thought that Reddit unintentionally challenged people/organizations around the world to replace them. This will probably set off more serious competition in the future.

They probably could have smoothed things out.

I suspect that it won but to do so the R-number went from > 1 to < 1 over the longer term.

That's a short-term win that's not good for a social platform.

Discord (and the general chatroom format) won.

Discord and Twitch both crushed it because they catered to, and made it effortless, to get gamers on there first and then widened their bases.

Reddit Live was a great place for gain massive instant audiences (20k-60k viewers) to feed primary other channels on Twitch, Youtube live, etc.

And lots of ordinary users spent that time tired of seeing that story have so much traction, or were angry at Reddit, inc. after some of the more nasty details came to light, dipped their toes in other sites for their daily info-trawl, and established habits that don't include Reddit.

This has been the summer of social media upheaval

They won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory.

I'm still just using Boost for Reddit. The day it stops working is the day I stop using Reddit.

Ha. Reddit lost a lot of people with awareness, decency, and self respect.

Lemmy, Mastodon, BlueSky and Tildes won.

edit: happytiger said it better. But yeah.

Reddit always wins, or big corp does at least. The mods have always been expendable. Believe it or not, people actually want to do the job.

I know things always can get worse, but I can't help but laugh at complaints regarding quality. The mods on reddit are terrible.

HackerNews is not much better. Essentially, just another power broker that moderates based on it's own biases. However, I suppose they're more successful with their goals.

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