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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

Had as much impact as a fart in a hurricane.

May a bit more: there were a few news stories about it, so it wasn't totally silent; but I kinda doubt the people it was meant to impact were at all distressed.

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Strongly disagree, it was very impactful to me. A few communities I really liked and used for support up and left to other platforms, leading to other issues. I tried to follow some of them but it didn't work. My take away of the blackout is "reddit broke, lots of the good people left, life is more lonely as a result".

Lots of bad people left too, which is probably a net good for reddit even if the number is lopsided for one or the other.

never considered if it was better or worse for trolls to be replaced by bots. Interesting philisophical question with no good answer. Though I'm sure someone will quickly point out some sci-fi novel that delved into such subjects.

Fallout 4 very loosely covers this, but doesn't dive at all into the social implications, since the concept wasn't the endgoal.

I disagree, it was impactful. More than a fart. What we have to look at is the impact though, not some specific objective that was impossible anyway (ie killing Reddit).

The impact was massive attention to alternatives. Tons of traffic testing on said alternatives. Tons of press to activity pub, etc etc.

It’s just like Mastodon. Every exodus was big for mastodon and activity pub. It gained traffic, interest, devs and users. Did it kill twitter? Of course not, but only fools thought it was likely to.

Killing some massive social network is near impossible. But dismissing the twitter or Reddit drama as being irrelevant because they didn’t die is missing a lot of interesting development in the FOSS ecosystem imo.

This was always what annoyed me about people who took this position before the changes. The goalpost was "Reddit is going to topple" - it turns out that the effect of these platforms is so strong that short of them literally going down you aren't going to see a full on collapse.

I think it's surprising because the collapse of sites like Digg and Myspace in the past, but the internet is a bigger/much different place now.

My prediction was the site is going to lose a lot of its niche communities and deep content will be diminished and the site will hollow out over time. It definitely seems like that's what is happening.

People also seem to forget that it's not like Myspace or Digg literally died overnight. It still took a few years each, and each of them never fully died as in "the URL is down". They are shadows of their former selves and not at all what they were 15+ years ago, but they exist.

Personally, I used to spend over an hour a day on Reddit. Now it has reduced to 10 minutes a week. Even when I go there, I see less quality posts at the top than before. So I think the blackout definitely had an impact, and Reddit is slowly going to become irrelevant.

The subreddits I used to visit are in a zombie state. It was like they killed 20% of my internet experience. More time spent here I suppose is better time, but Reddit was a good general purpose community until then. I guess the younger users fled to tiktok and the others to facebook?

If it had such a minimal impact, downloads of the official app should be exploding. Haven't heard anything suggesting that to be the case.

It’s now the #1 most downloaded app in the news category on the App Store, ahead of Twitter and Nextdoor. So maybe downloads did explode?

It seems like that data should be accessible at:

But you need a paid account to access stats older than 28 days, and this needs the 6-month view (or even longer, ideally).

Anyone here subscribe to Similarweb, and can answer for us? Or know of freely available historical app ranking stats?

I'll just wait for the S-1 investor disclosures they put out prior to their IPO.

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