How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history
www.theverge.com
Users were outraged, but Reddit mostly won.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1190537

How is reddit post protest, did it really win over protesters? Did the ones who left make a dent? Or like all things before, did it ultimately do nothing?

  • Arotrios
    50•1 year ago

    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.

    • Frost WolfOP
      7•1 year ago

      That’s an interesting take. If reddit can claim victory, it would be a hollow one, even if the remaining mods do cave.

      • b3nsn0w
        4•1 year ago

        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.

    • @bearr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      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.

    • @mosiacmango@lemm.ee
      2•1 year ago

      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.