Now Reading
Ask HN: What was the end result of Reddit blackout?

Ask HN: What was the end result of Reddit blackout?

2023-11-26 11:12:49

> Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don’t earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it’d cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it’s probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms – especially open-source/federated ones like Lemmy.

It shows different stats because the API changed. DAU is likely higher than ever.

That message on subredditstats is more recent than the sharp drop; the drop appeared during and immediately after the protest, and the users didn’t come back. The policy change took effect shortly after, and subredditstats only recently added that message to their pages (it wasn’t there ~week ago).

It also passes the sniff test. Pick any of the largest subreddits from the list and look at its front page. r/funny, with 54m “readers”, has multiple posts on its front page right now with less than a dozen comments. r/news has more activity on its posts, but still far, far less than 2019.

It’s not like there’s a thriving community on Reddit that makes subredditstats’ numbers look wildly wrong.

It doesn’t matter, because importantly, now they can game it however they need for their IPO. I stopped posting and know many others who did. The platform lost a lot and the front page is noticeably more trashy/Facebook like than it used to be.

> trashy/Facebook

Don’t mistake “bad for people like us” with “bad for business” — Duolingo appears to be doing fantastically well as a corporation despite having deliberately made themselves into something I found painful to use and therefore stopped using. Facebook is rolling in money despite being your example of bad. Tabloid newspapers sell very well.

I never was a huge Reddit user before, but I have noticed an increase in lower-quality reddit-style comments here on HN in the last year or so. Thankfully they usually get downvoted or are already dead. I might have to turn off showdead though.

I’ve noticed the same. Usually it takes the form of dumb phrase-like jokes, retorts, puns, etc, with the entire chain being downvoted and flagged. This is necessary to keep HN from devolving into thoughtless meme-style posts that just clutter the space.

My outcome was the shutdown of Apollo, rather than the blackout. I no longer read Reddit on my phone. (Except for a link or two clicked from something else, but even then I go to `old.reddit` instead to read the comments). That was really where I wasted the most time on it.

It’s kind of a relief. I think I was too “lazy” to stop on my own because Apollo was so comfortable to use.

I’ve been using Winston as an alternative but it still doesn’t compared to how good Apollo was. My reddit usage overall has decreased simply because of it.

Apollo’s shutdown was a blessing in disguise, I was addicted to Reddit and wasted hours on it before going to sleep. Thanks to that event I no longer browse or even feel the need to see what’s going on, it’s like quitting smoking, I literally feel better and relieved that I quit. I don’t think I would’ve been able to stop on my own either, Apollo made it too easy.

Yep I was using Baconreader and when that stopped working, I simply stopped using reddit. I was not a heavy user by that point, but now my use has gone to zero aside from the occasional google search result leading me there.

Same thing here. I stopped browsing Reddit mindlessly and only end up there now if a Kagi search takes me there. Otherwise I am almost completely off the platform, which is saying a lot because I used to spend 1-2 hours a day there.

Same outcome for me but with Relay for Reddit, I could not bring myself to use the official app and now my usage dropped closed to zero which was a good thing, I have more time for productive stuff.

A massive decline in post quality. I don’t know what happened but ever since the blackout only garbage gets posted. Even the quality of niche subreddits has fallen. I think the blackout meant that all the well moderated “good” subreddits closed while the bad ones stayed open. Now the bad subreddits are more popular and have eclipsed the good subreddits.

As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators have gained a bit of a foothold.

As I see it, post quality declined massively starting from when the smartphone became the device most users were browsing from. No matter how proficient people claim to be with a phone keyboard, it is a medium that discourages longform text. The blackout made no difference with regard to that, the damage was already done.

Post quality also declined after the 2017 redesign. The old design had a sidebar where subreddits kept a FAQ and wiki. Today, the same questions get asked again and again on many subreddits. Mods can’t lock those posts and direct the author to the FAQ, because most users can’t even see the FAQ. Mods who try to ensure a firm hand regularly get excoriated by the community, even by regulars on the sub, as “gatekeepers”.

I don’t know about “only garbage gets posted”.

In one of the craft based subs I moderate (5m subs – reasonably sized one), it’s not so much the quality of posts has dropped, it’s that the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly. This seems to directly translate to garbage posts getting a lot more visibility and sticking around for a lot longer. The good quality posts are still there, but proportionally the garbage is much more visible now.

This is enough of a problem that subscribers have been complaining about it. Not much can be done until (and only if) the number of actual contributors begins to rise again.

On the other hand, I also run a tiny local city sub (maybe 20k ppl) – the number of posts has been steadily growing. I can’t work that one out.

Less good moderators + more GPT generated comments

Yeah, I can see the average quality has been going down. Also I’ve felt less enthusiastic about contributing. I just won’t bother submitting articles, writing a more insightful comment, etc

Lately, they only deserve bottom of the barrel engagement

Personal anecdotal experience here.

Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return.

But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit the frontpage and attract new followers… All the Redditors looking for new hangout spots. Post quality has declined as a result, but the subs who stayed have seemingly absorbed the traffic.

——

Lemmy.world usage spiked dramatically, as has Mastodon.world. I think these alternative open source communities show lots of promise, though many decisions at Lemmy seem naiive right now.

The adults seem aware of the Lemmy problems however so I remain hopeful. If your community is text based, Lemmy is likely a good fit.

Picture based communities have a NSFW / trolling problem that is still an open question. If trolls can post CSAM to threaten the moderators / admins, what are Lemmy admins supposed to do about that?

DeFederation (and temporary DeFederation) are okay tools for this problem… But better tools need to be built into Lemmy. Random server #244 doesn’t necessarily deserve to be defederated if just 20 or so trolls are posting CSAM and threatening Admins. Nominally, a tool that more selectively bans users (or new users only) instead of cutting off the whole server would be ideal.

Nothing, some of us already knew nothing would come of it. People are just so dramatic and they don’t understand the services they’re using.

Most people have no idea what’s behind reddit, facebook, youtube. They just see a free shiny thing and start using it. Then one day the free shiny thing has a gross ad on it, and one day it has another one, and before they know it, it’s unusable.

Anecdotally, I mostly stopped using it, except for sport news and live threads.

The subreddit I moderate (100k subs) saw no lasting impact on traffic. We participated in the blackout for 2 or 3 days and then carried on as normal.

To be fair, it is a sub for a TV show, so the traffic is very seasonal. The blackout happened in the off-season, and now that the show is back we have a lot of traffic again.

It pushed me over to here more. I used to lurk on both HN, Reddit and some tech sites on a web 2.0 aggregator ( www.jimmyr.com ) ever since Digg was still going strong. I used to follow r/science, r/ech, r/pics or r/images (basically imgur top list) and the front page, all in separate dozen item lists, each in a separate tabbed section. Front had digg on onther tab, science w newscientist etc. The front page on there which lagged the main front page slightly as it was from some cache had slowly been eroding over the years but now what I see there is a ghost of its self. I’ll wander over to R/usenet now to check the holiday deals and see what that forum looks like now.

I generally don’t use apps for things that have a decent website. Reddit was still in that category.

But after they started doing stupid stuff I also moved to Lemmy, and haven’t looked back.

All the 3rd party client apps are dead, but the RES extension still works for now.

In terms of outcomes, Reddit appears to have made their mobile website less user-hostile. Dismissing the “download app” modal still has to be done, but after that the experience is OK. Funnily enough, there are not that many ads on the official site, because Reddit seemingly doesn’t have many advertisers to begin with.

Not completely dead, but yeah, for the vast majority of users who are not very technical, they are dead (and unsupported). I, personally, still use Reddit is Fun daily, so the API price hike didn’t change anything for me, so far. It just required a patch with ReVanced Manager and providing your own API key via a text file.

I used to use Reddit Sync. I uninstalled it when the API change happened. I don’t miss it. But a while later I wondered if anything was still discussed on the subreddit and it seemed that people had found a workaround and were continuing to use the app. Not sure if it’s still possible or possible with other apps.

Had as much impact as a fart in a hurricane.

See Also

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.

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”.

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.

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?

Many of those I frequented are now privated, many have been banned for having no moderators, discussion quality has become abysmal (i’m very glad that HN has collectively managed to resist reddit-style “humor” comment chains so far), the frontpage/default subreddits are full of politics, bots, karma farmers, sob stories and ragebait.

my guess: mission accomplished from reddit’s perspective. they lost more than they did during the ellen pao blackout but gained enough users to make up the difference, have more paid subscribers than they did previously and are probably saving a ton of money from all of the API traffic from the 3p clients that were kicked out.

lemmy is more popular than voat.co (shut down in 2020) but still far from a reddit alternative.

(I deleted my 12-year-old account and all of the posts/comments I made with it, and I use the site much less than I used to.)

This is a case study why boycotts (usually) don’t work. Even though this action was well supported by the public, eventually consumerism and convenience prevailed and the corporation won.

I don’t believe this significantly hurt Reddit at all, but at the time I felt that the company’s stubbornness did carry an increased risk of elevating a competitor. Of course, in hindsight we know there is no competitor. I’m a bit mystified why that is, especially given the fact that the casus belli was a greedy consolidation move aimed at controlling the platform more tightly.

The “original” boom-to-bust lifecycle of internet companies does not exist anymore. It may speak to the maturity of the medium, but we have fully transitioned what was once considered the new economy into our existing miasma of Forever Corporations that never die or fail, but simply merge and acquire ad infinitum.

Before the blackout I would not have guessed that Reddit fits into this category, though. Meta, Alphabet, Tencent, Apple, they all have big structural and systemic advantages that are unlikely to go away in our lifetime. But Reddit does not really have that: it doesn’t own significant amounts of content, doesn’t seem to have a patent and IP cache, doesn’t intertwine itself with governments, and does not seem to have achieved any form of regulatory capture. Its power actually does largely come from its users, and they stuck around.

Depends on the community. Some subreddits I used to go to migrated off the platform or closed down entirely, but many others just reopened with new staff and proceeded as usual. Not sure if activity was affected sitewide, though it feels a bit more quiet than it used to for me.

I’ve seen this happening for the city/state subreddits. Maybe the regulars stopped posting, because now it just reads like a Facebook group, constant fear mongering.

No change for me. I had to stop using Apollo (and Narwhal sucks) but using the browser is fine with me.

I signed up for the $60/yr. Ad-free version and Reddits still great IMO.

Lots of communities died: they “moved” to other platforms but didn’t meaningfully survive the move. Reddit’s conduct didn’t change.

nothing changed for me

we berated everyone that tried to bring that drama into our subreddits, it’s literally just a forum

the mods acknowledged that they have worse tools and that’s still true

Source Link

What's Your Reaction?
Excited
0
Happy
0
In Love
0
Not Sure
0
Silly
0
View Comments (0)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

2022 Blinking Robots.
WordPress by Doejo

Scroll To Top