this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Right now it looks like it's a decisive victory for spez, contrary to the article's title.
Of course, the long-term consequences aren't clear yet, the moderator exodus might result in the whole platform becoming too low-quality to sustain the user interaction, leading to people moving away from it.
I think we're gonna see another huge blow to Reddit in a few days when all the third-party apps go permanently offline. I'll bet that a lot of people who haven't been paying attention so far are definitely going to start having something to say about it very soon.
Maybe, I'm certainly in that camp. Once RIF stops working I'll stop using Reddit. I don't know that there are a lot of people like me though (and the ones that are are probably here already).
When RiF dies, I'll stop using reddit on mobile.
I'll probably check-in occationally when I'm on desktop, but that'll signifigantly reduce my time on the site.
I've already stopped using reddit altogether on my phone. I moved Apollo off my homescreen.
And I still check reddit on desktop here and there, but that's mostly to check mod messages. And to see what that latest admins are threatening me with. I got 3 small subs that are private. And reddit doesn't like that.
This will be when the true test for Reddit begins; if the outcry is large enough that spez ends up relenting in some way then he will have already alienated a lot of users. If the outcry is minimal then I guess he won, but the prize hardly seems worth the drama that has been spun up.
It isn't going to be outcry, it is going to be drop in traffic. Spez is gambling that third party app users will switch to the official app. I won't, and I hope most others don't.
At least Apollo put up a huge honking alert dialog about the situation, it was impossible to miss.
So did RIF.
Or it becomes mostly unmoderated, near a major election, at the same time as twitter turns into disinfo central.
@somefool @anlumo yeah it's enshittification in full force. The good info will be in archived posts.
This will happen no matter what.
It looks like it is going to be a pyrrhic victory for Spez. You're right in that we don't know the knock-on effects of this decision, including if Reddit can get long time users to jump to the official app and if moderators will continue volunteering time.
I suspect a lot of subs are now going to create contingency plans for leaving Reddit, even if they don't implement them.
Depends, on what you call winning.
Sure, he will get his way. He will make his changes.
But- I do believe the original goals were profit-motivated.
I'd be willing to bet- the mass exodus of users, is going to hamper his plans pretty significantly.
I think we'll see a exodus of experienced mods. Maybe even older (account age), more active users. I doubt we'll see a mass exodus of general users. The site is too big. Even if a million people left, there are still millions more.
Yeah an exodus of mods and more active users will hurt, but not enough to kill the site anytime soon. The site culture will change because of this, but the site culture is always changing. Reddit's not the same as it was 5yrs ago or 10yrs ago. Not saying it was better back then, just different.
If there's anything I've learned about social media users -- AKA everyone -- it's that people don't usually care too much about the platform and the company behind it, as long as content is entertaining. That they can keep consuming.
TikTok is the perfect example: the Chinese govt is potentially get all that user data. It's concerning enough that other governments have or are considering banning it. Have people left en masse? Nope. My coworkers still share TikTok videos all the time.
Or how about Facebook and Co.? Facebook has made all sorts of terrible UI changes over the years. That people got angry over. Hell, it's sold user data without user consent. It pumped out enough fake news that it swung an election! It's still probably the largest social media platform in the world.
Or about about Twitter? I'll admit, I'm still on Twitter as a lurker. And my feed is still just as active as it ever was. There's no mass exodus, even with that crazy CEO at the helm.
YouTube pisses people off, especially the content creators, with their algorithm changes and unknowing demonetization rules. They and the viewers are still there, pumping out and consuming content.
While I've been on reddit for nearly 13yrs, I didn't come from Digg. So I don't know why people did leave wholesale for reddit. But I'm starting to think that that was an outlier. And there is something to be said about Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok not really having good alternatives. Twitter does with Mastodon, but it's still nowhere near Twitter's userbase.
I don't know how much Beehaw and the Lemmyverse as a whole has grown in the last month, but something tells me it's still orders of magnitude smaller than reddit. I'm on Tildes -- which does have a restrictive registration policy -- and it's only grown by about 7000 new users in the last ~3 weeks.
I think this could be the beginning of the end of reddit. But it's still way too soon to tell and any results would be far off. It could also be nothing like Spez says. And historically, a massive social media platform dying off hasn't really happened unless the company pulled the plug themselves (Google+). Or it's Digg.
You have lots of very good points here.
I suppose in the end, the only real change will be- perhaps the quality of content goes down.
Or- maybe us that came over here to lemmyland will just be reddit's competition now.
Don't get me started on YouTube. lol. They have drove away a lot of the content I used to enjoy seeing.
I think the content creators who have a lot of the technical information that reddit has been used for, moving off site, it's at least going to become a cesspool.
Is Twitter a success now, as it is? Is money with no reputation or morality, success? Facebook is still around, but arguably is is successful, useful, and relevant?
Sure, and Digg got its way with the redesign back in the day.
Back then, there was an easy and viable alternative. Lemmy, sadly, is neither of those two.
I, for one, just signed up on this website specifically so I can leave reddit
Why isn't Lemmy viable?
Not enough people here (it's a network effect) and it's way too complex to sign up.
My signup process was like this:
I don't know anybody with even half as much patience as myself. Every single step on this way would have been a dealbreaker for a regular person by itself. Creating an account on reddit takes a minute, not a procedure of several days.
Also keep in mind that most people don't understand what federation means in the first place.
Bro this is a skill issue
Not everyone is a writer.
You misinterpreted what the application form is for. I have accounts on 3 instances (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org and lemmy.one) and for each of them my application message was "came from reddit." It's just a way for them to reduce abusive signups; even with that, 2/3 of those instances don't even require email verification. It literally takes 10 seconds to sign up and somehow you spent 86400 of them.
That’s not what the form's instructions say. I can’t read the mind of the admins to know how little I can get away with.
Perhaps don't advertise that you're willing to do no more than the absolute bare minimum to try to hoodwink the admins.
I didn't, that's why it took an hour to write the application form. Which is totally unacceptable for the general population.
To reiterate what I said in the last paragraph;
That’s not true from a technical point of view. A remote subscriber is way more expensive than a local one, so on the technical side it’s better when everyone signs up on the server where most of their communities are.
That may be true, but most of the communities I'm subscribed to are remote. I've not experienced any issue at all. In fact I'm getting your reply pretty much instantaneously and I'm on lemm.ee in the USA and you're on feddit.de in Germany.
I'd just like to say sorry for the experience you've had with Beehaw, we're trying our best at the moment to get through everyone but it's been a really hard time.. We think we might be able to reach 0 people left in our queue by the end of tomorrow (optimistically, there's about 2k left)
Maybe change the wording on the site to say one week to assume rejection, not 24h.
Or you can just figure that out from the fact they are swamped? This constant need for instant satisfaction is unreasonable to expect from others.
My experience signing up involved no pain at all and I personally liked having my application screened. I had access within an hour or two, it wasn't a complicated process and I chose beehaw because of it's community
It seems pretty easy to understand signing up, from my perspective. The hard part is understanding how everything is connected
My exact feels. I had never heard of the fediverse or whatever, and still don’t even know if I spelled it right lol.
But I just picked the first server that had a good amount of people on it, off a recommended list, and it’s been fine.
To sign up I had to answer 3 super simple subjective questions. Took 2 mins. Had to wait to get approved, but in the meantime I could still browse so it really didn’t matter.
To me, the hard part was learning lemmy/kbin/beehaw etc existed.
All of this is fairly reasonable for the kind of project it is. Sounds like you and those users don't understand what signing up at any site really means and you've been so separated by the front end, you be have no ability to show grace when basically using a website for free hosted and manages by free people what takes money donated by others?
Why is this anyone else's fault but you? You've gotten spoiled. Maybe everything isn't for you if you cannot even do the bare minimum to participate?
How do you think I came to be here if I wouldn't be able to do the bare minimum?
I'm very well aware of how it all works on the technical side, but the basic problem is that social networks only work when there's a large network of people connected to each other. If you're satisfied with the maybe hundred people that are active in this community that's great, but the whole discussion in this thread is about why Reddit can't be replaced by Lemmy.
I'm not trying to be judgemental about the process itself, I'm just saying that all of the points I made are dealbreakers for the question of Reddit replacement.
It’s obviously not Reddit numbers, but been a lot of posts about how much lemmy/etc have grown in the last week, largely due to the Reddit fallout.
Clearly it’s not going to replace Reddit overnight, but it’s made large strides very suddenly, and can def close that gap over time. Especially for people like me who enjoyed Reddit, but were just browsers, not really power users
People are signing up, but the number of posts and comments is still very low. In my subscription feed, there’s a new post every few hours and maybe 10 comments per hour. I've been on local message boards with more activity than that back in the 90s.
It sounds like you want a firehose. Most of us do not, from the comments I've seen here.
But, hey ... great thing about Lemmy is you get to find a server that suits your needs. If sheer volume is what you're after, other instances are geared toward that.
It was not difficult for me to sign up. I had to give some moments of thought to each step except the form application which I gave a couple moments of thought. I was kind of glad it wasn't instant-simple because I'd prefer thinking people be here.
That prolly sounds smackish but it's just my directness. I really didn't have any problems.
The thing with federation is, that this isn't really the result. The application for the server I got in was way easier, it was "convince me that you're not a robot".
The text field itself isn't even that big of a problem IMO, it's the delay of several days. Most people will have forgotten about it by then.
not enough people here? lemmy instances total are close to a million and that isn't even including kbin users
also, what you said about the sign up process is entirely because of the influx of new users right now - of course its not good UX but with the community beehaw wants to foster, they need that application and they're 4 people accepting all of them!
be reasonable and accept that this site is young! it has not had the decade of development that reddit has behind it! things are weird and still broken and that is okay, the community adapts to its quirks
You picked one of the worst instances to sign up with. Not all of them use the application process, many are just captcha plus email. Then Beehaw is failing to send confirmation emails.
The sign up process has to incorporate security to protect the Lemmy federation from spambots and other exploitation. Yeah it's a hassle, but it's not there to annoy people, rather to provide the best possible user experience. But still an application is something that can dissuade a potential user. That's why many don't use one.
Beehaw is one of the most heavily laden instances probably second only to the originating lemmy.ml instance. An overloaded instance can result in hangs and sluggish performance. Also true for one with high latency such as one located overseas.
It's true the chore of finding a good instance can dissuade some people. If you don't know any better and sign up on a bad instance it can unfairly soil your opinion of the whole Lemmy federation.
Once you find an instance you like (good ping, good performance, good admin) all the content across all the instances is there, barring any defederation. Which communities are local to the instance is not normally a selection criteria.
I disagree that there are not enough people here. Beehaw is busy enough for act as a reddit replacement imo. The federation setup is complex, but given how many bugs and technical issues it has right now, it's probably for the best - only people with patience and a lot of interest in Lemmy should be joining right now.
Why isnt it easy. It took me less time to sign up for lemmy than it did for reddit back in the day and I've had no issues at all. Some confusing back end stuff and relearning all the formatting for urls and etc but it's no more complicated than reddit was to first get into.
The time frame up to the IPO (I don't know how that timing works) seems to be what is critical. Right now Reddit has been unprofitable. The CEO took on massive new levels of expenses via staffing with no real plan (or it didn't work?) for how to pay for those expenses. This bad faith "negotiation" on API seems aimed at... I guess trading 3rd party utility and to some extent the community for the ability to sell data to AI industry?
I guess we will see but pick a time frame and none of it looks good for Reddit.
There has already been a relatively large population that has left the site (myself included) in a short amount of time. I doubt the rate will stay that high, but even though, integrating over time I see this is as the beginning of the end for Reddit and spez. The guy is a greedy jackass and I hope he loses it all.
A Pyrrhic victory. If he loses a large portion of his moderators, the whole platform will turn to shit. The whole thing was held together by passionate people in key places. Remove and replace with paid goons and the whole site suffers.