The blackout caused some more media attention beforehand, so that's part of the win I guess. Perhaps all the negative attention still isn't enough, but it did sent a message.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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I have had at least a dozen instances where I have done a Google search for a problem, and clicked a Reddit link without thinking, only to get hit with a private message. I do have an unusual number of problems per day (software dev who seems to spend their evenings trying stupid technical stuff), but I guarantee the impact is not seen on Reddit, but in the many users who never get there.
I was having similar experiences this week but with niche 90s music history. It scared me to think that Reddit has so much control over that data. Makes me wonder if it's possible/feasible for a single person to download a few subreddits as a precautionary archive..
If you need these infos, you can find reddit mirrors and reddit dumps on torrent
It went about as expected, IMO. 90% of redditors just don't care that much - even if they agreed with the blackout in principle, most of them were likely just waiting patiently for their favourite subs to reopen so they could go back to browsing as usual. A quick browse through some of my subscribed (and still open) subs revealed a lot of commenters weren't even clear about what was going on.
But it has had the effect of essentially kickstarting a community here which seems to be taking shape nicely and there's finally a (small but growing fast) alternative to reddit - which didn't really exist before. I can see the following months and years seeing a gradual shift in user base from reddit to here.
Reddit's not going to die overnight; that was never going to happen. But it's possible it's the beginning of the end of their empire and the slow decline to the ranks of the remember-that-website-whatever-happened-to-that club. Time will tell I guess.
Also, when mods of subs announce that their “protest” has an end date, it’s not a statement, just a minor inconvenience
I think the death of 3rd party apps in a few weeks could be another moment when we see a big change in consumption habits. I don't know that it'll push people here, necessarily, but I would imagine it'll hurt reddit traffic.
The other wildcard is what do mods do? If some big subreddits never come back, or a lot of moderators leave, what will that do to the quality of reddit?
I agree, this could be a slow burn, and these communities definitely have been kickstarted, which is nice. I just think the slow burn might be over the course of months, not years.
I never would have found kbin if it weren't for the blackout. I plan on staying around too. I will still use reddit for the smaller subs I'm in were discussion threads are actually that, but I unsubed from all the news and politics type subs. I was weening off those anyway since they make me want to just go to comments for entertainment instead of reading the article.
I agree, but those who are left are either looking for easily digestible memes or content created by others. Without an engaged community, Reddit has to be afraid of the next shiny thing that comes along, and I think that TikTok has shown us that they don't even care if that next shiny thing is spying on them.
think that TikTok has shown us that they don't even care if that next shiny thing is spying on them.
I think "is spying on them" has been baked in since Snowden at least. The TikTok early adopters grew up in a post 9/11 world predicated on being spied on.
The only real difference is it was someone else's government doing the spying, for a change.
The migration will definitely pick up once the apps no longer work, and even if there isn't a seismic growth in users in the fediverse the seer size of reddit was both a blessing and a curse.
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Don't underestimate the power of disgruntled users. There is no place right now that can handle Reddit - all the alternatives that aren't monolithic corporations can't handle the traffic. Kbin included. So the best anybody can do right now is be on the lookout. This isn't like it was when people left Digg for Reddit almost two decades ago. It takes quite a bit of resources to manage a large migration - it will be in small steps, but rest assured.... Reddit's mods and their communities now are forever changed....
As a mod of some reddits that will go back online, we're now going to be actively promoting alternative sites to also post content on and congregate - we have to do it piecemeal because of the technical requirements. We'll also be expanding the topic of our subs to include any news that's critical of reddit proper and these issues, so we won't let things die.
I'm hoping that people who are annoyed by the direction Reddit is taking will help migrate over their subreddits to here.
There's been a huge uptick in users joining by the looks of it and hopefully that upwards trend continues, it'll take months or years I'm feeling to get to the million users mark but so long as there's somewhat of an active scene here then people will come..
A private subreddit isn’t going to bubble up to the top. It’s bound to happen.
I think a better option is to let subreddits stay open and simply push their migration agenda to the top of the algorithm naturally. It might be telling their community to move to discord, fediverse, or something else.