After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access…
Every time I read something from the EFF I’m reminded how incredibly valuable they are to our internet.
For sure. Make sure to support them, if and when you can!
The thing here is that we haven’t really seen what the actual fallout from Reddit’s decision is going to be… and we probably won’t for a few months, at least (or until they do their IPO, whatever happens first).
What will be a better indicator is how many 3rd party app users end up switching to the official app on July 1, and if they don’t, how big of a dent they make in the volume and quality of contribution and moderation. Enough decline in contribution and moderation is going to result in less community engagement, but that’s something that will take a while to really be noticeable.
As far as the blackout, I think it’s a little disingenuous to say that a “two-day blackout” that lasted, checks notes, two days was a failure. Nobody realistically expected that the blackout would kill Reddit, or permanently cripple the site. Yeah, we hoped that’d bring Reddit to the table, willing to be more reasonable, which hasn’t really happened; but also, now there’s a whole community and team of moderators coordinating further actions, and new responses. The main goal of the blackout was to raise awareness of these issues, and I’m pretty sure that’s been raised.
Furthermore, the consequences of Reddit’s decisions and policies (not only this month, but for the last couple of years) are going to be felt in the following years, not days of weeks. While I love my 3rd party app of choice (RiF), and wouldn’t browse Reddit on the official, I’d still have old.reddit + RES + toolbox to keep me sane for a while; however, me and others are more concerned about the long-term consequences of Reddit going all-in on monetization-only decisions, that don’t consider the well-being of, or negative consequences to, the community. That’s why I’m 95% sure, at this point, that I’ll be deleting my Reddit account this month. Not because of RiF, or the official app, or the porn subreddits; but because I see this as a turning point of the admins of the site completely forgetting the principles of, as the EFF put it in the article, “free and open internet”, in order to please investors and chase a good IPO.
I really liked the article that I hadn’t read before on Enshittification by Cory Doctorow from January linked from the EFF article, which really well captures the inevitability of what’s happening to Reddit (and the value of the Fediverse):
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.
Reddit and Twitter are boosting decentralization and I’m all here for it
Yeah. I can’t help but think Reddit is doing the internet a favour in the long term. The more decentralized and less corporate control the better.
Feels like we’re coming full circle at this pointlol yep it’s funny: Reddit is unironically saving the Internet. It’s become pretty much 3-5 main sites and that’s it. In the 90s I had about a million different forum bookmarks, chat rooms and communities I was a part of. i’m feeling very comfortable having kicked reddit out of my life and gone back to that.
I do wish it had a different name than fediverse though, that name reminds me too much of Metaverse.
Fediverse has been a thing for much longer than Metaverse. Can’t blame them for not knowing Zuck will be giving his failed experiment a similar sounding name in the future.
Metaverse has been a word since ‘92, but I do agree that we can’t blame anyone for not knowing what zuck would do.
I kind of like The Federation, but that also sounds like the name of an evil empire in a sci fi show.
I mean that’s just literally Star Trek and probably copyright of whoever owns that IP these days.
Yeah ngl it’s a pretty dumb name.
We’re literally over here for it, rather than either of the theres.
This is, by far, the best article on the subject I’ve read to date. I really appreciated this paragraph being included:
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon.
@pheen I never saw how a service like Reddit should look to advertisers as way to self sustain itself. Wikipedia has paved the way for a community sustained crowdsourced model.
Excellent article - explained everything really well, gave credit to Reddit where it was due explaining why we all spent so much time there, and why we all left when we did.
I hope that one lesson reddit takes away from this is that they were idiots for letting a small handful of moderators have such sweeping control of so many subs. Moderators who mod 100+ subs are, and always have been, a cancer on reddit, but at least for once they’ve done something to our benefit.
I don’t see why there couldn’t be compromise: A free/low cost API, but 3rd party apps (3PA) have to show reddit’s ads in addition to the 3PA’s own ads, and are limited to data flow rates for “normal human users”. A higher cost higher flow API for 3PAs with ad filters and AI bot data vacuums.
I think it would be symbiotic to have both. A free api that serves ads and a paid api that doesn’t.
Then for the free tier, let the 3pa make a cut of that ad revenue.
You could then have an app like Apollo that gets paid if ads are shown or pays for no ads. The 3pa can pass that choice off to the user.
Non-user facing things like bots and data mining would need to use the paid app tier.
Supposedly API is priced at gouging rates so they can extract millions from OpenAI, Google, etc for scraping for AI.
…Supposedly. I mean, it actually makes some sense except how those companies weren’t using the API and stuff.
This was an interesting read, thanks for sharing. Let’s just hope the blackout of main subreddits will last forever. Two days accomplishes nearly nothing. A protest or even a revolution should only end when the leaders capitulate, die or actually start listening to their people and works things up together.
Lemmy got 100k users in a week. If it were not so quirky, it could have been much more.
how many are active though?
great article, thorough and insightful
It will definitely be an interesting next month…thank you for linking this article, gives a lot more insight
