Here’s the list of highlights from the article, as it’s a good TL;DR:
- The Reddit app-pocalyse is here: Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader go dark
- How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history
- Reddit will remove mods of private communities unless they reopen
- Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview
- Why disabled users joined the Reddit blackout
- Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit — and why users revolted
- A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working
so… nothing new?
Pretty much, but it’s useful to have such a summary to refer to. Specially in the future, as it’ll be harder and harder over time to remember what was going on in Reddit, and why so many people left it. And one of my objectives with this comm is to document what happened with Reddit, it would be great if we did the same when Digg went downhill.
I’ll tell you what happened with Digg:
- Kevin Rose swears he’ll listen to the community and not introduce a major overhaul which will bring several unpopular changes
- a month or so passes and Digg leadership thinks everyone is stupid and forgot
- Digg 4 launches and literally everyone leaves for reddit over the next couple of weeks.
- Fark and Slashdot collectively die laughing, then of being old curmudgeons
there, now you’re all caught up
there, now you’re all caught up
Note how your quick summary skips a lot of information and views, that give people context on what happened. For example:
- how power users were gaming the system, and that the userbase was already pissed, even before Digg v4;
- what’s wrong with Digg v4, and why users hated it so much;
- the pressures that caused v4 on first place;
- the state of Reddit (and Twitter, and Facebook) when the Digg exodus happened;
- how people organised that mass exodus off the platform;
- how the news back then covered Digg’s downfall;
- who’s Kevin Rose again? (I bet that plenty people don’t even know who Kevin Rose is, let alone his role on Digg.) etc.
And yet it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to remember everything about the events. And we [people in general] shouldn’t even trust anyone in specific to begin with, because everyone [including you and me] is a bit biased and will cherry-pick a few details and ignore others. For that we’d need a central repository documenting the downfall of Digg, preferably from multiple users’ PoVs. I think that this is important, because better knowledge of the past allows us to guide better our future actions.
Same deal here with Reddit.
You’re leaving out that Digg had been hemorrhaging users to Reddit for years due to better features and therefore better content. Diggv4 was just the final nail
You are wrong. Before Digg v4, it was a far better interface with better content than Reddit. Reddit was at best a marginal player and far smaller than Digg. I hated Reddit at the time and only begrudgingly switched because of what Rose did.
i think “hemorrhaging” is a strong term. the majority of people who used reddit (I had been on reddit pretty much since the beginning) used both sites. before the Digg v4 migration, reddit had been around for, oh, 3-4 years and had been growing slowly. as the rumors grew for a couple of months about the changes planned for v4, there was a sudden surge in new users on reddit, too, but it wasn’t until the launch that the deluge really began.
One of the reasons for the one of the pre-V4 exodus’ was people getting banned for posting the DVD crack code.
Fark and Slashdot were always kinda centrally controlled. During the heyday of the internet frontier they were fresh and hilarious, but they never attracted younger people because it was just the same jokes over and over. And without building younger communities they died of irrelevance.
did many people actually leave? Haven’t seen any statistics yet
I haven’t been back. Once Baconreader went dark it’s been all fediverse all the time.
I still open baconreader once in a while out of habit.
There’s a little message about “hey sorry but reddit fucked us”, then I remember there is no reddit anymore and I wander off :)
I’ve been minimizing my use as much as possible. I haven’t quit completely because there’s still a few communities I want to keep up with that aren’t moving to any other platforms yet. Some of them are too small to care, or too large to viably move to another site without fracturing the community.
me neither, but we’re probably the minority.
Here’s a discussion about this, showing comments statistics. One of the participants’ conclusion was that “they were right to just quell the protest and stay their course. People don’t care about having to use shitty software if that gets them their network effect back and spez can anger anyone on reddit without repercussions for reddit”.
I predict that the effect of the exodus will be felt in the longer term; most users might not give a fuck about the changes, but as the place becomes less manageable and the content quality drops down, they’ll start leaving. Sadly this means that the current investors will get pockets full of IPO money.
I am not sure they will leave even then. They are bored, wanting easy fulfillment, and even if every other post was an ad and every other commenter was a bot, still their lethargy may keep them there. And we must become okay with that, if that is what they desire.
I think that they might because even people with low standards would rather consume higher quality stuff. They probably rank content quality the same way as the others do; it’s just that their threshold for “unfit for human consumption” is rock bottom.
My go-to analogy for that is food. Would you be fine eating four days old stale bread? Plenty would say “it’s fine” - dip the murderously hard bun in some coffee to make it more palatable and move on. However, if you offer that person a sandwich - with good quality soft bread, a slice of meat that melts in your mouth, a bit of cheese, and just the right amount of relish - they’ll still devour it, regardless of their low standards. And if they know that they can consistently get that sandwich, they won’t consume the stale bread, even if they’d be otherwise OK doing it. (Perhaps they’ll even eat some stale bread again, after a few weeks, for the nostalgia factor. But then they’ll be back to sandwich-eating business.)
Transposing the analogy to this situation: they might be fine consuming post-appocalyptic Reddit content, but once it becomes stale enough, they’ll look for content elsewhere. And there’ll be always places with slightly less ads, slightly less bots, that quenches their boredom and fills their brain-stomachs.
Part 2 of my reply, b/c I was slightly over the character limit and did not want to abandon anything, so here goes:
I do disagree with you on one point, however:
They probably rank content quality the same way as the others do
No, I am certain that they do not. Maybe in some ways interests can align, but brains are not like stomaches: most people across the world regardless of class, gender, education level etc. have fundamentally the same stomach organ (there is a particular notable ethnic aberration wrt ability to process milk, but other than that, they seem to all be the same?). However, people are not all at the same intellectual level, and moreover they do not even desire to be. A longer comment such as this one that I am writing now, I have literally receive spiteful (occasionally crossing the line over into outright hateful!) replies to when posted to Reddit - even if you and I explicitly agreed, in advance, to have that exact longer-form conversation together, the fact that it so much exists where their eyes can view it, even in a slightly older (several days) post, somehow offends them. I admit that I do not understand this to any degree - if you dislike something, why not just scroll down past it, especially now that Reddit makes that easier on the mobile app? HOW HARD IS IT TO WITH A SINGLE FLICK OF YOUR WRIST, MOVE PAST SOMETHING!? I have receive literal awards from the people I actually responded to, bubbling effusively at how grateful they were that I would take the time out of my day to type all of that out for their edification - sometimes I would include screenshots, often links to exact places to go for further detail, and describe in-depth how to arrive at that same location more easily in the future. And yet even with all that, even with the award having been displayed, even with the response already there - and as comments were sorted by New by default in one place I am thinking of, very prominently so - even then, they actively took time out of their day, to involve themselves in a conversation between other people, both of whom were enjoying themselves, to tell the one who was talking to STFU. To be clear, I’m not talking about this happening once or twice, I’m saying that it happened MORE OFTEN THEN IT DID NOT HAPPEN.
So your food analogy seems doubly flawed then, imho, b/c not only is their willingness to tolerate imbibing lower-quality content significantly lower, as you say rock-bottom, but they ALSO are actively hostile to a great sandwich even so much as existing. I wrote out several additional stories as further supporting evidence, but due to character limitations had to cut it, and hopefully you get what I am saying even without them (I will add this relevant link in case you are interested - even I am tired of shouting about it into a void that does not want to hear about it, but it is quite relevant to this topic). If this were to happen irl like as I visit a particular section of a city, then I would stop going there. Hence, with it happening so very often on Reddit, I finally stopped going there. (I need to sometimes though, like for official announcements, but I suspect I will be 99% more of a lurker than contributor from now on, and that ironically has nothing to do with spez’s emotional meltdown recently - that just woke me up to what has been going on for YEARS over there, as it turned from “discussion forum” to “social media” site.)
Sorry for the late reply, it’s just that I’d rather take my time reading and answering accordingly.
Those people in Reddit might believe that crushing the protests was right, but I don’t think that their beliefs matter in the long run - what matters is the subjective value that they get from browsing the platform, versus doing something else. It’s kind of funny because, in their lack of insight and rationality, they behave in groups a lot more like perfectly rational and selfish agents than we (the ones who migrated) do.
Another point is that people should never have trusted Reddit to begin with.
Amen to that. Going from Digg to Reddit was running away from the fire and falling right into the frying pan. The Fediverse makes me a bit optimistic on that, though; it doesn’t expect you to trust anyone - instead, it assumes that at least some people will fuck it up, and gives you relatively painless escape routes. (e.g. admin goes rogue? there’s another instance right there!)
[off-topic] your mention of Time Machine reminded me two other books:
- Dougal Dixon’s Man After Man - humans diverging due to genetic engineering, and ending on different parts of the food chain. It’s like the Elois vs. Mordocks, on steroids.
- Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence - if we’re going to create analogies between the human race itself and its social media output, that’s gotta be like this book. It’s like we’re discussing how to handle the social media equivalent of people with 3+ pairs of nipples, or 7+ toes per foot.
I recommend both, although there’s a good chance that you’ve read the first one already (given that you like HG Wells).[/off-topic]
[the food analogy]
There are two things here that make me think that the analogy isn’t that flawed, and actually valuable. Although… well, it’s an analogy. Analogies always become mushy if we push them too far, I’m aware.
One of the things is that our food tastes are mostly the result of our brain, just like the digital content that we consume. Not just our stomach. Our food tastes depend mostly on social class and raising conditions, culture and region, our former experiences with one or another dish, so goes on. It’s the reason for example that, if you ask “polenta or rice?” to someone, you’ll get one answer in the Po’ Valley and another in Japan. The major caveat is that you won’t die if you avoid digital content altogether, so there’s a lower pressure to fulfil this need than the one to eat. (Or as people say here, “a hungry cat eats even soap” - but a bored person might not eat “digital soap” for entertainment.)
The second thing is that this analogy yields some useful results. Alongside your comment on the screeching Reddit moron, it made me realise that we got two types of bad content, not one; and they should be handled separately. They are:
- poorly made content, time-sentitive content that lost relevance, gibberish, spam. The equivalent of stale bread, or burned food.
- memes, shallow content, things that don’t generally contribute with your intellectual well-being and improvement, but crafted in a way that loads your senses for a small dopamine rush.
They might oppose the sandwich in comparison with the junk food; some people actively prefer junk food over good meals, and some consume both in different situations. But I don’t think that they’d oppose a good sammich over one made with stale bread and a burned piece of is-this-even-steak.
I predict that the amount of “junk food” in Reddit won’t meaningfully increase; it’ll be a bit more evident, but only because the ones preparing “good sandwiches” aren’t there any more. However the amount of “burned food” will increase by a lot, and that is the sort of bad content that’ll eventually make people leave.
(Some morons there will screech at you for replying to a comment after twelve hours. TWELVE HOURS! I got this once. I simply answered “I’m not spending 24/7 in Reddit, unlike you basement dwellers I got a life.”)
that just woke me up to what has been going on for YEARS over there, as it turned from “discussion forum” to “social media” site.)
Yup - the focus of the site has been slowly shifting from “Reddit is about the content” (forum) to “Reddit is about the people whom you connect to” (FB/Twitter style social media). It never completely flipped though; maybe because Reddit Inc. couldn’t compete well with the big ones out there.
To them, they really, truly, honestly do believe that Reddit “was right to just quell the protest and stay their course”. After all, “first they came for X, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a X”.
Now, mind you, when Reddit eventually comes for THEM (maybe killing off old-Reddit, maybe they’ll need to ditch NSFW content in order to keep advertisers happy, moderation will be of noticeably lower quality, bots will be rampant, etc.), they will be shocked, shocked I tell you, SHOCKED (well, they shouldn’t be that shocked, imho:-), and probably even then they will agree with ~~daddy~~ spez that it is all the fault of those ~~hard-working volunteers~~ traitorous basturds who abandoned their communities for… (checks notes) “no (real) reason whatsoever”. Some, I should say, might be nice people… but nonetheless they will go along with it, “for the sake of peace”. Those who do not know their history must consistently be doomed to repeating it, and these days the word “collaborator” has no meaning whatsoever, since very few alive has had to live through the reality of what it means (although a Ukrainian might be able to shed some light on that point… and possibly, dare I say, even a handful of Russians whose entire families have already been killed for the glory of the motherland:-D).
Another point is that people should never have trusted Reddit to begin with. We could have been developing social media technology like this all along this whole entire time, at the very least giving Reddit the tiniest of competition. Tbf, the world didn’t know what it was like inside the “walled gardens” of Meta, Apple, Google (Don’t Be Evil), except for those of us who actually read books that predicted such things, sometimes hundreds of years in advance. HG Wells’ Time Machine springs to mind for some reason, with the whole underclass of humans as food animals and the real engineers having diverged into a literally different species (the exact opposite of what Homo sapiens did to neanderthals!:-P). There is nothing new under the sun - people who see far are able to do so b/c they see clear to the true hearts of men. OF COURSE Reddit was going to do this - it was inevitable, and always only a matter of time. Well, now we know, I suppose.
Not all that many actually. Even traffic itself has only gone down by ~7-14% iirc, and by some metrics it has actually gone UP since the start of the protests!
One main reason is that the technology here is not the same as there - this place does not give that feeling that “daddy will take care of you” that Reddit does. Server outages, constant errors in trying to access content, or vote, or follow someone, you actually have to read a manual to understand stuff, things don’t work so intuitively especially for those wanting an exact replacement (making a “post” won’t work as expected, for that you need a “thread”), and perhaps worst of all, there’s that initial hump of which instance to even sign up to in order to get started (after which it gets much easier, but I bet that legit turns people away). People keep saying that you can transfer over to a new place if you want to later, but that conveniently leaves out how that functionality does not exist yet. So like if you accidentally signed up to lemmy.ml not really how shitty it is and decided that you wanted to join kbin.social instead - kidding btw:-P - you’ll have to leave all the posts and comments and such behind.
We are early adopters here - we like this feeling of “newness” - but we should not delude ourselves: this place is not for everyone, not yet. (and it is an open question whether it should be made to be thus, even?)
Other reasons include people replacing & then deleting their accounts still counts as traffic, and all those pics of sexy John Olivier still count as “content” atm. People have not yet started to feel the burn of subs that no longer have moderators, or that have objectively shittier ones, and many are content to wait out the blackouts for those that are still down (like r/firefox - oh wait that’s back up now, though pointing people to come to kbin, leaving the Reddit community to discuss cute “red pandas” aka “fire foxes” going forward). Until people actually EXPERIENCE the consequences of Reddit’s decisions first-hand, it looks like many have just decided to stay put.
Also, I’m keeping my account there. I’ll check it <1 hr per week instead of multiple hours a day (as a former mod), but I will continue to check in on both, to help my small gaming community deal with this ongoing crisis. Sometimes people will say like “it sucks but what are you going to do?”. For them, again, Lemmy/Kbin is not close to being an option yet. Until apps get better - happening RIGHT NOW - and maybe when old-reddit is killed off too.
I used red dit for over ten years. After these changes, I’m never going back. I’m not going to be forced to look at dumbass ads or pay $7/mo. Scumbag fucks. Yeah I’m bitter, so what? ;)
Good write-up.
It took me a while until I got up to speed. The web ui was a lot easier to handle than old.reddit on a phone. Once I downloaded Liftoff, it was just like how Relay worked for me.
Yea, the content hasn’t hit a critical mass, but I like being an early adopter again. I’m just surprised how fast Lemmy is moving. I haven’t felt the need to really browse Reddit in almost a fortnight now. Still missing some things. But I have hope for this place.
There are certainly many here that are vocal about reddits animosity towards users and good apps that sent us here. I left for good when Apollo stopped working
s down, they’ll start leaving. Sadly this means that the current investors will get pockets full of IPO money.
I only occasionally visit reddit (from desktop) to scout smaller communities for post to keep this place interesting. Once the communities here are more “alive” I can stop visiting reddit for good.
I left reddit when RIF stopped working.
deleted by creator
As someone who lives in the SF bay area I pray one day I see Steve Huffman in person so I can personally tell him to go f**k himself (yes I know, I know, r/iamverybadass) ;-)
I’m curious how Reddit thinks this is going to go. Community went NSFW and started posting NSFW content. Admins switch NSFW off, despite there being NSFW content. NSFW content continues to be posted, only now it shows up next to ads.
Like, the toggle exists for a reason. It’s not “incorrect”.
I think it’s pretty clear, by removing the ability to moderate NSFW content from their mobile app, that they’re trying to phase NSFW content off their platform completely. They’re going to slowly make it more and more difficult to post/browse anything NSFW on the site, until they announce an outright ban on it.
That’s what a ton of the casual users that keep their site chugging along are there for though…
It’s now clear to me that, since being sold to Condé Nast, Reddit has never been run by smart people who know what they’re doing
A community site built and moderated by the good will of others isn’t sustainable when the folks running the site tell the community to go fuck themselves.
It wasn’t Erin by Emery people before Conde Nast bought them. The only reason the site still exists is because Kevin Rose fucked up really badly, not through anything the admins did
You missed the part where spez does not care one bit.
When advertisers actually start pulling their ads as a result? That’s when he’ll care, but not until then. In the meantime he’s flexing, enjoying the feeling of “power” that it gives him.
I mean, they will eventually. There’s a reason those policies exist.
At a guess, he’ll try to spin it. Like “I’m being treated more unfairly than any leader in the history of the entire world has ever been treated anywhere, those meanies are harassing me when ALL I did was try to make the site profitable, that’s ALL!?”, and in combination with “Like everything else on the internet, people will get bored quickly and if you’ll just give it a moment, it’ll all blow over soon”. In short, he’s pushing to see exactly just how far he can take it.
And he may very well get away with it too. Unless someone actually does anything at all to stop it, by default he will reap the spoils of everything that he wants to get, b/c the VAST majority of people are just too lazy to care. He has caused US here to flee… but what does that even mean, overall? In the short-term at least, Reddit traffic has actually gone UP since the start of the protest - this “negative publicity” is still publicity.
At a guess, he’ll try to spin it. Like "I’m being treated more unfairly than any leader in the history of the entire world
Advertisers won’t give a shit what the reasoning is.
Unless someone actually does anything at all to stop it
The advertisers will. Again, this policy exists for a reason.
If have worked worked in the industry and know this to be true, then I will bow to your actual experience. Otherwise, I am reserving judgement until I see it happen. Remember: Trump was impeached, twice, and he may still be elected again - and there are pictures of him with very underage girls at Epstein’s parties and personal 1st-party accounts from the girls claiming that he had sex with them (at 14 years of age iirc), yet still many pastors proclaim from the pulpit that “he is God’s man” - which is a very different matter than that the other side is worse (also, by that same line of logical reasoning, why wouldn’t Hillary have been “God’s woman” if she had managed to get elected? Or Obama after he actually was?).
I’m just saying that I no longer am willing to put my faith and trust in things that “must” happen, to actually happen. Especially if there is some kind of claim for it to be a temporary measure while they restore order. Maybe some sets of advertisers will be swapped out for another, or maybe all of NSFW will be removed from Reddit, I don’t know what to expect except that whatever it is, spez will expect to profit from it, with like a 99.99% chance of not admitting any fault whatsoever.
I don’t understand what any of that has to do with this conversation…
It’s very simple: people WILL call out companies for the locations of their advertisements and these companies DO respond to having their brands tarnished in that way. This is not speculation, this is history.
One more time: that is why this policy exists.
Maybe they plan on banning everyone continuing to post NSFW material on non-NSFW subs to remove the dissenters.
It seems like this all happened a long time ago at this point…
A lot of that feels old for me, too.
Nothing changed, this is month old news.
