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This sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit. It’s the only quasi-social network I’ve used for a decade, and there a

This sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit. It’s the only quasi-social network I’ve used for a decade, and there are many communities that I feel at home in. It’s almost like grief, or feeling untethered somehow.

redundantly 3y ago
It's definitely surreal. Will apathy help Reddit to succeed? Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual? Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes? Is this the beginning of the end? Or will Reddit drastically change because of this and it will be unrecognisable in the years to come? It's an interesting time.
- radarsat1 3y ago
  > Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual? Maybe. It's hard to get back to business as usual when your usual client just stops working. We'll see how people adapt. I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app. Switching apps may as well switch sites too.. I've already got Jerboa installed, trying to see if content picks up there enough for it to remain interesting. Definitely some growing pains right now.
  - TheAnachronism 3y ago
    > I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app. You probably don't as most requests that app makes, are tracking requests. And they clutter the app so much, it's basically unusable with all the ads and broken video players.
    - ryanstorm 3y ago
      To add to this, the app downloads a significant chunk of data because of its inefficiencies. Not ideal for tight budget data plans.
- bobpaul 3y ago
  > Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes? If they do, it won't be for several months and only if there's a drop in traffic that looks to be permanent. The protest itself won't change anything. A change in the API certainly makes sense (OpenAI showed the value of the reddit's comment data, and I think spez is pissed that OpenAI is not only profitable, in a large part due to the availability of reddit's comment data, but because OpenAI is run by another reddit co-founder). And maybe that's the plan all along... There's an idea that users will hate any change you preset. If you give users minimal-change, they'll hate it and revolt. If you give users drastic-change, they'll hate it and revolt. So give them drastic-change, weather the revolt, then walk back to moderate-change and by-in-large they'll accept it.
benjaminwootton 3y ago
I don’t think anyone is claiming it’s the death of Reddit. They are going dark for 2 days, then it will be business as usual.
- TheAnachronism 3y ago
  It will be business as usual until the change of the APIs. Numerous moderation tools use these APIs and with Reddit shutting them down, many subs will be completely overrun with spam. /u/spez mentioned in the shitshow that was his AMA, that there would be moderation tools provided by Reddit, but nothing in that direction has ever been shown. So yes, maybe until the end of June it will be as usual, but afterward many parts of the platform will be unusable with the amount of spam and missing moderation.
  - quenix 3y ago
    I remember the Reddit side quoting some very low number on third-party moderation tool use… something like 8% of moderators using third party tools. Maybe that effect is overstated.
    - fabian2k 3y ago
      I would assume that a small percentage of mods are doing the vast majority of actual moderating. So the interesting statistic would be the percentage of mod actions performed via third-party tools. This is a bit similar to Stack Overflow claiming only 11% of mods are participating in the strike there. What they didn't say is that it includes almost all of the active Stack Overflow mods and some community-run anti-spam and moderation tools. So the coverage of actual mod activity is far larger than that number might make you think (and the number is of course outdated as well).
      - quenix 3y ago
        I tracked down the original statistic. CEO u/spez wrote: > About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.
johnfernow 3y ago
Reddit is highly addicting but usually brings me little joy. Most of the time when I'm just browsing the front page I don't laugh or learn anything particularly useful. But in a web full of bots and SEO blogspam, it's refreshing to have a place that is predominantly filled with content and comments by real people. Sure, it has tons of low effort posts and comments, but it's one of the few places on the Internet where you can ask a question about nearly any topic and get tons of answers from real people, and due to its voting system, in certain subreddits about specific enough topics, quality answers rise to the top. As a tool, Reddit is indispensable due to how bad SEO spam has gotten. If I want an answer written by a human who probably has no financial incentive to lie, adding site:reddit.com to my searches is by far the quickest way to do so. For certain topics, it's not just the quickest, but the only way certain information can be found. If Reddit dies or (more likely) becomes useless due to poor moderation, it's not hard to imagine us entering a new chapter of the Information Age. Many local newspapers no longer exist, and many magazines covering more niche topics have also shut down. People gladly share their experiences and discoveries on Reddit because they know many people will see it (easier to get motivated to write long posts if you know someone will read them.) Will people be willing to put that effort into writing on their own blogs? Many won't, as no one will even know it exists (before you could share your blog on Reddit!) Even if someone still goes through the effort of writing quality content on a blog or self-hosted site, again, it will be very difficult for anyone to find it due to SEO spam. This is such a stupid situation they've put themselves in. I get that they want to show ads, but I don't think ads not being shown is why people use 3rd party apps. On desktop, I'd rather use old.reddit.com with ads than new Reddit without ads: new Reddit is buggier, slower and shows less content. And they trivially could have added the features mods wanted that are offered by the 3rd party apps. No one would use 3rd party apps if the official one wasn't so slow, buggy and lacking. I understand the advantages of not having so much of the Internet's content all on one site, but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks. People may stop using Twitter, but most of those former users aren't going to start using Mastodon. Likewise, people may stop using Reddit, but I don't think they're going to start using Lemmy or any of the other alternatives. As far as random forums go, discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult, and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum. I dread to think how much of my life I've wasted on Reddit. But for all its faults, I think it has added a lot of value, and I think the Internet would be a worse place without it.
epolanski 3y ago
Honestly I'm taking this as an excuse to quit Reddit completely. It eats around 60 to 90 minutes of my days, which realistically means I spend 10% of the time I'm awake on Reddit. I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me, my mental health, my productivity, now it's time to move from Reddit too. Besides, the user experience on the website has been nothing but degrading for years, so they making this quite simple for me to do.
- mikkom 3y ago
  > I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me You do understand that you are posting this to hacker news right?
  - Takennickname 3y ago
    Hacker News is a news aggregator.
    - NoboruWataya 3y ago
      Yet here we are in the comments.
    - philwelch 3y ago
      Hacker News is a Reddit clone that PG wrote because subreddits didn’t exist yet and he wanted to write an application in Arc.
      - llamaLord 3y ago
        Hacker News is what I refer to as The last bastion of the "Old Internet". Like back when the internet was a thing that people actually had to put effort into participating in so the average quality of content and engagement was consistently high more often than it was low. Back when you actually had forums dedicated to single areas of interest, run by people who were interested in that thing "just coz". I feel like Hacker News is literally the last little glint of light in a sea of seething darkness... it makes me nostalgic for the internet we had and lost.
LLcolD 3y ago
If subreddits that went dark come back in few days no-one will remember this. If they go dark for a long time that is another story.
core-utility 3y ago
I think a large part of my grief of Reddit is the vast amount of knowledge and usefulness that's there. I use it as a hub of information far more than I use it as social media, and yes a lot of that may still be accessible (especially with archive) but the creation of that content dies today.
- bobpaul 3y ago
  Yes! I've been leech blocking Reddit the past couple of days and I intend to keep doing so until I've broken the habit of absent mindly typing "Reddit" into a new tab whenever I have brief downtime waiting for something. But in the mean time I find that search results for things point to Reddit at least as often as stack exchange.
cmsonger 3y ago
"untethered" is right for me. I'm backing the effort by not even landing on reddit. And it's odd. I have found reddit to be helpful over the (now many) years. I'm coming to the conclusion that capitalism destroys social media for me by causing the business to make it unpalatable to me. Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive without it.
- davidgerard 3y ago
  "enshittification", per Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys an instance of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
  - cmsonger 3y ago
    Ha! Great link. I legitimately think it's possible that a properly managed "for the profit of the investors" social media company will always follow this path. It's why I think the right future for social media is non-profit. None of this is amazing technology anymore. This would also have the benefit that it would take the question of "how do we avoid doing harm while still making profit off the table." Could write a statement of values and intent that legitimately puts well being of users and society ahead of everything else. (Which no for-profit with externally raised capital is able to do today.)
unconed 3y ago
I gave up on Reddit during the corona years when pleading with people to not create a QR-code underclass got me banned, permanently, from my national subreddit. This isn't some major subreddit run by the same mod cabal either. Reddit moderation is a poisoned chalice. It attracts the worst kind of people and pushes out the best.
JeremyNT 3y ago
> This sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit. The reports of Reddit's death are greatly exaggerated. I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.
- Bajeezus 3y ago
  The mods have all the leverage. They’re literally volunteer workers, they can quit their duties with no real downsides.
- r00fus 3y ago
  Read what I posted earlier [1]. tl;dr - everyone knows 2 days isn't enough time for a protest to work unless decision makers are really on the fence. What it does is to set the terms of the argument. Think 2 days is manageable? How about 30? Or 180. I wonder how good that would feel as you try to close your IPO? That is the threat - that it doesn't ever come back unless it's on better terms and it risks the real golden egg of management - the IPO. I theorized the best way for management to fight back is to engineer a way for them to claim the threat isn't real (ie, the outages today). We'll see how it impacts the metrics and whether engagement falls off a cliff. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36288240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36288240
- bobpaul 3y ago
  >I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site. I don't think reddit will be dead by the end of the year or anything quite like that. But we know from past studies (using that API, heh) that a very tiny percentage of site visitors post content. I think it was something like 10% of visitors are logged in, 1% of visitors comment regularly, and 0.01% post content. But something like 90% of the content is from only 1% of the users who post content, so the 0.01% isn't even that important, it's the 0.0001% who drive the site. And there's a lot of cross over between these power users who post all the content and the moderators of the largest subreddits. So what will happen when the power users quit the platform? It's not just that lots of communities will go unmoderated and shutdown (if their mods don't shut them down first), but a lot of the content will dry up. Now, vacuums fill and naturally any void left by the power users leaving will be filled by others who start posting, but that could very well be the beginning of the end. We saw this with Digg. There were several mass exoduses from digg to reddit and other sites that caused the quality of digg content to get worse and worse for the 3 or 4 years before Digg v4 put the final nail in the coffin. Had Digg kept old.digg running along side digg v4 it might have continued to suck for many more years, but Digg's influence on internet culture was decidedly in decline before Digg v4. And that I think is what we'll see with reddit. Many communities will collapse, content will reduce in quality, and the slow attrician will begin. It won't disappear in a year or 3, but it won't be nearly as important in a couple of years as it is today. Remember when "slashdotted" was a term? The big questions is "where will the users go?" When digg was fucking up, there was already reddit. Can fediverse link aggregators (lemmy, kbin.social, etc) really serve as a replacement? I'm not convinced. I've read there's efforts to make a link aggregator using BlueSky's AT protocol, but that's not yet here.

redundantly 3y ago

It's definitely surreal. Will apathy help Reddit to succeed? Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual? Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes? Is this the beginning of the end? Or will Reddit drastically change because of this and it will be unrecognisable in the years to come? It's an interesting time.

radarsat1 3y ago
> Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual? Maybe. It's hard to get back to business as usual when your usual client just stops working. We'll see how people adapt. I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app. Switching apps may as well switch sites too.. I've already got Jerboa installed, trying to see if content picks up there enough for it to remain interesting. Definitely some growing pains right now.
- TheAnachronism 3y ago
  > I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app. You probably don't as most requests that app makes, are tracking requests. And they clutter the app so much, it's basically unusable with all the ads and broken video players.
  - ryanstorm 3y ago
    To add to this, the app downloads a significant chunk of data because of its inefficiencies. Not ideal for tight budget data plans.
bobpaul 3y ago
> Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes? If they do, it won't be for several months and only if there's a drop in traffic that looks to be permanent. The protest itself won't change anything. A change in the API certainly makes sense (OpenAI showed the value of the reddit's comment data, and I think spez is pissed that OpenAI is not only profitable, in a large part due to the availability of reddit's comment data, but because OpenAI is run by another reddit co-founder). And maybe that's the plan all along... There's an idea that users will hate any change you preset. If you give users minimal-change, they'll hate it and revolt. If you give users drastic-change, they'll hate it and revolt. So give them drastic-change, weather the revolt, then walk back to moderate-change and by-in-large they'll accept it.

benjaminwootton 3y ago

I don’t think anyone is claiming it’s the death of Reddit. They are going dark for 2 days, then it will be business as usual.

TheAnachronism 3y ago
It will be business as usual until the change of the APIs. Numerous moderation tools use these APIs and with Reddit shutting them down, many subs will be completely overrun with spam. /u/spez mentioned in the shitshow that was his AMA, that there would be moderation tools provided by Reddit, but nothing in that direction has ever been shown. So yes, maybe until the end of June it will be as usual, but afterward many parts of the platform will be unusable with the amount of spam and missing moderation.
- quenix 3y ago
  I remember the Reddit side quoting some very low number on third-party moderation tool use… something like 8% of moderators using third party tools. Maybe that effect is overstated.
  - fabian2k 3y ago
    I would assume that a small percentage of mods are doing the vast majority of actual moderating. So the interesting statistic would be the percentage of mod actions performed via third-party tools. This is a bit similar to Stack Overflow claiming only 11% of mods are participating in the strike there. What they didn't say is that it includes almost all of the active Stack Overflow mods and some community-run anti-spam and moderation tools. So the coverage of actual mod activity is far larger than that number might make you think (and the number is of course outdated as well).
    - quenix 3y ago
      I tracked down the original statistic. CEO u/spez wrote: > About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.

johnfernow 3y ago

Reddit is highly addicting but usually brings me little joy. Most of the time when I'm just browsing the front page I don't laugh or learn anything particularly useful. But in a web full of bots and SEO blogspam, it's refreshing to have a place that is predominantly filled with content and comments by real people. Sure, it has tons of low effort posts and comments, but it's one of the few places on the Internet where you can ask a question about nearly any topic and get tons of answers from real people, and due to its voting system, in certain subreddits about specific enough topics, quality answers rise to the top. As a tool, Reddit is indispensable due to how bad SEO spam has gotten. If I want an answer written by a human who probably has no financial incentive to lie, adding site:reddit.com to my searches is by far the quickest way to do so. For certain topics, it's not just the quickest, but the only way certain information can be found. If Reddit dies or (more likely) becomes useless due to poor moderation, it's not hard to imagine us entering a new chapter of the Information Age. Many local newspapers no longer exist, and many magazines covering more niche topics have also shut down. People gladly share their experiences and discoveries on Reddit because they know many people will see it (easier to get motivated to write long posts if you know someone will read them.) Will people be willing to put that effort into writing on their own blogs? Many won't, as no one will even know it exists (before you could share your blog on Reddit!) Even if someone still goes through the effort of writing quality content on a blog or self-hosted site, again, it will be very difficult for anyone to find it due to SEO spam. This is such a stupid situation they've put themselves in. I get that they want to show ads, but I don't think ads not being shown is why people use 3rd party apps. On desktop, I'd rather use old.reddit.com with ads than new Reddit without ads: new Reddit is buggier, slower and shows less content. And they trivially could have added the features mods wanted that are offered by the 3rd party apps. No one would use 3rd party apps if the official one wasn't so slow, buggy and lacking. I understand the advantages of not having so much of the Internet's content all on one site, but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks. People may stop using Twitter, but most of those former users aren't going to start using Mastodon. Likewise, people may stop using Reddit, but I don't think they're going to start using Lemmy or any of the other alternatives. As far as random forums go, discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult, and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum. I dread to think how much of my life I've wasted on Reddit. But for all its faults, I think it has added a lot of value, and I think the Internet would be a worse place without it.

epolanski 3y ago

Honestly I'm taking this as an excuse to quit Reddit completely. It eats around 60 to 90 minutes of my days, which realistically means I spend 10% of the time I'm awake on Reddit. I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me, my mental health, my productivity, now it's time to move from Reddit too. Besides, the user experience on the website has been nothing but degrading for years, so they making this quite simple for me to do.

mikkom 3y ago
> I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me You do understand that you are posting this to hacker news right?
- Takennickname 3y ago
  Hacker News is a news aggregator.
  - NoboruWataya 3y ago
    Yet here we are in the comments.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    Hacker News is a Reddit clone that PG wrote because subreddits didn’t exist yet and he wanted to write an application in Arc.
    - llamaLord 3y ago
      Hacker News is what I refer to as The last bastion of the "Old Internet". Like back when the internet was a thing that people actually had to put effort into participating in so the average quality of content and engagement was consistently high more often than it was low. Back when you actually had forums dedicated to single areas of interest, run by people who were interested in that thing "just coz". I feel like Hacker News is literally the last little glint of light in a sea of seething darkness... it makes me nostalgic for the internet we had and lost.

LLcolD 3y ago

If subreddits that went dark come back in few days no-one will remember this. If they go dark for a long time that is another story.

core-utility 3y ago

I think a large part of my grief of Reddit is the vast amount of knowledge and usefulness that's there. I use it as a hub of information far more than I use it as social media, and yes a lot of that may still be accessible (especially with archive) but the creation of that content dies today.

bobpaul 3y ago
Yes! I've been leech blocking Reddit the past couple of days and I intend to keep doing so until I've broken the habit of absent mindly typing "Reddit" into a new tab whenever I have brief downtime waiting for something. But in the mean time I find that search results for things point to Reddit at least as often as stack exchange.

cmsonger 3y ago

"untethered" is right for me. I'm backing the effort by not even landing on reddit. And it's odd. I have found reddit to be helpful over the (now many) years. I'm coming to the conclusion that capitalism destroys social media for me by causing the business to make it unpalatable to me. Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive without it.

davidgerard 3y ago
"enshittification", per Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys an instance of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
- cmsonger 3y ago
  Ha! Great link. I legitimately think it's possible that a properly managed "for the profit of the investors" social media company will always follow this path. It's why I think the right future for social media is non-profit. None of this is amazing technology anymore. This would also have the benefit that it would take the question of "how do we avoid doing harm while still making profit off the table." Could write a statement of values and intent that legitimately puts well being of users and society ahead of everything else. (Which no for-profit with externally raised capital is able to do today.)

unconed 3y ago

I gave up on Reddit during the corona years when pleading with people to not create a QR-code underclass got me banned, permanently, from my national subreddit. This isn't some major subreddit run by the same mod cabal either. Reddit moderation is a poisoned chalice. It attracts the worst kind of people and pushes out the best.

JeremyNT 3y ago

> This sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit. The reports of Reddit's death are greatly exaggerated. I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.

Bajeezus 3y ago
The mods have all the leverage. They’re literally volunteer workers, they can quit their duties with no real downsides.
r00fus 3y ago
Read what I posted earlier [1]. tl;dr - everyone knows 2 days isn't enough time for a protest to work unless decision makers are really on the fence. What it does is to set the terms of the argument. Think 2 days is manageable? How about 30? Or 180. I wonder how good that would feel as you try to close your IPO? That is the threat - that it doesn't ever come back unless it's on better terms and it risks the real golden egg of management - the IPO. I theorized the best way for management to fight back is to engineer a way for them to claim the threat isn't real (ie, the outages today). We'll see how it impacts the metrics and whether engagement falls off a cliff. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36288240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36288240
bobpaul 3y ago
>I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site. I don't think reddit will be dead by the end of the year or anything quite like that. But we know from past studies (using that API, heh) that a very tiny percentage of site visitors post content. I think it was something like 10% of visitors are logged in, 1% of visitors comment regularly, and 0.01% post content. But something like 90% of the content is from only 1% of the users who post content, so the 0.01% isn't even that important, it's the 0.0001% who drive the site. And there's a lot of cross over between these power users who post all the content and the moderators of the largest subreddits. So what will happen when the power users quit the platform? It's not just that lots of communities will go unmoderated and shutdown (if their mods don't shut them down first), but a lot of the content will dry up. Now, vacuums fill and naturally any void left by the power users leaving will be filled by others who start posting, but that could very well be the beginning of the end. We saw this with Digg. There were several mass exoduses from digg to reddit and other sites that caused the quality of digg content to get worse and worse for the 3 or 4 years before Digg v4 put the final nail in the coffin. Had Digg kept old.digg running along side digg v4 it might have continued to suck for many more years, but Digg's influence on internet culture was decidedly in decline before Digg v4. And that I think is what we'll see with reddit. Many communities will collapse, content will reduce in quality, and the slow attrician will begin. It won't disappear in a year or 3, but it won't be nearly as important in a couple of years as it is today. Remember when "slashdotted" was a term? The big questions is "where will the users go?" When digg was fucking up, there was already reddit. Can fediverse link aggregators (lemmy, kbin.social, etc) really serve as a replacement? I'm not convinced. I've read there's efforts to make a link aggregator using BlueSky's AT protocol, but that's not yet here.