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I disagree, it was impactful. More than a fart. What we have to look at is the impact though, not some specific objective that was impossible anyway (ie killing
by unshavedyak 3y ago
I disagree, it was impactful. More than a fart. What we have to look at is the impact though, not some specific objective that was impossible anyway (ie killing Reddit).
The impact was massive attention to alternatives. Tons of traffic testing on said alternatives. Tons of press to activity pub, etc etc.
It’s just like Mastodon. Every exodus was big for mastodon and activity pub. It gained traffic, interest, devs and users. Did it kill twitter? Of course not, but only fools thought it was likely to.
Killing some massive social network is near impossible. But dismissing the twitter or Reddit drama as being irrelevant because they didn’t die is missing a lot of interesting development in the FOSS ecosystem imo.
- seesaw 3y agoPersonally, I used to spend over an hour a day on Reddit. Now it has reduced to 10 minutes a week. Even when I go there, I see less quality posts at the top than before. So I think the blackout definitely had an impact, and Reddit is slowly going to become irrelevant.
- dimmke 3y agoThis was always what annoyed me about people who took this position before the changes. The goalpost was "Reddit is going to topple" - it turns out that the effect of these platforms is so strong that short of them literally going down you aren't going to see a full on collapse. I think it's surprising because the collapse of sites like Digg and Myspace in the past, but the internet is a bigger/much different place now. My prediction was the site is going to lose a lot of its niche communities and deep content will be diminished and the site will hollow out over time. It definitely seems like that's what is happening.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoPeople also seem to forget that it's not like Myspace or Digg literally died overnight. It still took a few years each, and each of them never fully died as in "the URL is down". They are shadows of their former selves and not at all what they were 15+ years ago, but they exist.