Don't understand why other tech sites didn't follow this story as closely as The Verge did. They are witnessing the downturn of one of the largest websites in the world.
I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.
It kinda reminds me of what happened to rural buses in Canada. We had small bus companies going all over the place. Greyhound bought them all out and ran the whole thing as a monopoly for a few years.
Then they decided it was too much trouble and shut the operations down.
For the last twenty years there are no rural buses at all. If you want to get from point a to b outside of town, it's flight or drive.
Most of that was from subs coming back online. You can only delete visible content. I've been going back every few days and deleting the stuff that came back online.
Engagement is what drives social media. Upvotes, likes, page views, searches are the fuel for their algorithms. (Or at least that's what it seems to me.)
They deleted content that was in public subreddits, then when the privated subreddits started going public again, the posts he made in those became visible again, making it seem certain content he deleted was being undeleted.
So far, there's been no verifiable report of actual undeletion of content.
But besides all that, with GDPR and the similar California laws, Reddit is already asking to get sued and get the EU on their ass, for not deleting peoples data on request, as compliance requires.
For what it's worth, I used Power Suite Delete to replace everything in my 14 year account with a deleted message, haven't seen anything get reverted yet.
That will come automatically once my 3rd party app doesn't work any more. Hopefully some Lemmy apps will be available in the App Store soon. The website on mobile is quite suboptimal.
I've just been sorting my comments by highest score and replacing a dozen or so each day with something like "-> fediverse". So far none have been restored. Most of the lower scored comments don't have value to anyone anyway so I'm just ordering by most impact until I get bored.
Not participating isn't the only choice.
On days I'm feeling particularly petty I go into discussions and vote down the good comments and vote up the bad ones just to make the signal to noise ratio worse. Yes, I'm that petty.
we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
Any content that users have posted to reddit became theirs with the TOS you had to agree to first. They've already undeleted user submitted content deleted as part of the protests. I agree it's time to cut them loose and move on, but you won't be able to retroactively stop them from profiting off the content they already have.
Man Reddit is really trying to push a narrative of big bad mean mods, never mentioning they're unpaid and being ignored while doing a shitload of labor
You MUST re-open the community you helped build over the years for free so that we can earn BIG monies on teh ads!! Make us monies for FREE slave!! We pay you NUTHIN! You work hard for USSSS!!!! Work when WE tell you too!!!!!! foaming at the mouth with rage
I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA "Delete My Data" demands, on each account.
It's almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality...
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA "Delete My Data" demands, on each account.
It's almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality...
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
It’s almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality…
Or they're just, you know... children. Or people who were never familiar with the site pre-official app. I don't mean this in a disparaging way, but reddit 2014 is not the same as reddit 2023. They feel like entirely different websites to an extent (well, visually they actually are).
I'm willing to bet the average age on there right now is probably mid-to-late teens. They most likely use the official app and don't see the need to be involved in this because they weren't on the site when there wasn't an official app like most of us. I doubt many users are even that familiar with the old design.
The whole target market is different now.
I don't think they care about points or clout or whatever. Vast majority of reddit users are lurkers or occasional commenters. Doubt many have all that much karma to spare.
I think they simply don't understand the effects here because to them "third party" isn't something that they knew existed. "API changes" isn't something with a lot of meaning to most users.
The majority simply doesn't care, because in their minds, they don't need to. It's "not their fight". Whether they should care is obviously another story.
We're in a minority. Mods, third party app users, people who have a history with reddit. How many casual reddit users fall into one of those groups? How many into two? How many into all three? Not a lot.
This is, and always has been, a protest by a minority of reddit's users. One you, me, and the thousands of people who left reddit for Lemmy/kbin/Fedi support, but not one that a lot of casual users felt any resonance with.
The situation is a lot more nuanced when it comes to reddit users as a whole. It's not a simple "with us or against us" situation as some like to believe.
The mods make the community. I have modded a few subs and it is a pain to do well, so I stopped doing it. I have definitely had issues with mods (who hasn't), but if large numbers of the good ones leave Reddit is screwed.
Looks like they're holding out big hopes for July 1st to be the platform's big resurgence, and that everything will calm down once they throw the switch on API access. Sure, let us know how that works out for you, Digg 5.0.
If I'm being honest 1st of July will most likely be the last big splash and the last big grow for the alternative platforms. Afterwards I don't think the growth of Lemmy or similar platforms will be as big. Most of the mods will be silenced, subs opened and in 1-2 weeks it will be forgotten.
Reddit is way bigger than Digg was back then, has an impressive number of users so it's pretty hard to bring it to its knees. I hope I am wrong and that I am just pessimistic.
However I think the bad part for Reddit is that knowledgeable people and people you can hold a discussion with or to ask for help in different areas, are leaving/have left Reddit so the quality of posts will dilute.
It will definitely be a slow death. The sound of a few engaged users uniting in protest isn't what will scare Reddit. The sound that will scare them is the sound of many casual users going "Meh" when minimally-moderated subs plagued with spammers and repost bots finally bore the doom-scrolling zombies looking for a momentary dopamine rush from Tik-Tok videos and easily digestible memes.
Reddit has no fucking backup plan if the mods decide to bail. What happens? Communities go unmoderated, or randos take over which is even WORSE since randos bring about the possibility of the sub being shat up on purpose.
Keep in mind that Digg is around to this day. These actions won't sink Reddit overnight. And Reddit isn't done cleaning up for the IPO. As they do more and more of these prep actions, more users will bleed out. Hopefully the Fediverse gets more and more traffic to be a place other users look towards.