I was looking at reddit today, and the front-page felt like nothing happened. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and clicked into comments. Everything is popping off buzzing with activity. All the subreddits I was subscribed to that went dark are now back up and business as usual.
I knew we were a minority, but I didn’t expect this level of apathy. It feels like Spez was 100% right and this did in fact blow over. What’s your take on it it? I didn’t expect Reddit to immediately be a failure, but man I guess I expected a bigger impact than that.
A quarter of all subreddits are still private or restricted (can’t post in them). This includes ones like /r/music or /r/programming. Of the 6 30+ million subscriber subreddits, only 3 have returned to normalcy. One is restricted, two others are in john oliver mode. The developers of Minecraft have officially abandoned Reddit as a platform, and advertisers are still pulling out as well.
Oh advertisers are pulling out? That’s something they will be able to feel. Do we know to what extent currently?
It’s been a week and /r/interestingasfuck is still locked with no mod team
Just one important distinction: not a quarter of all subreddits, but a quarter of the subreddits that said they would go private for at least 2 days are still private.
“I don’t know how to use reddit. does that mean the protest was a failure?”
I view the protest as a shot across the bow. The warning about how much impact the changes are going to cause if Reddit doesn’t back off. Reddit management has gone with “damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead”. It is the next round that is going to indicate whether mods and users are really ready to bail.
Digg didn’t die all at once. It was a very slow, miserable death.
And even now, Digg still exists, with some users even. As long as the Threadiverse gets better and Reddit gets worse, we’ll see continued waves of people leaving.
The real question is whether it’ll look like Digg -> Reddit (where most everyone left eventually) or Twitter -> Mastodon (where large groups of people were “too confused” and didn’t move).
I’ve also read that many threads in Reddit are being kept active by Large Language Model (e.g. ChatGPT)-based bots pretending to be users to give a sense of normality
