I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Because Reddit got exactly what they wanted. Smaller subs, including my own, died. Larger subs had their mod teams replaced with Reddit employees or volunteers who follow blindly for free. The only people left on Reddit are bots, ignorant users, new users who don’t know the difference, and the losers that agree with what the corpo bullshit did despite it making their experience noticeably worse.
I left during the strike and haven’t been back since, abandoned my 10 year account. Been here ever since. Gotta admit I miss some of subs that pertained to my hobbies. They were initially small with little activity until Covid, then they all blew up. Lemmy is okay but it’ll take years to get enough members for niche communities to function.
BTW what “even worse decisions” are you referring to?
ghislaine maxwell is literally a supermod that’s all i have to say about reddit
I left Reddit. I came here and Discord.
I had over 14 years on Reddit before the API bullshit, and I haven’t been back since. I only see reddit content filtered through the occasional Kagi summery. Fuck Reddit.
Lately my 70yo mother has been sending me links from there instead of Facebook, so that’s an interesting development.
A fuck ton of people left and went other places, including here.
I fuck ton of technical individuals deleted their entire post history.
I’ve deleted my several times until they stayed gone.
The CEO did win to an extent, but the entire site became less useful and more toxic.
How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Most of the protestors that were serious already left.
This. Reddit still exists and is still siphoning value off its content for all it’s worth, but you can’t browse through any old discussion without finding a handful of deleted comments and comments edited to random jibberish. The scars of the APIcalypse still exist.
Newer discussions are too vapid and bot-riddled, and many older discussions are too pockmarked with redactions to be useful.
seems fine :)
What happened for me: I left reddit forever. Never looked back. Don’t use it, don’t miss it. I was quite active over there. Since then I am here.
Oh cool! So I’ve been on here 3 years haha
Didn’t the admins just ban any mods who kept their subreddit up like that after the three weeks?
Because they learned to expect much, much less from Reddit.
It’s on its way out.
I know TPTB think that by kicking everyone off and replacing them with AI bots, they can tailor the site in such a way that it shows huge amounts of use, but that’s just driving actual people away. People who come up with original content. People who have interesting discussion points. People who don’t want an antiseptic, saccharine 1950s White picket fence, Hail-to-the-Chief narrative to be the only thing they’re allowed to talk about without fear of being banned …
… which is what it’ll eventually become, and hold onto, desperately, as it drowns under the tide of users who eschew AI overreach, and crave originality and a reasonable lack of censorship in their discussions.
Or so I heard.
I was a reddit user for, idk, 13 years? I forget. Came here in 2023 because of the API shenanigans. The official reddit app sucked then and still sucks today. I open reddit maybe once a year, sigh, and close it again.
Lemmy has become so much better since joining, as far as apps go. Glad I left.
Similar position
Burnt down my profile, left several communities unmoddes
Walked away
I left Reddit and ran a script that was supposed to remove all my posts (don’t know if it worked or not).
It was ironic as it happened literally a week after I had bought the premium version of Apollo because I had used it for years and figured I’d finally throw the dev some money. He offered refunds to people but I declined.
Fuck u/Spez
I was forced out when my two main accounts were Banned. (One is now back after being perma-banned 😂) Both times were for calling someones opinion “stupid”. I didn’t disparage someone, use foul language or get nasty with another user. All I said was “That’s so stupid.”
So I happily left since speech was being heavily censored. I only keep my one account active to find solutions to niche problems that are only found on reddit.
The “Reddit exodus” gives us another example of how soft people are.
