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?
The brain and the heart left reddit back then, the gut and the asshole remain there.
Now its mostly the asshole.
RIF stopped working. Now I only end up on Reddit if the search results says something I am looking for is there, and if there’s somewhere else I try that source first.
Lemmy is okay, and I need to filter it, but that was the same on Reddit.
One the plus side I spend less time online 🎉
The boycott was about something, normal users don’t give any fucks about: Third party apps basically exclusively used by moderators to automate banning and censoring.
Users were also already pissed about being banned from subs based on which other subs they are in.
And the boycott was mostly experienced by users as moderators closing down subs without caring at all about what the actual users think about that. Sub mods in general already had a reputation as being narcistic and unreasonable to the point that they there and still are used as a meme.
So naturally, user sympathy was rather limited.In addition to lack of user sympathy, Reddit was never actually at risk of being replaced by anything else. Where would the users go to?
Lemmy and others are the niche’s niche; I still add Reddit (not Lemmy) to my web searches because that’s still where the content is. Reddit is massive and for most topics there just is nowhere else to go to. The network effect is real; size actually does matter a lot. It’s the same reason, YouTube can get away with their enshittification.I came here! Not everyone followed because the didn’t understand the concept of lemmy, and in general fediverse.
I found lemmy very confusing at the start. Instead of signing up to one site and all sub reddits are there, you can sign up for one of multiple sites. But they all somehow show the same sub lemmys. But then again they may not.
It was done in a very “reddit” brained way. The protest got over, everyone moved back to reddit.
What happened with the 2019 Hong Kong protests? What happened with the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests?
The protocol for handling protesting is pretty much locked down: ignore it and it will fizzle out. Outrage fatigue is real and people have jobs.
I came here and havent been on reddit since the API stuff. RIP RIF.
Recently I’ve been struggling though. The number of posts that just worsen my mood has been increasing and I have began to associate Lemmy with upsetting content.
To be honest I still have hope for this platform but I’ve been looking around. I’m not planning to go back to reddit yet.
Same for the first thing, not so much the second. I curate my subscribed list and find that much healthier than all, and certainly healthier than the reddit front page which I hardly ever looked at.
Block anything that’s not a net positive for you. Instances, communities, users, keywords, etc. You will start to enjoy the communities you do interact with more as they feel more relevant.
Been doing that but it’s like sitting in a hornet nest with a flyswatter. Trying my best though.
I unsubbed from most political communities. The technology communities are still fairly political but I can handle it. My feed is mostly memes now (thank you c/shitposting) and stuff related to Linux and self hosting
Another Lemming (I just made that up, what’s the correct term?) mentioned how they blocked all the news communities and how it improved their experience. Until then I’d just been blocking individual accounts. I took their advice and blocked news, but also politics, communities about certain countries, and anything else where the default seemed to be activism/rage/hopelessness related. I actually agreed with the sentiments or causes of a lot of the communities I blocked, but I found that those actually hit me the hardest as I would get invested in them. All this blocking has helped a lot. Lemmy is a lot less heavy now. There’s more humor and animals and less horrors. It’s not that I don’t care abotu bad things happening in the world, it’s that I start to care too much while being powerless to do anything about it, and then I was no good to anyone, not even myself.
RIP RIF can’t believe it’s been three years
a few days passed, people folded like a fuckin’ lawn chair.
I haven’t. I moved to Lemmy as soon as my reddit app of choice stopped working. Then I deleted my reddit account and all comments.
Now that the app has also shifted to Lemmy, my experience is the same, and actually continuing using reddit would be more of a friction than using Lemmy as I’d have to learn the new interface.
Well apparently not everyone gave in, lots of people deleted their accounts, comments and moved to lemmy.
My lemmy.world account: created 2023
Reddit API changes: 2023
🤔I never gave in, FWIW. The two tiny subs I created, I locked them. When every other sub started reopening or being forced open by admins, I just left Reddit altogether and never went back.
One of the best things I’ve done for my mental health
It’s not the first community I’ve abandoned in protest, GameFAQs back in 200? And Imgur in 201? I had long term accounts on both of those and just permanently walked away from them when the community went to shit. Before then, there were a bunch of forums I used to frequent that also went to shit with infighting and draconian moderation.
It’s the circle of life in the internet. It happens in every community.
Abe Simpson voice “And it’ll happen to you!”
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?
Letting ChatGPT train on all the reddit content without users approving, changing the UI for the worse, not letting you browse reddit or old reddit without an account (you can still browse if you have ublock origin, worked for me), making the reddit app more similar to instagram and tiktok, and making decisions that help the bots while blocking actual users.
Well one was they made it worse recently is now you can’t use old.reddit.com unless you are logged in
Back then I had Sync for Reddit, then left during the same strike and found out Sync for Lemmy existed and the switch was painless lol. But yes agree on there needing to be more members.
I used to mod a few communities which I closed back then. They were all renamed to a random string, leaving the subreddit name to be used by someone else. r/HytaleScripting
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.
One of my communities from Reddit tried to build momentum here but there just isn’t enough participation on Lemmy. So they went back to Reddit. I don’t know how they have been doing since.
Nothing happened, RedReader is still working, and the others were useless.
