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Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

• paulcole 3y ago
  No change for me. I had to stop using Apollo (and Narwhal sucks) but using the browser is fine with me. I signed up for the $60/yr. Ad-free version and Reddits still great IMO.
  • rickharrison 3y ago
    Hi, I'm the developer of Narwhal. I'd love to know why you think it sucks?
    • paulcole 3y ago
      Too customizable for my tastes. I'd rather apps make the choices for me and I can decide if I like it or not. There's no customization in Narwhal that makes it feel anything but watered down and trying to please everyone. I get it if that's your goal but it's not for me.
  • tgv 3y ago
    I'd say the net change is -$60.
• joelthelion 3y ago
  Alternatives have grown tremendously, although none have really reached the critical mass yet. Personally, I have moved to Lemmy, and I use Tildes, too.
• Unbefleckt 3y ago
  I stopped using it when they updated the rules a few years ago with bizarre things like: Racism or discrimination is never acceptable (unless against white people)
• sumuyuda 3y ago
  I switched to Lemmy as a result of third party apps being killed.
• Xelbair 3y ago
  Absolutely nothing. 0 changes on reddit side, and mods fell back in line when threatened with removal of mod privileges and forcefully opening the subreddits.
• _zoltan_ 3y ago
  Nothing changed for me.
• cyberjunkie 3y ago
  I guess I'm only using Reddit on a desktop/laptop. No way I'm using Reddit's official app since the rest died out.
• liampulles 3y ago
  I have never used Reddit on my phone, so for me the whole loss-of-Apollo concern was a non-issue. I do see less quality posts now, but it's not dead.
• zlg_codes 3y ago
  I stopped having an account at Reddit before the API changes, but there was a change in the way I saw the site over time. I'd be surprised if over 30% of its traffic is legitimate, organic, people just wanting to share things and talk about their interests. So much of many comment threads these days is about getting high scores on algorithms, and there's a lot of copying of high-scoring comments, clear attempts to change community narratives or sentiment regarding certain topics or brands, etc. Digg, Reddit, and more have proven: a truly public discussion board will be taken over by business behavior unless it is strictly prohibited and enforced. A decent number of people saw the writing on the wall that they didn't own the spaces that they socialized in, and sought something more distributed, with the Fediverse. It's a step in the right direction, but the extant focus on re-posting and updoots/downdoots still retains a lot of bullshit from social media that'll carry over just fine in terms of social behavior. Reddit burned me out on any sort of website that has scoring or other perverse incentives to mess up the intent of whatever community. Groups who are earnest and savvy will host forum software and not social media software. Though one socializes on a forum, the way that you do so and the mechanics available separate them and allow you to focus on the topicality instead of how many updoots one gets. That design decision prevents gaming the forum, and in doing so gets rid of 'fake' engagement. For instance, why do we allow up and down votes without corresponding messages/reasons? I care much less about the metrics of group sentiment and would rather see why they feel a certain way. Take a moment to actually read a Reddit thread, or a Youtube comments page, or any other generally accessible place to chat. Most of it is trash, a lot of it repeats itself, a lot of bots, misinformation, the works. The media itself is fake. The things that get posted on places are meant to be posted places. It's all a fake social game. At least StumbleUpon, in its early hey day, exposed me to new and fun places on the Web. That atmosphere is dead in modern social media. Bird's eye view, not much has changed. But Reddit has removed their awards system and Premium doesn't seem to have value. The bot problem hasn't gotten any better; rate-limiting just means they need more accounts. I visit there sometimes out of old habit, but I don't find anything fun anymore. Lemmy has potential but I feel it's basically the same norms we saw on Reddit, depending on the instance. Sure I'm on HN and it might barely qualify as social media, but I don't exactly fit in here. This is sort of a "last earnest effort" to participate somewhere on the Internet that isn't my own self-hosted services that use open or federated protocols.
• seydor 3y ago
  Lemmy got some temporary traction. Torn whether it will continue
• unsupp0rted 3y ago
  Reddit knew they could wait out the blacked out sub mods, or actively force them to either resume or be replaced... and Reddit were right. It's back to business as usual, minus 3rd party apps (goodbye one-time-payment version of Narwhal, I miss you) and perhaps marginally worse content.
• nmeofthestate 3y ago
  My personal experience was the app I used to browse the site going to a subscription model and me very rarely visiting Reddit any more as a result.
• RocketOne 3y ago
  My personal result was quitting 10 years on reddit and giving up my worthless but substantial karma. The next result is that I noticed I became less argumentative in real life and tend to keep my opinions to myself more, all in all much appreciated by those I love. And my mental health is better. The next result is that in going back occasionally to scroll through reddit it seems MUCH more obvious to me that almost every post is designed to incite anger, controversy or judgment. It didnt feel nearly that obvious before. And there are some clear indications that bots are running rampant. Especially r/AITA (Am I The Asshole) where EVERY post is now almost exactly the same length, written about some situation that is quite stupid or rage inducing that its hard to believe that anyone would bother to respond. But they do. Im guessing they have an intern pounding away at ChatGPT for 10 minutes to create the next 100 AITA's Lastly, Ive migrated to tildes.com, and much smaller community where I was/am startled to see that people can communicate politely even when they disagree and rage baiting does not exist. Its not nearly as busy as reddit was and the topics are far more limited but the quality is miles above the poor posts that now permeate reddit.
  • SamuelAdams 3y ago
    I’ve also taken a break, and I have noticed that Reddit posts repeat themselves often. Here’s an example of something on the front page right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/1853x6g/whats_your_unpopular_traveling_opinion_ill_go/ https://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/1853x6g/whats_your_... Seven months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/solotravel/comments/12iwccx/unpopular_travel_related_opinions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/solotravel/comments/12iwccx/unpopul... One year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/TravelNoPics/comments/vbcvu6/whats_your_unpopular_travel_opinion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TravelNoPics/comments/vbcvu6/whats_... Two years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/p71gax/whats_your_most_unpopular_travel_opinion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/p71gax/whats_your_m... The end result: if you want to karma farm or make a hot topic, just search for something that was posted 6+ months ago.
• nfriedly 3y ago
  For me personally, reddit usage went from several times a day, to several times a month. I uninstalled the app and only check the website when I'm looking for something specific now.
• bloqs 3y ago
  Many people went to Lemmy, which has it's own problems
• tony2016 3y ago
  The subs I frequent are alive and strong. There are no alternatives to them on the web. If some subs have died down, they are not ones I care about.
• pluc 3y ago
  People with unwavering ethical principles left. That's been the only outcome.
• fsmv 3y ago
  Personally I moved to lemmy and hackernews and stopped using reddit because the apps stopped working.
  • bergie 3y ago
    I generally don’t use apps for things that have a decent website. Reddit was still in that category. But after they started doing stupid stuff I also moved to Lemmy, and haven’t looked back.
• thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
  Some Reddit communities fled to other platforms such as Lemmy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network) Many subreddit moderators protested in various ways and were removed and replaced. Reddit never agreed or compromised and for the most part the movement seems to have run out of steam. Maybe if Reddit squeezes more, more users will go to Lemmy and similar alternative platforms?
  • shitlord 3y ago
    Lemmy.world has 143k users. For comparison, a now-banned snuff film subreddit made their own website, and it has over 1M users. Lemmy and similar platforms just aren't very appealing to the hordes of people who left reddit. Those users are getting their dopamine fix from somewhere else.
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >Maybe if Reddit squeezes more, more users will go to Lemmy and similar alternative platforms? oh, no worries. We have at least two looming controversies for that upcoming. 1. the contributor program (AKA, get paid to post on reddit) that replaces Reddit Gold that was datamined: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/reddit-will-start-paying-you-real-money-for-your-karma/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/reddit-will-start-paying-y... 2. the looming hostility towards NSFW content that will likely in the mid term (1-2 years) lead to reddit trying to cut off NSFW material. It's a matter of being prepared for the next drama instead of if it'll ever happen again.
  • x86x87 3y ago
    Nah. A lot of power users are gone. Now it will slowly slide into irrelevance.
    • PurpleRamen 3y ago
      New power users will take their place. The platform is still big and fame. What we've seen is mainly a shift from old to new generation.
    • 3y ago
• h2odragon 3y ago
  Had as much impact as a fart in a hurricane. May a bit more: there were a few news stories about it, so it wasn't totally silent; but I kinda doubt the people it was meant to impact were at all distressed.
  • 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 ago
      Personally, 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 ago
      This 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.
      • 3y ago
• CM30 3y ago
  Depends on the community. Some subreddits I used to go to migrated off the platform or closed down entirely, but many others just reopened with new staff and proceeded as usual. Not sure if activity was affected sitewide, though it feels a bit more quiet than it used to for me.
  • TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    > feels a bit more quiet than it used to for me. The site as a whole feels a bit less active - i.e. not as active as it used to be.
    • paradox460 3y ago
      And what activity there is, is tepid and bland, the same low effort crap you'd see on Facebook or YouTube comments The soul is dead, the body is alive
      • rchaud 3y ago
        I've seen this happening for the city/state subreddits. Maybe the regulars stopped posting, because now it just reads like a Facebook group, constant fear mongering.
  • slashtab 3y ago
    iirc there was a report in the Verge that overall content quality has fallen. r/all has mostly short trending tiktok video, earlier it used to be niche interesting topic, you wouldn't find anywhere else. I started using tildes.net which is invite only interesting community. https://tildes.net/register?code=QF8KC-GAWKJ-K6WQ6 https://tildes.net/register?code=QF8KC-GAWKJ-K6WQ6 https://tildes.net/register?code=F67V6-483W1-ADFS0 https://tildes.net/register?code=F67V6-483W1-ADFS0
    • rchaud 3y ago
      r/all was formulaic upvote-bait for a couple of years before recent events. It was only readable with a robust subreddit blocklist.
• sieabahlpark 3y ago
  [flagged]
• sorahn 3y ago
  My outcome was the shutdown of Apollo, rather than the blackout. I no longer read Reddit on my phone. (Except for a link or two clicked from something else, but even then I go to `old.reddit` instead to read the comments). That was really where I wasted the most time on it. It’s kind of a relief. I think I was too “lazy” to stop on my own because Apollo was so comfortable to use.
  • willis936 3y ago
    Same here. I'm happily spending more free time on creative and learning ventures.
  • funkychicken 3y ago
    +1. I’m grateful because I knew it was in my mental health’s best interest to stop endlessly scrolling /r/all, but I needed a push.
  • TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Yep I was using Baconreader and when that stopped working, I simply stopped using reddit. I was not a heavy user by that point, but now my use has gone to zero aside from the occasional google search result leading me there.
  • baby 3y ago
    I basically stopped using reddit when they came up with the new web UI, and then pushed me to download the app on mobile. They obviously don't care about users.
  • Kichererbsen 3y ago
    I didn't even use Apollo: I was hooked on the official iOS app. And used the blackout to kick the habit. Haven't looked back since. _Some_ of the free time I got back has now gone towards youtube shorts, but since those really requires headphones, I can keep it to a much smaller percentage of my free time. Instead, I bought a subscription to a local news paper, you know, for when you're on the loo and need something to read. I feel I'm better informed now than when I was reading reddit compusively.
  • 3y ago
• nullc 3y ago
  Lots of communities died: they "moved" to other platforms but didn't meaningfully survive the move. Reddit's conduct didn't change.
• _hi_again_dang 3y ago
  [dead]
• 7373737373 3y ago
  Reddit feels pretty dead nowadays in comparison. Or at least it is mostly dead to me.
  • okdood64 3y ago
    What subreddits did you frequent that now feel dead?
    • 7373737373 3y ago
      Many of those I frequented are now privated, many have been banned for having no moderators, discussion quality has become abysmal (i'm very glad that HN has collectively managed to resist reddit-style "humor" comment chains so far), the frontpage/default subreddits are full of politics, bots, karma farmers, sob stories and ragebait.
      • demondemidi 3y ago
        But which subs? You didn't answer...
        • 7373737373 3y ago
          r/astrophotogramemes for one, but also many other smaller/niche ones I can't even remember nor find anymore since I stopped using them a while ago when this happened - I deleted my reddit account.
    • jimhefferon 3y ago
      I often check out the LaTeX subreddit and I perceive the number of posts are down, even with a pretty recent new mod, who was doing a good job.
• x86x87 3y ago
  I stopped using Reddit. That was the impact to me.
• rchaud 3y ago
  All the 3rd party client apps are dead, but the RES extension still works for now. In terms of outcomes, Reddit appears to have made their mobile website less user-hostile. Dismissing the "download app" modal still has to be done, but after that the experience is OK. Funnily enough, there are not that many ads on the official site, because Reddit seemingly doesn't have many advertisers to begin with.
  • globular-toast 3y ago
    I used to use Reddit Sync. I uninstalled it when the API change happened. I don't miss it. But a while later I wondered if anything was still discussed on the subreddit and it seemed that people had found a workaround and were continuing to use the app. Not sure if it's still possible or possible with other apps.
  • Tenemo 3y ago
    Not completely dead, but yeah, for the vast majority of users who are not very technical, they are dead (and unsupported). I, personally, still use Reddit is Fun daily, so the API price hike didn't change anything for me, so far. It just required a patch with ReVanced Manager and providing your own API key via a text file.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• fdgjgbdfhgb 3y ago
  Anecdotally, I mostly stopped using it, except for sport news and live threads. The subreddit I moderate (100k subs) saw no lasting impact on traffic. We participated in the blackout for 2 or 3 days and then carried on as normal. To be fair, it is a sub for a TV show, so the traffic is very seasonal. The blackout happened in the off-season, and now that the show is back we have a lot of traffic again.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  nothing changed for me we berated everyone that tried to bring that drama into our subreddits, it’s literally just a forum the mods acknowledged that they have worse tools and that’s still true
• nunez 3y ago
  my guess: mission accomplished from reddit's perspective. they lost more than they did during the ellen pao blackout but gained enough users to make up the difference, have more paid subscribers than they did previously and are probably saving a ton of money from all of the API traffic from the 3p clients that were kicked out. lemmy is more popular than voat.co (shut down in 2020) but still far from a reddit alternative. (I deleted my 12-year-old account and all of the posts/comments I made with it, and I use the site much less than I used to.)
  • apwell23 3y ago
    >ellen pao blackout those were some innocent times
    • system2 3y ago
      They were. Similarly Unidan's crow stuff. I miss those days of reddit.
      • lagniappe 3y ago
        Honest mistake, pretty sure you mean jackdaw stuff.
        • system2 3y ago
          Crow, jackdaw, from the same family. I am surprised I remember that much :)
• Projectiboga 3y ago
  It pushed me over to here more. I used to lurk on both HN, Reddit and some tech sites on a web 2.0 aggregator ( www.jimmyr.com ) ever since Digg was still going strong. I used to follow r/science, r/ech, r/pics or r/images (basically imgur top list) and the front page, all in separate dozen item lists, each in a separate tabbed section. Front had digg on onther tab, science w newscientist etc. The front page on there which lagged the main front page slightly as it was from some cache had slowly been eroding over the years but now what I see there is a ghost of its self. I'll wander over to R/usenet now to check the holiday deals and see what that forum looks like now.
• rabbits_2002 3y ago
  A massive decline in post quality. I don’t know what happened but ever since the blackout only garbage gets posted. Even the quality of niche subreddits has fallen. I think the blackout meant that all the well moderated “good” subreddits closed while the bad ones stayed open. Now the bad subreddits are more popular and have eclipsed the good subreddits. As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators have gained a bit of a foothold.
  • gumballindie 3y ago
    The blackout is one reason for a decline in quality. The other, main reason, is people not wanting their content ingested by ai. That reason applies to a steady decrease in blog content and quality.
  • gardenhedge 3y ago
    This comes from Reddit's focus on mobile. Commenting is now quicker, shorter and likely repetitive. Users don't really read through comments, they just broadcast their thoughts like Twitter.
  • muzani 3y ago
    Many of the subs had a moderator protest, where mods were purposely not moderating and major subs would fill up with porn. Then Reddit removed the old mods and it seems that it hit the same old low quality that was always there. Power vacuums filling up always lead to lower quality governance, but it seems that reddit did not have to be governed that well after all.
  • raverbashing 3y ago
    Less good moderators + more GPT generated comments Yeah, I can see the average quality has been going down. Also I've felt less enthusiastic about contributing. I just won't bother submitting articles, writing a more insightful comment, etc Lately, they only deserve bottom of the barrel engagement
    • ratg13 3y ago
      I don’t know how more people don’t notice this. I truly believe Reddit themselves are using the bots to fake participation. This was noticeable immediately after the blackout, with all of the “I’m sorry I’m not allowed to generate offensive content” comments .. which I’m sure they only learned to filter away.
• jmd42 3y ago
  Reddit did make some concessions about continuing to support free API access for accessibility-related tools, which was one of the major complaints about the pricing announcement: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-accessibility-apps-api-pricing-changes https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-acc...
• hamandcheese 3y ago
  I never was a huge Reddit user before, but I have noticed an increase in lower-quality reddit-style comments here on HN in the last year or so. Thankfully they usually get downvoted or are already dead. I might have to turn off showdead though.
  • nathanaldensr 3y ago
    I've noticed the same. Usually it takes the form of dumb phrase-like jokes, retorts, puns, etc, with the entire chain being downvoted and flagged. This is necessary to keep HN from devolving into thoughtless meme-style posts that just clutter the space.
    • COGlory 3y ago
      Glad it's not just me. I've seen many people complain about the reduced quality of discord on HN for years and years, and never noticed it myself. Last few months I keep running into very low effort comments, to the point that this notion has really started to become impossible to ignore.
    • pugworthy 3y ago
      I get the notion of not allowing it to devolve, however I do think it should be OK and acceptable to upvote someone for truly making a humorous or clever comment. I work with a lot of clever people in my job, and humor (even bad humor) is part of our daily camaraderie and social interaction, so in some ways it's second nature for me to want to post humorous comments. Not to over complicate the comment system here but I wish one could just tag a comment as "humor" and one could then choose to just not show them if one did not care to see such things.
      • okdood64 3y ago
        Slippery slope. Personally I’m okay with no pure, low effort humor posts on here. Besides, one person’s joke is another person’s eye roll.
      • giraffe_lady 3y ago
• INTPenis 3y ago
  Nothing, some of us already knew nothing would come of it. People are just so dramatic and they don't understand the services they're using. Most people have no idea what's behind reddit, facebook, youtube. They just see a free shiny thing and start using it. Then one day the free shiny thing has a gross ad on it, and one day it has another one, and before they know it, it's unusable.
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >People are just so dramatic and they don't understand the services they're using. At the same time, people are so fixated with "X killer [no, not the twitter thing]" that they can't see the small victories when a site with 1000 people grows to 10k people. 10x growth is insane but it can be swept away if all they see is a 0.02% drop in reddit traffic to achieve that. So much better to celebrate the growths than to chant at the downfalls. downfalls are good popcorn drama, especially these days, but doesn't really solve the problem.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• thaumaturgy 3y ago
  The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the most popular subreddits show a steady decline from 2019 to present, with a sharp drop in July 2023. Once this happens to a platform, it's rare for the platform to ever get those users back at scale. It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform, a la Slashdot -- still up and running with some users, but with flat or declining activity forever.
  • lopis 3y ago
    > It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform That's just not the reality. I'm surprised and pleased to see that big subreddits suffered a significant decline, but I notice the number of subscribers continues to grow. Also, after the the dust settled, Lemmy activity really took a downturn. Small communities just can't survive the migration en masse. Whenever I need to look up something I still eventually need to check reddit, and most communities seem alive and healthy... The truth is, major subreddits are not what keeps reddit alive.
  • crossroadsguy 3y ago
    I think in case of Slashdot and Digg et all there were places users went on to. In case of Reddit, while decline might true, there is no such “destination” or a path to migrate to. The users are either coming back or have never gone anywhere in the first place, because that “place” isn’t there. I have seen next to no engagement change in subreddits where the mods didn’t make it very difficult or impossible to engage (i.e either stayed neutral, or made notional changes and few posts). In fact growth as if been seen at normal rates, as if nothing happened.
  • deafpolygon 3y ago
    I didn't perceive any sharp drop-- quite the opposite. The negative press drove more people towards Reddit. The average person didn't care about what the mods wanted.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• nurettin 3y ago
  End result was: mastodon networks got a huge amount of bored redditors.
• mhb 3y ago
  We'll know in nine months.
• dragontamer 3y ago
  Personal anecdotal experience here. Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return. But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit the frontpage and attract new followers... All the Redditors looking for new hangout spots. Post quality has declined as a result, but the subs who stayed have seemingly absorbed the traffic. ------ Lemmy.world usage spiked dramatically, as has Mastodon.world. I think these alternative open source communities show lots of promise, though many decisions at Lemmy seem naiive right now. The adults seem aware of the Lemmy problems however so I remain hopeful. If your community is text based, Lemmy is likely a good fit. Picture based communities have a NSFW / trolling problem that is still an open question. If trolls can post CSAM to threaten the moderators / admins, what are Lemmy admins supposed to do about that? DeFederation (and temporary DeFederation) are okay tools for this problem... But better tools need to be built into Lemmy. Random server #244 doesn't necessarily deserve to be defederated if just 20 or so trolls are posting CSAM and threatening Admins. Nominally, a tool that more selectively bans users (or new users only) instead of cutting off the whole server would be ideal.
  • davidgerard 3y ago
    Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.) The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is a bit underspecified in practice, and you're gonna have to test combinations of actual running code. We've been having a bizarre time just trying to talk to Kbin reliably, i.e. software intended to do the same Reddit-alike job as Lemmy. We almost have two-way Mastodon story and comment flow working, except when the Mastodon has authorized_fetch switched on. Etc etc etc, the problems are a string of little glitches. OTOH, it basically works well enough to sustain discussion, both local and federated. So everything else is fussing, really. * https://awful.systems/ https://awful.systems/ official refuge of SneerClub and TechTakes
    • dragontamer 3y ago
• w-m 3y ago
  Another data point, the top AskReddit posts of the past year [0]. Zero of the top 25 posts of the last twelve months are younger than five months. Two of the top 50 posts are younger than five months. Comments (using subredditstats from a sister comment) have gone from around 70k per day to around 12k per day. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/top/?sort=top&t=year https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/top/?sort=top&t=year
  • raverbashing 3y ago
    That's interesting I remember during the blackout that there was an extra push (by reddit paid mods) of pushing content to AskReddit (or maybe they made up a similar sub) and were noticeably creating topics there
  • starkrights 3y ago
    This was extremely intriguing to me- I started looking and noticed that I was getting into the 400-500s of posts in the top/year, and not a single had been from within 8 months. That said, on second glance there is something weirdly fucky here. This post [0] from a day ago has 4.2k upvotes- and yet, it does not appear in the spot it should in the top of year [1]. Tf? [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/185g0tf/whats_the_quickest_way_you_saw_a_coworker_get/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/185g0tf/whats_th... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/top/?sort=top&t=year&count=251&before=t3_102aorw https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/top/?sort=top&t=year&coun...
• constantly 3y ago
  I still use it daily. It seems the same to me as it was. Maybe some subreddits no longer exist, but as I predicted they were just replaced with other similar subreddits to fill the gap. But realistically they were totally fungible anyways, so it’s not as if I care that I’m seeing videos on “r/video” or r/videos” or something else. I don’t notice any increase in spam, which was a big “you better agree to to our demands or else” point. Anecdotally scanning the main comments in the all subreddits, I don’t see any change in number of comments anyways. Honestly without quantitative data on comment quality or comment numbers, I’d be skeptical of bias by anyone willing their pet desired outcome from api changes into existence.
• jjcm 3y ago
  For me at least, it gave me the motivation to launch. I had been working on a Reddit-like platform for several years, and didn't really have pressure to launch. There was always "one more thing" to build. I was pretty stunned with the positive response to it on HN[0]. With Apollo going down as well, I've since been creating an iOS app for the site fairly heavily inspired by it[1], and hired a dev as well. Traffic has since died down heavily (I'm down to 40 subscribers from a peak of 120 during the HN launch), but it still motivates me knowing there's at least a desire for something similar (and hopefully better). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695 [1] https://non.io/Nonio-ios-app-designs-November-update https://non.io/Nonio-ios-app-designs-November-update
  • 58x14 3y ago
    I spent half my day following your launch, and it looked like things were going downhill pretty quickly. How have things been since? You turned on your paid subscription signup?
    • jjcm 3y ago
      I apprecate you joining in on the chaos! It was definitely WAY more attention than I was expecting. That's why I had encouraged people not to pay during the announcement post - I was more aiming to show off a side project rather than launching a platform. It was an absolutely crazy week, especially considering I was launching a larger feature for Figma (my day job) two weeks after that. Three of the biggest issues was there was an off-by-one error in the payment amount selector (which imo is unacceptable for anything paid), the subscription cancellation button didn't work, and the mobile view (which made up ~60% of the user agent requests) was broken (especially when logged out). I fixed those and started rolling out regular updates as well: https://non.io/#updates https://non.io/#updates Launched a bunch of new features since, but really what I'm waiting on before promoting and trying to get things off the ground is the iOS app. Overall it's been wild ride, but the thing I'm most proud about is the $119 I've paid out to users. It's a tiny amount in the grand scheme of things, but it proved the platform worked and that the distribution of funds worked.
• rozab 3y ago
  Some subreddits such as r/malefashionadvice did achieve the critical mass required to fully migrate to another platform. In that case, the moderators never re-opened and were replaced by scabs by the admins. But the sub remained fully dead. The userbase had moved to a discord server, which is well run and has plenty of users in the 50+ age bracket not normally associated with the platform.
  • system2 3y ago
    Where did they go?
  • fulladder 3y ago
    That sounds like an interesting place. Can you share the Discord?
    • rozab 3y ago
      https://discord.gg/Z7mACcrfJV https://discord.gg/Z7mACcrfJV Verge article: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/13/23794110/reddit-male-fashion-advice-protest-discord-substack https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/13/23794110/reddit-male-fash...
• denysvitali 3y ago
  I think people silently left, and now Reddit usage declined. I don't have the data to prove it - but from the quality of the content nowadays (for the little I have checked it out) is really bad. I personally tried to build an alternative back then [1] (open source [2]), but the problem even Reddit is facing now is acquiring more users and keeping high quality content. Last time I checked Lemmy, it wasn't doing good either - but these might just be personal Interpretations of the current situation. [1]: https://rings.social/ https://rings.social/ [2]: https://github.com/rings-social https://github.com/rings-social
  • fibonachos 3y ago
    I'm one of those who simply left, though I don't know that deleting my account counts as "silently". My usage had already been on the decline at that point, so I just needed that last push to leave for good.
• Loughla 3y ago
  I left the platform completely. So that's at least n=1?
• machdiamonds 3y ago
  There are still some good subreddits, like "LocalLLama", but most of them seem to have been ruined by mods. I think this was the case even before the whole API issue, which just accelerated the decline.
• thorum 3y ago
  I believe the primary outcome was users switching from the popular Apollo app, which closed down, to Narwhal which stayed active, added a paid plan, and rolled out a redesign to integrate many features from Apollo.
• derbOac 3y ago
  Wanted to plug this alternative that was developed as a result. I have no association with this, just a fan of the design (the whole thing, not just the visual design): https://limereader.com/ https://limereader.com/ I haven't posted much there (at all) in awhile so I'm guilty as anyone but am not sure why. I think a chicken-and-egg thing? My sense is the quality of posts on smaller subreddits I frequent declined perceptibly but not dramatically after the blackout. In a lot of the subreddits it seems like the diversity of topics went down and the posts got a little more superficial or something. I personally started frequenting old-fashioned forums more often again for certain topics. Some things are hard to beat the subreddits though, and I've noticed they have slowly started returning to their prior quality (in a qualitative, not value sense). It seems like a lot of them that attempted to migrate to other places (lemmy, kbin, etc) never quite reproduced the subreddits, although I've been surprised at the staying power of some.
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >I haven't posted much there (at all) in awhile so I'm guilty as anyone but am not sure why. I think a chicken-and-egg thing? It really depends on the person. Even on reddit, the number of posts and top level comments I made can be counted on my hands. I don't really "make content", I respond to others' conversation that result from it. But that's not what a new site needs in order to get off the ground.
• simonblack 3y ago
  I'm generally still logged-in. But I don't have any subscribed subreddits. What I have instead is about half a dozen bookmarks in my browser. So I don't have a personal front page showing my subscribed subreddits. Only if I activate a browser bookmark will I see any reddit posts, and even then I only see the particular subreddit that the browser bookmark supplies. Those daily hours I used to spend on Reddit are now practically non-existent.
• whalesalad 3y ago
  Absolutely nothing came from it. Except for the fact that the best Reddit client and arguably one of the best iOS apps of all time disappeared off the face of the earth.
  • system2 3y ago
    For some reason, Apollo's creator declined to turn Apollo into a new Reddit. He could've tried at least.
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      tried what? He made a very nice front end, but hosting and moderating a server himself is a lot of thankless work for a hostile userbase. I don't really blame him.
      • system2 3y ago
        His users could've helped. Apollo's userbase was better than Reddit's average and they wouldn't crap where they eat. If Apollo dev asked for money people would gladly chip in $1 a month for the servers.
    • whalesalad 3y ago
      I agree that he could have tried harder. For one, I’d have been willing to get my own API key and paid my own fees to use the app. Like part of onboarding could have been enter your API credentials. Not the most user friendly but better than nothing.
• Banditoz 3y ago
  I still mindlessly scroll sometimes on a third-party app with a personal API key (crappy habit, I know) but there's definitely some interesting subreddits that got popular on the (not signed in) frontpage when the cutover happened. r/amiugly, r/amiuglybrutallyhonest, r/presidents, r/howtolooksmax, r/whatifalthist (this is an odd political subreddit), two more r/amitheasshole themed subreddits popped up, and some others that I'm forgetting. Definitely worse before the API changes, feels like there's less content now. I don't have to scroll very far to find niche subreddits anymore, which is a plus I suppose.
• deleted 3y ago
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• deleted 3y ago
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• modeless 3y ago
  The outcome as far as I can see was that every subreddit posts impotent "protest" messages at the top of every thread with AutoModerator, like a new kind of cookie banner you have to ignore. It's pretty lame.
• miki123211 3y ago
  I have already said this multiple times in different threads, but I think the protestors took entirely the wrong approach here. The only thing that genuinely scares companies whose primary business model is ads is content that is not considered "brand safe". Posting such content, particularly on subreddits where it doesn't belong, would have been a far more effective strategy IMO. Filling the frontpage with porn, slurs, racist memes, made up slanderous stories about the most common Reddit advertisers and other such junk would have forced Reddit's hand.
  • callalex 3y ago
    It’s just a website. Doing all this plotting and scheming takes a lot of effort. Not going to a website because it sucks takes no effort.
  • _ink_ 3y ago
    They did this, tho. Many subs did suddenly allow nsfw content. It was very effective. Reddit Corp needed to remove the mods of those subs and replace same with ones that would implement ad friendly rules again. It really showed that the mods are not free in how they run their subs.
  • tensor 3y ago
    Many subs did this and the mods got removed real quick. I did the only thing that I could do that actually hurts them, delete my data.
  • bobsmooth 3y ago
    >slurs, racist memes Reddit has spent a lot of time cultivating a community that would not accept that, even ironically. Any attempt at using "racist memes" to fight the admins would get shutdown by the powermods real quick.
• wetpaws 3y ago
  [dead]
• burgerquizz 3y ago
  anyone found a decent alternative for apollo on ios?
  • callalex 3y ago
    Voyager is meant to be a direct ripoff, delivered as a PWA. In my usage, it delivers a very similar look and feel, although it is definitely not as feature-filled yet which is understandable for the price. https://vger.app/ https://vger.app/
• raydev 3y ago
  Overall, everything has gone back to normal. A vocal minority was convinced that Reddit was going to Digg itself but they didn't know that Reddit's audience is vastly different than it was 10 years ago. The nerds were outnumbered, and it shows.
• kerv 3y ago
  What are people using now?
  • bluGill 3y ago
    I use kbin which links to both mastodon and Lemmy.
• crtified 3y ago
  As a casual but persistent user, it pains me to say it - because ethically I support the grassroots side of the equation - but as a path of least resistance to casual, anonymous public engagement on a wide range of topics, there seems no viable alternative. [For a given subjective value of 'viable', naturally!]. So after a period of abstention, I gradually ended up back there, simply because I know of no other sizeable gatherings on certain topics that aren't either annoyingly gatekept (technically, and/or socially), and/or are far more toxic themselves. Look at HN - simple hierarchical discussion forums with a negligible barrier to entry and no grating artificial limitations, and we quite rightly love it. In short, I still use Reddit, but there's nothing ideological about that choice.
  • seydor 3y ago
    lemmy is not that empty
  • rexf 3y ago
    agreed. The loss of Apollo was a huge blow to the UX since the official Reddit app is hard to use and has poor design choices (in favor of business choices). Why would the official app have TINY up and down vote buttons? There are countless baffling decisions in the design & functionality in the official app. Without an alternative to reddit, using the reddit app remains the way to stay informed & engaged in various niche reddit communities.
  • mlrtime 3y ago
    Looking at these posts people want to be on the "right side" of this issue and I don't get it. I still use reddit the same today as I have been for the last 10+ years (chrome + RES). /r/all is as bad as it's ever been, however my subbed feed hasn't changed much.
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >Looking at these posts people want to be on the "right side" of this issue and I don't get it. HN is a highly skewed techy community. And I imagine many are reddit vagrants as well. I see it less as "giving the right answer" and more "asking a biased audience". It's the opposite of asking people on reddit what they think of the blackout; many who stayed and never used 3rd party apps probably didn't care or even argue it was an abuse of mod power. And of course, Reddit isn't just one website. Some places may have barely changed. Others are indeed irreparably changed. Others still are literally shut down. The question is highly sensitive to how you browse, and what you browse.
• TMWNN 3y ago
  I've heard it theorized that the API change screened out a lot of bots that had been driving conversation/voting. This is borne out by, say, /r/europe, which has taken an abrupt, substantial turn away from its traditional mantra of "more 'refugees', please".
• wmidwestranger 3y ago
  Well the esp32 subreddit took a dive. The other subs I care about were pretty stoic and unaffected, basically, "duh, we are on their site." Some attempted half-hearted departures but the only successful separation I've seen is TheMotte, an offshoot of the slate star codex sub.
• DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Reddit has a right and a need to figure out monetization. This was part of that effort and it was likely painful but Reddit is dead anyway if it never figures out monetization. I didn't participate in the blackout. I felt the mods were wrong to take that approach. I did go to bat for blind mods. They need better mod tools than they have. That comment is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36232441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36232441 Hopefully Reddit does figure out how to both foster attractive communities and make enough money. I run a bunch of Reddits. One has 20k members and says "top 5 percent" and many have a few hundred and say "top 50 percent." There's a lot more to Reddit than the very big Reddits. I think the relatively small number of very big Reddits get too much press. That's not all there is to Reddit and I hope they defy the expectations of people already pronouncing them "dead."
  • dclowd9901 3y ago
    Since you run a few subs maybe you know: if modding has gotten harder since the API switch, why don’t mods just bring in more mods to help?
    • DoreenMichele 3y ago
      I work alone. I accepted the offer to join me on my largest forum once. They bailed within a day or three without so much as saying "bye, bitch!" I'm not blind. I have no idea if it's gotten harder for blind mods. Sorry.
    • redserk 3y ago
      Not the person you’re responding to, but team coordination is a very difficult task as you add people. It’s difficult enough getting 8 developers on the exact same page when writing code, now imagine trying to moderate to a ruleset with a much greater degree of ambiguity.
  • tensor 3y ago
    They have a right yes, but they will also rightly suffer from their approach. I not only participated in the blackout, but because of the CEOs arrogant comments about how valuable my data is and how they deserve to sell it, while destroying the tools I value and use, I also deleted all of my valuable data from reddit and after handing off the one sub I moderated I left the platform forever. I think reddit is a wonderful idea that needs different leadership, and the only way for that to happen at this point is for reddit to die and something new and preferably harder to buy out takes its place.
• nitwit005 3y ago
  I suspect the big impact will still take a while to appear, which is that reddit alternatives seem more credible. People looking to set up a new community were often picking reddit by default without thinking about it.
  • muldvarp 3y ago
    Especially for things aimed at teenagers reddit is mostly replaced by Discord. This isn't a new development though and I doubt the API debacle had much of an impact on that.
• TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
  I've noticed there's a lot less activity in niche subreddits, but I felt like Reddit was in decline before the blackouts. It generally feels like Internet communities have become less interesting, or at least that's the case with the ones I'm exposed to.
• Havoc 3y ago
  Nothing. They correctly surmised that there are enough people that don’t care and won’t notice the drop in quality. Then again Reddit is doing all it can to make the site as UX hostile as possible so I guess their network effects are powerful
  • broodbucket 3y ago
    I think it's more than nothing, though app monetisation may still be enough to justify the loss. The vast majority of users do not contribute content and they certainly don't help moderate communities - a lot of the content that is good on reddit either comes directly from or is facilitated by the people who care a lot, and those people are the most impacted by third party apps going away, old reddit being abandoned, moderation tools being weakened, new reddit obsoleting per-subreddit CSS, etc. reddit was the place for a lot of communities (and for the most part still is) but there's a lot of places on the internet you can get generic mass-market content, that might be what drives reddit's bottom line but it's not what makes it special. The masses will go to the next popular platform, people interested in specific communities will stay as long as reddit doesn't piss them off. The beauty of reddit is that you can be interested in one or two niche communities, but you soak up the rest of the ecosystem along the way. If the masses go somewhere else and the niche communities are pushed away, there's not much left. Also to clarify, I don't mean niche as in small, I just mean specific hobbies or interests etc, that's what reddit was good at - not needing to go to some forum to be able to talk about your thing. And by masses I mean whoever is participating in r/pics or r/funny or r/tifu or whatever else.
• spacecadet 3y ago
  I signed out of reddit during it, wont ever sign back in or click a link ever again. But then again, Ive abandoned the consumer web at this point, with hacker news barely holding on as the last vestige of a dead era... I'll say, there was some real kicking and thrashing this year as the high water mark became visible.
• jrflowers 3y ago
  If you hated the mods, the mods lost. If you hated the admins, the admins lost. If you were a longtime user that is familiar with Reddit wholeheartedly supporting r/jailbait to bootstrap growth, you won because nothing about the website could bother you.
  • breckenedge 3y ago
    Was r/jailbait as bad as the name implies? I was a user for about 11 years and have never heard of it.
    • jrflowers 3y ago
      Yep.
    • jabroni_salad 3y ago
      It was about photos of minors at the beach. CNN ran a story about it and that event was when Reddit started to get much more hands-on about acceptable content. Gotta say though.... if you make a fresh instagram or tiktok account that same material will be suggested to you while you are in the wide suggestion phase. Kids love taking pics at the beach, which is just one of many reasons not to start a UGC website.
    • throwaway920102 3y ago
      It was just amateur porn by young adult women or late teen girls, like mirror selfies by women/girls in bikinis with their tops pulled down or ass bent over or whatever, but the people in the photos were very young. Whether that meant 18, 19, or 17, or 16, people weren't too concerned.
• pierat 3y ago
  Im seeing a LOT of "reddit won" here... But don't forget: Reddit faked hundreds of accounts when they started. They would have no issue in using whatever chatbots and LLMs to fake engagement now. https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2 https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
• kgwxd 3y ago
  I quit Reddit entirely. Lemmy is much better.
• opportune 3y ago
  I honestly think this was a finishing blow to reddit, which had already started declining in ~2019 due to TikTok and (anecdotally) an aggressive user acquisition strategy that had led to a big decline in content/discussion quality. Or even earlier, as mobile users replaced desktop and so things like long-form replies with links died off. The biggest problem from the blackout and API drama isn't that some clients had to shut down. It's that, as a new user or a user that only uses the platform a little, it's much harder to discover good content organically now that most subreddits are NSFW or not on the /r/all feed. Even as someone who used reddit way more than any human ever should, I find the site a lot harder to use because I have to expend a lot more effort manually curating my subreddits when previously I could exhaust my personal feed and then just switch to /r/all - and I don't think I could ever discover some niche or zany community I didn't know about beforehand since I'd have to know to look for it to find it. Since I doubt I'm alone in this, I think it's the beginning of the end for Reddit. It'll be a lot harder for new communities to form, existing small/medium/focused communities will struggle to gain members, and new users will probably think the site is empty and leave.
• thesid 3y ago
  It was complete submission lmao
• system2 3y ago
  Nothing. As the CEO predicted it fizzled out. The 3rd party apps died or asked for ridiculous amounts just to use the app. My Reddit usage dropped significantly but I guess I am not their target anymore. As any drama starts and ends on Reddit, this will be forgotten very soon.
• insanitybit 3y ago
  As a user, I have noticed zero change. I didn't expect to.
• intended 3y ago
  Reddit screwed up in a different way. They’ve shown they run the subs, make hire/fire decisions and have the power to supersede community manager calls. This makes mods look more like labour, not volunteers.
• unethical_ban 3y ago
  Reddit has always had its issues, but the spam and bullshit content has gotten so much worse in the past six months. It's a cesspool unless you go to hobby or municipal subs.
• albert_e 3y ago
  I have stopped visiting the site myself -- taking the opportunity to try and de-addict myself and recover some mental space and time. Working very well so far. Can't say I am missing anything in life. There were only one or two occasions since then where I clicked on a reddit link when the context/topic was very compelling. Happy to report I did not feel the urge to browse away and bury myself in other reddit links and subreddits. On desktop I have a uMatrix/uBO rule that blocks the domain completely. So inadvertent clicks before seeing the domain also get trapped.
• csomar 3y ago
  I left. Came back and now left again. There isn’t a readily available alternative at the moment. However, the quality has declined so much that it has become garbage. The discussion seems to be driven by bots, mercenaries and AI. I also think many reddit users moved to HN which resulted in some quality going down as they bring the old reddit culture with them, but I’m betting that won’t last. I think it’s still early to tell. Reddit still has lots of traction and even if it’s becoming less attractive, the alternative is not quite there yet.
  • unsupp0rted 3y ago
    I do find here on HN a lot more low-effort one-liner joke comments and "huh, glad I'm not the only one who misread the post title as XYZ" useless comments. Previously these would get instantly downvoted and greyed out as not adding to the discussion nor showing curiosity. Now they remain, because a lot more HN users are Reddit refugees who think this type of comment is normal/good.
    • nunez 3y ago
      They're still getting mostly downvoted, fortunately. HN still encourages long form; one of the reasons why I love this site.
• backtoyoujim 3y ago
  The geo-local community subreddit that I left has been overwhelmed by the local sheriff who likes to post about who they are firing, why won't anyone apply to work there, why criminals have no rights, and why that department's regressive tax plans won't even be noticed by anyone with enough money that matters. That has turned the flavor of that sub into a simulacrum of Nextdoor.
• maxlin 3y ago
  Moderation / admin quality going ever worse. Recently fought for my alt account and a subreddit that was an automated, arguably better of another popular subreddit with basically the same content but without as much editorialization. Had to appeal like 10 times, and a few days after that, the account got re-banned on a faux "ban evasion" charge. Sigh.
• choxi 3y ago
  If anyone’s looking for alternatives, Lemmy is federated and nice to use: http://lemmy.world/ http://lemmy.world/ It’s really only lacking the size of Reddit for me, there isn’t a ton of activity in niche subs, but they’re growing.
  • emptysongglass 3y ago
    Lemmy has been great for me. It took me about a week of scrolling through Lemmy's r/all equivalent to find enough interesting communities to sub and filtering out the rest. Now both my subscribed feed and all feeds are generally high quality and aligned with my interests. It does feel like they're growing.
  • hiepph 3y ago
    From my experience, programming and technology communities are already really strong on Lemmy. I'm confident to say that if you care about these topics, moving from Reddit to Lemmy is a good option. For another categories, they're still small and having struggles gaining traction to have enough users and posts to be lively. But I think it's just a matter of time if Lemmy continues polishing its features and community discoveries.
• Dwedit 3y ago
  For some reason, my copy of the app "Offline Reader For Reddit" still works, and I have no idea why.
• neilv 3y ago
  Biggest outcome: I'm no longer surprised when Web-searching a problem, getting to a Reddit post that might have the answer, and... the top-voted comment on that post has been deleted (or replaced with some text about protesting Reddit policy changes).