That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
Reddit will die off in stages. Slowly.
First the power users are leaving now. These are the mods and the major content creators (think Minecraft leaving)
Eventually they will piss people off again and the more common content creators will leave.
Then after reddit has worse and worse content, the users who just comment will leave.
After that there will be nothing worthwhile for the lurkers and they will leave too.
Reddit will then be a wasteland.
This will all take quite a while. Even Digg took time to die off.
I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won’t be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.
As a person who really gets stuck in his ways and hates having to change things if I don’t have to, here I am on Lemmy. I’m ready to settle in.
Joining this was easier since I haven’t been on Reddit since the 12th
Got past the habit stage. Now I’m onto alternatives
Lemmy is something like .02% the size of reddit
Do you think that number would change significantly if one were to discount bots from the calculation? I swear 3/4 of comments on some subs were bots, I’d like to think that it’d take a chunk off the actual reddit user base
Unfortunately for me, one of my favorite uses for reddit has been live game threads for various sports and that really only works with a larger user base. For instance, I follow the Seattle Mariners and I have found two different Lemmy instances for them. The one with the most subscribers (44) hasn’t had a game thread posted in 13 days despite the Mariners having played like 10 games in that stretch. The other one has 9 subscribers, although it looks like someone has set up a bot to automatically post a game thread and a post-game thread; however, every single one I looked at has 0 comments.
I’m not gonna be able to pull the plug on reddit entirely until Lemmy gets a serious increase in users.
Hi! I’m an admin of fanaticus.social. I’d like to apologize for the game bots disappearance. It’s back now! I made pinned a post about it, which you can read here.
We’re working hard to iron out the kinks in the game bots but I apologize for the inconvenience. I was on vacation last week and because of a bug, the choice was between keeping the fanaticus servers up or putting the bots to sleep.
The live game threads were some of my favorite parts of Reddit too. I can’t do anything about the small user base but porting the game bots over to lemmy and posting content is the best way I could think of to start attracting users.
I miss a lot of my favourite smaller subreddits too. There’s way more now popping up then there was a few weeks ago so it is getting better. It’ll take time for communities to grow, we can’t expect it to be instantly like our fave subreddits were right off the bat. We have to remember that our niche subreddits started small as well at one point. Also consider doing some posting in those slow communities yourself to get the ball rolling. I’ve noticed it takes someone else commenting and providing content before other people feel brave enough to join in too. Kind of like no one wanting to be the first or only person on the dance floor. Once a couple people get in there and begin dancing others join too.
Yeah Digg didn’t die in a day. It takes time. I joined lemmy today, but I looked into it a few weeks ago first. It wasn’t worth the effort then, it is now. Having an Apollo-like app is a big help too.
Every previous major exodus had the problem that it was the people everyone was better off without leaving. Maybe you hated Reddit in 2015 and were pissed at their decisions, but the alternative was a place dedicated to mocking fat people and saying slurs.
Comparatively lemmy just kinda has a similar vibe to Reddit. Like I need to look for equivalents to some spaces I miss, but it’s not the people we said good riddance to
I’m in the same boat, I just joined today and I’m surprised but Lemmy already scratches the same itch that reddit did
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I’m not sure if Reddit will “die off”. There seems to be a significant portion of users who don’t care about the API debacle or protests - they just want to scroll through memes.
I would definitely like to see Reddit experience more pain, given how cunty they’ve been to users and moderators. But we live in a world where big companies act like shit and get away with it.
no memes to scroll through if there is no one to post the memes
When I’ve checked the Reddit home page in the last few days (using an ad blocker of course, or sometimes an alternative Reddit front-end), it looks like stuff is still being posted.
Hopefully Reddit will feel more pain that persuades it to change course at least a little bit. But I won’t believe that the pain is happening until I see it. Unfortunately it seems to me that there are some Reddit users who just want to watch the funny videos and don’t care about Reddit’s poor behaviour.
it’s still too early. These things take time.
True I suppose things could change over time. We’ll have to see.
It’s been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.