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 is too big to fail, they have achieved critical mass. Keep in mind facebook is still around despite being a reviled company, and instagram certainly hasn’t had a mass migration off of the platform either.
At the end of the day Lemmy isn’t a replacement to reddit yet. It depends entirely upon it getting traction which thus far still hasn’t occurred - we are not at critical mass yet. I hope it happens but there are many reasons why this site could fail even after reddit’s admin blunders. Too many people are apathetic to the changes and not all of them are lurkers who do not post or comment.
Today you can’t just stop using reddit either, especially for google searches. Too much content is ONLY on reddit. It’s a huge problem. We really need a wikipedia style reddit where it’s not for profit and still moderated for content.
Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the “metaverse” to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn’t seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There’s no denying that. But, it’s their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.
As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There’s a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there’s also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don’t know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can “get back to normal” and continue being Google’s sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that “the beatings will continue until morale improves,” it’s hard to imagine how they can get back to “normal.”
I’m okay with lemmy getting just enough traction to bring in the best users without being “popular”
This is the most level-headed take. Reddit is going to continue to slog along with or without my account, with or without Lemmy’s 53k active users. Anyone who thinks this protest is going to sink them entirely is naive.
However, they may stagger along as an enshittified website that has lost it’s spirit and never meaningfully grows again. Reddit is still better than any other alternative at this point in time, but Reddit is not by my estimation going to improve again. It’s all downhill. So I’m doing my part and trying to work to build community elsewhere.
We don’t need 50MM users to reach a mass where the content is fresh and engaging all the time. Probably a fraction of that would be. Lemmy’s userbase is double Squabbles and there is already a noticeable difference in content.
Yep. I think people need to think about what “failure” means in this context. Reddit isn’t going to go away, and honestly the “default” experience - what you see when you just visit the homepage - isn’t likely to change much at all IMO.
The thing is I haven’t liked the default reddit experience for many years. The draw of reddit was that they could do all their crappy changes to the default-level site and it still left the niche discussion-based communities to their own devices.
Now they’ve affected those communities, which is why I’m here. But I’m well aware that a great majority of reddit’s userbase uses reddit to doomscroll through endless insipid bot-generated meme lists. None of that is going to change. People like me who care about the small places that will be impacted are in a very small minority compared to the overall userbase of reddit.
So reddit will fail (or has failed) for my use case, certainly. But I’m under no illusion that it will cease to exist.
I feel like I’m being repetitive, but yes your point that the Reddit popular/all front pages won’t be dramatically affected is spot on. Those are where a huge amount of passive users spend their time, and the posts there have been trash and reposts for years now.
The quality content enjoyed by many people who jumped ship was never showing up on the front page anyway. I made numerous original content posts that gained a lot of traction relative to the niche subreddit it was in, but my 3K upvoted quality content was never going to compete for popular/all space with a 50k upvoted repost of a repost of TikTok video.
I did notice, when I visited Reddit desktop today that r/popular has a lot of political posts, despite one of popular’s reasons for existing to be a non-political alternative to r/all. I wonder if that’s something that’s crept in over time and I never noticed, or if that’s the result of losing so many subreddits that politics had to backfill popular though.
I think being repetitive is ok, because I continue to see the sentiment out there that everyone who is upset about reddit is delusional and think reddit will be closed in a month, etc.
The reality is more complicated. And I think a lot of people don’t get it because a real lot of people actually don’t ever see the great parts of reddit that we all loved.
I like to get that message out there as much as possible because saying reddit is ruined for my usage isn’t the same as saying it is going to go under.