Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 478 posts

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#31
post #23

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.

If it had such a minimal impact, downloads of the official app should be exploding. Haven't heard anything suggesting that to be the case.

It’s now the #1 most downloaded app in the news category on the App Store, ahead of Twitter and Nextdoor. So maybe downloads did explode?

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#32
post #22

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#33
post #7

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.

Exactly this.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#34
post #18

Some Reddit communities fled to other platforms such as Lemmy: 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?

Nah. A lot of power users are gone. Now it will slowly slide into irrelevance.

We'll see. Back in 2015 I wrote about how poor moderation and moderator incentives were problems, and yet since then Reddit has kept growing: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator-problem-how....

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#35
post #18

Some Reddit communities fled to other platforms such as Lemmy: 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?

Nah. A lot of power users are gone. Now it will slowly slide into irrelevance.

Many of the "power users" were outright liabilities for Reddit, and they should consider their departure a good thing.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#36
post #30

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 alternat…

>ellen pao blackout

those were some innocent times

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#37
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.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#38
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. A lot of power users are gone. Now it will slowly slide into irrelevance.

We'll see. Back in 2015 I wrote about how poor moderation and moderator incentives were problems, and yet since then Reddit has kept growing: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator-problem-how... .

You can be both large and irrelevant. Facebook is perhaps the best example of this. Reddit feels headed in the same direction.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#39
post #35
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. A lot of power users are gone. Now it will slowly slide into irrelevance.

Many of the "power users" were outright liabilities for Reddit, and they should consider their departure a good thing.

It depends. When your best content and the filtering of crap content comes from these power users you're in trouble when they leave.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#40
post #7

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.

Same outcome for me but with Relay for Reddit, I could not bring myself to use the official app and now my usage dropped closed to zero which was a good thing, I have more time for productive stuff.
Post reply on HN