Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 478 posts

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

#71

Post by dragontamer »

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.

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

#72

Post by latency-guy2 »

loxias wrote: post #46
h2odragon wrote: post #3

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.

Strongly disagree, it was very impactful to me. A few communities I really liked and used for support up and left to other platforms, leading to other issues. I tried to follow some of them but it didn't work. My take away of the blackout is "reddit broke, lots of the good people left, life is more lonely as a result".

Lots of bad people left too, which is probably a net good for reddit even if the number is lopsided for one or the other.

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

caslon wrote: post #54
thaumaturgy wrote: post #48

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/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…

> Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it's probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms - especially open-source/federated ones like Lemmy.…

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by x86x87 »

smrtinsert wrote: post #61
marginalia_nu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Define irrelevant, because if it has eyeballs...

Facebook has the eyeballs. I don't think it's relevant anymore

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

#76

Post by nkotov »

sorahn wrote: 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.

I've been using Winston as an alternative but it still doesn't compared to how good Apollo was. My reddit usage overall has decreased simply because of it.

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

#77

Post by theshrike79 »

sorahn wrote: 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.

Yep, Apollo going away made me stop using mobile Reddit completely. Don't bother on the desktop either, because I liked the Apollo UI a lot more.

Nowadays I'm mostly on Tildes and here, neither of which has the endless inflow of content that Reddit did, it's actually possible to read "everything" on both and then go do something else.

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

#78

Post by _kulang »

4death4 wrote: post #56
thaumaturgy wrote: post #48

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/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…

That’s really interesting data. But isn’t it possible less popular subreddits have picked up the slack?

Just have a a look through /r/all and compare to what it was before. Good moderation essentially led to well curated content. At the moment more subreddits contribute in my opinion worse content

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

#79

Post by veqq »

davesmylie wrote: post #50
rabbits_2002 wrote: post #43

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 hav…

I don't know about "only garbage gets posted". In one of the craft based subs I moderate (5m subs - reasonably sized one), it's not so much the quality of posts has dropped, it's that the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly. This seems to directly translate to garbage posts getting a lot more visibility and sticking around for a lot longer. The good quality posts are still there, but proportionally the ga…

> the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly

Mine's gone from 1-1.5k to 2-400 posts a day.

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

#80

Post by Pathogen-David »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #48

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/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…

I took the protest as an opportunity to quit my 12 year Reddit addiction cold turkey and never came back, seems like I'm not the only one. Sometimes I miss /r/houseplants but I'm better off overall.
Post reply on HN