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Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

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

#121

Post by johndunne »

latexr wrote: post #99
candiddevmike wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you switch to?

Hopefully nothing, since they described it as an addiction and mentioned they’re now better overall. But your question isn’t atypical, which is weird when you think about it in comparison to any other addiction. If an alcoholic said they stopped drinking, asking what drug they replaced booze with would be a weird and possibly insensitive question.

I don't think anyone was asking "What addiction did you replace your addiction with." I interpreted it as more of a "What better habit did you replace your addiction with."

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

#122

Post by 58x14 »

jjcm wrote: post #109

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…

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?

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

#123

Post by nerdponx »

candiddevmike wrote: post #82
Pathogen-David wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What did you switch to?

I never found an equivalent alternative. I still log on to my local city subreddit occasionally (~1x/month) to see if there's any local news I missed. But otherwise I've just moved on to doing other things with my time.

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

#124

Post by qznc »

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…

Lemmy certainly got a boost but I'm not sure yet that is stable.

https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

Nearly half the active users have disappeared again since the peak.

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

#125

Post by nerdponx »

ben_w wrote: post #59
dubeye wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attempt to change policy completely failed. Wasn't a stalemate in any sense of the word

Pyrrhic victory for Reddit Corporation?

Hardly Phyrrhic. "Noticeable in numbers" does not equate to even short-term financial damage, let alone harm to the longer-term financial outlook. Reddit Corporation won unambiguously, as expected by most reasonable observers.

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

#126

Post by swores »

arp242 wrote: post #120
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 data seems wrong. I don't use Reddit much, but I checked the data aginast some smaller subs I sometimes check, and according to those charts they have just a few comments per day, but I know for a fact that's wrong. It's wrong for all subs I checked. For example: https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit Just 3 comments for Nov 22, 8 for Nov 23. But how does that square with the existence of this thread from Nob…

Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is (the 2023, fewer people hours, version of what they did to launch the site), and subredditstats.com has detected that?

I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit comment counting serving could do the same.

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

#127

Post by n2d4 »

josefx wrote: post #113
n2d4 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just straight misinformation. If you go on any of the "big subs" you linked, you'll see that there are far more comments than that per day. For example, in ELI5, by just taking the 5 most commented posts that were posted in the last 24h, they have 700 comments which is more than the peak that Subreddit Stats says they had since July. Instead, if you go on Subreddit Stats and read the text with the big red fon…

> they have 700 comments which is more than the peak that Subreddit Stats says they had since July. So only down by two thirds, so they still have to double down if they want to outcompete X.

I compared a lower bound of actual comments to the upper bound of the number claimed by SRS. In reality, the number is much higher (by taking all posts instead of just 5, and including comments made today on posts that were posted yesterday).
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