Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

Replaced it with Lemmy, sure. I think you're underestimating how many others went off to other large, centralized places, even if they barely relate to reddit. Discord, Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, etc. If they first and foremost just wanna chat, they don't need a long form forum like reddit, and I imagine most aren't making sizeable comments anyway. I'd be surprised if the mean comment length on a large sub wasn't below Twitter's character limit.

>Maybe if Reddit squeezes more, more users will go to Lemmy and similar alternative platforms?

oh, no worries. We have at least two looming controversies for that upcoming.

1. the contributor program (AKA, get paid to post on reddit) that replaces Reddit Gold that was datamined: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/reddit-will-start-paying-y...

2. the looming hostility towards NSFW content that will likely in the mid term (1-2 years) lead to reddit trying to cut off NSFW material.

It's a matter of being prepared for the next drama instead of if it'll ever happen again.

on the other end, I've replaced almost every community I used to browse on Reddit for. The non-casual thing is that it doesn't take one alternative, but many:

- tech topics I browse on HN for. 90+% of what I'd see on places like r/technology I'd see here with tons of discussion

- more political or otherwise touchy topics I replaced with tildes.net. And honestly I am the much better off for it. It is a lot quieter than Reddit, but there are very few times where I feel such topics devolve into the polarized turf wars you know r/politics to be.

- Don't browse it as much, but for memes/humor stuff Lemmy and KBin work well enough. still very much growing and I hope they can become more general purpose replacements, but for now non-meme stuff is a trickle unless it's that 1-2 posts that blow up (usually political stuff or more reddit drama... not what I go there for)

- lastly, a lot of gaming stuff I migrated to discord for. Definitely the worst experience when on large servers and it feels even noisier than Twitter. But the small community for niche genres or specific games are surprisingly cozy. It's a real mixed bag.

So I'd say it's 90% replaced. But I can also admit there are some few communities I reluctantly go back to that keep me from fully disconnecting to reddit (though, note that I deleted my account way back in February. I fully lurk):

- gamedev communities are a huge one. The best alternative to that is Twitter and... no, I still can't do Twitter/X/Whatever Musk fancies that day of the week. Never liked it before, and I'd rather deal with Reddit's madness than try to learn it in 2023 at its worst. maybe I'll try Bluesky one day, but I'm personally rooting for Mastodon (haven't checked it out myself, though).

- in a similar vein, I still find it easier to skim for industry news on r/games and related subs than to scour the net. This is definitely laziness on my end so I can't pretend to be immune from the path of least resistance. I can alleviate half of this with a proper RSS feed (never used one, but I am very curious about setting one up), but research into this really made me remember how many sites I used to discuss on removed their forums or comment sections. Or in some cases, the comments make reddit look like a bastion of nuance in comparison.

well, one day. I'm still searching in the meantime.

>I've spent years saying that programmers make good money, then expect slave labor from writers and content developers.

I guess. They have very different histories and it's not like programmers are strangers to doing "free work" (i.e. the entire open source community until the Github era). the narrative would be flipped 30 years ago. I'm not quite sure how that is relevant.

>If the only way people will "allow" a valuable service to live is as their bitch, the entire internet is welcome to go die in a fire while we dream up some new answer for the future of this world.

sure. pay your labor. I don't think we disagree.

But the issue isn't that reddit doesn't make millions. It's that it's obsessed with spending 10's of millions in hopes of making hundreds of millions off of content provided via free labor. I just want to browse some news and discuss with people. HN doesn't cost millions in server costs and performs that perfectly for me.

If I had a nice cozy forum I wouldn't mind a subscription to it. I paid my 10 bux to SA back in the day and I donated to Tildes for a few years. But I do agree many would rather let the internet burn than pay for a site directly.

>People are just so dramatic and they don't understand the services they're using.

At the same time, people are so fixated with "X killer [no, not the twitter thing]" that they can't see the small victories when a site with 1000 people grows to 10k people. 10x growth is insane but it can be swept away if all they see is a 0.02% drop in reddit traffic to achieve that.

So much better to celebrate the growths than to chant at the downfalls. downfalls are good popcorn drama, especially these days, but doesn't really solve the problem.