I have never used Reddit on my phone, so for me the whole loss-of-Apollo concern was a non-issue. I do see less quality posts now, but it's not dead.
Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
371–380 of 478 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
#372My 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, albeit with Reddit is Fun. Personally I used to visit Reddit multiple times per day but now I typically visit it once or twice per week, if at all. I'm sure the official app is fine, but the approach they took to third party developers soured it for me. Ultimately I think if anything had any impact on Reddit's traffic it would have been the killing of the defacto mobile apps. The lesson any future founders shou…
Reddit Is Fun (rif) was a well-designed app that just worked. It was fast, had a customisable user interface with defaults that didn't get in the way of enjoying the content, and could run on all of my devices easily, including an Android 7 phone from 2018. It's a shining examplar of what a mobile browsing app should be like.
By comparison, the official Reddit app feels somewhat slower, even on my relatively new Android 12 phone from 2021, having a very noticeable lag when scrolling through articles and comments. For video and photo posts, there's no way of browsing the comments without clicking on the thumbnail and having it auto-play the videos every time, meaning I need to react fast to pause the video (there is practically no way of stopping this). And it doesn't support Android 7 anymore, meaning the only way to access it from my 2018 phone is via the browser.
It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.
Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
#373I stopped having an account at Reddit before the API changes, but there was a change in the way I saw the site over time. I'd be surprised if over 30% of its traffic is legitimate, organic, people just wanting to share things and talk about their interests. So much of many comment threads these days is about getting high scores on algorithms, and there's a lot of copying of high-scoring comments, clear attempts to change community narratives or sentiment regarding certain topics or brands, etc.
Digg, Reddit, and more have proven: a truly public discussion board will be taken over by business behavior unless it is strictly prohibited and enforced.
A decent number of people saw the writing on the wall that they didn't own the spaces that they socialized in, and sought something more distributed, with the Fediverse. It's a step in the right direction, but the extant focus on re-posting and updoots/downdoots still retains a lot of bullshit from social media that'll carry over just fine in terms of social behavior.
Reddit burned me out on any sort of website that has scoring or other perverse incentives to mess up the intent of whatever community. Groups who are earnest and savvy will host forum software and not social media software. Though one socializes on a forum, the way that you do so and the mechanics available separate them and allow you to focus on the topicality instead of how many updoots one gets. That design decision prevents gaming the forum, and in doing so gets rid of 'fake' engagement. For instance, why do we allow up and down votes without corresponding messages/reasons? I care much less about the metrics of group sentiment and would rather see why they feel a certain way.
Take a moment to actually read a Reddit thread, or a Youtube comments page, or any other generally accessible place to chat. Most of it is trash, a lot of it repeats itself, a lot of bots, misinformation, the works.
The media itself is fake. The things that get posted on places are meant to be posted places. It's all a fake social game. At least StumbleUpon, in its early hey day, exposed me to new and fun places on the Web. That atmosphere is dead in modern social media.
Bird's eye view, not much has changed. But Reddit has removed their awards system and Premium doesn't seem to have value. The bot problem hasn't gotten any better; rate-limiting just means they need more accounts. I visit there sometimes out of old habit, but I don't find anything fun anymore.
Lemmy has potential but I feel it's basically the same norms we saw on Reddit, depending on the instance.
Sure I'm on HN and it might barely qualify as social media, but I don't exactly fit in here. This is sort of a "last earnest effort" to participate somewhere on the Internet that isn't my own self-hosted services that use open or federated protocols.
Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
#374A 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…
This comes from Reddit's focus on mobile. Commenting is now quicker, shorter and likely repetitive. Users don't really read through comments, they just broadcast their thoughts like Twitter.
Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
#375If anyone’s looking for alternatives, Lemmy is federated and nice to use: http://lemmy.world/ It’s really only lacking the size of Reddit for me, there isn’t a ton of activity in niche subs, but they’re growing.
From my experience, programming and technology communities are already really strong on Lemmy. I'm confident to say that if you care about these topics, moving from Reddit to Lemmy is a good option.
For another categories, they're still small and having struggles gaining traction to have enough users and posts to be lively. But I think it's just a matter of time if Lemmy continues polishing its features and community discoveries.
Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
For what it's worth: many of the NSFW subreddits are dead . Even r/gonewild, one of the OGs - either they've gotten closed due to being unmoderated or they've been overrun by onlyfxns spam, or they've been hit by some weird downranking like GW. Particularly the nsfw loss hits hard for those interested in niche communities. We've lost tumblr, never had any of the Meta (FB, Instagram) views, Reddit is holding on on thr…
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Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth: many of the NSFW subreddits are dead . Even r/gonewild, one of the OGs - either they've gotten closed due to being unmoderated or they've been overrun by onlyfxns spam, or they've been hit by some weird downranking like GW. Particularly the nsfw loss hits hard for those interested in niche communities. We've lost tumblr, never had any of the Meta (FB, Instagram) views, Reddit is holding on on thr…
> overrun by onlyfxns spam I suspect this is the bigger issue to be honest. I certainly stopped because of this. Not that I begrudge people having OF or advertising that, but please, for fuck's sake, stay on-topic, and don't spam the fuck out of things with content barely related to the sub's topic. I also really hate the shift in language to be more personal; e.g. "would you like to [..]" / "I would like YOU to [..]…
This is the internet at large. The porn subreddits must have become part of the dark forest.
Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
#378I suspect the big impact will still take a while to appear, which is that reddit alternatives seem more credible. People looking to set up a new community were often picking reddit by default without thinking about it.
Especially for things aimed at teenagers reddit is mostly replaced by Discord. This isn't a new development though and I doubt the API debacle had much of an impact on that.
Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
#379The 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 didn't perceive any sharp drop-- quite the opposite. The negative press drove more people towards Reddit.
The average person didn't care about what the mods wanted.
Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
#380The 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'm still off Reddit and Twitter, and plan to keep it that way no matter what. Gotta be the change you want to see in the world.
This is the right approach and I did the same. Always surprised how many people here and on other sites whine and moan constantly about how they hate Reddit, Twitter and FB and can't seem to handle even slightest inconvenience to switch ("Oh Mastodon doesn't have a quote-tweet functionality, I can live without it!", "But-but-but my hiking group is on FB!", etc.). You can't argue with big tech companies, the only language they understand is reduced profit.