41–50 of 478 posts
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.
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.
As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators have gained a bit of a foothold.
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.
Most people have no idea what's behind reddit, facebook, youtube. They just see a free shiny thing and start using it. Then one day the free shiny thing has a gross ad on it, and one day it has another one, and before they know it, it's unusable.
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 most popular subreddits show a steady decline from 2019 to present, with a sharp drop in July 2023. Once this happens to a platform, it's rare for the platform to ever get those users back at scale. It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform, a la Slashdot -- still up and running with some users, but with flat or declining activity forever.
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…
Yeah, I can see the average quality has been going down. Also I've felt less enthusiastic about contributing. I just won't bother submitting articles, writing a more insightful comment, etc
Lately, they only deserve bottom of the barrel engagement
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…
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 garbage is much more visible now.
This is enough of a problem that subscribers have been complaining about it. Not much can be done until (and only if) the number of actual contributors begins to rise again.
On the other hand, I also run a tiny local city sub (maybe 20k ppl) - the number of posts has been steadily growing. I can't work that one out.