Not sure if I agree with him (or rather, pretty sure I disagree). The protest was very successful for me - it got me off the site, and I have no plans of going back, even if it fully opens and goes back to “normal”. In my case, reddit is not winning, it completely lost. I see more people like me around here every day and it makes me happy. Can’t remember lat time reddit made me happy, so I’m enjoying the change, even if it comes with a fair bit of jank.
@doctortofu Ditto, fellow traveler.
I think his comments are directed at the moderators who have caved, not necessarily to every viewer of the video
His broader point is that he thinks mods should have stuck to their guns and kept subs private which would include their historic posts. By even reopening, they’re allowing traffic to return to the site even if a few large communities are memeing hard. For the most part, subs that have reopened are going to return to business as usual. All because the mods of those communities didn’t want to sacrifice their control. Spez called their bluff.
While thousands of users have been driven away, there are still more than enough who will remain and continue to engage with the site. The only lesson Reddit will have learned is that they can just wait it out no matter how unpopular of a decision they make.
I’m very curious to see if there will be any meaningful drop in traffic at this time next month.
Reddit was never going to just go away as a result of this. Even if every blacked-out subreddit remained private forever and everyone who was aware of this protest walked away, there’s plenty of oblivious users and remaining subreddits to continue operating.
The “win” condition for the protesters is some or all of the following:
- Give Reddit bad publicity in the mainstream press
- Cause a drop in ad revenue. Money is life as far as Reddit is concerend.
- Harm Reddit’s valuation in its IPO. Money is life.
- Help Reddit replacements get established, restoring competition that Reddit thought had long ago vanished. (You are here).
Nothing was going to stop Reddit from going ahead with their API change, all we could hope for was to make it hurt for Reddit. And in that regard I do believe we’ve scored a solid win. The Fediverse is now competition for Reddit, and as they squeeze and squeeze their users for money over the years to come there’s now an escape valve that users can flow out of under that pressure.
My goals in aiding protests were just as you say. I wanted to help consolidate the instances I use, and the communities I use. I’ve always known reddit will stay there. I don’t even think I’m wounding reddit. That beast is too big. All I can do is piggyback some popular posts and get a few hundred to a thousand people to fill up my instance and make me a bit happier about this whole debacle :)
We’re a swarm of mosquitoes. We bite Reddit and it’s painful, but really the only way we’re going to kill Reddit is if in the process of swatting at us Reddit forgets that it’s holding a machete in its hand.
Fortunately Reddit shows signs that it is indeed doing that.
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Thing is, Reddit is so big that it can only die due to stupidity on their end
So I see it more as Reddit, instead of swatting, going full bug spray mode and spraying so much they poison themselves instead of a little poison that’s just enough to keep the mosquitoes down (in this case, things like the over priced API, brushing off the protests, the threatening mods, and other self destructive behaviours. The API was going out during dusk, the brushing off protests was going, “It’s fine” instead of applying repellent, and the threatening mods and other behaviours from here on out being them getting swarmed, panicking, and spraying the toxic shit in obscene amounts)
Left and will not return. It can only get worse.
Money corrupts all
As much as Louis is on our side in this, I feel like he alone was responsible for the MOST damage to the protest efforts. After his video about how a 2-day blackout wasn’t enough, dialogue from the anti-protest side started to shift heavily toward “this isn’t even going to do anything,” and his video was cited as often to support “we need to do more” as it was to support “you guys are stupid if you think you’re doing anything.” So I hope he finds some room to be pissed off at himself while he’s pissed off about the “failed” reddit protest.
And, spoiler alert: it takes time for momentum to shift, and it’s very much shifting - it’s just not happening as fast as this guy wants it to.
Yeah it’s very interesting that most scabs on Reddit sound very similar to him and his video. Even though his intention was to help the protest, ironically he’s done the most damage to the protest and given the scabs and anti-protestets plenty of ammunition to use against protesting efforts.
I’m sure he’s not even willing to admit where he’s wrong or at fault here, he doesn’t seem like the kind of person to own up, in any meaningful way at least.
Typical Rossman to think anything but the platform shutting down (before 3pas actually stop working even) is a failure.
He can definitely speak with a lot of vitriol :/ It’s why I stopped watching his videos. I’m glad he’s pushing for right-to-repair stuff, but I just couldn’t handle the anger and negativity.
I stopped when he went on a transphobic rant about 3 years ago.
Yikes, I wasn’t aware of that. I’m already avoiding his videos, but I’ll probably completely hide his channel on Youtube.
EDIT: Do you have a link for that video? I’m searching for it, but trying to find it without clicking on Reddit links is a pain :(
It was a couple of years ago, just after he had hooked up with a gf, and he was doing weird AMA videos while wearing a smoking jacket. The general gist of the rant was his political beliefs on racism, wokeism, and ‘there are only two sexes’, it wasn’t a full on hate-speech-apoluza, and probably not enough of a red flag for him to continue gaining in popularity.
For me, it coming a little while after Cody going a bit too RWNJ after Kanyon left him, it was enough for me to nope-out of his channel, but I have a very slim tolerance of youtube celebs anyway, I find most of them unbearable.
edit: given the ‘My Girlfriend owns a macbook, F my life’ video that was posted a week or two after his rants, I’m going to say it must have been 2019.
What did Cody ever say/do to give you “right wing nut job” vibes? He basically just started homesteading and pretending he’s on Mars.
I don’t really get how reddit is “winning” if I am no longer using it. Lemmy and kbin have more than filled the gap from reddit. Even if users at large don’t switch immediately, that is fine.
