hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
Because, while we know how shitty Reddit as a company has behaved, there are millions who have no idea (despite the popular posts by mods across thousands of subs) and now feel that the mods and subs which went private/restricted are the ones damaging Reddit, rather than Reddit shooting itself.
To be honest, not that many people seem to actually care and I think this would have gone better if they didn’t announce their “for 48 hours” bullshit. Imagine if the WGA said they were going on strike for two weeks and then getting back to writing. They would accomplish literally nothing.
Subs saying “for 48 hours” is the equivalent to that. If they just went indefinite from the start, they wouldn’t have to be polling people who are now mostly just annoyed that their experience has been unpleasant for two days.
Honestly, as much as I support the whole thing, it went about as well as expected. Mods kind of shot themselves in the foot, now the community blames them.
In a way, those users are right. Either go all in or do nothing. Middle-of-the-road shit doesn’t work for things like this.
Also, the constant image with the black background and large white text saying Reddit sucks (that’s at least how it appears to general users) is becoming literal spam. Regular users see it, and it becomes one of those things where it’s like “we heard you the first dozen times, please shut up”. Also, because it’s being spammed, it loses impact and people gloss over it or filter it out.
At best, they’ll annoy enough people to leave (kind of roundabout way of accomplishing things, but I guess it works). At worst, they’ve given reddit a reason to declare the mods as promoting and engaging in spam which “doesn’t benefit the users of the site, so we’re going to step in and get things back on track so everyone can enjoy Reddit” or some corporate shit.
Honestly, Reddit’s in a position where they may even have the upper hand now in terms of PR. Users angry, but not at them.
The thing is, the people who don’t realize what this is about are going to be having a really rough time in a couple of weeks when moderation slides. Of course, they’re going to blame the mods again and say they’re doing it on purpose because the “protest failed and now you’re just being spiteful and hurting the users”.
We know that’s not the case. The majority doesn’t and won’t care.
I think the real issue is that the protest coordinators were not able to succinctly explain why they had to protest to begin with. Charging third party app developers for API access is an esoteric topic. Most people don’t even know what an API is. Most people don’t use third party apps. Most people also don’t care.
Most (60%) of Reddit users either use 3rd party apps (~30%) or old.reddit.com (~30%)
You can’t throw out an enormous number like that without further explanation or a source at least. The only post I found on my first Google search is from a reddit post (6 days ago) where it’s said that reddit reports about 5% of its users coming from third party apps.
Apollo also reported having around 1.2M users while not being a small app at all.
So with 400M MAU as the lowest possible amount of users, somehow all others 3rd party apps have over 118M users between them?
I could believe 30% of users being old.reddit ones due to it not being deleted after all those years. But for mobile apps, that 5% quote seems the most realistic.
Yeah, I was going to mention that as well.
Longtime users and especially power users and mods have been on third party apps for ages. And because third party apps are the most “visible” examples of the API, that’s what drew the attention.
As soon as they tried to explain “it’s not only about third party apps, but also third party tools”, that’s when they lost people because explaining what those tools are and accomplish to users who aren’t mods (or even familiar with tech at all) becomes a subject without much clarity.
To a massive portion of users, there is no “reddit(dot)com”, it’s just the app. The fact that so many subs are still using titles like “save third party apps” is a bad sign. It’s not “save Reddit from spam bots and other awful shit” (which is one of the things this is mainly about), but you’re telling a bunch of people to “save” apps that they don’t use or care about.
There’s an added cog in the machine here. Every time someone tries (and succeeds) in explaining the issues, the astroturfing (or just regular bootlicking) begins and suddenly there’s seeds of doubt.
One thing we can count on is Reddit fucking up again. And again. And each time, it’ll lose the more active users. It’s not ever going to be a mass migration, but waves over time. Even then, what can we say Reddit will be in another five years? Probably different from what it is now, with users who expect different things.
I am seeing many users (especially those who haven’t been around for as long) asking people what the big deal is and why their favorite subreddits are down. Half of the people trying to respond aren’t giving these people satisfactory and succinct answers. The protest is breaking down as soon as it began.