This is a rant post and I apologize but I had to talk about this. Most subs are coming back online and not saying ANYTHING about the next steps. Only a handful of subs are going indefinite. I checked the front page for the first time today after leaving the a couple hours before the day of the blackout and what do I see? Subs are up, and comments and upvotes are up to the general average before the blackout.
I checked r/gaming to see their recent post (WHICH HAS OVER 68k UPVOTES), and I see a comment with over 500 upvotes saying in a nutshell, “You guys need to calm down, they’re a company and need to make money”.
Along with a couple other comments saying similar things. Are you fucking serious? You can’t even have the fucking balls to say, “This is a company that has consistently screwed over its users and I need to take a stand and quit my addiction”? You’re just gonna sit and do nothing? Fuck you. You’re no fucking better than u/spez. You’re all a bunch of fucking hypocritical liars for shitting on spez and the admins while talking about how you’re “done” with Reddit and you won’t support this.
Go touch grass you fucking addicted cowards. I’m glad I made the switch to Lemmy if it means I don’t have to interact with dumbfucks like you.
See that’s the thing. People keep saying that. But is that really what’s happening? Because as I said, from a quick glance nothing has changed. There hasn’t been a substantial drop in content, upvotes, comments. It looks EXACTLY the same as it did three days ago.
So, either the people that DID leave and took it seriously are a small minority, or the majority of Reddit is full of hypocritical liars. Right?
Actually I’m skeptical about this. There were some other posts pointing out huge upvotes happening during the blackout, and others noticing a surge of bot followers appearing.
So I’m not sure that I trust those numbers at this point.
The other point is - it’s too soon to tell. But if advertisers and investors start having second thoughts about Reddit then that hurts the IPO.
The key isn’t in how many subs come back or how many folks return. It’s about getting Reddit’s attention by affecting what they care about most so that they have to start listening to their users again.
Too soon to tell, but that just means that at this point in time, it’s not a failure. Have hope!
With potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, reddit would 100% fudge the numbers with vote manipulation and bots.
I dunno - isn’t that essentially a jail sentence if uncovered? Misleading of investors?
Misleading investors is only illegal if you get caught. /s
All jokes aside it’s actually very difficult to prove “misleading investors / defrauding investors” in court.
Didn’t stop the robo-comments to the FCC about net neutrality…
Read some posts here today as well about mods who got removed and replaced so some subs could be reopened. Just word of mouth, but wouldn’t put it past the admin team. Read a news article today about some effects being felt by advertisers, so could be a mitigation effort in some part.
It was very clearly a very small minority that cared.
There’s a drop in historical content though, a lot of us who will have posted stuff that people would later want to refer to that is no longer there because we wiped it all before going.
I’m okay just finding a niche community that aligns more with my perspective. Even if it didn’t dent Reddit’s numbers like many has hoped, more people have joined here much more quickly than I would’ve thought. While it also may be a hindrance to some, I think it’s quite fascinating being a part of a rapidly expanding community going through growing pains. I have no idea how this will pan out, but I’m glad I’m here for the ride.
I honestly prefer the smaller community right now. I feel like I can comment and post without a huge group of people barraging me because I may have a different opinion.
The community here is quite cozy, and we have agency in the development of it. It’s very exciting.
Yes, there is a logical inconsistency in the statements about how many users are actually affected. On one hand Reddit claims to lose a lot of money on advertising, yet the 3.part app userbase is a too small to care about. So which is it?
There already is a noticeable change. The remaining users are very angry right now, understandably so, but it may also hint at more hidden problem for Reddit.
As this topic suggests (and my experience is the same) it’s really toxic over there right now.
If the toxic behaviour doesn’t normalize soon then Reddit shouldn’t worry about users leaving, they ought to worry about what kind of users remain. There probably has been a some brain drainage in the userbase and it will get worse when the apps actually close. Who wants to sign up for that…
As a 12 year reddit user, I assure you the majority of reddit is full of paid spammers and bots. The numbers have been as artificial as Twitter’s for a while.
I think there’s probably not many of us unfortunately.
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