The title is a bit clickbaity but the article is worth a read. To keep it short:
- large subreddits stopped protesting
- 1.8k subreddits are still in the dark, but those are rather small
- [from the article] “Though the Reddit team likely caused permanent damage to the platform and its relationship with users, Spez got his way. But that victory might not mean much.”
IMO it was a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, the protests ended, and most users are still stuck in that shithole… but the reputation damage won’t be reversed, Reddit managed to seed its competitors (as this one) with the necessary userbase to make them functional, and odds are that Reddit will keep going in its death spiral. And that doesn’t even take into account the amount of bad press that it generated, that will hurt IPO numbers for sure.
Keep in mind the users left on reddit aren’t really the cream of the crop. They’re the ones who say stuff like “bruhhh this app is shit” fully unaware that reddit is a website first and foremost
Reddit is competing with Instagram and TikTok for the dumbest slice of the Internet. If you can think, you’re no longer welcome there, and are probably a liability to their advertising efforts
A lot of the best mods left. Some made it over here to the Fediverse, but a lot of them just stopped. Which is probably better for their mental health.
You still have good mods left over there, but there was also a distinct brain drain.
Some of the best mod tools shut down, and overall the site is just a bit worse to use.
Now, can the remaining mods train up to the level of the ones who left? Sure, but there’s going to be that doubt in the back of their minds now. Reddit Admins can no longer be trusted to let mods run their communities.
And the next time Reddit Admins do something that pisses off the community, more people will leave and not look back. The IPO is still looming in the future, and there are a lot of fuckups for Spez to make.
To add on that: even the good mods to be far less cooperative than before. Accessing the site only once a day, never reporting issues to the admins, plopping lazy automod rules full of false positives, never engaging with the userbase, so goes on. Until the mod suddenly goes missing in action - people noticed that the sub went downhill, but they never noticed that the mod was gone.
The standards of the “immigration leftover” might be low, but even those will eventually migrate once they get better content elsewhere. And at this rate even IG and TT will be able to offer it, not because they’ve become better but because Reddit itself is worse.
I don’t think corpo websites will survive high intrest rates in the long term. They’re already making rash decisions to quickly start turning a profit andbit’s only gonna piss off users. Once the fediverse gets critical mass their days are over and we’ll wonder why we didn’t do this sooner