It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.

I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.

Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.

I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.

I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.

I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.

  • Shertson@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I can’t believe that they didn’t do at least some research on how many people use 3rd party apps and account for those losses. The question is really how many will leave vs how many will just switch to the official app. I suspect most will just switch. It’s sad really. Hopefully Infinity for Reddit (and other 3rd party apps) will support Lemmy. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

    • Meseta@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      I think they did do research and third party app users make up a small enough portion of their user base that losing them is okay to Reddit.

      Keep in mind how popular Reddit is – for the most part the people left will be content with the karma bots reposting memes for the thirtieth time and there’s always going to be somebody racing to be the first to post some news to a related subreddit.

      I doubt it’ll affect their bottom line too much and in a week it’ll be back to business as usual for most subreddits.

      • acosmichippo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        I think they did do research and third party app users make up a small enough portion of their user base that losing them is okay to Reddit.

        users maybe, but i don’t think they considered mods in that. of course they can just replace mods as necessary, but the mod quality will go down for sure.

        • TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pubEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          Have they walked back the API costs for mod tools yet? Given they caved on the accessibility app, I’m anticipating them to cave there as well.

          • acosmichippo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            no, I really don’t think that’s gonna happen. It wouldn’t make sense to only do it for mods, the 3rd party apps would still have the same issue of figuring out a revenue stream to stay alive.