Some of the planned blackouts will be temporary, others plan to shut their subreddits down indefinitely in protest.
More power to the protest, but I am skeptical that it will do much good. I think reddit has strayed so far from its original mission and values that today it is nothing like the platform the reddit founders originally envisioned.
I think the reddit executives have probably already run the numbers on this and don’t care if every single user & mod who uses 3rd party apps and the API walks away from their platform. At this point they only care about the IPO and what they need to do to increase shareholder value after the IPO.
They may even see the exodus as a positive. They may think of these power users and API-utilizing mods as a drag on their bandwidth and worse, they are users who seldom if ever see any ads and increase their ad-viewing numbers.
Will the quality of reddit content suffer? I think it very likely will. It’s already been going downhill for a while now.
However, the executives mostly don’t care about content quality, either. As long as the free content they get from their users doesn’t stray into illegal and controversial waters, they are happy. If the content is mediocre memes and cat photos, they are quite happy with that. The goal is to serve as many ads up to as many users per hour as possible. They are banking on millions of “casuals” to stick around and scroll through the content and see those ads. Content quality is way down the list of their concerns.
My guess is the suits are are no longer interested in an “engagement” platform in the same way that Twitter and Facebook try to be (in their own ham-fisted and evil social-engineering ways). At this stage of the game, reddit just wants to be a mindless app that bored people can scroll while in the doctor’s waiting room, the airport, in the bathroom, or wherever they are and need to kill time.
Have the reddit suits made a miscalculation here? Will the exodus make reddit another “not cool anymore” type of platform like Digg that almost everyone abandons? Will the mass exodus only leave bots and karma farmers behind to talk to each other? Maybe, I don’t know. It’s hard to predict that kind of thing. But I think the execs are willing to roll the dice on this because short-term profits are all they care about since they will be going public. If the bots and karma farmers fool the people buying ads, reddit will just roll with that.
(You’d hope anyone buying ads on reddit would check to make sure their investment is actually increasing their sales…but there’s a lot of poorly managed businesses out there).
Either way…for those of us who enjoyed old reddit (and Digg before that, and Usenet before that) I think the path forward is a new platform such as this one.
This is like watching an incredibly slow train wreck. We know what the outcome looks like, but are (mostly) powerless to stop it unless these blackouts work.
Yeah it’s like watching a drunk man confidently walk out into oncoming traffic in a moment of hubris. Everyone can see what’s about to happen except him.
Yup, old time reddit user here. Sad to see this, but excited to see where the change will lead.
Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature’s delight.
- MA
The circus is burning, as its owners tried to heat it up. Let us enjoy watching the flames from a safe distance.
I’m still a bit sad about Reddit’s seemingly approaching ending. I never cared about Twitter so moving to Mastodon was a snap, but Reddit has had loads of amazing content posted and I’ve enjoyed it for 15+ years. I love the Fediverse, and Lemmy is great, but it may take some time before these platforms and communities can replace Reddit for me.
I worry that content disappearing will be a bigger problem on the Fediverse, as instances come and go.
Yeah. As much as I want to abandon Reddit completely if they go through with this, I’ll probably be forced to use new reddit and the official app because most communities probably wont migrate at all. There are many niche communities that I’m subscribed to, like related to a specific anime/LN series that’s not too big.
Just for curiosity: which is the anime/light novel series?
On-topic: I hope that other communities start migrating, once Reddit’s downwards spiral becomes too hard to ignore. I’m also considering to set up a few weaboo communities and one for conlangs, once I find a good instance for that. (lemmy.ml is already rather overburdened; perhaps someone could set up an instance for this sort of geeky stuff?)
There are many but a few that come to mind that I’ve been browsing a lot recently are:
- r/KumoDesu : The final volume (volume 16) is coming out on the 20th and I’ve started rereading the series. I actually finished reading the WN a couple of days ago (I love this series so much asdfaklmsv).
- r/IsekaiOjisan : Just plain fun
- r/Mashle : Not small but still one of my favourites. I don’t watch shonen a lot but this is a great manga.
I’ve considered hosting a couple of fediverse (and nextcloud) servers before but servers are expensive 😞
I mainly want an exact alternative to r/Anime and r/Manga for the episode discussions and I also want r/WritingPrompts and r/Animemes because those are my gotos to kill time.I’ve been meaning to check out Kumo for a while. I’m a big fan of Honzuki no Gekokujou and apparently there’s a lot of overlap in the fan base.
I watched a little over one season of Honzuki no Gekokujou and I didn’t find too interesting tbh (I only watched that many episodes because I was really bored at the time). It just felt like a “base building game” (I can’t think of any other analogy for some reason). Is there something I’m missing, like the anime not adapting the source material well? Because I see a lot of people who like but I can’t seem to understand why. To be clear, I don’t think it’s that bad but it seems more popular than it should be.
The beginning is a bit slow, I will admit, but the first season is a very good adaptation overall (later seasons skip a lot). So maybe it’s just not your cup of tea. I don’t think I follow the base-building analogy 🤔
As for its popularity, I think it does a lot of things really well, better than most other series, and the sum of it is superb.
- Characterization: there are almost no 1-dimensional characters. Even random side characters, or seemingly comic relief characters, have their own motivations and goings-on outside of what Myne (the unreliable narrator) sees. These are often revealed to the reader in side stories, and can recontextualize a lot of what’s happening.
- World building: we start with a straightforward medieval city. Then a small bit of magic is introduced. Then we find out about a bit how the country is governed, then more about how magic works, histories, politics…all in a satisfying way, because Kazuki-sensei planned the whole story from the beginning. Which brings me to:
- Foreshadowing: EVERYTHING is a Chekov’s gun. There’s a lot of stuff to find on a re-read, and the theorycrafting people come up with in the weekly chapter releases is a lot of fun too.
- Themes: this series does not shy away from serious themes. Poverty, children starving, sexual assault, the ramifications of a strict caste system, slavery…There’s a lot that sucked about medieval times. But also:
- Humor: absolutely great comedic moments. It’s rare for a book to make me laugh out loud. For example, there’s a scene where Myne hosts what is essentially a J-Pop concert and it’s just nuts.
I could go on…tl;dr it’s a great series!
