I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
At the time I deleted all my posts, quit reddit and came here. After a while I went back to reddit (mostly to my country’s sub) and I noticed a huge difference. It became a lot less organic, bot traffic increased and the content seemed mostly reposts and rage bait. It was a huge change. I truly believe it was a major blow to reddit and the beggining of the end, even if it’s not immediately obvious. But I believe in time we will see the API fiasco as the first major exodus.
Lemmy then was a ghost town. In a few minutes you could scroll all the content for the day. But it started growing, and with each major scandal the traffic increased until now, where its potential as competition is starting to become apparent.
It was not for nothing, AT ALL. We won big time, they just masked it for whoever wasn’t watching carefully
One thing you didn’t mention is a lot of mods didn’t capitulate and were removed from power and banned.
That’s a big part of why so many communities are full of bots and slop now. The bigger subreddits were already bad for that, but before I left Reddit (during the API protest), I at least was able to find quality discussions and posts in a bunch of smaller, more niche subreddits.
Lemmy doesn’t have nearly as many of those kinds of communities, so I found myself visiting Reddit a few times after the API stuff. I was disappointed to learn that many of the communities I had frequented were nothing like I remembered, and many of them had completely different mod teams. Whether it’s the mods or just the people who cared enough to frequently post and comment, a lot of the good people on Reddit left during the API fiasco. Although I enjoy Lemmy far more than I did Reddit (due to the higher concentration of meaningful conversations), it sucks to see how much has been lost at Reddit
Take this lesson to heart. Whether it’s Reddit, or protests, or strike actions, you need strategic plans to account for moves and counter moves or your effort is just a minor inconvenience and you will never be heard and never promote your interests. People need a higher tolerance for sacrifice and a non-dependency relationship with corporations to allow for it. We should all be capable of dropping any business from our lives.
I quit Twitter after the kitchen sink incident in 2022.
Quit Reddit for good after the API bullshit.
I like the Fediverse.
2023 api was what led me here. Actually, might’ve been earlier. I was here since fuck spez protests.
Edit: actually, yeah 2023 was both api and fuck spez protests
Most communities shrugged their shoulders and turned the lights back on after reddit finally dropped the api. They became more heavily moderated and the enshitification only has gotten worse. Those of us that really cared deleted our history and accounts, gave Spez one good last fuck and came here.
From my perspective (not giving a crap), it sort of faded away as people got tired of seeing post after post about it.
Just looked it up - there’s a free tier for hobbyists etc. capped at 100 requests/sec, and a high-volume tier for commercial users that costs roughly 24 cents/1000 requests.
Been here ever since.
Same, found Lemmy immediately after leaving.
They didn’t work. Reddit pushed on with the change, their user numbers didn’t dip enough and well that’s that
I think it lasted for a couple of weeks.
It lasted exactly two weeks. No demands were met. No further action was taken.How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Following the original “protest” some subs remained dark to continue the boycott. These communities were either banned or had their moderators replaced with more compliant ones. Some subs saw their moderators banned for dissent, then the entire sub was banned for being unmoderted. After that, dissenting users were systematically banned, either explicitly for dissenting, or implicitly for various BS reasons. Now, Reddit is mostly AI bots with a handful of real people who either drink the kool-aid or have learned that the nail who sticks out gets the hammer.I’m here! Still running and mostly personally paying for hosting a Lemmy server (25% partially funded by 2 donating users, which I appreciate a ton!)
A lot of people left Reddit then, you can see some of them here on Lemmy.
You’re posting your question on what happened. A significant portion of the population here is because of it.
Reddit stood their ground and most of the userbase capitulated - me included.
Funnily enough, I’ve now quit Reddit because of their recent decision to stop people who aren’t signed in from using Old Reddit.
My protest was to leave and never return. I have been on Lemmy since that week.
