Just looking at Redditor’s reaction to this is telling me the battle is already lost. Most seem to be completely done and just want their cat videos back. It’s clear that the normies who invaded the site and proceeded to make it worse are completely content with what is happening so long as their addiction is fed. As far as I’m concerned, they can have the site.
HOWEVER. Maybe its a sign that all of the people who were in favor of the protest actually did leave and the only ones who are left are those who don’t give a shit about it or don’t support it.
I like those normies. It makes reddit feel a little more representative of the real world instead of the exclusive domain of cloistered nerds (I say that as a cloistered nerd). I’m here because federation is a better long term option for social media. I hope we can lure the normies over here too one day.
Well, there are also apparently some alt-right goons who want Reddit to burn for shutting down their old favorite hate forums, and they’re stirring up shit too.
The way you put it reminds me of Digg. When the “normies” came along with Digg v2, the OGs (the cloistered nerds see below) left.
Yeah you can’t exactly take the subset of redditors still using the site during the blackout as representative of how redditors feel about it - anybody with any concern about it is not crossing the picket line.
The number of comments per minute seems to have gone back to pre-blackout levels today. I think unfortunately there are just way fewer of us than I’d hoped.
I think we’ve got a decent start and getting kbin back online yesterday should be pretty big. Kbin seems a bit easier to sign up and less politicized.
The actual implementation of the reddit API changes at the end of the month should give us another big wave, but we should really try to prepare for and maximize that moment.
After that it’s going to be a war of attrition, if we can get enough word of mouth and build a better UX, I think the fediverse could win out in the long run, or at least become a viable alternative.
The organisation was very poor. All the mods had to do was setup a sub here and link it. The ones who cared could’ve joined.
48hrs isn’t enough.
Honestly I’m okay with that. Some awfully toxic stuff happens when a good community like this gets too big. I say I’m happy if it stays small.
There are. The few of us that appreciate it and give back to the community. I’m starting to look at it as a good thing.
Regarding the “real” issue being the use of the API by AI developers: It’s been evident for at least the last few years that this was going on, and I had seen it as a positive thing—that we were helping to create a training corpus that would be freely accessible to everyone, not just a handful of corporations with their own proprietary data.
It’s worth noting that any company that operates a search engine probably has a copy of the whole web anyway and does not need to do API calls to get it. They just scrape it for search indexing. This includes, e.g., Microsoft and Google.
