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.
I’m expecting the API change to happen exactly as planned. As a result all 3rd party apps will die by the end of this month, and the user count will take a severe hit. Many essential mod tools will stop working, so those who actually found the default app tolerable, will get to see all subs go downhill since they aren’t really being moderated anymore. As a result, the user count will continue to decline in the following months as people come to terms with Reddit sucking harder than before. Oh, but then it gets even worse when the spam bots and official ads start taking over every sub. Most likely the next year is going to be very rough in terms of user count.
Unlike other social media sites, where people stick around because of family and friends, at reddit-like sites, people stick around for the content and discussion. Once the content gets taken over by spam-bots, it’s over.
There’s some apps I hate like Instagram and WhatsApp, but stick around because it’s the only way I can contact some friends and family. The network effect is strong and I can’t really leave.
With Reddit, I don’t care. If there’s enough content somewhere else, even if it’s a fraction of the volume (there was no way I could get through everything on Reddit anyway) then it’s an easy switch.
I just revolted and said, if anyone wants to communicate with me, they need to use e.g. Signal.
I’m absolutely not installing this spyware on my phone
A good chunk of my close family all use iPhones and iMessage to communicate with each other - but they won’t add me to any group conversations because “green bubbles bad”… I spun up a Matrix server, created an account for everyone, pre-joined them to a room with all of us in it and sent everyone their credentials along with a link to Element for iOS so that all they had to do was download an app and copy/paste into two fields.
This worked great for about two or three months until most of them went back to their group chats over iMessage and I was back to being excluded. Only one of them still uses Element to communicate with me, but I suppose that’s still somewhat a victory since previously we were using Facebook Messenger (bleh) to chat.
I guess there are some sayings that still ring true, such as “Old habits die hard” or “Humans are creatures of habit”… 😮💨
It sucks, because it’s incredibly difficult for me to not take that personally as “They don’t seem to care about me to try to meet me half way to keep in touch”. I don’t know what more I could do aside from purchasing an iPhone, which is just not going to happen.
maybe I’m just very stubborn, but I already let the complete family of my girlfriend switch to Signal, because else I wouldn’t communicate with them.
I think, I’m just projecting some work frustration into my private life and don’t want to eat shit anymore. so, if I’m not worth enough for them to choose a medium, I’m fine with, I accept, that they don’t want to talk with me. I do have no problem with less communication - it’s their problem, when I don’t show up to happenings.
But I understand you, I also take it somehow personally, when people tell me “what do you have to hide?”
As I was part of the founders of a pirate party in my country, I’m maybe more loaded with arguments, but I’m just fed up with this shit and I just don’t take it anymore.
in situations of being left alone, some lovely Punk music always helps me - and my girlfriend is on my side, so that’s a major influence as well of course
but hey, if everyone just looks for convenience, I can do too
Oh, hey Punk is my favorite type of music as well! I get it though - honestly I feel like I’d be a little more at ease if I could just explain it logically. If there was a feature that iMessage had that no other platform had then as much as I’d still have some disdain for Apple and the situation they’ve created, then I could still explain it. But no, I specifically chose Matrix/Element because it could do what iMessage does (well aside from the weird “apps/games” thing they’ve got, which to my knowledge no one, let alone any of them, use…) and no one pointed out any issues with it. I wouldn’t even mind if they had another preference like Discord or What’sApp - just something cross platform…
I just hate it so much. One of my siblings just got married and I was the last to find out because of this. Another one just graduated from high school last month. I also have had so many issues with my health over the last few years and have had a terribly high amount of time spent in the hospital, and during those times it’d certainly be nice to talk to them and let them know I’m okay directly, rather than by proxy of one person.
Its so strange just how far we’ve come with tech, and yet still run into such simple roadblocks that should be easily avoided… but no.
I complete get the frustration, I’ve just grown stubborn ;-)
and very nice to meet another Punk connoisseur!