I’m here now and not there. So I guess it at least did a little something 🙋‍♂️

No, it didn’t get crushed. The goal was never to move everyone off reddit, it is to trigger the death spiral by having the people who cared about and actively contributes to abandon reddit and being redditors.

If this trend continues, reddit will get Facebook’d as their algorithms will make contents there get louder and dumber and angrier than ever before and cause more people to leave.

Remember, reddit is cynicism and despair, and despair is the enemy of progress.

I have nothing to back this up and I haven’t spent any significant amount of time browsing Reddit since the end of June. Yesterday, a search result took me to a section of Reddit and eyebrowsed through a bit. I feel like the people that left were the people that contributed and a lot of the remaining traffic is the people that just browse. Social media and the internet are not like real world businesses that just tank. Online social media is made up of the people who view it and the people who contribute to it. Facebook became boomers, memes that aren’t as clever as people who post them think they are, You’re great and posting pictures of a family reunion you didn’t know existed, and a substitute for craigslist. It didn’t used to be that way, but I think overall they would say their numbers are solid. Social media evolves, and Reddit is evolving in a direction, that a core group of users who I speculate were some of the more useful contributors, don’t want to participate in. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow and find Reddit gone. But will it ever truly be the front page of the internet again? Will it ever be where I’m glad my search took me for a specific tech problem? Will information that used to be on individual bulletin boards scattered throughout the net which had centralized on Reddit remain on Reddit? Reddit will probably cash out in some way and we’ll be left with the Facebook equivalent of Reddit. If that’s something that quality contributors don’t want to participate in, then it will be even more akin to Facebook. So is it going to go away? Probably not. Could you argue that it’s basically already gone? I would say it’s at least headed that way.

Saying that it’s over and the Reddit won is a bit naive. The majority of the subs that I used to frequent have come back online, but they are definitely still protesting. ProgrammerHumor is making new troll rules based on majority vote every week. Madlads made everyone a mod. Many subs are posting John Oliver or troll versions of their original purpose.

It’s not over. Will they succeed? Who knows. But Reddit is currently a completely different place than it was a month ago because of the ongoing protests.

My corners of Reddit – the apolitical, narrowly to very narrowly focused subs – never protested or gave up. Some are trying to move to various platforms: one to Lemmy, another to Squabbles, a third thinking about Tildes. The one that posted about moving to Lemmy appears to be a moderate success; the others not.

Now, if only /r/NoSleep would move here, I wouldn’t have to keep visiting Reddit. But I am just too addicted to the stories there

Reddit didnt crush the protest, redditors and mods did. Mods acted like mods (their stereotypes mostly deserved) and users were so addicted to the site that they lost their shit that their favorite sub went dark for 2 days. The mods never had leverage and 99% of the users have no desire to lift a finger to meaningfully protest.

Reddit doesnt have any real competition (yet… hopefully lemmy does well) so they dont really care if what theyre doing pisses off users. The site is thoroughly in the enshittening phase of its life cycle and the apathy of its users ensure that reddit has no incentive to reverse this.