As Reddit Crushes Protests, Its User Traffic Returns to Normal
User visits and time spent on the social media platform normalize after traffic to Reddit briefly dipped last week during the blackout, according to SimilarWeb.
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Well, user traffic has returned to normal, but we also have to consider that it's just traffic. Some of that traffic is also a bunch of people talking about Reddit, protesting, etc.
That being said, I don't think Reddit will die from this, but it doesn't need to in order for the Fediverse to succeed. All it needs is to push enough people onto federated services and kickstart it, just like Twitter did with Mastodon. We aren't going to all switch overnight, it will be a gradual process.
I hate that I’m still adding to Reddit traffic but every once and a while I still do (search item) + Reddit because it’s still better than just googling something and getting 100 terrible SEO articles about a topic.
For example. I wanted to look for DIY dog toys. I got hundreds of results with crappy clickbait, and ridden websites. Did +Reddit and got some great results.
Once I can do +Lemmy and get decent results my traffic will fall hard… I guess I gotta be part of that change, offering threads of my own with information I know. But it just seems homeless some days.
Honestly, I haven't seen as big of a push for redditors to move elsewhere.
It feels like Plan A was to protest the changes and when that plan didn't work, there was no Plan B in sight. I saw someone suggesting that perhaps, at this point, it would be best to consider moving to another platform but the reality is that outside ModCoord I didn't really see a coordinated effort to do that.
While everyone is likely to suffer in the long-run in terms of the quality of content, outside of losing access to some very cool apps the biggest victims of the whole ordeal have been the mods actually standing up to Reddit's tyrannical behavior.
Reddit is beyond redemption, but for many people reddit is home and the plan now seems to be to comply with the orders and try to keep what semblance of normalcy and power each mod has rather than realizing that the point at which their votes, voices and free labor matter is over.
My own reddit traffic has dropped right off since I discovered Lemmy. For now this place has the feel of the early internet: democratic, distributed and friendly. It really makes clear how repugnant Reddit has become.
Same for me. Lemmy still has some rough edges but even the apps that are available now are really good as they are. Improvements are happening at amazing speed. What we currently have is quite good in my opinion and this is the worst it will ever be, as we’ll have improvements on top of improvements, most apps and lemmy itself are open source, I believe that soon, instead of us feature pairing with reddit, it will be them trying to chase us up.
What's nice to me is that I'm not replying to this on Lemmy. I'm able to use my preferred UI (Kbin) and interact with the same content as everyone else, connecting more people together. It makes it feel more collaborative.
This is a good point. Because even websites which replaced others, oftentimes the older one is still there. Like even Digg still alive after Reddit got more popular. Some people say Tumblr's dead but its really not especially for specific interests like games. The success of you isnt based on the failure of someone else, and its important to remember and not become cross because reddit still has users. Especially its been only like 10 days and a lot have already gone onto other sites.
Ok, those places are still "alive", but have you actually gone to them lately? Digg is literally run by an ad bot who creates 99% of posts. You have to search down the list for a post that actually has comments. And of the comments that exist, it looks like a Facebook conversation with a few people, one of which is likely a bot.
Users are the content creators, whether through posts or comments. Pissing off a large portion of them will just leave the ones that don't care about content, they just want something...anything...delivered to them endlessly. If the good users abandon the site, then Reddit will slowly turn into Digg, a link aggregator run by bots serving SEO content to users that contribute nothing more than "nice picture!". And that's really sad when you consider what the place once was...just like it's sad to see Digg now.
I'm not angry with Reddit because it will survive. I'm angry with Reddit because of what I've lost at the hands of management that turned their backs on me. While their are alternatives that cover some of what I've lost, I know I'll never get back some of it.
Digg didn't "die" from a single change. It bled users over the course of multiple changes. The size of the waves was based on how many users were affected. The big wave was when they redesigned the whole interface.
I don't think Reddit is done changing, so we'll see where things go. I know that eventually they'll kill off the old interface, and that will lose a large portion of users as well.
