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Now that the dust has settled, what went wrong with saving 3rd party apps?

93 comments

  • Nothing "went wrong" with it. It was simply never possible. Reddit controlled whether those 3rd party apps could function, and Reddit wanted those 3rd party apps to cease functioning.

  • Ultimately, what went wrong is that most Reddit users were screeching at individual leaves littering their garden, without noticing the tree creating those leaves on first place. They failed to connect the dots between: arbitrary bans, subreddit suspensions, user-on-user harassment, the idiotic way that rules are enforced, the presence of powermods, then Reddit trying to get rid of the powermods, the 3PA being killed... while focusing too much on a braindead clown called Steve Huffman.

    It's all about profits. You can't enforce any demand if you don't make Reddit lose money. Blackouts and John Oliver posting only go so far, you need to migrate out of the platform. And if you're staying in the platform you need to transform it into an advertiser-hostile shithole. But for that you need more coordination than just "HURR DURR WE WRITE FUCK SPEZ IN PLACE LOL LMAO".

    • The John Oliver thing was so dumb. Like, so what? Doesn't matter if you're posting John Oliver as a protest, you're still using the platform on a sub that allows advertisement.

      The only thing that could actually go anywhere was making the subs NSFW, since those will actually hurt Reddit's finances, but obviously they forced the subs to revert and most easily gave up.

      • I think that the John Oliver thing was useful to raise awareness, but people eventually confused a situational strategy with an actual solution.

        Besides NSFW-ing, mods could've also promoted ad blocker usage, the sort of consumption criticism that advertisers outright despise, scorched the earth (slowly removing content from the subs), and harshly restricting the scope of the subreddit, not just through a "haha John Oliver" but a permanent solution. Or just stop moderating at all, since all those clowns that u/ModCodeOfConduct is putting on the place of older mods are incompetent clowns and powertrippers.

    • Honest question: how is Lemmy safer against power tripping mods, user-on-user harassment and everything else? Sure it's a super nice place now but eventually the powertippers etc. will pop up. ?

      • The federation itself alleviates those problems.

        In Reddit those problems backtrack to the Reddit admins giving no fucks about the users. Why would they? Even if the users are mistreated, network effect still keeps them in Reddit, as they don't want to lose the content.

        Here in Lemmy however, if the admins of an instance are arseholes, negligent, stupid etc., their users will simply migrate to another instance. The users won't lose access to their content, and they know it.

        And in some cases, admins of other instances might even defederate the instance with problematic admins, to protect their own users. (Specially useful when it comes to harassment, as harassers tend to gravitate towards the same places.)

        So for example. In Reddit you got the powermods going rogue, being abusive towards the users, and the admins went like, "NOOOOO THEY'RE A PRECIOUS PART OF OUR COMMUNITY". Until the powermods turned against Reddit itself; then the admins took action. Here, the admins would need to act as soon as the powermods become an issue for the users, not just for themselves.

        Additionally: it's hard to power-trip when you got a public modlog telling people what you did.

      • It contains the fallout of site-wide issues to some extent. Mods and user-on-user will still be issues. If one federation owner goes on a power trip everyone can just leave that server while continuing to use other Lemmy instances.

        Essentially you'd only lose access to some subreddits instead of all of reddit in that situation.

        You also would have 3rd party apps that would continue to work. Unlike now where apps like Sync are just down for a few months until they finish development for Lemmy.

        But don't worry, reddit had a run of like 6-10 years there where mods weren't an issue so we have some time before that all starts.

  • What went wrong is simple and clear as day: People did not commit to their protest. Only a fraction of those who took part made the important step of quitting reddit altogether. Because the protest was limited, reddit absorbed the hit.

    If you're not willing to give up your abuser, you're destined to be battered.

    It is important to remember that you owe these platforms nothing. There is life after an endless stream of dopamine hits. Just walk out.

  • As far as the protests go, they were quite successful. Reddit's traffic went massively down; users, especially power users who uploaded content and moderated subreddits, left the site; and Lemmy became a viable alternative to Reddit with the influx of users. Reddit is still struggling to replace the moderators who quit, and they've been forced to take desperate actions like reinstating r/place and paying users who get a lot of upvotes to keep traffic on the site. The decision was never going to be reversed, the old free API scheme legitimately cost Reddit money and forcing users to use the official app like every other major social media has meant they could collect more data on users to sell. But as far as what the protest accomplished besides reversing the decision, it massively hurt Reddit and bolstered Lemmy into being a viable replacement

  • Everything that has a beginning has an ending (perhaps with a long tail). Perhaps the only wrong thing is that we forgot about that. All of these Internet services tend to have a long tail, most of everything we remember once using is still around in some form barely being used but for a tiny and loyal user base that is still hanging in there for some reason.

    None of these things were great in and of themselves, it was always the community.

  • The only thing I can think of was that the mods announced a time limit of 48 hours for the protests, but I'm not sure that making all the protests indefinite would have solved anything.

    Spez was determined to copy Elon Musk even though Elon clearly doesn't know how to run a social media platform. Now both Reddit and Twitter are dying.

  • The fact that Reddit moderators quickly folded the moment Spez threatened to take their "powers" away made the whole thing quickly fail. Very few had the balls to go through with the protests and didn't care about those imaginary powers (honorable mention to the former r/interestingasfuck mods), but many were too addicted to that fake status symbol to even imagine letting go of it and Spez took advantage of that to kill the protests.

    For those of us who left Reddit and mostly only use Lemmy now, I believe the 3rd party apps thing was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I think it's just that we already hated Reddit so much that when presented with Lemmy we immediately jumped ship.

    For many other Redditors however the appocalypse didn't make any difference, many big subreddits are still very active and the Reddit moderators who folded realized they don't want to lose their control over those subs and all the potential that control gives them (monetization via partnerships with brands, sponsored AMAs, selling film rights like one former mod of r/wallstreetbets did, shilling your new app, website or crypto like again r/wallstreetbets mods did etc...).

    The mistake in these protests was to assume that Reddit mods would align with the interests of 3rd party app users.

93 comments