Ordinary redditors are feeling the pain as well.
Ordinary redditors are feeling the pain as well.
I wanted to inform you that Boost will stop working after July 1st[.](https://i.imgur.com/KD4pPlL.png) As you know, Redd
The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,
I'm not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn't even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can't tell you how many times now I've looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.
I've already felt the sting of the protests when googling solutions to various issues. I used to be able to include "reddit" in the search and would almost always find relevant information quickly, but now as OP mentioned many posts and whole communities have gone dark.
It's all been really eye opening about the potential negative consequences of having so many communities and information in the control of so few.
People are only using the 3rd party app line because it's the most relatable argument. It's much more than that. A ton of moderation tools and useful bots are going dark tomorrow thanks to the API policy change. Even if we all go back to Reddit, there's no bringing back those tools. Reddit communities are going to slowly go to shit as spammers all realize that moderators aren't as effective as they used to be. This was going to happen regardless of how the protests turned out. There's no scenario where things get better for Reddit.
To some degree it's hard to be sympathetic, because the people complaining about this are seriously lacking in sympathy themselves. They just wanted to see the content that those users produced for them, they didn't care about the difficulties or preferences of the users themselves. So when those Spez-opposed users took their ball and went home the Spez-friendly people got angry at them for taking their comments away with them rather than at Spez for having driven them to that in the first place.
Exactly.
Most of us on the fediverse can sympathize with the idea that "its really frustrating not being able to use Reddit as a reliable spurce for obscure knowledge."
The difference is that we feel "its really frustrating that I can't rely on Reddit, because even if the answer is there I can't in good conscience support spez." Instead of "all the answers are gone because of these stipid protests."
People love to blame the victim for defending themselves over the problematic person who is abusing them, because if they acknowledge that someone is being abusive that kind of morally obligates them to step in.
And they very much don't want to do that.
And obviously the exploitation of users for their knowledge and content so that the owners of Reddit Inc. can gain wealth for sitting on their thumbs is different from the kind of abuse one's mind might go to when the word is raised, but it's the same dynamic.
Someone is claiming mistreatment, those around them are annoyed by the claims, not by the mistreatment, because the person standing up for themselves is putting onlookers in the dangerous position of examining their relationship to that mistreatment.
And they don't wanna.
Vicious, but true. I'm still struggling with whether or not I'm going to astroturf my comment history and delete my account. I see a lot of folks saying their comments were restored and then they had no way to log back in to delete them again. For now, I'm just going to leave my Reddit account dormant. I suppose it isn't super effective to leave my content there for Spez to benefit from, but I kinda feel like it does more harm to people just looking for answers than it ever will to Spez if I were to remove it. All around, this is just a ridiculously stupid situation we all find ourselves in over the whims of small minds chasing after big money. Again.
I posted a similar comment elsewhere but along the same line of thought: The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever. There's a real problem of Apathy in today's culture when people are just jonesing for their fix of daily content/memes, or at the very least nothing that disrupts the status quo. They don't give a fuck about "ideals" or what corporations do or farm from them so long as their instant gratification and daily intake of said content remains unchanged.
The most toxic users of Reddit want to stay there rather than come here? Oh boo-hoo, cry me a river:-). If they are happy with their childish toys, then let them be - that's a win for them, and a win for us too?
Okay, so that's glass-half-full thinking, and more realistically the situation is also half empty at the same time, but both are true at the same time, so we'll see what happens I guess.
The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever.
I actually consider this to be (mostly) a good thing. Within those that walk away from reddit, I expect the ratio of content creators vs. content consumers to be way above average. So if we get most of the people who used to make Reddit a great source of food for thought, and spez gets to keep the vast majority of cat video watchers, that's not a bad deal at all.
I've seen many toots on Mastodon where people argue it is ethical to mirror Reddit now because so many people are destroying their content, and that will make searching for answers more difficult. Sure, I get their stance but at the same time I think is being a selfish scab.
The content that is now lost, will bounce back on some other plattform. Hopefully a better and more democratic plattform.
only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest
That's one of the most solipsistic "if it doesn't affect me it doesn't exist" comments I've seen in a good while.
To give the poster the benefit of the doubt, it's probably just a very poorly worded frustration that /r/20flavorsofshitpost (with the mindless horde) is operational when /r/thethingiwant (with a passionate small community that adds a lot of value) is dead. It sure could have been communicated better, but I really don't think it's meant to claim the protest only affects the poster's interests.
It's harder to see the difference when 10% of a huge sub leaves than 80% of a tiny one.