I see a lot of comments from bootlickers on how the protests are dumb and stupid and dont work and engagement metrics are still holding but the quality of posts and comments has noticeably depreciated imo. So much so that whenever I visit the site Im actually shocked at how bad it is.
The quality has been declining for years now. This last thing has only made it worse, but you’re likely now noticing how bad it is because you spend less time on it.
The protest won’t work. It’s failed in crippling reddit. Reddit will keep going, but as a shadow of its former self, with increasingly shallow discussions and increasingly crappy/old/unoriginal comment.
I’d say the protest did work. A lot of good users and mods left Reddit, the admins massively overplayed their hand and showed their true colors, probably hurting their IPO, the fediverse got enough of an influx of users to get a good kickstart and the next migration wave is just around the corner.
I read an article comparing Reddit to a dying mall and honestly it’s kinda getting that vibe since the protest
The migration is not gonna happen overnight, but it is happening.
I think the protest crippled reddit considerably. It robbed reddit of a significant number of quality users and moderators, caused an extreme amount of media attention, and created enough of a problem for Google that they had to change course in order to compensate for all the broken links and noticeably poorer search results.
The main reason it looks like it had a much smaller effect is because a lot of missing users have been replaced by bots. And given how hostile those bots are with respect to moderators and the protest, it seems clear that they were put in place by reddit themselves. So don’t be fooled by “traffic is normal” announcements and metrics. They mean nothing by themselves.
The protest caused a lot of users to start looking for alternatives and it shed a lot of light on the fediverse, giving it an incredible amount of exposure. People now know that it exists and know that there are alternatives to reddit.
Remember, the worst is yet to come after June 30th when those API changes take effect.
The quality and the traffic. At least in terms of engagement. I knew another mod there that I used to do spamhunting with and we both modded a couple big subs, we were talking about it one day and we were talking about sub traffic, and I noted about 2 years ago there was actually a big decline in traffic in /r/videos, which he modded he said he hadn’t noticed it, but when you went to archive.org and compared random front pages to engagement at the time, you noticed that all posts overall had fewer comments and fewer upvotes, we started checking a few more large subs and noticed it was quite similar.
Quality is, to some extent, a mod failing. Mods can’t be expected to go out there and produce top quality posts all the time, but they can be expected to keep out the low quality content, and a lot of them don’t do that. By ignoring frequently reposted topics, to not bothering to properly apply the rules to keep the posts fully on topic, the subs just declined and declined.