Ask Lemmy

Because they learned to expect much, much less from Reddit.

It's on its way out.

I know TPTB think that by kicking everyone off and replacing them with AI bots, they can tailor the site in such a way that it shows huge amounts of use, but that's just driving actual people away. People who come up with original content. People who have interesting discussion points. People who don't want an antiseptic, saccharine 1950s White picket fence, Hail-to-the-Chief narrative to be the only thing they're allowed to talk about without fear of being banned ...

... which is what it'll eventually become, and hold onto, desperately, as it drowns under the tide of users who eschew AI overreach, and crave originality and a reasonable lack of censorship in their discussions.

Or so I heard.

People immediately gave up and accepted their ass fucking because it's convient

I’m still mad that all of the people during those protests telling me “Yeah right, you’ll come crawling back in a week.” Have no way to know they were wrong.

A lot of large subs that really tried to make a stand got taken over by the admins.

I quit for 2 years, then spoofed the API to use RIF again, fuck Spez. Was there for about a year and finally got banned for saying nazis deserve to be dead. Hit a little too close to home for the admins with that one. I still lurk, but I wrote a program in python that bypasses the login requirements for old reddit, blocks all ads, and adds back features they removed, such as seeing number of points weighted. Again, fuck Spez. I'd have distributed the program if old reddit redirect didn't just bypass the login themselves.

One of my communities from Reddit tried to build momentum here but there just isn't enough participation on Lemmy. So they went back to Reddit. I don't know how they have been doing since.

You're posting your question on what happened. A significant portion of the population here is because of it.

I think it's down to they kept or replaced enough subreddit mods that actually make reddit work. That and crucially lemmy or any alternative barrier to entry is/was still too difficult. Less users less content.

It's a long difficult road to break people's social media inertia and habits. Also reddit is obviously trying to become more addictive like TikTok, another barrier for alternatives that rightfully refuse to so that, but in some way they're fighting biology as well.

The overall quality of Reddit has very definitely gone down the last couple years.

Obviously I don't have access to their statistics, but just from looking at it I think most of the higher quality posters have either given up on it or been drowned out by bots.

I'm here! Still running and mostly personally paying for hosting a Lemmy server (25% partially funded by 2 donating users, which I appreciate a ton!)

In many cases, the mod team was selectively replaced after the story ran out of steam. A number of smaller communities did go dark and stayed dark, but Reddit forced the opening of several of the major ones.

There was a significant migration to lemmy, but many didn't stay, and ended up back on Reddit. We're in the middle of a 2nd surge with the removal of old.reddit.com from the public (not logged in) front-end, but it's more of a steady stream as individual users get fed up, not the big wave that hit with the API announcement.

I think this time folks are going to stay. Reddit's content quality and frequency of OC has plummeted, while it's been steadily rising on the Fediverse. And the dialog here is vastly better.

That's the real driver as to whether people stay on a social media site - the conversations with other users. Reddit has started to heavily censor and manipulate that conversation, and is dying as a result.

On the Fediverse, that conversation is alive and thriving. And as long as it is, this place will continue to grow.

A lot of people left Reddit then, you can see some of them here on Lemmy.

Nothing happened, RedReader is still working, and the others were useless.

Reddit stood their ground and most of the userbase capitulated - me included.

Funnily enough, I've now quit Reddit because of their recent decision to stop people who aren't signed in from using Old Reddit.

It is run by AI admins now

Nothing. I left and came here. I blocked reddit at my router along with the other scumbag sites. It doesn't exist anymore.

I think it lasted for a couple of weeks.
It lasted exactly two weeks. No demands were met. No further action was taken.

How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Following the original "protest" some subs remained dark to continue the boycott. These communities were either banned or had their moderators replaced with more compliant ones. Some subs saw their moderators banned for dissent, then the entire sub was banned for being unmoderted. After that, dissenting users were systematically banned, either explicitly for dissenting, or implicitly for various BS reasons. Now, Reddit is mostly AI bots with a handful of real people who either drink the kool-aid or have learned that the nail who sticks out gets the hammer.