this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Was there even a mass exodus? I largely avoid Reddit now, but I do kind of doubt that they've been hurt in any meaningful way by all the protests and people leaving...

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[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Is it important that Reddit suffers? For me the important thing is that lemmy flourishes and has good oc.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago

I support this point of view, but at the same time I want the status quo to be disrupted and the internet to change, I'm not a fan of allowing corporations to fall into complacency when they hold so much power.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right? Ignore them, have fun here. No reason to give any thought to them.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (15 children)

This is what I wish more lemmings would grasp. I've commented before how there's this disillusionment that reddit actually died when a bunch of people left. It didn't. The sooner everyone can stop being in denial about that, the better.

The situation is really more akin to an abusive ex and the people that left realizing that they're better off without them. You're in a better place. Stop talking about, focusing on the drama that your ex brought and just embrace your newer better environment.

Millions of people are in that situation and don't leave because they've been manipulated, they're scared, and in this case addicted. My brother in law switched from Apollo to the official app and hates it, complains every day, and says reddit sucks now...but won't leave.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (4 children)

No idea, and I don't care. What matters for me is that there are enough people on Lemmy to keep it interesting.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Can't speak for anyone else, but as soon as RIF died I was gone. Was on it for over 10 years, and the only way I would view reddit content. Reddit's ui is cancer.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Honestly, I don't really care. I like it here more than reddit and if it stays like it is, awesome.

I have no desire to see reddit succeed or fail, I simply found a place I fit in better.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Anyone that expected Lemmy to instantly get as big as reddit overnight were naive. Overall I think only a small fraction went away but reddit is clearly using tactics like mass inviting to group chats and reopening places to boost activity.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Just have a look at the content there, it dropped a lot in quality.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

As someone who only ever browsed all, I see no difference.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't care.

I didn't leave to make the service worse.

The service got worse, and so I left.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (10 children)

If we're perfectly honest - No.

Reddit has over 53 some odd million users. Million with an M. Lemmy has gained, at most, upwards of just thousands. To call it a 'mass exodus' is really overselling it.

It's going to take a fairly long time, for Lemmy to even scratch 100k even. I'm on both Reddit and Lemmy. Lemmy, for a more positive experience. Reddit, because the numbers are just there.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This crisis has given Lemmy enough users to be a vibrant, viable alternative with the software and apps undergoing rapid development. This means the next time that reddit tries to pull some shit, there will be somewhere for people to go, unlike this time. Lemmy just wasn't really ready for prime time.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I think you are correct. Lemmy is really just gearing up at the moment, but can't handle the volume to compete with reddit.

The increase of instances, user guides, communities and third party apps are necessary building stones of a federated reddit alrernative of size.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Lemmy has almost half a million accounts ( 400k ) with over 1.5 million posts. lemmy.world grew by ~30k new accounts in June.

Others grew by single digit thousands, so the migration seems to be about ~50k new users to Lemmy.

That's not trivial, Reddit had those kind of numbers in like 2007. Give it time.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

I'm just happy to be here. I care less and less about reddit. Using lemmy and mastodon for a while, it's gotten more and more important to me to just build a great, fun, healthy community and less important (emotionally) to bring down the giants. I still care about it politically and theoretically, I just don't feel it as much.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The real question is why anyone cares? Move on and just enjoy Lemmy. Forget about reddit.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I’m torn on this. Because a sort of injustice happened. Do we really just ignore enshitification, try to educate others, reflect and keep an eye on the site while trying to understand what happened and not repeat old mistakes? Or just move on with our lives and hope that the injustices sort themselves out?

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Several major subs have closed, they're forced to campaign to keep mods, a significant amount of content generators have left. Even though it's been only a couple weeks, they've slid on the global index of visited sites. They've lost 3-4% of 1.7 billion views in weeks. That's 10's of millions of ads not delivered. That alone is several million dollars lost on a site trying to be profitable. This doesn't include people on the fence, people currently unaffected because their app didn't die until this week, or people just watching the drama until it's boring again. Also, Reddit depends heavily on free labor to succeed, the bulk of the community that is leaving is their free labor pool. They don't have the cash to pay moderators for their time and they just removed the tools that let those people do their work.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Their user numbers are available with a web search. Reddit useage dipped towards end of June but has mostly leveled out.

Quite a few mods left, which has had a larger impact than an equal number of general users leaving would. The niche topic sub I was involved in went from four mods to one half-hearted mod. The quality of posts has dropped. Almost every comment thread contains complaints. Reports are piled up.

Most surprising to me when I peeked at the sub this weekend was the amount of borderline-incel desperation and negativity. The sub is for a hobby that while slightly male majority, we had plenty of women contributing with minimal problems. Not anymore. If I were a woman looking at that sub for the first time, I would probably block it. It is so depressing and angry now, I barely recognize it.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

This is some fomo type shit.... forget about your ex, invest in your current!!!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Personally I came over bc the app I used stopped working (boost). Lemmy seems to have the same content I used reddit for:

  • US politics headlines
  • Memes
  • Niche communities

I don't plan on going back to reddit unless it's via Boost. Fediverse is better anyway

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fuck Reddit. I’m here now and it’s great.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Honestly I like Lemmy more and more everyday. It's quality vs quantity when it comes to posts and the users.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Quanlity sounds like the next Antman movie.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Only evidence I have is:
any day of week 1 of using Lemmy I had about 1 page of new stories on my subscribed communities any day of week 2 of using Lemmy I had about 2 pages of new stories on my communities any day of week 3 (this week) I'm at least 4 pages in and still haven't hit on the old stories

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the damage done to Reddit is not from protests but the bad management decisions -- enshittification as Corey Doctorow put it -- in order to hasten Reddit's IPO. The attitude by upper management, taking user content for granted, is going to continue to serve to chase users away, or drive them to deprioritize engagement with Reddit.

I'm missing only a couple of communities here on Lemmy but otherwise it serves me as a daily feed. And reddit still can be searched for troubleshooting.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel all those posts about reddit looking for mods for various communities is a good indicator. They might not have lost quantity all that much, but a very small portion of quality kept a lot of reddit interesting and running smoothly. A lot of that has either just dropped entirely engaging or migrated.

I doubt everyone would move. Some people simply take it as a sign to move on and do other things with their limited time on this little planet.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

I see it as a signs of problems to come. Being a Mod sucks, the only reason most hung around was that they were passionate for the subs they moderated. Replacing moderators at first might be easy but I believe, with time, the turnover rate will increase linearly thus causing a massive drop in quality content as time progress. Thus causing a feed back loop of less good users, less good content and more shit users, more shit content, culminating in the slow and painful death Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I left and deleted my baconreader app. Haven't gone back since. And I used to spend about an hour a day on there.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The timing of /r/place nullified any possibility evidence of an effect, as a ton of streamer featured this event, creating traffic. I wouldn't be surprised if they got a huge net profit this month.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I hope so, but I don't care. The same with the bird site. I chose to delete my barely-used bird account when that idiot bought it, and to explore mastadon and lemmy when I could no longer use Apollo to view reddit. Two or 3 times I've popped over to reddit to see what's going on, and check on any other subreddits that have moved to lemmy, and using the official reddit browser or app just reinforces why I left. It's shit, and getting shittier.

Basically I like the mantra "not my circus, not my monkeys."

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

No, of course not. If you're using Lemmy as a "protest" instead of thinking that it's a better platform, it's totally ineffectual and you'll go back to using Reddit sooner or later. Personally, I think that the fediverse is a more compelling idea than the traditional internet, so I'm sticking with Lemmy for a bit in one form or another.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Again, as long as we're being thoughtful and having fun here, people will come naturally.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What I do know is that I'm happier having left.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Im working on a case study for a publishing firm about the whole API announcement and subsequent fallout so I've been watching all this really closely. The thing I'm most anxious for is the data on web traffic to reddit and it's competitors, which I can only get on a monthly basis. It dropped a lot from May to June, which you could attribute to the protest or even the summer. However, Discords traffic increased during that time, and it was the only major social platform to change in either direction. I'm hoping to get some clarity once July data comes out but I don't think we well know for sure about long term impact for a while. Reddit I'm sure knows more but definitely won't share it publicly unless necessary, like if they do go public, but I'm not sure that kind of data would be included in a filing.

(I tracked traffic on similarweb and Semrush. Lemmy is on there too, but is tracked per server, and most were tracked starting in may or June so data is pretty limited and can't really be compared.)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The effect is going to be long term. The most active users (usually 10% posters, 1% content creators and mods) were the most affected by the changes. Those are also the most vocal. And, probably the first ones to move here. Once those move reddit content will get worse over time which will make the other users move (89%) too. So yea, don't expect short term impact. It's the long run that matters

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't know if I'd call it a mass exodus, and I don't know that it directly has anything to do with Lemmy, but there's been a noticeable dip in quality. Fewer posts across many of the front page subreddits, fewer votes, more bot posts, more low effort posts, less discussion in comment sections, lots of deleted comments and accounts... overall there just seems to be a dip in quality.

I was going to delete, but decided to stick around for a while first, to see how things pan out, and I've got to say the mobile site is even worse than expected. I get constant pop ups trying to direct me to download the app, then when I say no the website will auto reload, often sending me back to the top of the page. It's difficult to find and respond to anyone who replies to your comments, and sometimes if you sort by top: today it won't even show any posts. Just... blank. Clicking on a post opens it as a tab that is more like a popup, and closing it resets where you were on the page.

I could keep going but I think that pretty much summarizes what I've noticed. Don't know that it's directly related to a Lemmy "exodus," and I'm still finding my way around here so I can't really say, but reddit as we knew it seems pretty dead.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

We came to Lemmy for our own benefit, not just to fuck with reddit. Who cares if it hurt them or not? We're better off without reddit, and that is all that matters.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I really don't care about reddit anymore. I pretty happy with Lemmy right now.

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