Reddit protest updates: news on the apps shutting down and Reddit’s fights with mods
www.theverge.com
Reddit communities went dark to protest recent changes.

Here’s the list of highlights from the article, as it’s a good TL;DR:

  • The Reddit app-pocalyse is here: Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader go dark
  • How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history
  • Reddit will remove mods of private communities unless they reopen
  • Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview
  • Why disabled users joined the Reddit blackout
  • Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit — and why users revolted
  • A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working
  • BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml
    36·
    1 year ago

    I’ll tell you what happened with Digg:

    1. Kevin Rose swears he’ll listen to the community and not introduce a major overhaul which will bring several unpopular changes
    2. a month or so passes and Digg leadership thinks everyone is stupid and forgot
    3. Digg 4 launches and literally everyone leaves for reddit over the next couple of weeks.
    4. Fark and Slashdot collectively die laughing, then of being old curmudgeons

    there, now you’re all caught up

    • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlOPM
      17·
      1 year ago

      there, now you’re all caught up

      Note how your quick summary skips a lot of information and views, that give people context on what happened. For example:

      • how power users were gaming the system, and that the userbase was already pissed, even before Digg v4;
      • what’s wrong with Digg v4, and why users hated it so much;
      • the pressures that caused v4 on first place;
      • the state of Reddit (and Twitter, and Facebook) when the Digg exodus happened;
      • how people organised that mass exodus off the platform;
      • how the news back then covered Digg’s downfall;
      • who’s Kevin Rose again? (I bet that plenty people don’t even know who Kevin Rose is, let alone his role on Digg.) etc.

      And yet it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to remember everything about the events. And we [people in general] shouldn’t even trust anyone in specific to begin with, because everyone [including you and me] is a bit biased and will cherry-pick a few details and ignore others. For that we’d need a central repository documenting the downfall of Digg, preferably from multiple users’ PoVs. I think that this is important, because better knowledge of the past allows us to guide better our future actions.

      Same deal here with Reddit.

    • cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      1 year ago

      Fark and Slashdot were always kinda centrally controlled. During the heyday of the internet frontier they were fresh and hilarious, but they never attracted younger people because it was just the same jokes over and over. And without building younger communities they died of irrelevance.

    • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      You’re leaving out that Digg had been hemorrhaging users to Reddit for years due to better features and therefore better content. Diggv4 was just the final nail

      • rusticus1773@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        You are wrong. Before Digg v4, it was a far better interface with better content than Reddit. Reddit was at best a marginal player and far smaller than Digg. I hated Reddit at the time and only begrudgingly switched because of what Rose did.

      • BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        i think “hemorrhaging” is a strong term. the majority of people who used reddit (I had been on reddit pretty much since the beginning) used both sites. before the Digg v4 migration, reddit had been around for, oh, 3-4 years and had been growing slowly. as the rumors grew for a couple of months about the changes planned for v4, there was a sudden surge in new users on reddit, too, but it wasn’t until the launch that the deluge really began.