What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it.

Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.:

https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews

https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive

https://subredditstats.com/r/videos

All of the most popular subreddits show a steady decline from 2019 to present, with a sharp drop in July 2023. Once this happens to a platform, it's rare for the platform to ever get those users back at scale. It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform, a la Slashdot -- still up and running with some users, but with flat or declining activity forever.

My outcome was the shutdown of Apollo, rather than the blackout. I no longer read Reddit on my phone. (Except for a link or two clicked from something else, but even then I go to `old.reddit` instead to read the comments). That was really where I wasted the most time on it.

It’s kind of a relief. I think I was too “lazy” to stop on my own because Apollo was so comfortable to use.

A massive decline in post quality. I don’t know what happened but ever since the blackout only garbage gets posted. Even the quality of niche subreddits has fallen. I think the blackout meant that all the well moderated “good” subreddits closed while the bad ones stayed open. Now the bad subreddits are more popular and have eclipsed the good subreddits.

As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators have gained a bit of a foothold.

Personal anecdotal experience here.

Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return.

But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit the frontpage and attract new followers... All the Redditors looking for new hangout spots. Post quality has declined as a result, but the subs who stayed have seemingly absorbed the traffic.

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Lemmy.world usage spiked dramatically, as has Mastodon.world. I think these alternative open source communities show lots of promise, though many decisions at Lemmy seem naiive right now.

The adults seem aware of the Lemmy problems however so I remain hopeful. If your community is text based, Lemmy is likely a good fit.

Picture based communities have a NSFW / trolling problem that is still an open question. If trolls can post CSAM to threaten the moderators / admins, what are Lemmy admins supposed to do about that?

DeFederation (and temporary DeFederation) are okay tools for this problem... But better tools need to be built into Lemmy. Random server #244 doesn't necessarily deserve to be defederated if just 20 or so trolls are posting CSAM and threatening Admins. Nominally, a tool that more selectively bans users (or new users only) instead of cutting off the whole server would be ideal.

Some Reddit communities fled to other platforms such as Lemmy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)

Many subreddit moderators protested in various ways and were removed and replaced.

Reddit never agreed or compromised and for the most part the movement seems to have run out of steam.

Maybe if Reddit squeezes more, more users will go to Lemmy and similar alternative platforms?

As a casual but persistent user, it pains me to say it - because ethically I support the grassroots side of the equation - but as a path of least resistance to casual, anonymous public engagement on a wide range of topics, there seems no viable alternative. [For a given subjective value of 'viable', naturally!]. So after a period of abstention, I gradually ended up back there, simply because I know of no other sizeable gatherings on certain topics that aren't either annoyingly gatekept (technically, and/or socially), and/or are far more toxic themselves.

Look at HN - simple hierarchical discussion forums with a negligible barrier to entry and no grating artificial limitations, and we quite rightly love it.

In short, I still use Reddit, but there's nothing ideological about that choice.

I think people silently left, and now Reddit usage declined. I don't have the data to prove it - but from the quality of the content nowadays (for the little I have checked it out) is really bad.

I personally tried to build an alternative back then [1] (open source [2]), but the problem even Reddit is facing now is acquiring more users and keeping high quality content.

Last time I checked Lemmy, it wasn't doing good either - but these might just be personal Interpretations of the current situation.

[1]: https://rings.social/

[2]: https://github.com/rings-social

It pushed me over to here more. I used to lurk on both HN, Reddit and some tech sites on a web 2.0 aggregator ( www.jimmyr.com ) ever since Digg was still going strong. I used to follow r/science, r/ech, r/pics or r/images (basically imgur top list) and the front page, all in separate dozen item lists, each in a separate tabbed section. Front had digg on onther tab, science w newscientist etc. The front page on there which lagged the main front page slightly as it was from some cache had slowly been eroding over the years but now what I see there is a ghost of its self. I'll wander over to R/usenet now to check the holiday deals and see what that forum looks like now.

Reddit has a right and a need to figure out monetization. This was part of that effort and it was likely painful but Reddit is dead anyway if it never figures out monetization.

I didn't participate in the blackout. I felt the mods were wrong to take that approach.

I did go to bat for blind mods. They need better mod tools than they have.

That comment is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36232441

Hopefully Reddit does figure out how to both foster attractive communities and make enough money.

I run a bunch of Reddits. One has 20k members and says "top 5 percent" and many have a few hundred and say "top 50 percent." There's a lot more to Reddit than the very big Reddits.

I think the relatively small number of very big Reddits get too much press. That's not all there is to Reddit and I hope they defy the expectations of people already pronouncing them "dead."

Nothing, some of us already knew nothing would come of it. People are just so dramatic and they don't understand the services they're using.

Most people have no idea what's behind reddit, facebook, youtube. They just see a free shiny thing and start using it. Then one day the free shiny thing has a gross ad on it, and one day it has another one, and before they know it, it's unusable.

Another data point, the top AskReddit posts of the past year [0].

Zero of the top 25 posts of the last twelve months are younger than five months. Two of the top 50 posts are younger than five months.

Comments (using subredditstats from a sister comment) have gone from around 70k per day to around 12k per day.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/top/?sort=top&t=year

Had as much impact as a fart in a hurricane.

May a bit more: there were a few news stories about it, so it wasn't totally silent; but I kinda doubt the people it was meant to impact were at all distressed.

Anecdotally, I mostly stopped using it, except for sport news and live threads.

The subreddit I moderate (100k subs) saw no lasting impact on traffic. We participated in the blackout for 2 or 3 days and then carried on as normal.

To be fair, it is a sub for a TV show, so the traffic is very seasonal. The blackout happened in the off-season, and now that the show is back we have a lot of traffic again.

my guess: mission accomplished from reddit's perspective. they lost more than they did during the ellen pao blackout but gained enough users to make up the difference, have more paid subscribers than they did previously and are probably saving a ton of money from all of the API traffic from the 3p clients that were kicked out.

lemmy is more popular than voat.co (shut down in 2020) but still far from a reddit alternative.

(I deleted my 12-year-old account and all of the posts/comments I made with it, and I use the site much less than I used to.)

Personally I moved to lemmy and hackernews and stopped using reddit because the apps stopped working.

Overall, everything has gone back to normal. A vocal minority was convinced that Reddit was going to Digg itself but they didn't know that Reddit's audience is vastly different than it was 10 years ago. The nerds were outnumbered, and it shows.

I have already said this multiple times in different threads, but I think the protestors took entirely the wrong approach here.

The only thing that genuinely scares companies whose primary business model is ads is content that is not considered "brand safe". Posting such content, particularly on subreddits where it doesn't belong, would have been a far more effective strategy IMO. Filling the frontpage with porn, slurs, racist memes, made up slanderous stories about the most common Reddit advertisers and other such junk would have forced Reddit's hand.

Nothing. They correctly surmised that there are enough people that don’t care and won’t notice the drop in quality.

Then again Reddit is doing all it can to make the site as UX hostile as possible so I guess their network effects are powerful

I left. Came back and now left again. There isn’t a readily available alternative at the moment. However, the quality has declined so much that it has become garbage. The discussion seems to be driven by bots, mercenaries and AI.

I also think many reddit users moved to HN which resulted in some quality going down as they bring the old reddit culture with them, but I’m betting that won’t last.

I think it’s still early to tell. Reddit still has lots of traction and even if it’s becoming less attractive, the alternative is not quite there yet.

Reddit feels pretty dead nowadays in comparison. Or at least it is mostly dead to me.

For me at least, it gave me the motivation to launch. I had been working on a Reddit-like platform for several years, and didn't really have pressure to launch. There was always "one more thing" to build. I was pretty stunned with the positive response to it on HN[0]. With Apollo going down as well, I've since been creating an iOS app for the site fairly heavily inspired by it[1], and hired a dev as well.

Traffic has since died down heavily (I'm down to 40 subscribers from a peak of 120 during the HN launch), but it still motivates me knowing there's at least a desire for something similar (and hopefully better).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695

[1] https://non.io/Nonio-ios-app-designs-November-update

I signed out of reddit during it, wont ever sign back in or click a link ever again. But then again, Ive abandoned the consumer web at this point, with hacker news barely holding on as the last vestige of a dead era... I'll say, there was some real kicking and thrashing this year as the high water mark became visible.

I stopped using Reddit. That was the impact to me.

I still use it daily. It seems the same to me as it was. Maybe some subreddits no longer exist, but as I predicted they were just replaced with other similar subreddits to fill the gap. But realistically they were totally fungible anyways, so it’s not as if I care that I’m seeing videos on “r/video” or r/videos” or something else. I don’t notice any increase in spam, which was a big “you better agree to to our demands or else” point.

Anecdotally scanning the main comments in the all subreddits, I don’t see any change in number of comments anyways. Honestly without quantitative data on comment quality or comment numbers, I’d be skeptical of bias by anyone willing their pet desired outcome from api changes into existence.

All the 3rd party client apps are dead, but the RES extension still works for now.

In terms of outcomes, Reddit appears to have made their mobile website less user-hostile. Dismissing the "download app" modal still has to be done, but after that the experience is OK. Funnily enough, there are not that many ads on the official site, because Reddit seemingly doesn't have many advertisers to begin with.

Some subreddits such as r/malefashionadvice did achieve the critical mass required to fully migrate to another platform.

In that case, the moderators never re-opened and were replaced by scabs by the admins. But the sub remained fully dead. The userbase had moved to a discord server, which is well run and has plenty of users in the 50+ age bracket not normally associated with the platform.

Absolutely nothing came from it. Except for the fact that the best Reddit client and arguably one of the best iOS apps of all time disappeared off the face of the earth.

Lots of communities died: they "moved" to other platforms but didn't meaningfully survive the move. Reddit's conduct didn't change.

Wanted to plug this alternative that was developed as a result. I have no association with this, just a fan of the design (the whole thing, not just the visual design):

https://limereader.com/

I haven't posted much there (at all) in awhile so I'm guilty as anyone but am not sure why. I think a chicken-and-egg thing?

My sense is the quality of posts on smaller subreddits I frequent declined perceptibly but not dramatically after the blackout. In a lot of the subreddits it seems like the diversity of topics went down and the posts got a little more superficial or something.

I personally started frequenting old-fashioned forums more often again for certain topics.

Some things are hard to beat the subreddits though, and I've noticed they have slowly started returning to their prior quality (in a qualitative, not value sense). It seems like a lot of them that attempted to migrate to other places (lemmy, kbin, etc) never quite reproduced the subreddits, although I've been surprised at the staying power of some.

Absolutely nothing. 0 changes on reddit side, and mods fell back in line when threatened with removal of mod privileges and forcefully opening the subreddits.

Depends on the community. Some subreddits I used to go to migrated off the platform or closed down entirely, but many others just reopened with new staff and proceeded as usual. Not sure if activity was affected sitewide, though it feels a bit more quiet than it used to for me.

If you hated the mods, the mods lost. If you hated the admins, the admins lost. If you were a longtime user that is familiar with Reddit wholeheartedly supporting r/jailbait to bootstrap growth, you won because nothing about the website could bother you.

I suspect the big impact will still take a while to appear, which is that reddit alternatives seem more credible. People looking to set up a new community were often picking reddit by default without thinking about it.

I honestly think this was a finishing blow to reddit, which had already started declining in ~2019 due to TikTok and (anecdotally) an aggressive user acquisition strategy that had led to a big decline in content/discussion quality. Or even earlier, as mobile users replaced desktop and so things like long-form replies with links died off.

The biggest problem from the blackout and API drama isn't that some clients had to shut down. It's that, as a new user or a user that only uses the platform a little, it's much harder to discover good content organically now that most subreddits are NSFW or not on the /r/all feed. Even as someone who used reddit way more than any human ever should, I find the site a lot harder to use because I have to expend a lot more effort manually curating my subreddits when previously I could exhaust my personal feed and then just switch to /r/all - and I don't think I could ever discover some niche or zany community I didn't know about beforehand since I'd have to know to look for it to find it.

Since I doubt I'm alone in this, I think it's the beginning of the end for Reddit. It'll be a lot harder for new communities to form, existing small/medium/focused communities will struggle to gain members, and new users will probably think the site is empty and leave.

Reddit did make some concessions about continuing to support free API access for accessibility-related tools, which was one of the major complaints about the pricing announcement: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-acc...

No change for me. I had to stop using Apollo (and Narwhal sucks) but using the browser is fine with me.

I signed up for the $60/yr. Ad-free version and Reddits still great IMO.

Reddit knew they could wait out the blacked out sub mods, or actively force them to either resume or be replaced... and Reddit were right. It's back to business as usual, minus 3rd party apps (goodbye one-time-payment version of Narwhal, I miss you) and perhaps marginally worse content.

Well the esp32 subreddit took a dive. The other subs I care about were pretty stoic and unaffected, basically, "duh, we are on their site." Some attempted half-hearted departures but the only successful separation I've seen is TheMotte, an offshoot of the slate star codex sub.

My personal result was quitting 10 years on reddit and giving up my worthless but substantial karma.

The next result is that I noticed I became less argumentative in real life and tend to keep my opinions to myself more, all in all much appreciated by those I love. And my mental health is better.

The next result is that in going back occasionally to scroll through reddit it seems MUCH more obvious to me that almost every post is designed to incite anger, controversy or judgment. It didnt feel nearly that obvious before.

And there are some clear indications that bots are running rampant. Especially r/AITA (Am I The Asshole) where EVERY post is now almost exactly the same length, written about some situation that is quite stupid or rage inducing that its hard to believe that anyone would bother to respond. But they do. Im guessing they have an intern pounding away at ChatGPT for 10 minutes to create the next 100 AITA's

Lastly, Ive migrated to tildes.com, and much smaller community where I was/am startled to see that people can communicate politely even when they disagree and rage baiting does not exist. Its not nearly as busy as reddit was and the topics are far more limited but the quality is miles above the poor posts that now permeate reddit.

I still mindlessly scroll sometimes on a third-party app with a personal API key (crappy habit, I know) but there's definitely some interesting subreddits that got popular on the (not signed in) frontpage when the cutover happened. r/amiugly, r/amiuglybrutallyhonest, r/presidents, r/howtolooksmax, r/whatifalthist (this is an odd political subreddit), two more r/amitheasshole themed subreddits popped up, and some others that I'm forgetting.

Definitely worse before the API changes, feels like there's less content now. I don't have to scroll very far to find niche subreddits anymore, which is a plus I suppose.

I have stopped visiting the site myself -- taking the opportunity to try and de-addict myself and recover some mental space and time. Working very well so far. Can't say I am missing anything in life.

There were only one or two occasions since then where I clicked on a reddit link when the context/topic was very compelling. Happy to report I did not feel the urge to browse away and bury myself in other reddit links and subreddits.

On desktop I have a uMatrix/uBO rule that blocks the domain completely. So inadvertent clicks before seeing the domain also get trapped.

End result was: mastodon networks got a huge amount of bored redditors.

Reddit screwed up in a different way.

They’ve shown they run the subs, make hire/fire decisions and have the power to supersede community manager calls.

This makes mods look more like labour, not volunteers.

Im seeing a LOT of "reddit won" here... But don't forget: Reddit faked hundreds of accounts when they started. They would have no issue in using whatever chatbots and LLMs to fake engagement now.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...

I'm generally still logged-in. But I don't have any subscribed subreddits. What I have instead is about half a dozen bookmarks in my browser. So I don't have a personal front page showing my subscribed subreddits. Only if I activate a browser bookmark will I see any reddit posts, and even then I only see the particular subreddit that the browser bookmark supplies.

Those daily hours I used to spend on Reddit are now practically non-existent.

I left the platform completely. So that's at least n=1?

My personal experience was the app I used to browse the site going to a subscription model and me very rarely visiting Reddit any more as a result.

I have never used Reddit on my phone, so for me the whole loss-of-Apollo concern was a non-issue. I do see less quality posts now, but it's not dead.

The geo-local community subreddit that I left has been overwhelmed by the local sheriff who likes to post about who they are firing, why won't anyone apply to work there, why criminals have no rights, and why that department's regressive tax plans won't even be noticed by anyone with enough money that matters.

That has turned the flavor of that sub into a simulacrum of Nextdoor.

Moderation / admin quality going ever worse.

Recently fought for my alt account and a subreddit that was an automated, arguably better of another popular subreddit with basically the same content but without as much editorialization. Had to appeal like 10 times, and a few days after that, the account got re-banned on a faux "ban evasion" charge. Sigh.

For some reason, my copy of the app "Offline Reader For Reddit" still works, and I have no idea why.

I've heard it theorized that the API change screened out a lot of bots that had been driving conversation/voting. This is borne out by, say, /r/europe, which has taken an abrupt, substantial turn away from its traditional mantra of "more 'refugees', please".

If anyone’s looking for alternatives, Lemmy is federated and nice to use: http://lemmy.world/

It’s really only lacking the size of Reddit for me, there isn’t a ton of activity in niche subs, but they’re growing.

Nothing. As the CEO predicted it fizzled out. The 3rd party apps died or asked for ridiculous amounts just to use the app. My Reddit usage dropped significantly but I guess I am not their target anymore. As any drama starts and ends on Reddit, this will be forgotten very soon.

I've noticed there's a lot less activity in niche subreddits, but I felt like Reddit was in decline before the blackouts. It generally feels like Internet communities have become less interesting, or at least that's the case with the ones I'm exposed to.

The subs I frequent are alive and strong. There are no alternatives to them on the web. If some subs have died down, they are not ones I care about.

Biggest outcome: I'm no longer surprised when Web-searching a problem, getting to a Reddit post that might have the answer, and... the top-voted comment on that post has been deleted (or replaced with some text about protesting Reddit policy changes).

The outcome as far as I can see was that every subreddit posts impotent "protest" messages at the top of every thread with AutoModerator, like a new kind of cookie banner you have to ignore. It's pretty lame.

I believe the primary outcome was users switching from the popular Apollo app, which closed down, to Narwhal which stayed active, added a paid plan, and rolled out a redesign to integrate many features from Apollo.

There are still some good subreddits, like "LocalLLama", but most of them seem to have been ruined by mods. I think this was the case even before the whole API issue, which just accelerated the decline.

For me personally, reddit usage went from several times a day, to several times a month.

I uninstalled the app and only check the website when I'm looking for something specific now.

Reddit has always had its issues, but the spam and bullshit content has gotten so much worse in the past six months. It's a cesspool unless you go to hobby or municipal subs.

People with unwavering ethical principles left.

That's been the only outcome.

As a user, I have noticed zero change. I didn't expect to.

nothing changed for me

we berated everyone that tried to bring that drama into our subreddits, it’s literally just a forum

the mods acknowledged that they have worse tools and that’s still true

I guess I'm only using Reddit on a desktop/laptop. No way I'm using Reddit's official app since the rest died out.

We'll know in nine months.

Many people went to Lemmy, which has it's own problems

Lemmy got some temporary traction. Torn whether it will continue

I switched to Lemmy as a result of third party apps being killed.

anyone found a decent alternative for apollo on ios?

I quit Reddit entirely. Lemmy is much better.

What are people using now?

Nothing changed for me.

Alternatives have grown tremendously, although none have really reached the critical mass yet.

Personally, I have moved to Lemmy, and I use Tildes, too.

It was complete submission lmao

I stopped having an account at Reddit before the API changes, but there was a change in the way I saw the site over time. I'd be surprised if over 30% of its traffic is legitimate, organic, people just wanting to share things and talk about their interests. So much of many comment threads these days is about getting high scores on algorithms, and there's a lot of copying of high-scoring comments, clear attempts to change community narratives or sentiment regarding certain topics or brands, etc.

Digg, Reddit, and more have proven: a truly public discussion board will be taken over by business behavior unless it is strictly prohibited and enforced.

A decent number of people saw the writing on the wall that they didn't own the spaces that they socialized in, and sought something more distributed, with the Fediverse. It's a step in the right direction, but the extant focus on re-posting and updoots/downdoots still retains a lot of bullshit from social media that'll carry over just fine in terms of social behavior.

Reddit burned me out on any sort of website that has scoring or other perverse incentives to mess up the intent of whatever community. Groups who are earnest and savvy will host forum software and not social media software. Though one socializes on a forum, the way that you do so and the mechanics available separate them and allow you to focus on the topicality instead of how many updoots one gets. That design decision prevents gaming the forum, and in doing so gets rid of 'fake' engagement. For instance, why do we allow up and down votes without corresponding messages/reasons? I care much less about the metrics of group sentiment and would rather see why they feel a certain way.

Take a moment to actually read a Reddit thread, or a Youtube comments page, or any other generally accessible place to chat. Most of it is trash, a lot of it repeats itself, a lot of bots, misinformation, the works.

The media itself is fake. The things that get posted on places are meant to be posted places. It's all a fake social game. At least StumbleUpon, in its early hey day, exposed me to new and fun places on the Web. That atmosphere is dead in modern social media.

Bird's eye view, not much has changed. But Reddit has removed their awards system and Premium doesn't seem to have value. The bot problem hasn't gotten any better; rate-limiting just means they need more accounts. I visit there sometimes out of old habit, but I don't find anything fun anymore.

Lemmy has potential but I feel it's basically the same norms we saw on Reddit, depending on the instance.

Sure I'm on HN and it might barely qualify as social media, but I don't exactly fit in here. This is sort of a "last earnest effort" to participate somewhere on the Internet that isn't my own self-hosted services that use open or federated protocols.

I never was a huge Reddit user before, but I have noticed an increase in lower-quality reddit-style comments here on HN in the last year or so. Thankfully they usually get downvoted or are already dead. I might have to turn off showdead though.

I stopped using it when they updated the rules a few years ago with bizarre things like:

Racism or discrimination is never acceptable (unless against white people)