Hopefully I’m posting this in the right place, but I see Reddit developments as Tech news right now.
Wanted to share a website that is tracking Subreddits that have/will be going dark. It even has a sound notification for when they change their status.
Edit: Adding the stream https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247
Double Edit: Data visualization https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
It’s sad though I truly enjoyed Reddit like obviously many here, but also to be fair I’ve also felt like the quality of posts and comments overall degraded and the whole thing turned into a big meme factory where only funny images with text and tiktok reposts really were uploaded.
The whole thing started going downhills as soon as the first tiktok reposts started flooding in to be fairly honest. Let’s please not let this happen much here, unless of course in dedicated communities for that because everything has a place.
Also, this is my first ever post on Lemmy, hi 👋
I feel like this still depended on community. There was plenty of more niche hobby specific communities that were enjoyable. r/coffee comes to mind for me or something like r/fountain pens. I still enjoyed r/Analog although that had it’s own issues.
Yeah there are going to be quite a few TTRPG subreddits that I will miss. I really hope that the fediverse will be able to grow enough that niche interest pages can thrive here like they did over on reddit.
Hello!
Just flipped the switch (so to speak) on a couple subs I moderate, and the largest (just shy of 1m users) will be going dark in a few hours.
What surprised me most is how well the members are took it. To be fair the subs I moderated are typically quite tech-minded, so everyone is quite in-the-know with what is happening and why.
It makes me furious that a site built and maintained by the users is being exploited at the users’ expense.
I hope Reddit bleeds money from this silly line they drew in the sand.
I’m curious if you directed the users of those subs to any particular alternative?
I mean, apparently they are already bleeding money, but I doubt that these changes are going to do much to help in that regard.
On two we presented the options abailable (Lemmy, Mastodon, Usnet and so on), on the biggest we didn’t do that. It was a last-minute announcement, so didn’t really have the time (also too many cooks with different recipes, so to speak).
I’m sure it won’t matter in the long run, but should we not try? A giant company runs on advertising. And the time we stop users interacting and engaging with these ads can only be a good thing.
As I’m writing this, 4,669 of 6,934 subs have gone dark.
Its beautiful to see.
“6236/7265 subreddits are currently dark.”
85.83%
That’s a pretty good response from the subs.
I’m hoping that a great deal of mods out there will continue to stay dark if nothing changes. And I expect nothing from Reddit’s admin team to change. Just let the site devalue for the rest of the month to bots posting the same garbage over and over.
Nah the admins will probably change. Just for the worse. If things continue for too long, I fully expect them to kick out the mods for most of the subs and start making mods of scabs
It does have a pretty big impact on the first day already.
comments are way down
Wow /r/nba decided to go dark. So unexpected and huge respect to the mods there. Really huge one with the NBA finals going on too.
How will I know, without jumping onto the game thread, that the refs are terrible, and that both teams are being simultaneously helped and hindered by each and every call for/against them?
This is just beautiful to watch. For once reddit comes together to spite… reddit.
Man, it’s so satisfying to watch all of these subreddits switch to green. I really wish more of them committed to an indefinite shutdown though.
I know of some that decided to discuss that after the initial 2 day blackout. My guess is that at least a few of the big ones will shut down permanently.
Damn. That is only a tiny little dip in the post/comment rate so far relative to the historical cycle. What, maybe 5%, assuming the vertical axis crosses at zero? Not terribly encouraging…
My partner is a casual reddit user; the experience change was immediately apparent. She got bored and switched to facebook because all of the niche communities that the larger subreddits repost from went silent.
This should be bumped.
The smaller/niche communities is what made Reddit interesting.
When those eventually decide to pack and the only vibrant communities are the meme subreddits etc then you would probably see a drop in usage.
My GF is also a pretty casual reddit user and she was pretty pissed about her favorite subs being closed.
I’ve continued to tell people: This won’t kill Reddit in the sense of outright turning it into a ghost town. If your only goal is to make Reddit collapse overnight, you’re going to be disappointed. The quality content that many people here enjoy is not what makes up the frontpage of r/all or what a huge amount of passive users consume. Reddit has more than enough low quality trash to backfill the frontpage and keep users occupied.
Anybody migrating should focus on porting quality content. Let reddit live long and be a dumping ground.
It’s more about reaching a tipping point where adding a new user to something else (fingers crossed for Fediverse) makes it a palatable alternative for more than one redditor. The network effect is a thing, so it exists, and if enough people get kicked off of an app they like it’s not impossible to hit.
I see this less as a damage to Reddit, and more as an opportunity to diversify, make people aware of the threat of centralised corporate-run platforms, and to build the federated internet alternatives a bit more, to give them momentum.
Yep! Although it is too bad that when you sesrch for reddit alternstives, that lemmy doesn’t come up.
Yeah, I was negatively surprised as well. Almost 60% of all big SFW subreddits closed, and still only a small percentage less posts and comments.
Reddit may also be astroturfing their own site to make it look like there’s not much effect of the blackout.
I wonder how much the stats were boosted by all those people asking where their subreddits have gone. Today seems to dip lower than yesterday, probably because everyone by now knows what happened.
I’m guessing (hoping) the difference at peak will be larger. All we can do now is wait and see, unfortunately.
The large subs and front page just consist of bots reposting the same old content. The bots are easy to tell apart from real people just by eye, so I’m sure that reddit either has no problem with that or that they made these bots themselves to hide the fact that actual users are becoming less and less.
I saw that too - hopefully the changes will show in the next “up” cycle. Apparently the bots are out to play as well.
Now include links to their preferred lemmy alternatives
At the bottom of the site, it does say “use Lemmy for less reddit shenanigans” with a hyperlink
Reddit is deddit.
Yeah I’m getting a “You Broke Reddit” message when attempting to old.reddit.com. I didn’t break reddit ‘you’ broke reddit lol.
It seems like the servers are having some trouble [https://www.redditstatus.com/]. Couldnt have chosen a beter time
Is there a way to see what subs re dark out of the actual total? This looks like it is what % are dark compared to what % are restricted?
In other words I confused what the n is on all of these
Is there a way to see what subs re dark out of the actual total?
https://blackout.photon-reddit.com
Choose ‘percent’ on the third card on the left.
The level of unity has been awesome. At first I thought this might only really spread through tech minded subreddits, but it really caught on broadly.
I don’t know about you, but streaming the “Darkening” is like the best thing ever. Just reading all the comments as viewers cheer on each subreddit.
When r/trees wend private I was thinking “shit just got real.”
Anyway, I suggest watching the stream, if just for the cameraderie.
There’s a trees sub-lemmy but it only had pictures of actual trees when I checked yesterday
It exists on Lemmy.world
Damn, the arborists got here first this time.
No 1. The Larch
blackout.photon-reddit.com seems to be down for me. Any idea what’s up with that, or other places that are visualizing traffic?
It’s back up!
Oh god here it comes. So long and thanks for all the fish.
