I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
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.
For me it was the removal of being able to see comment history, especially at this time while spam bots are flooding the site. I have no idea if any post at all on Reddit is authentic anymore if the post history is hidden. It made me just not want to engage with anything.
AMEN brother