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!
“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
93% now
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.
It does have a pretty big impact on the first day already.
comments are way down
If the creator of the site is here, some guidelines across the graph could be nice, especially for the X axis so we can see what time each point is at
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
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
I don’t see myself going back to Reddit if they keep those subs closed down. However I do believe that if this “strike” goes on for longer than a week or so, the admins will forcefully replace each closed subreddit mods to make them live again.
I hope that if that actually happens they’ll find no volunteers to actually mod those subs and realize they’ll actually have to hire and pay the people that actually makes their site usable
Or at the very least the volunteers do the same thing. We need volunteers to keep the strike going lol!
Sadly there’s always going to be people that will do this just for the feeling of insignificant power they get from moderating a subreddit
Probably won’t matter much when critical mod tools suddenly stop working.
The same powermods that teed up his prepared answers…
Probably yes. That will make quality tank badly.
This is just beautiful to watch. For once reddit comes together to spite… reddit.
I’m really confused by the chart on the site https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ I understand the dip annotated with the red arrow, but I do not understand the rebound annotated with the green arrow… With that many sites down, it should not be possible to rebound to normal levels…
Because that dip isn’t due to the blackout. Reddit was pretty hard down for about an hour.
I could actually see engagement staying relatively the same since most people are probably popping Reddit open for a few minutes, maybe engaging, then moving on.
What I do find odd is how consistent Posts per minute are over time. But it doesn’t dip or rise with comments. So now I’m wondering how automated a lot of posting is.
Bots, all the bot posts. If you even check “All” for a bit even on Lemmy you will see the bots are moving here as well.
If you go to the site and view by new it’s just page after page of /r/askreddit. Tons of people posting to it with nowhere else to post. So that would explain some of the rebound but the graph is still odd that it rebounded to exactly where it should be if there was no blackout.
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?
update for 2nd day of the blackout
I will be paying attention to this the following couple days. I wonder how they are going to tell investor, lol.
I’d be curious to see an updated valuation
The site is broken atm, but yesterday when I check it it was about half way between the blackout and the normal volume. (might just because weekend people have more other stuff to do?)
Yeah that’s possible. Quite frankly all of this is pretty moot for the time being, the real test is at the end of the month when the API changes take effect.
Monday’s post/comments return to normal level. (the tracking site is working again.)
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Yeah, the drop will come the first of july, when the api become $$$ :D
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They’re about 1/5 of the way through the subreddits that said they would go dark. It’s crazy watching all of them blink out in real time.
Feels a little apocalyptic.
We shall see which subs stay closed past two days. A lot of moderators have said they will reopen because otherwise Reddit will remove them. Saying out loud that the protest is toothless. Only the moderators willing to be removed will have any impact. If there is a mass de-modding that requires Reddit Corporate to fill in permanently with their own mods, only then will lasting actual damage be done. Otherwise, the protest is a speedbump that Corporate won’t even feel.
This one has a pretty nice look with a list of all 6000 participating subreddits and fading in in real-time when a subreddit goes dark:
Love that site. Great to watch.
So satisfying
