Is Reddit Dying? (eff.org) 266
"Compared to the website's average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop..." reports Engadget (citing data provided by internet analytics firm Similarweb).
[A]s many subreddits continue to protest the company's plans and its leadership contemplates policy changes that could change its relationship with moderators, the platform could see a slow but gradual decline in daily active users. That's unlikely to bode well for Reddit ahead of its planned IPO and beyond.
In fact, the Financial Times now reports that Reddit "acknowledged that several advertisers had postponed certain premium ad campaigns in order to wait for the blackouts to pass." But they also got this dire prediction from a historian who helps moderate the subreddit "r/Askhistorians" (with 1.8 million subscribers).
"If they refuse to budge in any way I do not see Reddit surviving as it currently exists. That's the kind of fire I think they're playing with."
More people had the same same thought. The Reddit protests drew this response earlier this week from EFF's associate director of community organizing: This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge... Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to "spam"). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary...
Saturday the EFF official reiterated their concerns when Wired asked: does this really signal the death of Reddit? "I can't see it as anything but that... [I]t's not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course. The longer they stay in their position, the more loss of users and content they're going to face."
Wired even heard a thought-provoking idea from Amy Bruckman, a regents' professor/senior associate chair at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bruckman "advocates for public funding of a nonprofit version of something akin to Reddit."
Meanwhile, hundreds of people are now placing bets on whether Reddit will backtrack on its new upcoming API pricing — or oust CEO Steve Huffman — according to Insider, citing reports from online betting company BetUS.
CEO Huffman's complaint that the moderators were ignoring the wishes of Reddit's users led to a funny counter-response, according to the Verge. After asking users to vote on whether to end the protest, two forums saw overwhelming support instead for the only offered alternative: the subreddits "now only allow posts about comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver."
Both r/pics (more than 30 million subscribers) and r/gifs (more than 21 million subscribers) offered two options to users to vote on... The results were conclusive:
r/pics: return to normal, -2,329 votes; "only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy," 37,331 votes.
r/gifs: return to normal, -1,851 votes; only feature GIFs of John Oliver, 13,696 votes...
On Twitter, John Oliver encouraged the subreddits — and even gave them some fodder. "Dear Reddit, excellent work," he wrote to kick off a thread that included several ridiculous pictures. A spokesperson for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.
In fact, the Financial Times now reports that Reddit "acknowledged that several advertisers had postponed certain premium ad campaigns in order to wait for the blackouts to pass." But they also got this dire prediction from a historian who helps moderate the subreddit "r/Askhistorians" (with 1.8 million subscribers).
"If they refuse to budge in any way I do not see Reddit surviving as it currently exists. That's the kind of fire I think they're playing with."
More people had the same same thought. The Reddit protests drew this response earlier this week from EFF's associate director of community organizing: This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge... Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to "spam"). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary...
Saturday the EFF official reiterated their concerns when Wired asked: does this really signal the death of Reddit? "I can't see it as anything but that... [I]t's not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course. The longer they stay in their position, the more loss of users and content they're going to face."
Wired even heard a thought-provoking idea from Amy Bruckman, a regents' professor/senior associate chair at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bruckman "advocates for public funding of a nonprofit version of something akin to Reddit."
Meanwhile, hundreds of people are now placing bets on whether Reddit will backtrack on its new upcoming API pricing — or oust CEO Steve Huffman — according to Insider, citing reports from online betting company BetUS.
CEO Huffman's complaint that the moderators were ignoring the wishes of Reddit's users led to a funny counter-response, according to the Verge. After asking users to vote on whether to end the protest, two forums saw overwhelming support instead for the only offered alternative: the subreddits "now only allow posts about comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver."
Both r/pics (more than 30 million subscribers) and r/gifs (more than 21 million subscribers) offered two options to users to vote on... The results were conclusive:
r/pics: return to normal, -2,329 votes; "only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy," 37,331 votes.
r/gifs: return to normal, -1,851 votes; only feature GIFs of John Oliver, 13,696 votes...
On Twitter, John Oliver encouraged the subreddits — and even gave them some fodder. "Dear Reddit, excellent work," he wrote to kick off a thread that included several ridiculous pictures. A spokesperson for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.