45
votes
People who have visited Reddit over the past few days, what's it like over there right now?
What's it like over there right now? IIRC the blackout was supposed to finish today. I've decided to quit reddit unless something changes, so I want to do my best not to visit the site, but I am very curious about what the website and culture has been like for the past few days. And now that the initial blackout is 'over', how many subreddits have started to emerge again? Are people coming back now and acting like they've won? Has reddit responded to the blackout at all?
I just looked this morning. Most of the subreddits I were subscribed to are still private, which means that basically my entire feed is made up of the one default subreddit I am subscribed to, which means that it's mostly low-effort garbage posts.
Going to /r/all, however, the top posts right now are mostly posts that are basically middle fingers to Reddit corporate, with the second most appearing thing being details about the latest Trump drama (I'd call it news, but it's all basically coverage of him griping).
It’s pretty clear to me that they are struggling for content. Things are lingering on the front page and none of it seems particularly interesting. All the good subreddits are private.
I feel like that's somewhat normal on reddit. At least on my frontpage. There are many times where I go to sleep (US TZ) and then wake up in the morning, and my frontpage is still largely the same. I'm always like "wth, Euros et al, did you guys not do anything on reddit?" And I'm subbed to and lurk in some large, active subreddits still.
I had to get on reddit briefly today to talk to a co-mod. My frontpage didn't seem vastly different from before. Though I'll admit, I didn't look very closely. Just got on to check mod messages, respond, and then left.
that's not my experience on reddit, but since the blackout it has been struggling for content
So earlier I asked my brother about his experiences on the site over the last 36-48hrs. He knows the protests are going on, and even though he's an older user, he's not as invested in the platform as I am. I mean, my god, he uses the official app; that tells you all you need to know!
But he did mention that his frontpage was pretty dead. That several subs that he frequents were private. And it was pretty boring overall.
Either way, seems like all not users are being affected in the same way. Which makes sense. I'm not subbed to a lot of the big "defaults," but I think my brother is.
Importantly, however, he asked about the Lemmyverse (he's not "Tildes material", lol), so I pointed him in the direction of an instance I've found enjoyable. I think that counts as progress.
This is how the frontpage looks right now screenshot
The mods are playing it smart. Yesterday there were a ton more blackout posts breaking 40k upvotes, but due to diminishing engagement they slowly disappeared from the front page and troughout the night a bunch of random posts started filling the frontpage instead
So this morning the mods of some of the biggest subs posted THEIR blackout posts again and now they're on top of the frontpage again
This screenshot is nice to see. At this point I am doubtful that any difference will be made. It seems like no matter what, the reddit CEOs have made up their mind. But that front page shows undeniably that people are upset. It's become abundantly clear to me that the reddit I signed up for 12+ years ago is far gone. I anticipate that I won't be going back at all, besides when google takes me there for niche searches, and that's saddening. But if this is the way that reddit is going to treat its users, clearly not listening, then it's not a website that I want to support or be a part of anymore.
I am enjoying Tildes, and until spez is gone, I'm not even sure if I'm comfortable returning to Reddit with how they've handled everything so spectacularly awful; I truly hope all of the subs and their mods opt to remain private indefinitely beyond the 48hrs that some pledged. If Reddit doesn't have the content that we (the users and volunteer mods) have provided them for free over the years, then they have no site. Let them descend into Diggland. I just really hope that the majority of the user base refuses to cave, in regards to accepting their godawful app and unacceptable treatment to all of the developers of the many amazing 3rd-party apps. This is the time to prove strength in numbers.
I don't even use 3p apps, but joined the blackout on principle. I am not sure I'll go back now unless there are big changes over there. I'm enjoying having back some time (instead of mindless scrolling) and the slower pace over here at tildes.
I’ve visited on the official reddit app since that is what I had on my phone. You wouldn’t know there was a blackout unless you were quite active I think. Just browsing my front page there was very little difference. I think only once I tried to visit a subreddit that happened to be private.
I don’t think the average Reddit user will have really noticed or cared once it is over.
That is because the official reddit app doesn't curate your content based on your subscribed subreddits. If you use a 3rd Party app like Apollo, you will probably notice a big difference. Either that or you aren't subscribed to any of the 8400+ subs that have gone dark. I hopped on there a couple times, just out of habit, and my feed is basically just r/politics and r/news with a couple of the smaller subs that didn't go dark. It is pretty barren over there right now.
The app works the same way as everything else does with regards to showing you subscribed subreddits.
How noticable the blackout is depends on how many subreddits that didn't black out you were subscribed to, for most people it will be noticable but not enough to kill the site
Not sure what you mean by curating based on subscribed subreddits. I think it does? Even when I visit on the browser it wasn’t very noticeable. I guess I’m subscribed to enough non dark subreddits that my front page seemed reasonable full. I don’t really spend enough time on Reddit to go far beyond the first or second page. I’m sure if you are more active it will be more noticeable but I do think a portion of users, probably large, simply didn’t notice or care all that much.
If you are relatively active on Reddit I could see this feeling much more impactful.
Most of my subs didn't go dark, sad, but a lot of them are gaming subs and the gamers just didn't seem that concerned. Most of the "in-dpeth" tech subs are also still up (I got a call to answer a question on the /r/SQL sub from someone in my team . . . they knew nothing about the blackout).
To be honest I haven't taken a real good look, just hit the front page a few times to see what is going on.
I browsed r/all last night for about an hour and felt that it was quite the distillation of dumb (even moreso than usual). r/memes, r/news, r/politics, and others like it dominated the space and people piled into the threads to express how stupid the blackout was and how nothing is worth fighting for and everything sucks so better just give in and accept it.
Ugh. Just ugh.
I saw lots of people saying the blackout was "stupid" while at the same time saying that it made them want to leave Reddit. Sounds like it's working to me (at least to some degree).
I'm interested to see how things look in a week, a month and a year from now. We'll see how many people actually follow through on using reddit less or completely leaving it all together.
r/help has a number of posts from people who are disturbed that they can't access favorite subreddits and past content that they have posted in subreddits that have gone private. I would say it was noticeable if like me, you have favorite subreddits that participated in the blackout. My default feed during the blackout included random subreddits that I wouldn't ordinarily see. I think one was called r/truerateme and was women posting pictures asking for feedback about how attractive they are.
With users rating very attractive women 5 or 6 out of 10. Apparently you get banned for rating someone 7 or higher, so to sum up: it's basically organised incel negging being excused with pseudo scientific terms.
Blackout is the first time their sub reached my point in /all and yeah - it's wild bizarre.
The combination of maintaining the guise of being both an organic "rateme" sub, but also having an "objective" standard... And the comments are hilariously overrun with mod warnings for "overrating" because no human being exists above a 6.5.
Functionally, it's more that users are rated by mods - and mods simply go through the comments removing and telling off anyone who doesn't rate a user the way mods think that user needs to be rated. That the "objective system" is just a thin veneer over wanting to paint everyone as aggressively average gets pretty clear when trying to use their charts according to guidance. That the charts generation required subjective assessment is a separate philosophical rabbit-hole ... but even sidestepping that, their purported system is transparently not even trying to do anything except leave mods space to shape comments to reflect their own biases.
It does carry some really strong incel/PUA vibes.
I noticed the same thing. I use Sync and basically only ever browse the feed containing my list of subs. I had a peek today and it looked like about 50% my subs, most of which are dark, and 50% random public subs.
I have been checking on modmail for a few subreddits, to give a stock answer about why people don't have access to the subreddits in question. While doing so, I have seen the front page a few times, and it is certainly different from normal. It feels like this has skewed the content I would typically see, but I have been making an effort to not actually see the not-modmail parts of reddit as much as possible.
I visited on the web version, but did not log in, and from my point of view, there is content on the "popular" feed, but not very interesting. I did a search for the subreddits I use to follow and they are almost all dark. So to me it looks the same, but there were not many interesting posts.
I'm on PC, not the app so the only difference I can see is if you are subscribed to subReddits that are participating in the blackout, those have a closed or private notice set up. Otherwise, just based on the "all" or "popular" feeds, it feels like nothing is happening.
I just hope that if they do change their minds, Apollo will come back. Christian has said he can’t see working with Reddit again after how they have treated him. I support him, but I just hate to lose Apollo forever.
I do too and I don't want to use reddit without it. On the other hand, seeing how they treated him, I totally understand why Christian can't see working with them again. Would you want to work with people who have outright lied and tried to make you look like some crazy person with an agenda against them?
So while I selfishly want apollo to come back if (and that is a huge if) reddit does change their minds I can also understand Christian not coming back and I'd be surprised to see him doing so unless they kicked out Spez and profusely apologized to him. Other than that, I really don't see how he could trust them.
Maybe we can convince him to make an app for this place :).
It's been quiet. Most of r/all is about the blackout, with a couple of the bigger holdouts. That, and r/ShittyTattoos
It varies. I just checked because of this thread:
/r/popular is full of banal memes as always. The news/politics subs are still up... their power-mods are extremely power-hungry, which I've unfortunately experienced firsthand modding alongside them. WhitePeopleTwitter stayed up, which is about what I expected from a mod team running that garbage.
My 8 multireddits are completely barren. /r/games stayed up, but technology and programming (which has reddit admins as top-mods) went down. Even truereddit went down after the community flamed the mods for thinking of keeping it up. The only subs remaining are pretty much corporate-owned (e.g. /r/unity3d, /r/leagueoflegends... having inside information I know 100% the mods there are in cahoots with real employees and get the occasional
bribesgifts and favors... oh, and that their mod team has overlap with /r/news which is up).The thing I find weird after having checking it a few times today...there is surprisingly few posts about the blackout in the first few pages of the main front page. Of the posts that do exist, it's nothing but "this whole protest is stupid" comments with thousands of upvotes. Otherwise, the rest of the comment threads don't even mention anything about the blackout. For a massive incident that has rocked the entire site that resulted in an outage, you'd think there would be more chatter about it. There's more people talking about the protests here and on other forums like Slashdot than on the actual site the protests are occurring. I'm not one to believe in conspiracies, but I do find it interesting when reactions don't line up with recent events...
A lot of my saved subreddits were removed, since they went private. Some of the larger subreddits have disappeared from the front page, but not all. It's been hit or miss honestly.
I personally think it's more usable than I expected. There's not much rich content, but there is content. It's moving slower than normal, but still faster than most other news aggregators.
My hypothesis is Reddit has a much larger internal moderation team than they lead onto. They're running the biggest subs that are still up and I expect they'll be expanding to take over other subs. This is a strong and direct counter to the argument that "volunteer mods are necessary".
We very well could see Reddit come out of this even stronger by proving they weren't bluffing.
Most of my regular feed is just gone. Some small, slow, niche subs are still active and appear on the front page for the first time in a long time, if ever. Most of the front page is static though, in terms of posts. Some movement in number of upvotes and comments. r/AskReddit is really busy.
Only new posts that popped up recently were about the blackout from r/ModCoord and r/Save3rdPartyApps
I thought the black out was from the 12th to the 14th, so still another day or two to go.
I've been avoiding reddit for now, but my wife still goes to it. Their does seem to be a drop in quality content overall, but I'm not sure if it's enough to make a difference. We'll see how it goes today and tomorrow.