I’ve been seeing a lot of pro-reddit, anti-mod comments, despite tens of thousands of up votes on Reddit blackout posts. Pro-reddit comments also have a ton of gold for some reason.
Is reddit trying to change the narrative towards hating on mods for “ruining everything” before they try and remove them?
I suspect there’s also sampling bias. The types who are still using reddit are not the same who were heavily in support of the blackouts.
I wonder how much will change with so many long time active users leaving Reddit. I’ve been very active for 15 years on Reddit, deleted thousands of posts and even more comments and won’t be returning. I know there are a lot of people like me who are finally done with the site. Is it just going to go more downhill than it already has?
I think it’ll be a slow decay. I’m in the same category of long time user that deleted their history and isn’t going back. Reddit has lost a lot of accounts like ours.
In the short run Reddit has already lost a lot of its ‘cultural history and identity’ (sounds dumb I know but I think the terms apply). There were a ton of ‘inside jokes’ and reddit history references that made it feel like a broad community and there’s probably not going to be a critical mass of users that perpetuate that feeling much longer.
In the longer term the loss of personal mod and active user investment in their subs will start to show. Subs will be poorly curated and become dominated by whoever is loudest and angriest. Reddit was fun because it had a huge amount of engagement on any topic, but that was tempered by the ability to find subs with active moderation on topics you cared about. Now they’re going to have to deal with all that desire for engagement but with nothing to keep it on the rails, which will mean the engagement will only remain desirable for those that don’t want rails. But once they get their way they’ll get bored too because they’ll only have their own anger to engage with.
The loss of users is already beginning to show, depending on the community. I had some LifeProTips and other useful threads saved and was trying to archive them for myself yesterday, and several had either the original post or the highest-upvoted parent comment outright deleted.
I’m seeing this a lot in the stickies for reopened subs discussing whether they want to continue the blackout. Last week they all wanted to protest, this week they don’t want it anymore and prefer the sub to stay up. It’s likely a different subset of people commenting.
Those that stay probably weren’t aware of what they were missing out on.
Hoping that those that leave find themselves a cozy place here on Lemmy.
Or kbin! Or Fedia! Or any of the platforms. That’s the beauty, they’re all correct choices and (to an extent) all open to any user.