Bye reddit.
Just looking at Redditor’s reaction to this is telling me the battle is already lost. Most seem to be completely done and just want their cat videos back. It’s clear that the normies who invaded the site and proceeded to make it worse are completely content with what is happening so long as their addiction is fed. As far as I’m concerned, they can have the site.
HOWEVER. Maybe its a sign that all of the people who were in favor of the protest actually did leave and the only ones who are left are those who don’t give a shit about it or don’t support it.
I like those normies. It makes reddit feel a little more representative of the real world instead of the exclusive domain of cloistered nerds (I say that as a cloistered nerd). I’m here because federation is a better long term option for social media. I hope we can lure the normies over here too one day.
Well, there are also apparently some alt-right goons who want Reddit to burn for shutting down their old favorite hate forums, and they’re stirring up shit too.
Yeah you can’t exactly take the subset of redditors still using the site during the blackout as representative of how redditors feel about it - anybody with any concern about it is not crossing the picket line.
The number of comments per minute seems to have gone back to pre-blackout levels today. I think unfortunately there are just way fewer of us than I’d hoped.
Regarding the “real” issue being the use of the API by AI developers: It’s been evident for at least the last few years that this was going on, and I had seen it as a positive thing—that we were helping to create a training corpus that would be freely accessible to everyone, not just a handful of corporations with their own proprietary data.
