I mean I stopped using reddit and I think I'm better for it. I haven't replaced it with much else so it's a good thing.
So takeaway. I don't care what happens, they can make all the money in the world, I can only control what I use and consume.
I find the next draft to be a wonderful curated news aggregation that someone has been lovingly doing for a long long time. It has been better for keeping up with the news.
13 years, over 500,000 comment karma, also taking a break.
Of course, Reddit made it easier when they randomly removed all my posts and comments! I appealed, got a canned "oops, spam-filter false-positive, fixed now" message, but they didn't actually fix anything, and the sole appeals-form stopped working because it falsely claims the account is normal... And it happened a second time when I sought help using another account! (Yes, I'm very bitter at the Kafkaesque shitstorm.)
Fortunately I was still able to get a data dump--a bunch of massive CSV files--so it's not a total loss, some things I'm proud of writing I can still reuse.
So maybe it's time to go back to blogging, perhaps replace the abandoned WordPress site with a static generator...
I also believe there will be another drop when the apps actually are shut down. Now people are loggin in to get the last details without much hassle. I did this myself, it’s muscle memory to open Apollo and browse it, even with some subreddits closed. When the app are down… there will be the another spike, which Reddit has to overcome. At that moment I will most probably also shut down.
Reddit already knows what proportion of users are in third party apps. It's somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5%. The only open question is what proportion of third party app users will come back using the website or official app. My bet is at least half, probably more.
> On June 13, the day after the blackout began, the amount of time visitors to the website spent browsing content dropped to 7 minutes, 16 seconds, or about 16% below the normal level of more than 8 minutes, 40 seconds. *Since then, visit duration has recovered somewhat to a little over 8 minutes on Sunday, but that’s still a 7% drop from the average visit duration in May.*
Emphasis mine.
Looks like Reddit will be mostly fine once Eternal September begins.
Which is a shame, really, as Reddit was one of the last vestiges of the "old Internet" that is still popular (I.e. unobtrusive ads, no social media attention grabbing, no dark patterns to boost engagement).
It’s probably about right. I think it represents the most impacted by the changes. I would say the vast majority of users are consumers, and the bulk are using the stock app. What will be interesting is what happens next. If the 7-16% are the mods and main contributors to the subreddits, Reddit could just decay. It also might not, but it won’t be the same on a lot of subs.
So takeaway. I don't care what happens, they can make all the money in the world, I can only control what I use and consume.
I find the next draft to be a wonderful curated news aggregation that someone has been lovingly doing for a long long time. It has been better for keeping up with the news.
So that's it.