The community is posting about steam, the water vapor, in retaliation. It's a beautiful thing.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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This is what I want to see from every subreddit that is forcibly reopened. The admins can try and force mods to 'do their jobs', but they sure as shit can't force what can be/gets posted!
It's funny, but I don't quite get the point of this. If you are boycotting Reddit then you shouldn't be going there to post about things. If you ARE going there, you are no longer boycotting. Reddit doesn't care what you post about. You are still participating in the site. It's just driving traffic back to Reddit, which harms the cause.
The point is the lurkers subscribed there are going to get bored of steam pictures and unsubscribe, if it happens to enough subs then a lot of the passive userbase will end up either spending less time or leave entirely. Since the vast majority of users are lurkers, it'll outweigh the number of people creating these rebellion posts and Reddit should see a net loss in traffic. At least, that's what I've gathered. Please don't shoot the messenger if I'm wrong or it's a stupid idea
I'll add that I think another aspect to this is: if the site declines quietly, you'll end up with users shrugging and either continuing to use it or not. Most people don't understand why this matters at all, and if the post quality declines it probably will be a lot like Facebooks decline. People knew it got worse, but the prevailing narrative is "that's just how social networks work, the kids are always jumping on the next thing".
By doing this, it makes it very clear that the mods and power users are pissed by actions taken by Reddit. People are starting to hear about it, but it's not common knowledge.
If people hear "Reddit users protested then left because of Reddit corporate", investors are going to be pissed, advertisers are going to find it less attractive, and (most importantly) when discord or YouTube consider their own anti-poweruser moves (which they're currently talking about) they'll remember "we need to be careful with changes or we'll have a reddit moment"
I think this all started with Musk and his instance that despite pissing off users left and right, he's made Twitter more profitable than ever and only kicked off bots and scammers. It's absurdly unlikely (not like he's releasing numbers and they are deciding to not pay bills).
But by creating that very attractive narrative, other social media companies are looking for their own ways blatantly grab cash
I'm not sure how they are actually anticipating this not to go negatively. If they are pushing active moderators and replacing them, that seems like a PR nightmare waiting to happen on top of all of this.
So done with reddit I finally took the time to figure out how federated platforms work. Just started on kbin, and I've been seeing a lot more of what I actually want to see.
The people who care have left. The people who don't care stayed and they obviously won't give a shit. The only way they're going to give a fuss is when the content torpedoes, which it looks like it's already started.
Quality content creators are mostly gone from Reddit. Quality content submitters are mostly gone from Reddit. Quality content commenters are mostly gone from Reddit.
So what's left?
Mods who think they have value and for some reason care about their /r , and working for free.
Ads thinly disguised as posts. Bots spamming and upvoting those fake posts.
And nobody important reading.
The quality difference on lemmy/kbin is staggering. This is the perfect time to be part of it.
It's inevitable it will start to slide once critical mass of users have been reached though. I'm curious if federated and smaller instances will keep it agile and fresh and big corp influence free.
but there are users advocating changing the sub to be about actual steam.
Look at posts in the last 10 hours, they all are lol. Yay!