First subreddit over 10M to go private. The message shown when trying to enter the sub is a quote from spez:
I think the problem Digg had is that it was a company that was built to be a company, and you could feel it in the product. The way you could criticize Reddit is that we weren’t a company – we were all heart and no head for a long time. So I think it’d be really hard for me and for the team to kill Reddit in that way. Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, April 2023
First subreddit over 10M to go private.
If I’m not mistaken, the first was /r/videos (about 30m subscribers)
My bad then
No worries, great to see other subs following suit!
Over the years I’ve become a glass half full kind of a person when small people fight against big corporations. Eventually the dust settles, and the people give up, but the company goes on. There are exceptions, but this has been the norm. I would be pleasantly surprised if all this actually brings Reddit’s downfall.
I think there are two reasons. I think Reddit has way more ‘normal’ users than Digg who feel strongly about this, and there is no one single Reddit to replace Digg this time around. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
There is not a single Reddit, but there’s a single Fediverse, offering a single alternative to every social media. And it’s growing faster than ever. We shall win!
How does this compare to the twitter exodus
Well, Twitter is a lot larger than Reddit, so more people were involved, but Mastodon was actually a lot (250x) larger than Lemmy before the exodus, so while Mastodon only increased its user count 4-5x, Lemmy is already past the 10x mark and the exodus has barely begun!
This is the number one source of reassurance I give people who object that Lemmy is “overrun by tankies.” That was just the earliest niche community that happened to jump ship in this particular direction. Now, even at this early stage, Lemmy is being overrun by everyone else.
People will start contributing to Lemmy software. Anarchists and democratic socialists will also improve it, not just Marxists.
Just a nit: Given the context of the rest of your post, I think you mean “glass half empty”.
“I see the glass half full” means optimistic, while “I see the glass glad empty” means pessimistic. The idiom is about what a person chooses to focus on in a less-than-ideal situation: what’s missing, or what’s still there?
(Not saying you don’t know that, just explaining for anyone who isn’t familiar with the idiom)
If people use Facebook after the genocide in Myanmar and Cambridge Analytica then reddit will be fine?
That’s unexpected!
—Steve Huffman, July 2023, ex-CEO of Reddit
well that was
…unexpected
Did they actually go dark without warning or announcing their plans? That would have been pretty meta.
Nah, they actually announced it first: https://web.archive.org/web/20230607150644/https://www.reddit.com/r/Unexpected/comments/143fpkn/runexpected_is_joining_the_protest_on_june_12th/
I would’ve expected otherwise. Well played, r/unexpected.
Roll credits
Directed by Robert B Weide
“So I think it’d be really hard for me and the team to kill Reddit in that way. But I’m not one to back away from a challenge, so hold my beer.”
It’d be truly sad if this shareholder enshittification of Reddit is what guts it and leaves its corpse in a ditch, but it does seem to be the way most things are headed these days.
This quote brought tears to my eyes. Greed is an amazing thing but community (Lemmy) is an even amazing one. I look forward to build something meaningful here
I don’t really follow too well. Is this just turning private and they continue to use with the community they have or will they just point blank stop posting on that sub?
Going private means nobody can view or post in the sub unless manually added by the mods. Presumably they won’t be adding anyone since that defeats the purpose, so yeah, nobody can view or post.
Thanks for the clarification. Seemed a bit daft if it was just private group working away
No, it means the subreddit inaccessible to everyone except mods and admins. It’s effectively suspended to everyone else.
unexpectedly?
I expected the unexpected. Call me a wizard.
Will they be back in 48 hours, or are they staying down indefinitely?
I think the main plan is 2 days to start, but prolonged if nothing changes. Each sub could do it’s own thing though
They’re /r/unexpected, so if they were to state one or the other I don’t know if that could be trusted anyway.
What would be truly unexpected is for it to randomly be open then closed.
Dont give them ideas
Let them stay private indefinitely. Reddit is already dead like Twitter and Twitch.
