I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
There was definitely a massive migration, at least seen from lemmy’s side, check out the graphs at Fediverse observer. Within a two month span (May-July 2023), the number of total monthly lemmy users went from 47 000 to 1 700 000. That’s a 37-fold increase in two months. The number peaked at about 1.9 million in august the same year, with about 130 000 active monthly users (up from about 1 000). In the same period, the number of online lemmy servers went from 80 to a peak at 1396 (a 17-fold increase).
In reddit terms, the migration wasn’t massive, they lost on the order of a hundred thousand users. Still, over a hundred thousand users leaving a platform within a couple months is probably near-unprecedented in internet history.
I think Reddit lost many of its most active users.
I still go back for a couple of subreddits like Unraid. Outside those niche communities, there is a lot less user generated trends and memes.
Anybody remember the button or the giant canvas? Haven’t seen anything like that since the purge.