Eh, I used Reddit daily for 14 years, and quit cold turkey. The first few days were rough, but between the feddiverse and inoreader, I’m doing fine.

Sure the communities I left behind were much larger, but honestly the responses I get here are of much higher quality.

I’m doing my part. I hope others do an exodus and not a hiatus.

Reposting something I wrote in another community I hang out in, but it feels appropriate to the topic:

I won’t pretend “Reddit is dying” or anything of the sort, but I have noticed something interesting (that is maybe something I should’ve noticed long, long ago), and that is that subreddits have an insane concentration of whiny entitled lurkers that seem to want content catered and spoonfed to them.

During this whole debacle, I’ve seen creators and enthusiasts that drive the traffic be perfectly content creating elsewhere because it was more about expressing their passion of a topic than cultivating some kind of audience. No matter the alternative they chose, they have plenty of outlets for their creation. But everyone else hates this. All of the bitching about blackouts that I’ve seen haven’t been “man I wanted to post cool shit” but more “where am I supposed to get cool stuff from?”.

In general, what I’ve seen is a slight decline in activity, but a sharp decline in quality. Comparatively, my experience in Lemmy thus far has been that people creating were fine moving elsewhere to do their thing, and while communities are still small, I’ve seen a lot more long-form, thoughtful and respectful discussion because everyone there was a creator and enthusiast about that topic. Looking at the profiles of people commenting, they’ve typically posted at least once in that community already.

Meanwhile on Reddit, since the blackout wore off on certain subs, I’ve seen a lot of this:

[In the original, here would be an image of a typical current comment thread in a blackout-related post, but the context of it is explained below anyway]

Where people who bitch about the blackout because “but I wanted to discuss x!!” are then invited to discuss exactly that, and the conversation goes something along the lines of

“I wanted to discuss x!”

“Oh cool, me too. I like x y z about it, though I preferred if x was like this instead, and maybe z could be polished a little more”

“Well, idk I like it”

“ok 👍”

or just

“i like this”

“i like this too 👍”

because they don’t actually have any proper formulated thoughts or opinions on the subject beyond surface-level observations, brand identity or attachment, or if they do have them, they don’t have the drive to create or lead conversations about it and just lurk waiting for said content and thoughts to be delivered for them.

Which makes the already bad state of egregious repost bots rising to the top because people keep upvoting the same topics over and over even worse.

In a way, I guess it’s kinda similar to what happened with 9gag when that hit critical mass.

To expand on this, I also find it interesting and perplexing just how far that entitlement goes. Moderators are on the verge of losing critical tools, and they’re essential in maintaining the quality of the discussions held. Creators create the topics of discussion, and are the main driving force in setting the baseline quality of said discussions, and as power users are more likely to be the ones to depend on third party apps to create the content people browse.

Both seem fine with the situation, and/or migration, and very understandably go “Hey we feel disrespected on this platform and are moving to x where we feel we can thrive better without external influences deriding our community” and lurkers, who contribute nothing and have the least barrier of entry because they essentially just need to change the url they search the same terms in, stomp their feet and cry “but I want you to discuss things for my entertainment HERE!!!” like two year olds.

Edited to add, here on Lemmy:

I’m hopeful that this situation will show moderators they can curate a dedicated community anywhere with similar (actually relevant) post flow and quality, but without enduring the abuse of the platform they host it in and a bunch of on-lookers. I really hope they don’t buckle in the name of “but we’re already established / have so many people / are such a good resource” because all these things can be true elsewhere without receiving death threats or mod mail spam for doing the right thing.

The hardest part for me was realizing how shit Google search is without appending reddit.

Under lots of the “we’re back, let’s talk what’s next” announcements, comments pop up that say basically - “ah well, guess that’s it, just use the app, it’s great” and they get positive rating, where a week ago they’d be downvoted to oblivion.

I guess everyone for whom this was actually important, has already found an alternative and at most is waiting for their 3rd party app to break.