I myself am really on the fence about this.
I hate what Reddit has done, as I was removed as a moderator on my sub. But I much prefer the UI to Lemmy so far. I’m also having a hard time understanding how this all works. I was familiar with Reddit, and it is obviously a way more active community.
But I also used Apollo and hate how they’ve done him so dirty.
Will you guys return if Reddit rights it’s wrongs?
No. This latest monetization grab has exposed a lot of wrongs with Reddit and the way that its employees and owners think. It fundamentally makes us question how the modern web was taken from the people.
If anything, the past two weeks of Lemmy proves that individual and community ownership of the Internet is not completely dead. It doesn’t have to be the same four or five companies owning everything on the Internet. There is a better way.
I think Reddit is permanently harmed. The numbers of comments on posts have dropped in every sub. People will be wary of posting quality content there anymore because it’s going to be owned by, and monetized by Reddit. Nobody wants to provide free labor for someone else to copyright and make millions. The quality posters are gone, back to their specialty forums or chat groups. The people who stayed behind are the low hanging fruit and probably not worth discussing anything with.
This was Reddits Slashdot moment.
The annoying this is that it didn’t need to go down like this!
This entire thing was bungled from conception to announcement to execution, if they had worked with the third party app devs, if they had communicated clearly, if that hadn’t come off as money grabbing, personal data selling ass holes then none of this would have been a problem.
As it is though, they can just get fucked.
What did slashdot do wrong? I wasn’t up on the lore, I just thought they decided to be a bit more moderated, which even though I would want to participate in a place that is a little more open to broader content, I can respect the decision.
It was another attempt at monetizing a website about 10 years ago. Slashdot got bought out by a company that was one of the online job hunting firms. And then the site was redesigned with more ads on it, sponsored articles, so the original owners cashed out, and the new ownership tried to use the Slashdot branding on various different types of media. They tried to monetize the user base, not realizing that the user base was Slashdot and not the other way around.
Slashdot community forked the site a few different places since the original Slashcode was FOSS. Many left and went to Reddit; and in about two years the new owners divested the Slashdot branding. Slashdot was effectively dead, and if you go back now, the comments on articles are in the dozens and not thousands like it was before the takeover.