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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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User engagement is still user engagement, would be best if no one participated at all.
Sorry I’m not picking on you specifically, but every post about Reddit or r/place has someone saying something like “just leave” “any engagement helps them”, etc.
I think that’s exactly what they want.
They want the intelligent-but-cynical, hard-to-influence, infamously difficult-to-monetise dissenting mob to fuck off elsewhere, and leave them with the doomscrolling, passive users who are willing to use their app and happy to just look at whatever content is in front of them as long as sometimes there is a kitty.
The problem we have is that that mob of vocal users isn’t everybody. It probably isn’t even most users. I think they’d willingly lose us if it means the dissent goes with us.
So I don’t think this negative engagement is necessarily bad - it keeps their mismanagement in the news, and it opens users eyes to alternatives. And for me, that is the goal - to bring some of those awesome communities over to federated alternatives where no one corporate entity can take it away.
Plus it’s certainly going to be amusing if their flagship community engagement event (the output of which has been widely shared by the media in the past) has a giant “fuck spez” banner in it.
Yeah, a lot of people still haven't gotten this yet. Spez wants reddit to be friendly to stupid people who do stupid things like buy Trump NFCs. This entire thing is about purging the old, tech savvy, liberal/left crowd to make room for Facebook NPCs who are easier to monetize.
You'te just addicted. Let it go.
No, he's right. If people just "fuck off" instead of protesting, shit doesn't get done.
Some people don't just want to "move on" when they're pissed at yet another example of capitalism ruining a platform that got itself a monopoly because of capitalism. If reddit hadn't been there when Digg died, somebody else would have. That somebody else might have done things differently than reddit, and now we wouldn't have this issue where reddit is almost "too big to fail".
So I may be too lazy to actively protest reddit, but saying my decision to "just fuck off" is the braver one because the protestors are "addicted"... I just disagree.
Capitalism says we're not supposed to have expectations of the giants who cannibalize their market. I disagree strongly.
Doesn't reddit not make money though? Like, if traffic resulted in them making money, I'd agree, but everything I've heard would indicate using reddit with an adblocker literally costs them money.
Exclusively using reddit to protest should be fine IMO, just don't contribute anything that isn't a protest (including voting)
The argument is that it drives the active users and engagement up which allows them to show off those numbers to investors and it looks great for the upcoming IPO.
IMO though, I do believe that Reddit was losing money from 3pa because they’ve refused to say just how many users were using those apps compared to theirs.