Aside from the occasional /r/jokes jab at Ellen Pao, Reddit seems to be back to what it was a few days ago. Nothing seems to have come of the protest, other than priming the next admin screwup to make a slightly larger impact.
Part of the reason, I believe, was the closed doors of voat and loaded servers on other link aggregators. Redditors had no quick, familiar platform to stream to immediately, so most of the 'refugees' seem to have returned with nothing but a shred of unease in the back of their minds, dormant until the next issue pops up. This was more or less expected, honestly - there was no way a mass exodus was going to succeed with one small swoop like this, even though it was the biggest so far. The admins would need to make a digg-level series of mistakes in order for that to happen.
I didn't think Reddit would change. Honestly? I thought a lot of the hoopla was funny. Sure, there are some points users/mods had with the lack of support and tools, but I knew that this was all a bunch of hot air as soon as r/pics went back up after that vaguest of vague post from the admins. Reddit is a reactionary place. I think Redditors like getting upset or excited about something as a group. The Blackout was THE biggest... well, circlejerk in the history of the site. The issue was entirely beyond partisan lines, and I think Redditors liked that. But it was also boring. Going private meant no content, no upvotes, no karma. If Reddit loved doing something as a group, then what happens if you're hours upon hours into this just refreshing r/all and seeing nothing there? A lot of Redditors gleefully imagined how dull and confusing the site had to have been for new users on the holdout open subs and meta subs, but I really wonder just how much of that was projection. I spent my time watching AMAgeddon on the IRC chat in subredditdrama while playing terraria. There was nothing else to do. But what really spoke volumes is the fact that there has not been one single announcement by the admins on Reddit itself publicly. I think the admins knew just what kind of userbase they have and they knew we would get bored eventually. Reddit has a short attention span almost by design. Pao made that run of the mill apology on TIME, but there's been little actual talk from them otherwise. Why should they have faced the flames if we were going to stop throwing a tantrum sooner rather than later? The petition on change.org says it all, really. Reddit has no conviction to stay dark, we have neither the desire to mass leave or the option to, and I honestly doubt that the July 10th thing will amount to anything. Pao's detractors will sign that worthless petition till the cows come home, but have little will to do anything that requires any actual effort or inconvenience for long periods of time. Just how much work is in electronically signing a petition anyway? That's why AMAgeddon was funny to me.
Hey, I was in that IRC, too! I agree, the whole AMAgeddon fell pretty flat. The way everything went down looked like a temper tantrum rather than a revolt, and it got pretty tiresome to deal with. I think the weirdest part about it was all of the people that got mad when the mods brought the subs back, despite it being their fight more than anyone else's. I think a lot of people just used it as an excuse to get mad at Chairman Pao and her minions at the Gestapo Reddit HQ. It went from pretty understandable to absolutely ridiculous pretty fast. However, I don't really mind. I found a couple new sites to split some of my time up into, which is a bonus for me. If anything, I guess I have to thank them for it, so: thank you Ellen Pao!
It just has so much content. I've been enjoying this site a lot, but after the first couple posts of any tag, they start to be 2, 3 days old really quickly. Reddit was just a never ending stream of new content. I can't find anything else that satisfies my short attention span fueled desire to flip through links and comments.
Stop. Worrying. That. A. Post. Is. Old. First step is to turn off your feedtimes in your settings. Do it. Then comment on a post that is 2-3 days old. Or a year old. Or 2 years old. Why? 1. It will be reinjected into people's feeds. 2. It will show up in chatter. There are often posts that get reinvigorated. The only reason it doesn't happen more is because you are trained that comments old posts won't get read (or upvoted). So, stop thinking like that! Why does an article that's a year old have less value than one posted today?
I'll admit, it is hard to stop thinking like that. Everything online instills in us this sense of immediacy. People stop thinking about a post they saw on reddit at most 12 hours after they saw it, threads on 4chan "404" hours, sometimes even minutes after being made, replies on Twitter tend to make no sense after the initial tweet is a few hours old, people are deathly afraid of accidentally "liking" a Facebook or Instagram post that's more than a month old for fear of looking like a stalker. I think the internet as a whole is running our attention spans into the dirt. I also think it's deviously engineered to do just that but that's a tin foil hat conversation for another time.
The problem, I think, is there is no real reddit competitor at the moment. People were trying to force a reddit alternative via whatever flavor reddit clone could be found. The big problem with these sites was that they largely didn't have a large established community already. The result was there was no real "culture" in all those reddit clones. At the same time no name sites were trying to capitalize on the chaos to promote their low traffic websites and gain some exposure. Not to say those sites were bad, just that they could not possibly stand against a wave of reddit culture washing over all their established users. What reddit really needs is a rival, not just a clone or a replacement. Right now reddit has no real competition or rival and so there's no legitimate place to jump to. If there were an established competitor to reddit, the chaos would've been funnelled to that site, instead there was a mix of people trying random new websites and people trying to just make "reddit 2.0".
I don't think there really was a mass exodus. Not seriously. Google Trends there was a spike in interest but 100 searches? Really? Its not even a blip. Unless I don't know how to drive that google trends thing.
That's not how Google Trends works. The 100 is a relative index to the volume of searches over time. It's to compare how many people Googled a term at one point in time compared to others. When it says 100, it doesn't mean that 100 people searched it, it means that that was when the search volume was at its highest. So, in reality, it was the biggest day of all time for those search terms. If you want to look at actual numbers, there's always Google Adwords. There's a problem with this, though. The numbers only go up to May of 2015 for some reason. Here's a link to my search. Here's a screen shot of the page, if that doesn't work. It's safe to say that there definitely was a desire for Reddit Alternatives this week. I guess we'll have to wait a while for the exact number of searches, howeve . there was a spike in interest but 100 searches?
Most of Reddit knows about voat - there were multiple frontpage posts about it. So, if voat was open, the migration (however short it may have lasted) would have probably been much more visible. There was also a very popular thread about alternatives, as well as an entire subreddit for it (/r/redditalternatives) - Redditors really had no need to google it. So I don't think search trends are a very accurate estimate of how many would have left in the right circumstances.
Yes. We had one reddit influx a while ago was due to a mention of "hubski" without a link in a top comment on a top askhubski post. The influx was remarkably smaller than any others that we have had, even though the visibility of the post and comment was higher than most (if not all) of the links we have had on reddit. However, traffic we got from google searches for hubski was insane whereas when people link, the user comes directly from reddit and the number of people who show up is so much higher. Redditors really had no need to google it.
I think it wasn't underrated at all for voat's servers. They really took a pounding when put it side by side next to reddit alternatives. There was a link shared to reddit that got bombarded, then crashed the servers, then making everyone return with no where else to go.
Turns out I don't know how the google trends thing works. "100" is "peak search interest". It's a maximum. It's not an actual count of the number of searches.