People who dislike these videos and comment on them to say that the perpetrators are morons also contribute to the tractiosn it gains because algorithms love engagement, corporatations love engament, so they’ll happily show the videos to more people in the vicious cycle of engagement.
I think it’s more of an ego thing. The people with healthy egos probably never end up as execs in companies as big as Reddit, and the people that do are likely driven by something else other than the desire to actually build a platform that respects its users and works well in cooperation with them - “I’m smart, I’m sexy, I know better than these plebs making us money”.
I wouldn’t count on big companies ever going that route, to be honest. The decision-making people there will likely never trust Lemmy or similar software enough because it’s not like them - not proprietary, not closed source, so they’ll keep wasting money on making their own shitty websites with their own shitty forums if they ever want to give their communities an official place to hang out.
Hopefully my experience can help some people see the bright side of going off Reddit.
To me, Reddit has been a great platform in almost every possible way - except meaningful engagement. At some point, I realized that any somewhat big subreddit that I frequented for news and discussions of topic I’m interested in is plagued by dead-end threads: karma farms through reposts, lame jokes and similarly low-effort content that’s breeds equally low-effort comments, and things that don’t provoke any sort of discussion in general.
Joining the protest made me go to difference places, especially forums big and small, where the only real way to engage with the community was to actually reply to what they said. I quickly realized that Reddit has long turned into another brainless scroller akin to Instagram or Twitter, which all may have their place, but that’s just not what I joined Reddit for back in the day.
Now that I’ve basically kicked the Reddit habit, I’m finally enjoying the Internet again - it’s not the same as it was in the 00s, and it will never be, but it’s much, much better than going to a single website, owned by a single company, for nearly everything I want to do online.
Today, I finally have a proper choice for the first time in years. A lot of that choice consists of the fediverse, with different scopes and goals, but some is just basic and mainstream places I’d forgotten because of the convenience that Reddit seemed to bring.
Today, I’m finally having actual conversations with people in the communities I choose to interact with, rather than just reading through the witty chains of comments.
I know that Reddit means different things to different people, but to me, it has lost its meaning long ago, and it’s only with the protest that I managed to kick the habit of going there for basically nothing. As surprising as it is, the whole thing lead me to enjoy my online life much more, and actually engage with the topics on the old, deeper level of fun, rather than just being exposed to an absurd amount of things, each pretty shallow and uninspired.
I think it’s good that they went for a seemingly small period, at least at first. This is a great way to convince the users to join the protest, which is the fuel of it, as asking so many people to forget about Reddit for longer easily could result in more people ignoring the actual boycott because of the scale of the change to their internet habits.
Having many services welcoming redditors is a great help, of course, but it’s much easier to convince a large number of people to keep the protest going now that many have found alternatives they like - perhaps some won’t migrate completely, but they may use Reddit less as a result. The amount of these people could have been significantly lower had the people had to consider going off Reddit for a similarly significant longer period of time.
The 48 hours of boycott may seem like a small step, but this step is a stepping stone to huge impacts later on, as we’re already seeing by the attention the whole situation is picking up.
We’re far from the credits roll in this movie.
I kinda owe this whole protest the fact that my most recent complaints about the internet have finally found an answer in the shape of many place I have discovered, like Lemmy and its instances, Kbin and its instances, Matrix and its instances…
I am finally feeling a little more like I used to when I browsed the internet in the 00s, when I just had so many different places to go for different things, rather than just being actively manipulated into staying in one play that “has it all”. Sure, the fediverse, too, may have the same effect, but its instance actually feel different, and I think I’m seeing different kind of content as well.
There are things that I consider dear to me about Reddit and the communities I discovered there, but if its decline means that I stop mindlessly scrolling it trying to find that “final” stimulation for my brain, and instead start interacting with actually interesting, human-like, and though-out content, then the sacrifice is well worth it. Life changes, and the good changes should be welcome, even if they result from something less than pleasant like this.
Sometimes you also think that you’re the one who’s got it all figured and can provide something so insightful, so powerful, so eye-opening that you’re going to change someone’s life, and consequently, the world, for the better - we like to feel special and big, but we’re not.