As Reddit Crushes Protests, Its User Traffic Returns to Normal
As Reddit Crushes Protests, Its User Traffic Returns to Normal
User visits and time spent on the social media platform normalize after traffic to Reddit briefly dipped last week during the blackout, according to SimilarWeb.
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As I expected.
I'm not sure it it's just Reddit that makes me sick, or Google. It's the way that society is getting dumber and more subservient.
I definitely get angry when I hear people are 'googling' everything they want to 'search' for. Similarly that people simply wish to protest Reddit - when they don't really care, they're just jumping on the RANT bandwagon.
With the advent of instant gratification, smartphones/internet access, I welcome the lack of need for a paper dictionary.
However, people go further - they love the way the big tech can aggregate their content and dish it up to them.
They don't care that they are being spoonfed solent green, and increasingly denied the ability to find actual answers to their questions.
If you do disturb them, like a borg they will become disoriented. They start to drown until they can feel the comforting caste of blue light on their faces as they dive back into their familiar environment.
Reddit's CEO is not stupid - he knows that most of it's users are sheep, and the escapees will be a minority. The mods, addicted to their power trips, will return and take whatever shit they have to... what else is their life good for?
Reddit is not 'crushing' the protests. The protests were mostly a flash in the pan - now most folks got bored, and just wanna go back to reading their joke of the day.
Moving Forward
A couple of problems. Firstly, even if I've been talking on Fediverse somewhere about a topic - if I search that topic, it will not take me to the Fediverse - I get taken to Reddit.
Unless the Fediverse content is getting included in search engine data, it'll never be driven from that direction.
I know personally that the reason I created my Reddit account is that I would find answers there, and then end up discussing them where I found them.
i try to push back against this notion when i see it: misanthropy is not the proper response here. people aren't sheep, they aren't stupid, they just aren't living in the same context as we are. for a lot of people (and a lot of older people especially), the politics of the internet are a black box, not because they're too stupid to comprehend this stuff, but because its simply out of scope for what they want to achieve online. there's tons of things to care about, and while the internet is a pretty important thing to care about in modern life in my opinion, lots of people simply don't live enough of their lives online to give a shit.
i dunno, i just get kinda pissed off with the whole "sheeple" bullshit. not everybody has your priorities, and not everybody knows what you know. that doesn't make them bad people, or stupid people, or subservient people, it just makes them people.
This comment should be placed as a disclaimer on every online discussion about internet, social media, or entertainment drama. It's amazing how deep we get into these super niche microcosms that have very little effect on most people's lives. The death of 3rd party reddit apps to me seems like the end of an era, but most people I interact with IRL don't even know what reddit is outside of the occasional search result. I need that perspective every once in a while.
Most people, by default, are not sheep; you are not wrong about this. But most people have allowed themselves to be domesticated as if they were (relevant thread attached at bottom).
this is not a "we are forcing normal people to understand scary programming things" problem.
this is a "corporations are doing everything to make people so strongly anti-learning and so against trying new things that they voluntarily refuse to use anything except for their own product" problem
source: https://eldritch.cafe/@AgathaSorceress/109296512790347301
like, maybe that's true, but i'm unsure if we have enough data to back that up as the main explanation for why people are hesitant to changing platforms, or if they are. maybe people have been brainwashed into staying on Facebook or whatever else, or maybe it was the first of its kind, and all its competition has been subsumed into it by monopolistic business practices, and people haven't had any alternatives for a long time. maybe institutions and systems are very difficult to stop once they get going.
i dunno, i'm really just not convinced by arguments like this. its taken quite a bit of time for our understanding of social media and its impact to become evident, and movements like the fediverse are building up steam for a reason. its seems more likely to me that you and i are simply early to the party.
my position isn't "we are forcing normal people to understand scary programming things". that would imply i think that people can't understand this stuff. its "we are engaged in communities where the structure and function of internet infrastructure is a topic of concern, and most people aren't". they aren't being exposed to challenges to corporate infrastructure. they aren't engaging with critiques of for-profit industry. but that is changing. people are more aware of the ills of social media platforms today than five years ago. hopefully, that trend will continue. i think that the only problem really is that more people don't know there are other options.