Yes! I've been leech blocking Reddit the past couple of days and I intend to keep doing so until I've broken the habit of absent mindly typing "Reddit" into a new tab whenever I have brief downtime waiting for something.
But in the mean time I find that search results for things point to Reddit at least as often as stack exchange.
> Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes?
If they do, it won't be for several months and only if there's a drop in traffic that looks to be permanent. The protest itself won't change anything.
A change in the API certainly makes sense (OpenAI showed the value of the reddit's comment data, and I think spez is pissed that OpenAI is not only profitable, in a large part due to the availability of reddit's comment data, but because OpenAI is run by another reddit co-founder). And maybe that's the plan all along...
There's an idea that users will hate any change you preset. If you give users minimal-change, they'll hate it and revolt. If you give users drastic-change, they'll hate it and revolt. So give them drastic-change, weather the revolt, then walk back to moderate-change and by-in-large they'll accept it.
>I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.
I don't think reddit will be dead by the end of the year or anything quite like that. But we know from past studies (using that API, heh) that a very tiny percentage of site visitors post content. I think it was something like 10% of visitors are logged in, 1% of visitors comment regularly, and 0.01% post content. But something like 90% of the content is from only 1% of the users who post content, so the 0.01% isn't even that important, it's the 0.0001% who drive the site. And there's a lot of cross over between these power users who post all the content and the moderators of the largest subreddits.
So what will happen when the power users quit the platform? It's not just that lots of communities will go unmoderated and shutdown (if their mods don't shut them down first), but a lot of the content will dry up.
Now, vacuums fill and naturally any void left by the power users leaving will be filled by others who start posting, but that could very well be the beginning of the end. We saw this with Digg. There were several mass exoduses from digg to reddit and other sites that caused the quality of digg content to get worse and worse for the 3 or 4 years before Digg v4 put the final nail in the coffin. Had Digg kept old.digg running along side digg v4 it might have continued to suck for many more years, but Digg's influence on internet culture was decidedly in decline before Digg v4.
And that I think is what we'll see with reddit. Many communities will collapse, content will reduce in quality, and the slow attrician will begin. It won't disappear in a year or 3, but it won't be nearly as important in a couple of years as it is today. Remember when "slashdotted" was a term?
The big questions is "where will the users go?" When digg was fucking up, there was already reddit. Can fediverse link aggregators (lemmy, kbin.social, etc) really serve as a replacement? I'm not convinced. I've read there's efforts to make a link aggregator using BlueSky's AT protocol, but that's not yet here.
But in the mean time I find that search results for things point to Reddit at least as often as stack exchange.