No Stupid Questions

I joined right around the blackout, and the amount of content, especially content I enjoy has increased considerably. Everytime I open the app there are new things to read, which definitely wasn't the case a month ago.

So mass exodus, nah, even if every new user of Lemmy, Kbin and all the other alternatives left Reddit completely we're a single digit percentage at most. But mass adoption, definitely. With the smaller user base pre-apiexit its much easier to notice all the new contributing users.

No, it's not a mass exodus.

The total number of users across all Lemmy instances is about half a million, from memory? There was a post about it not so long ago. A quick google's search shows Reddit has 55 million daily active users.

It's fuck all, at least for now.

Oh and if people are also going elsewhere, where else are people going? (ie not lemmy)

I think it's more of a mass giving up on Reddit. Some people might come here, some people might go elsewhere, some people might use it to digital detox.

But the 'mass' bit will probably be ex mods, power users and people who cared about the way Reddit was being run - a sizeable number but definitely not a majority of users. But crucially a lot of the people who helped to provide quality content.

Despite the hate he gets, Spez is not quite as batshit crazy as Musk (he still is coming up with shit ideas for the future of Reddit though). So although I think Reddit will become a much less interesting place it probably won't become an unuseable dumpster fire for casual users (like Twitter).

I doubt a "mass exodus", most people probably stayed and it will take time before there's a mass exodus from the platform. As apparent as it is to many of us that Reddit has gone to shit, for the vast majority of users, they just saw it as another meme-able moment, just another one of those reddit dramas that flares up and dies down eventually in time fort he next trend to hit.

For them though, maybe it's died down already and it's back to business as usual, maybe not, but the casual users aren't going to see the true effects for some time I think. As a lack of moderation, a lack of content, an increase in bots, spam, and extremism start to take hold on the platform, users will start to realize that something is not quite right, it's not the same reddit it used to be. They'll start to get an inkling of what we've already seen and maybe at that point they'll start branching out to Lemmy or some other platform. This may cause Reddit, the company, to start acting out in desperation to try to keep users from leaving and/or protect its potential profits, which may in turn cause a feedback loop wherein more users leave and Reddit gets stupider and stupider (similar to what we're currently seeing with Twitter). It'll be awhile before there's a true mass exodus from the site.