nefarious

Statcounter bases their data on web traffic. If you're browsing the web on your Steam Deck, I think that should count.

I'm not sure Twitter is a Cloudflare customer. There's no Cloudflare infrastructure referenced by the DNS entries for twitter.com.

This feels short-sighted. The odds of the protest having a major and immediate impact were always low. It's not like the suits were going to have a sudden change of heart and realize they were alienating their users. The majority of Reddit's userbase weren't going to suddenly leave the site forever. But that wasn't the point.

Here's what's changed since the API changes were announced:

1. Reddit's responses to user concerns and protests have alienated even more users than the initial changes themselves, showing users exactly how Reddit's administration sees them.
2. A whole bunch of mods, devs, and contributors who put in a lot hard work improving Reddit for free are now much less motivated to do so (if they're still willing to do it at all).
3. The protest raised awareness of federated Reddit alternatives, which have grown substantially as a result. A lot of those people who helped improve Reddit for free are now turning their attention to kbin and Lemmy instead.
4. Reddit is on a clear trajectory. They've shown they will continue making user-hostile decisions and antagonizing their userbase in pursuit of further growth.

We now have an established alternative to Reddit that has reached a critical mass for growth. A lot more people are now working on making the fediverse better, and communities are forming that will attract new users on their own. From now on, every time Reddit makes another move like this, more people will move over (or get closer to moving over) and Reddit will drop in quality even more as a result. If there's ever a Digg V4 moment (maybe when they kill old.reddit), the fediverse will be much more prepared to take on the mass exodus that results.

Honestly, I should probably set up a system-wide adblocker, but I just use uBlock in Firefox and avoid apps that shove ads in my face.

I was thinking the same thing. I think the user curation aspect is what made Reddit so sticky compared to old-school forums where you had to wade through every comment one by one, but having a visible karma score incentivized people to try to make the number go up.

I think Goodhart's law applies, because karma is ostensibly supposed to be a measure of how good a contributor you are, but in practice it just measures how good you are at getting people to upvote you, which it turns out doesn't require you to make quality contributions.

All of these things have already been disclosed.

ActivityPub is a public standard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

kbin is open source. https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin

Lemmy is also open source. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Google is your friend.

I had wondered about this. I figured that all of these surveillance capitalist adtech/analytics companies would have to have some metrics on this.

What would be really nice to know is how the numbers look now that the blackout has been over for a while. A 6.6% drop is pretty tiny if it only lasted a day or two.

Could've been UPS using USPS for last-mile delivery. The OP is also from feddit.de so maybe they're not in the US.

The framing of "Go back to normal" or "Only sexy pictures of John Oliver" was clever. Lots of people are going to pick the funny option over the boring one in basically any low stakes poll, so even people who don't care much about the protest probably still voted for it.

There's also a lot more motivation for the people who are pissed about Reddit's changes vs. the people who just want their infinite feed of content back to its former state.

I bet similar scenarios play out with spez's whole "moderator democracy" idea.

This is exactly the kind of tactic that's needed now. If Reddit wants to end the blackout by force, then what else is there to do but make them regret it?