It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.
I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.
Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.
I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.
I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.
I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.
I think Reddit will just accelerate its descent into low-quality spam and repost bot hell. Half of it will be Facebook Memes posted to Twitter posted to Reddit. Or Tiktok videos posted to Instagram posted to Reddit.
Not everyone will leave and many subreddits will return but unless there’s a MAJOR walkback, concession and promise then Reddit will remain as a husk of its past. Every move Reddit has announced since April just sounds like they are trying to wring out every penny from users that care to use their platform.
I’m weaning off of Reddit mostly, the blackout helps with the transition.
You know thinking about it, so much of its content had already become this. Basically half of all posts I’d seen had replies like “this is a karma farming bot, ignore it.” And the other half were just reposts from TikTok.