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.
Yeah, I’m only seeing plumbing and homeimprovement subs. :)
And a lot of people posting “hey, what happened to <sub>?”. Like… have you been living on the sun the past two weeks?
Crowds of people can be incredibly clueless. Before the blackout, there would be stickied posts explaining the whole situation in plain language, and then dozens of comments like “What’s going on I don’t understand???”
I think part of that’s also that stickied posts don’t stick to the top when you sort by new, iirc? And if you only check reddit once a week, or less, I could see missing all of it. Perfectly normal one day, leave, then you come back a week later and it’s a desert. Must feel weird and startling without context.
And some apps give you a setting to not show stickied posts altogether (which is just dooming yourself to problems like this, but people apparently get annoyed enough by them that they don’t care, I guess?)
I meant somebody would be commenting on the post itself asking questions answered by the post.
This all did happen very quickly. Someone who only looks at reddit like once a week or so could easily miss all of it.