virtually everyone who knows what JavaScript is and cares about privacy has long since abandoned ship
This is not the case though, or the post we just read would have never existed in the first place. The amount of traffic Reddit generates is completely absurd, and is itself part of the problem.
It is not that people don't know about what is happening at Reddit, or even that they don't care about it, it's just that there is no replacement for it. I still have to use Reddit, because there are two communities on there that I need to look at sometimes and they don't really exist elsewhere.
We don't have the digg or MySpace situation where users just abandon ship and go elsewhere. These companies are behemoths. Voat was entertaining the idea of Twitter disappearing a while ago, didn't happen. This current Facebook scandal is like a fly on the windshield for them. Celebrities, media, entire communities etc. have populated these platforms en masse, and it will take an act of god for them to be replaced with something else.
I think the act of god will be really exactly what you guys have done, creating an open source code that allows smaller versions of these things to pop up, eventually companies will see the value in running their own and start adopting their own social networks and the giants will fall from thousands of pin pricks rather than any one giant blow.
This is not the case though, or the post we just read would have never existed in the first place.
I see what you're saying, but I don't think any of those people (even the tech literate ones) really care that much about privacy. Or maybe they care so much, that they sacrifice their own privacy in order to educate the noobs? One way or the other.
I still have to use Reddit, because there are two communities on there that I need to look at sometimes and they don't really exist elsewhere.
Anything that you need an army of normies to get done, reddit is your place. I won't judge someone for using it. Despite their dominance though, sites like phuks, voat, and many others still exist. The alternatives are there, and their existence tells me that demand is there as well, even if the numbers are smaller in these places.
As nice as the thought of reddit going down is, and hilarity all the sheep not having a clue where to go next, reddit really doesn't need to go anywhere. Reddit is the ultimate containment forum. If they ever went offline, the rest of the internet would be absolute shit until those users all collected themselves in their new spot.
The only real problem with reddit is that there is a political bias to their censorship.
I'm not exactly surprised. Reddit is now set up in such a way that you can't even see posts or navigate the site without js enabled, let alone post or comment. Virtually everyone who knows what javascript is, and cares about privacy has long since abandoned ship. I mean, there are people in that thread who don't even know how to work an adblocker, let alone write a greesemonkey script that will let you navigate the site without their built in system to lock out anyone who doesn't submit to fingerprinting.
I'm more surprised that they're allowed to talk about this at all, let alone for 16 hours without getting deleted. Admins must be drunk this weekend or something.