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.
Incidental ddos is a possibility as well if the hype builds enough.
Ddos is the least of its worries.
A coordinated astroturf attack by various interests will be it’s real telling moment and has already claimed previous attempts like Voat.
Voat died because it was a cesspool of the worst of the internet. I checked it out a bit after it’s formation and the last thing the world needed was another haven for pedos and alt-right sorts.
What is “Voat”?
A Reddit alternative that had a chance but couldn’t handle the influx so it ended up with just the hatorade free speech absolutists as reasonable people just went back to Reddit.
Important to note the influx in question was caused by reddit banning hate subs and reasonable people also saw there was a forum to leer on children and left on the spot.