All this backlash is going to kill Reddit. It will take a thousand little cuts for sure, but it started the moment they announced their ludicrous pricing.
I don't think it will. It'll IPO just fine, make their shareholders wealthy and become another millquetoast advertiser friendly walled garden for your average internet user while the jilted original users go and find another platform, which will in turn IPO just fine, make their shareholders wealthy and the cycle repeats forever.
The average internet user by the way, is statistically not you reading this, doesn't really care too much about APIs and finds the current Reddit client just fine really and as a recent registration, doesn't understand that the developer community basically built the interest in reddit and without third-party moderation tools, clients and a community that deeply cared about their special website, flawed though it was.
All platforms go through this cycle, but Reddit felt special to me and it hurts to find that wasn't true.
I think this captures how I feel, which is an odd sense of mourning.
It's not that I haven't known for a long time now that reddit isn't the site it used to be, it's that this episode in particular has put that in such focus I can't ignore it.
So now I feel a sense of loss for the reddit of old, even if it hasn't really been such for a long time anyway.
Reddit itself will carry on fine, and perhaps get even stronger with a tighter control over content. Efforts to make a federated alternative are doomed.
I’d be pretty wary to join in on the IPO if they are taking actions like this, which seem likely to scare off all their moderators. If the volunteer moderators leave, they are going to have to change their business model to actually pay people to work, right?
But I’m not an investor, maybe Reddit has some numbers that make this make sense, or something. Or maybe they are just hoping to rip off some investors who don’t know how the site works.
Same. Last night I felt a sense of grief that all this immense knowledge & the tools to aggregate it have been fully captured by the bland sanitized values of ad networks.
Even today I can’t find answers on Google to my daily inquiries, but will find it on Reddit.
If there is an internet worth building, it’s not on ads.
But we all knew that from the start.
Here’s to those working on the federated web, maybe the outcome can be different.
I'm beginning to explore the fediverse more and have resolved to find an appropriate place to become part of it somehow. I don't think the fediverse as we know it today is the solution but instinctively I feel it's our best way right now to find our way there.
> All platforms go through this cycle, but Reddit felt special to me and it hurts to find that wasn't true.
This is not always true and there’s an important correction to this: all VC-funded platforms go through this, especially monetized by ads.
There are examples of privately owned platforms with subscriptions that are doing great and show no sign of quality decline. Telegram most notably being one of those.
This chase for constant high returns and also the focus on an audience very ortogonal to your actual users (ads buyers) are what seriously misaligns the incentives of users and platform owners.
I don't think it will because there's no solid alternative. If/when there is, and the most active users - the ones contributing the content and moderating the comments - start leaving, then it will turn into an empty husk of itself and die like Digg did, even if it does have millions of readers.
My argument against parallels drawn Digg is simply current users of the internet. In 2010-2011 people were more likely to experiment with different social forums, websites, and etc. Also the age of the users were always on the younger side. Nowadays it’s fairly different, and seems like users are more sticky and will only flock to an already established websites, so unless Reddit becomes genuinely unusable (broken native client, dead infrastructure and etc.), majority of the users will stay on and contribute. It’s similar to “Twitter exodus”, which didn’t happen. Obviously things might go downhill for the company, but people go in for their quick dopamine hits, not for some dramatic battle between evil (Reddit corp) and good (Apollo).
Not to sound too pessimistic, but most of the mods of the bigger subreddits aren’t going to give up either, since it’s a part of their life, and not really their battle.
I really hope I am wrong though, since it’s about time we have something new and shiny.
This is what will happen, and generally the people who would leave over these changes are the ones who make worthwhile content, and now they will move elsewhere. But where?
Reddit's doom has been announced over and over again since they started raising the bar for what is an "acceptable" sub-reddit in 2011.
The reality is that Reddit hasn't ceased growing since then. The same thing happened with YouTube. YouTube pushed its content to switch from filthyfrank to Jimmy Kimmel/Fallon. Advertisers are not interested in us, early-adopters, mostly young and middle-aged western males. They want kids and soccer-moms: they're less likely to install an ad-blocker, and have a much wider range of products for which they're the target audience.
I think we need to understand that we were never the target audience.
Reddit, like YouTube, will do more than fine. The early-adopters just won't be part of it.
My hope is that we will go back to independently ran niche-community bulletin-boards, like in the 2000s with phpBB, instead of piggy-backing on some other new for-profit corporate walled-garden.
Hah it’s funny you mention Filthy Frank specifically as he himself is now Joji[0] the very serious and not funny musician. He deleted all his old videos and scrubbed the evidence of who he once was, similar (although not as egregious) to the scat video Blippi posted [1] to get internet fame before he became a beloved children’s YouTuber.
I have friends who fit the target audience criteria you mention. These people absolutely do not care about the client and never find the need to step outside the default client. My partner has access to Apollo Ultra through iCloud Family, yet she finds the default reddit client good enough.
If these people exist and they’re the majority, why kill 3rd party apps to mess with a minority?
Because if you're a ruthless company going public, you want to avoid ways for your users to block the ads or "cheat the walled garden." Forcing them to use the official app is the way to go. And advertisers feel safe.
I'm not saying I approve the practice. I'm saying that it makes sense from their perspective.
I'd like to move away from Reddit, but I don't see any viable place to go. The best thing about Reddit is how generally casual the user base is. It's not just a self-selected number of tech-affine users. It's people who love books, people who love running, or video games, or space, or literature, or knitting, or anything and everything else.
Reddit has centralized what would otherwise be hundreds (thousands?) of obscure, splintered and isolated communities and forums. What could possibly compete with that without having already reached critical mass and become an obvious competitor to Reddit?
Yep, and after reading this thread (and clicking through to the reddit thread) I couldn't justify not delivering 1 little papercut of my own; I just canceled my paid account.
(Although at little personal cost, since I don't normally go to reddit directly, but I paid just to stop the inline ads that I would see when I would, as often happens, end up on reddit after googling something with kagi.com or bing.com.)
Maybe so, but Reddit is not Twitter; API access is far more important for Reddit because its official client is garbage and can't handle the long-form content that Reddit is known for.
This will have outsized implications for the 1% of users who actually post the content the other 99% come to see in a way that Twitter (and its 280-character comment limitation) does not.
> The very same thing hardly seems to have hurt Twitter.
It has. As somewhat of a Twitter addict, I'm finding it much easier not to log on these days, because the experience and the conversations have really hollowed out. I'm also no longer seriously considering using Twitter for promoting any projects or anything of the like going forward.
Personally, when someone mentions tweets nowadays, my first impulse is to ridicule / discount it all - "what, are you seriously using a service Elon bought to promote far-right topics...?"
Typically it comes out of my mouth in a more moderate stance, like "sorry, I don't use Twitter anymore. Any chance you could link a better forum?"
The most charitable reading of your comment still leads one to question what you would consider the right if Elon is far right. I am pretty sure he is a moderate leaning both ways on differing topics.
I don't care what he "is" or might be; his actions objectively helped the far-right. Whether he did it to troll, to "restore" some imaginary "balance", or because he genuinely believes in far-right topics, he still very materially helped far-right speech - and he clearly did it on purpose.
He is for sure far right. He's against increasing taxes on the wealthy, vowed to lobby against transgender health care, endorsed Republicans in the midterms, launched Desantis's campaign, and constantly rails against woke culture. There is not an ounce of left in this guys body.
I seriously question the motives of people saying this guy is a "moderate." You cannot gaslight America into thinking the far-right is middle of the road.
If Digg is of any indication, it takes a series of negligent and greed-driven actions to scuttle a social media platform, but it is possible.
Reddit has been more or less re-inventing itself for their asinine IPO aspirations, and in doing so it has moved to closed source code, redesigned their interface, adjusted content policies to court advertisers, and now they're finally going after the crowd of enthusiasts who depend on features that Reddit has failed and/or declined to implement.
This all reeks of venture capitalist sabotage and it's the very thing that
ultimately killed off Digg.
No the kill the API thing came after Elon. It was one of the things he did, but indeed this specific thing does not seem to have hurt user engagement in particular. In fact it was probably one of the things that was good for their ad revenue and probably why they did it.
I wish I still had the graph, but someone posted something for their (150k subs) subreddit recently, and it was below 10% old. No idea what sub, or what the source was so, so take this with a pitcher of salt.
I have no doubt some users will leave, but I’m not sure what principles have to do with whether or not it would be the end of Reddit. Unless you mean in some subjective, personal sense.
Think of old.reddit.com as a canary. If it goes, then you know some shit is going down and Reddit will never truly be the same going forward. Even if you don’t use it, that should be the signal to leave if you haven’t already.
The average internet user by the way, is statistically not you reading this, doesn't really care too much about APIs and finds the current Reddit client just fine really and as a recent registration, doesn't understand that the developer community basically built the interest in reddit and without third-party moderation tools, clients and a community that deeply cared about their special website, flawed though it was.
All platforms go through this cycle, but Reddit felt special to me and it hurts to find that wasn't true.