Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nineplay 1108 days ago
A few hard truths

- No alternative is going to show up which can host anywhere near the amount of traffic that reddit receives/received. That takes a lot more money than any new contender can drum up.

- reddit isn't going to decide it no longer wants to make a profit

- A lot of users are going to wander back over to post-blackout replacement subreddits

- A lot of communities are just going to disappear. It breaks my heart as a member of a sport-based subreddit, there's just no good substitute. If I were in charge of a sports league, I might be working on some sort of equivalent because for me personally a lot of the joy of watching a sport is sharing reactions with others. I can see my interest just fizzling out.
3 comments
the_snooze 1108 days ago
> It breaks my heart as a member of a sport-based subreddit, there's just no good substitute.

I'm in the same boat. I love /r/cfb and /r/collegebasketball, from the consistently formatted game threads and post-game threads, to the clever offseason shitposting [1]. It's sad to see reddit putting on the brakes on their API that power the moderation tools which make those subreddits so good.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/5nbcgu/examining_the_e...

link
greenhatman 1108 days ago
There is a base alternative, which I'm going to choose, and that's just to use social media less. Not going back to Reddit even if another alternative doesn't pop up.
link
yjftsjthsd-h 1108 days ago
> reddit isn't going to decide it no longer wants to make a profit

They could, however, take a saner approach to making a profit. If profit was their actual goal, for instance, it's entirely likely that they could actually make more money by either reducing the API pricing or charge it to the user (by making it a function of Reddit Gold). Of course, that assumes that money is the goal of the API changes, which was never obvious to me.

link