Are they a multibillion dollar corporation though? I know they have had crazy valuation's, but we are moving past a time of value based on eyeballs and to a time of value based on monetization. Where does the monetary value of reddit really lie? It seems like most of their creative monetization strategies like gold, donations and custom avatars have failed. This leaves the more mundane avenues of advertising to users, and selling the content that users creates. Both of those are severely handicapped by a free/low cost api. If they cannot monetize a user or their data then that user is bad for their bottom line.
reddit is doing this because their investors want them to be a multi-billion dollar company, not because they already are.
Imagine comparing coal miners to the equivalent of internet janitors who volunteer to work for free as long as they get their share of petty power.
Tons of them are basically just protesting since they won't be able to exert said petty power as efficiently as they used to.
I can't imagine getting to a point where I'd defend Reddit powermods, even over spez himself. But even in your very shaky analogy, the mods are at worse the petty bourgeois, not some sort of proletariat of Reddit wtf.
How are they bougie? They have no ownership over the means of production or financial stake in the success of Reddit. If Spez IPOs Reddit to the moon, do the mods get a taste? At most (from a class perspective), they are the thin layer of floor management that the site relies on the function - those people are still prole labor.
Yes, yes, Reddit is no where near as bad as a coal mine, that's why it's an analogy.
> I can't imagine getting to a point where I'd defend Reddit powermods, even over spez himself.
Why not? Workers vs. Capital, if you can't side with the workers, then you are siding with the moneyed interests, and I can't figure why an average person would do such a thing.
I'm not siding with the admins, to be clear. I really really dislike how Reddit has been run. Always been a shithole, one way or the other.
But I also think that powermods are a net negative for the website and have turned moderation on Reddit into a joke.
At the end of the day I think users are the "proles" here. And most of them just want to use Reddit for things like tech support or purchasing advice or discussing video games.
That a few mods are able to take ownership of communities that aren't theirs (the community is the users, not the mods imo) and close them down is pretty meh.
I personally would never use Reddit once RiF stops working (and I mean it, I can't even get myself to use the old Reddit interface).
But this is a weird temper tantrum imo that is typical of Reddit; a very tiny minority of third party apps users and even commercial third party app devs shutting down stuff that isn't theirs because they dont have it their way. Again, basically 90% of users just use the new Reddit app and website sadly enough.
It will no longer be free to browse how you like. You will be forced to use Reddit's Apps, Reddit's website, etc. Along with the tracking and restrictions that they impose (Future removal of NSFW is an example of a restriction).
Got it, thanks.