[JustARandomGuy]

Quote from article: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman… is apparently unaware that Reddit's success is because of the posts by the users that use the service in all of its forms

If Reddit starts losing popularity due to this incident (and that is not guaranteed by far) this is going to be the money quote which sums up the entire situation. An unaware CEO unable to understand his own product nor users.

With that said I think there is a strong chance that this will end up being a tempest in a teapot - there doesn’t seem to be any immediately obvious damage to the Reddit brand because of the blackout.

[superkuh]

This is the third wave of gentrification on reddit. This has all happened before including reddit kicking off/out mods that closed their subreddits in protest. I know because it happened to me in wave 2.

For all the people that leave there are plenty of Facebook refugees trickling in at the same rate. Reddit doesn't want it's power users, it wants Facebook/etc's users and cares nothing for it's original userbase (or culture, as shown by the post-VC capital emphasis on posting to /u/ user profiles instead of subreddits).

[valar_m]

> "Reddit doesn't want it's power users"

I keep hearing people say this, but why would that be?

By "power users" it seems like people are broadly referring to people who submit lots of original content-heavy posts and comments. Why would Reddit not want that?

[rzazueta]

I have a pet conspiracy theory that the leadership there thinks this may rid them of "troublemakers". Huffman's seemingly ludicrous hardcore stance against third party Apps and mods who disagree with him would seem to reinforce this.

Basically, they're chasing away the folks who are most likely to cause a ruckus when Reddit inevitably tries to go IPO or otherwise make a profit. Everyone is saying this is in prep for their IPO, but I agree with Huffman's analysis that now is a really shitty time to be pondering an IPO. My guess is he has a checklist of items he needs to accomplish on the site handed to him by leadership to make everything look good for an IPO. He may have realized a lot of these would not go well with the community - this isn't his first rodeo with this stuff - so he applied draconian measures, hardened his heart against the mods and app devs who made the site what it is, and is hoping and praying there will be something left when the smoke clears. And there will be, especially as they force subreddits back into the light and encouraging mods to turn on each other. Basically, this is a loyalty test, and all of the disloyal people are being forced out. The loyal people who will pretty much go with anything Reddit leadership wants will be all that's left, and they're banking that will be enough. Add the influx of Facebook and Twitter refugees who likely see all of this as just nerd posturing, and, yeah, Reddit will likely survive and go IPO.

But it will not be Reddit. It will be a sad, corporate shadow of the vibrant community it once was. And it will not last. I honestly believe distributed social media - ActivityPub, BlueSky (ew), or something yet to come - will be the future. It will look like your favorite social media feeds now, but it will act like email, just hopefully with better moderation and spam handling. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and even YouTube will eventually relent and tie themselves to this ecosystem as a last ditch effort to stay alive, then probably picked apart by private equity vultures in an ignominious final act.

EDIT: WOW - within five minutes of posting this, this other news story crossed my transom, more or less confirming my theory. Neat! https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote...

[solarmist]

Because they also tend to find ways to make that easier for themselves (like no ads, etc) which what Reddit doesn’t want. I believe they are drastically underestimating the overlap of short two groups.

[lennixm]

It's probably less than 1% of users that care about these changes at all. An even smaller number will actually dial down their reddit usage as a result of this.

The only consequence Reddit will suffer from this is an increase in ad revenue and maybe the added side effect of reigning in the power of moderators. Let me be clear: Reddit messed up in their communication and execution of effectively cutting out third-party apps but the underlying strategy remains sound.