cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19466667
Money, Mods, and Mayhem
The Turning Point
In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it’s a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.
The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn’t mince words: “Reddit’s API changes are not just unfair, they’re unsustainable for third-party apps.”
Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.
The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.
One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”
Best thing to ever happen on reddit is the guy that posted on askreddit how to set the site language back to English because he accidentally set it to Spanish… and everyone posted their replies only in Spanish.
That was peak reddit.
Thank you! God the official site is so bad.
I remember Reddit helping to make a kid do his homework.
“Test Post, Please Ignore,” and that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera were high points for me.
that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera
This one: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cmwov/hey_reddit_what_tattoos_do_you_have/c0tpyls/
Make sure to click
[+][deleted] 14 years ago (156 children)to get even more.
They banned bots from WholesomeMemes and there were no posts for 2 days. Dead Internet is now, and it’s at Reddit.
Let’s be honest, most of Reddit’s default subreddits (or whatever the fuck they’re called now) are basically just karma farms with no real moderation beyond removing extreme content. The real value of Reddit has always been in its smaller, niche subs. But as those grow in popularity, they end up having the same problems as bigger subs.
That subreddit always seemed so off-putting to me and now I know why. I don’t hate wholesome stuff, but there was just something off about that subreddit that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Badbye, Reddit
How can the demise of reddit be hastened ? Its bloated corpse clogs up the pipes of the internet still.
I heard that 99% of the internet traffic is marketing bots fucking each other
The remaining 1% is those humans still plugged into the matrix, they won’t be able to escape until the pipes get unclogged of all the Web 2.0 big tech floatsam still swimming around.
flotsam* :)
My favorite of the protests was DnDmemes becoming a goblin porn subreddit, and the final reply of the main mod “I shitposted me way in here, I’ll shitpost my way out”. That and demanding a d20 roll for persuasion(?) from the admins
I liked pics becoming nothing but sexy pictures of John Oliver, with the notice that all pictures of John Oliver are sexy pictures of John Oliver.
I think that this article is accurate and sensible.
There’s a point that I’d like to add, that the author doesn’t mention: user trust.
The main value of an online platform is the user trust, as it dictates the users’ willingness to help building it instead of vandalising it. In Reddit’s case it means people writing well-thought posts, moderating communities, reporting content, using the voting system, etc.
And user trust is violated every time that a platform takes user-hostile decisions. Like Reddit has been taking for almost a decade; with 2023’s APIcalypse being a big example of that, but only one among many.
And when user trust is violated, it’s almost impossible to come back. John Bull explains this well, with the Trust Thermocline; but the basic idea is that those violations pile up invisibly upon a certain point, when they suddenly become a big deal and the platform bleeds users like there’s no tomorrow. And once it reaches that point it’s practically impossible to come back.
So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.
Yeah that’s my main problem with the article, it argues “as if” it was all but inevitable. As if something could be done. As soon as you have for profit motivation of social media, it’s all but inevitable that enshittification ensues. That obscures the real problem.
You want a website that is run non-profit for users and somewhat democratically. But they shy away from that conclusion.
Reddit could’ve become a non-profit for users, financed by them. So the outcome was avoidable, at least years and years in the past.
But for that Pigboy and kn0thing would need to give up the pretension of drinking champagne in an IPO. kn0thing gave up too late; Pigboy never did.
A good “dividing line” where the outcome became fixed was the introduction of Reddit Gold.
Saturn devouring his son, with reddit snoovitars
Somebody with midjourney skills needs to do that
It’s got viral potency
Midjourney skills
I think that’s an oxymoron…
For a site that says it doesn’t care about reddit, there sure are alot of posts about it.
don’t know what marketing blurb you heard, but lots of users moved here from a disdain for reddit
What trips me out is that somehow they still have the video of the dude that somehow survived after blowing his own face off with a shotgun. It’s fucked up, sad and sickening.
Honestly I would have just put him out of his misery if I had found him like that. And no, I will not be linking that video here or anywhere for that matter, it’s pure nightmare fuel.
then what’s the point of crying about it
The point is that once they went public, they said they were gonna be removing certain horrible communities, and the particular community that particular video is on would have been like at the top of the list if I was in charge of Reddit.
But honestly I don’t give a flying fuck.
they’ll be fine. as evidenced by twitter, there is absolutely no amount of enshittification that will make some people leave
That’s because there will alway be new 10-year-olds who are just discovering “new” parts of the Internet. They are growing up with the enshittification, so they don’t know that things were better before they were born.
i guess you dont remember digg https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/the-demise-of-digg-how-an-online-giant-lost-control-of-the-digital-crowd/
Fuck, I remember Yahoo.
It was never cool but in the stone age it was hip for about 30 minutes.
I missed digg. I was on fark before reddit and somehow fark is still around and hasn’t changed at all
And Spez’s response?
“OMG! STOP GOING DARK OR I AND MY LEGION OF SLIME ADMINS WILL REMOVE YOU FROM POWAH!”
And so he did which is why some subreddits came back from being dark. Some subreddits submitted to their own fates. Other subreddits reluctantly came back, proving the protest was just a mere farce that amounted to a nothingburger.
And what did Spez do after the whole fiasco? Why, he punched Reddit into now being Public. Completing what people had long speculated that he’d do.
And what did Spez do after that? He’s now rolling out the concept that Subreddits will be monetized.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing from these incidents and expects it to get better, with that stupid shit eating grin on his face because he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts.
Oh the irony getting removed by a mod here. Although its probably in the mod logs somewhere with an actual reason :)
actually it’s not … An admin banned OP (troll account). Seems that no record of comment exists. Kinda a bug in the Lemmy software where logs of banned accounts aren’t stored, or at least I don’t know how to see them.
And he’s getting rich off of it too. I mean, that’s his whole gain, right? Money! He’s given his soul for money. The whole community hates him, but at least he’s gotten rich now. I’m sure reddit’s annual founders parties must be a hoot.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists, Reddit users seem to have a knack for taking it up dry than doing anything about their problems.
I guess that is truly Reddit’s nature.
