Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
The tricky thing will be the small niche communities that are already hosted on Reddit. For example, there is a group of us dorks who are really into home automation with HomeKit. I’d hate for that small group to splinter into smaller groups that are so small that they’re no longer a good source of collective knowledge.
I don’t really have a great solve for that problem, but as someone who does experience and service design by trade, I’ve found this to be a fun puzzle to marinate on over the past few weeks.
That’s where most of my devastation lays with all of this. Parting ways with reddit was more and more in the back of my mind steadily over the last few years. I was only holding on due to being active in some of those small, niche communities. I finally deleted my reddit account the other day and have no intention of going back, and I feel horrible about what will happen to those little communities but I cannot continue to support the big, soulless corporation that reddit has been striving to be.
It’s going to be a weird and interesting transition period for a part of the online commhnity going forward. We can only hope for the best!
I share your concern, there are so many niche subreddits that are the most active community for the given thing. Lemmy is awesome but it doesn’t seem to have that same consolidation power just yet.
Reddit didn’t have the breadth of communities back when it had it’s initial big growth spurt from the digg migration. In time this whole thing could match it.
I was thinking the exact same thing. My interests are home automation with Home assistant and media management with sonarr/radarr and associated programs. Reddit is such an incredible resource for those communities, it’s gonna be hard to replace.
I’d be for starting a community for that here. If it’s well moderated I think word would spread.
@misguidedfunk @closure1170 As long as it’s started on one lemmy/kbin instance, users from any other can join. People using different fediverse tech can also join (hi from mastodon)
… I hadn’t thought of it that way. Thanks for that!
There’s a home assistant group on one of the servers, I found it the other day. It doesn’t have the traffic of reddit’s of course, but it does exist. I’d link it but I don’t know how in the app.
It sort of feels like someone should download all of reddit, pull out the actual good information, and discard the rest. That’s likely an impossible task though. It would take forever.
you too can download the json archive of Reddit from 2005 through 2022!
But agreed, a more curated version of the archive - or at least a tool to make searching the archive easy - would be super nice to have.
It’s be a shame if someone used that as the input set for generative AI, set it for “stupid”, and then used it to flooded Reddit with bots attached to high karma accounts that the owners no longer give a damn about.
First uploads, The safe, cum box, magic tournament butt cracks, poop knife, banana for scale, and “with rice.”
Same! 90% of my Reddit time was simply r/homekit and r/Apple . I see that there’s now a Homekit community, !homekit@lemmy.ml it doesn’t really have content yet but we have to start somewhere right?
Ah, thanks for finding the HomeKit community!