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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.”
they’ll be fine. as evidenced by twitter, there is absolutely no amount of enshittification that will make some people leave
Hasn’t Twitter lost ~30 million active users, about 10%, since Musk bought it? Plus there’s probably going to be a couple million more gone from the Brazil ban.
I’m also willing to bet a ton of the remainder are bot or alt accounts for people too.
My girlfriend doesn’t use Twitter but the platforms she does use she has multiple accounts on and I bet a lot of people do that too.
Musk himself said there are way more bots than he thought when he was trying to weasel out of buying the site. That was before AI that could solve recaptchas, and respond like a human. Imagine how many bots there are now.
Reminds me of the handful of big subs on reddit who had no new posts for days when they banned bots lul.
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.
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I wish my old angelfire site was still around…
Neocities is now, old man!
I missed digg. I was on fark before reddit and somehow fark is still around and hasn’t changed at all
Slashdot is still kicking around too. Remember the Slashdot effect?
Yeah I remember when cmdrtaco was in charge. It was great back then. Now it’s full of anti woke stuff.
Yup. I walked the whole path. Slashdot->digg->reddit->now lemmy I guess.
Weirdly enough, I never cared for Yahoo. Back in the late 90s, their homepage was a cluttered mess
Always but for a few minutes there it was the only niftily human-curated view of “The Internet”.
Interesting, I never used digg and didn’t know about it’s history. It seems like they could have easily fought back bots with captchas, email verification, phone verification and so on.
Phone verification? In 2010? Only 20% of US citizens had a smartphone in 2010. That kind of verification was extremely rare at the time. Privacy was still very much a thing, sites that requested personal data like that was regarded with suspicion.
I mean phone number verification like steam does. It’s only one of many possibilities when you are a major company.
That only works when there’s competition. There’s like 5 sites left on the Internet. It’s been centralized and monopolized.
Digg era is very different than today. Peak user for Digg is 30million, while Reddit and Twitter is 330million and 368million respectively, almost 10 times the different. As demonstrated by Twitter, even in its worst form they only lose like 30million user. Reddit won’t go anywhere, the vibe though, will.
I keep seeing YouTubers who host their own subreddits still mentioning Reddit a lot in their videos. Yeah, some people probably don’t even care what happened.
A big streamer I watch is sorta in that camp. He mentions his subreddit all the time and it’s an active part of stream/communication with chat, he bitches at reddit and it’s broader base all the time but I see no signs of moving away from it.
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.