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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.”
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.
Well put
And also because the only other place my niche interests have communities is discord
And AI. AI is a wet dream to a company like Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. They can keep the appearance of an active and popular site indefinitely, stealing money from advertisers years before they catch on.
Wrote something similar 1 year ago 😁
https://dbzer0.com/blog/reddit-is-a-dead-site-running/
I remember reading your text back then. It’s great, and it shows something that neither the article in the OP nor my comment show - the role of network effect in the process.
That das a nice read, but the site is weird to read on mobile i had to switch to the desktop mode lol
I can’t pinpoint when Reddit died in my eyes. But I can say the long road to where it is today started with Reddit Gold.
Reddit Gold was a minor change that didn’t do much of anything besides offer a way to collect money directly from the user base. But it was the start of monetizing the site and every decision by Reddit management after that point furthered that monetization at the expense of everything else.
I didn’t mind Reddit gold as a method of paying for upkeep on an ostensibly free site. If well-off Redditors wanted to chip in to help with maintenance resulting in fewer or less intrusive ads then that’s grand.
The point when they started losing me was when the Reddit front page modernised into the Instagram feed looking abomination it is today and when they shifted from Reddit gold to the silver diamond thing they have now. No I don’t want to make an avatar. No I don’t want to follow users or have them follow me.
It started as the last example of old social media like forums and got metric’d into this half-formed freak of a site that seems to actively resent the users that build and maintain their entire platform.
Hell, I chipped in for reddit gold. I’m not well off, I just used the platform loads and didn’t mind paying a little for something I enjoyed. Like so many others, my goodwill was pissed on, though, and I am just another paying customer that they lost. The API thing was the final nail in the coffin for me.
Spez and his executives do resent the users. He’s on record making statements which make it clear that he sees the user’s resistance to monetization as a roadblock between him and his money. The fact that people built all of the content on the entire site for free, doesn’t matter to him. He actively hates them for not behaving in a way that gets him more money.
I can pinpoint the exact moment: When the admins actively gave t_d a full pass on anything they wanted to do in 2016.
That single act drove away more users than any previous exodus.
There were even earlier signs of Reddit caring more about profit than the best interests of the users.
2014: buying and crippling Alien Blue. Reddit could’ve built its own official app and users would have two to choose from; or it could have bought and improved Alien Blue. By doing neither, Reddit showed complete disdain towards user experience.
2015: Reddit fired Victoria Taylor. Except that Taylor did an essential job there, as she was a bridge between Reddit Inc. and mod teams; she was for example the one verifying people for Ask me Anything (back then it was a big deal).
You probably could find even more signs of that, if digging further. And while neither is as serious as the way that Reddit handled T_D, both already show that it was putting revenue over users.
There were a few around that same timer period. IIRC, that’s also about when the whole /r/jailbait controversy happened, and the site suddenly had a really bad reputation among non-users. Like before it had been seen as a weird site, but then it was suddenly seen as outright predatory. Users suddenly didn’t want to associate with the site. Then the t_d stuff happened, which just compounded the issue of users not wanting to associate with the site due to the bad reputation.
Reddit Gold is a great example IMO.
If Reddit’s goal was to serve users, instead of profit, it might’ve still implemented Reddit Gold. A site doesn’t run for free, and having another source of income could help to serve users better.
However then the nature of Reddit Gold would be completely different:
Very well said, and it was the trust violation which finally pushed me off of Facebook and Reddit. Reddit as we know it is dead, it’s obvious to anyone who used to use it. But AI is here, and it’s going to continue pumping semi-believable posts and replies for years, making it look as if the site is still booming. But the posts are vapid, devoid of soul, and almost always written with an ulterior motive to sell something or some idea. The Dead Internet is here.
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.
Also, I think the unaccountable moderators really are a problem. You end up with major subs like r/politics or /worldnews getting camped by people who just happened to get there first, and then being forever unaccountable for bias or stupidity. And then you get sitewide bans if you subvert the bans from the tinpot dictators camping on what should be community-led spaces.
Yeah. Worst offender is r/climatechange which is still moderated by a “both sides” climate skeptic. It’s practically aiding genocide / omnicide.
Unfortunately lemmy doesn’t have good solution to fracturing and default instances either.