Reddit’s crisis is a warning for all social platforms: when you trade community for profits, everyone loses. Will Reddit fix its mes...

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.”

  • glimse@lemmy.world
    10·
    3 months ago

    It’s getting to the point where all the good content is also on Lemmy,

    Oh how I wish this was true… Unless you mean memes (which are reposted everywhere), lemmy has a fraction of the content. There’s huge niche communities over there and I still have to add “reddit” to my searches for technical issues.

    To be clear, that hasn’t convinced me to start using reddit again beyond that. Just being realistic about comparing the two

    • doctordevice
      4·
      3 months ago

      Yeah, any gaming discussion I have to search for reddit. And because of the stupid new deal with Google it means I have to do it via Chrome. And then constantly manually change the address to old.reddit so it doesn’t look like ad-riddled garbage.

      I would love to be able to replace that with Lemmy, but there isn’t enough community here for the kind of niche discussion you can still find on reddit.

      • SHOW_ME_YOUR_ASSHOLE@lemm.ee
        1·
        3 months ago

        There is a plugin for your browser that will automatically redirect you to old.reddit.com so that you don’t have to manually change the URL every time. I forget the name of the extension but it does exist and it’s very helpful.

        • doctordevice
          1·
          3 months ago

          Are you thinking Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES)? I used that on desktop and it is great. I never considered trying it for mobile, thanks for the suggestion!

    • ChocoboRocket@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 months ago

      Fair point, I’m definitely still using reddit searches for specific answers because the communities are still valuable sources of information.

      That being said, mainstream news and world events are definitely present on Lemmy, it’s not just a meme pile.

      Reddit/lemmy is the only social media I use, so maybe the meme situation isn’t even that great but it suits my needs!

      The tradeoff for Lemmy getting that community content reddit used to have (can still find it between the bots) is that it will attract attention from everywhere which results in enshittification