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Some of the planned blackouts will be temporary, others plan to shut their subreddits down indefinitely in protest.

  • Boozilla@beehaw.org
    55·
    2 years ago

    More power to the protest, but I am skeptical that it will do much good. I think reddit has strayed so far from its original mission and values that today it is nothing like the platform the reddit founders originally envisioned.

    I think the reddit executives have probably already run the numbers on this and don’t care if every single user & mod who uses 3rd party apps and the API walks away from their platform. At this point they only care about the IPO and what they need to do to increase shareholder value after the IPO.

    They may even see the exodus as a positive. They may think of these power users and API-utilizing mods as a drag on their bandwidth and worse, they are users who seldom if ever see any ads and increase their ad-viewing numbers.

    Will the quality of reddit content suffer? I think it very likely will. It’s already been going downhill for a while now.

    However, the executives mostly don’t care about content quality, either. As long as the free content they get from their users doesn’t stray into illegal and controversial waters, they are happy. If the content is mediocre memes and cat photos, they are quite happy with that. The goal is to serve as many ads up to as many users per hour as possible. They are banking on millions of “casuals” to stick around and scroll through the content and see those ads. Content quality is way down the list of their concerns.

    My guess is the suits are are no longer interested in an “engagement” platform in the same way that Twitter and Facebook try to be (in their own ham-fisted and evil social-engineering ways). At this stage of the game, reddit just wants to be a mindless app that bored people can scroll while in the doctor’s waiting room, the airport, in the bathroom, or wherever they are and need to kill time.

    Have the reddit suits made a miscalculation here? Will the exodus make reddit another “not cool anymore” type of platform like Digg that almost everyone abandons? Will the mass exodus only leave bots and karma farmers behind to talk to each other? Maybe, I don’t know. It’s hard to predict that kind of thing. But I think the execs are willing to roll the dice on this because short-term profits are all they care about since they will be going public. If the bots and karma farmers fool the people buying ads, reddit will just roll with that.

    (You’d hope anyone buying ads on reddit would check to make sure their investment is actually increasing their sales…but there’s a lot of poorly managed businesses out there).

    Either way…for those of us who enjoyed old reddit (and Digg before that, and Usenet before that) I think the path forward is a new platform such as this one.

    • CaptainCarrot@beehaw.org
      22·
      2 years ago

      I don’t think it’s been clearly voiced enough, but there are thousands of sub moderation bots that do things like automatically flag hate speech for mod review that will all just stop working. Some of the larger, older subs have entire ecosystems of content tagging and linking that will break. An example is putting the name of a tv show in braces [TNGS01E13] and getting a link to that episode’s wiki as a comment reply. It dramatically improves the Reddit experience, but isn’t worth the outrageous cost to keep going.

      Overnight, Reddit would turn into a (more) poorly moderated nightmare.

      • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
        7·
        2 years ago

        Sounds like this move will make Reddit worse in every way possible, which is a pretty impressive feat IMO.

        1. Most (or all?) 3rd party apps will disappear. You’ll miss out on all the cool features that actually made Reddit useable.
        2. You’ll have to see the ads again if you use the default app.
        3. Accessing your curated multireddits will be harder. Just try the default app and you’ll see what I mean.
        4. The UI will be full of trash such as “news” and “discover new subs”.
        5. Lots of users will be gone. There will be less quality conversation and quality posts. This means that you will find fewer things worth reading.
        6. Regulating bot spam and other sorts of trash might (or will?) be harder and less efficient. You’ll be seeing more stuff you don’t want to see.

        If all of this comes true, Reddit would earn the ”most hostile move towards your users in hopes of an easy cash grab” -award of the year.

    • pleasemakesense@lemmy.ml
      21·
      2 years ago

      Problem for reddit is, the people contributing through posts or comments are the ones most likely take offence to the new API pricing, and losing those people will be exponentially more hurtful for reddit than losing your average redditor. The proportion of people commenting, posting and upvoting is incredibly small compared to the total user number

    • Rhaedas@lemmy.one
      16·
      2 years ago

      My first reply here, and that’s why I’ve gone ahead and branched out into different directions before things go dark. I missed out on Digg, but at the time I had gone from Usenet to various boards, and when some of them began to get quieter or stale looked around and found Reddit, soon after the Digg migration. I don’t know if it’s Lemmy or some other that will/can take up the need for a collective aggregate service, but this has potential and I like the distributed idea. With improved UI for the novice it could turn into the next Reddit without some of the baggage (and probably its own issues).