All this backlash is going to kill Reddit. It will take a thousand little cuts for sure, but it started the moment they announced their ludicrous pricing.
The average internet user by the way, is statistically not you reading this, doesn't really care too much about APIs and finds the current Reddit client just fine really and as a recent registration, doesn't understand that the developer community basically built the interest in reddit and without third-party moderation tools, clients and a community that deeply cared about their special website, flawed though it was.
All platforms go through this cycle, but Reddit felt special to me and it hurts to find that wasn't true.
It's not that I haven't known for a long time now that reddit isn't the site it used to be, it's that this episode in particular has put that in such focus I can't ignore it.
So now I feel a sense of loss for the reddit of old, even if it hasn't really been such for a long time anyway.
Reddit itself will carry on fine, and perhaps get even stronger with a tighter control over content. Efforts to make a federated alternative are doomed.
Not to sound too pessimistic, but most of the mods of the bigger subreddits aren’t going to give up either, since it’s a part of their life, and not really their battle.
I really hope I am wrong though, since it’s about time we have something new and shiny.
But I’m not an investor, maybe Reddit has some numbers that make this make sense, or something. Or maybe they are just hoping to rip off some investors who don’t know how the site works.
This is not always true and there’s an important correction to this: all VC-funded platforms go through this, especially monetized by ads.
There are examples of privately owned platforms with subscriptions that are doing great and show no sign of quality decline. Telegram most notably being one of those.
This chase for constant high returns and also the focus on an audience very ortogonal to your actual users (ads buyers) are what seriously misaligns the incentives of users and platform owners.
There is nothing inevitable about that.
Even today I can’t find answers on Google to my daily inquiries, but will find it on Reddit.
If there is an internet worth building, it’s not on ads.
But we all knew that from the start.
Here’s to those working on the federated web, maybe the outcome can be different.
The reality is that Reddit hasn't ceased growing since then. The same thing happened with YouTube. YouTube pushed its content to switch from filthyfrank to Jimmy Kimmel/Fallon. Advertisers are not interested in us, early-adopters, mostly young and middle-aged western males. They want kids and soccer-moms: they're less likely to install an ad-blocker, and have a much wider range of products for which they're the target audience.
I think we need to understand that we were never the target audience.
Reddit, like YouTube, will do more than fine. The early-adopters just won't be part of it.
My hope is that we will go back to independently ran niche-community bulletin-boards, like in the 2000s with phpBB, instead of piggy-backing on some other new for-profit corporate walled-garden.
If these people exist and they’re the majority, why kill 3rd party apps to mess with a minority?
I'm not saying I approve the practice. I'm saying that it makes sense from their perspective.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Qzzggn--s&pp=ygUESm9qaQ%3D%3...
[1] Seriously, I’m not actually going to post the video. Im sure you can find it if you really want to. My kids aren’t allowed to watch Blippi though.
Reddit has centralized what would otherwise be hundreds (thousands?) of obscure, splintered and isolated communities and forums. What could possibly compete with that without having already reached critical mass and become an obvious competitor to Reddit?
(Although at little personal cost, since I don't normally go to reddit directly, but I paid just to stop the inline ads that I would see when I would, as often happens, end up on reddit after googling something with kagi.com or bing.com.)
This always makes me chuckle. Kaging something may not be mainstream yet but Kagi-fu sounds better then Google-fu!
Typically it comes out of my mouth in a more moderate stance, like "sorry, I don't use Twitter anymore. Any chance you could link a better forum?"
I seriously question the motives of people saying this guy is a "moderate." You cannot gaslight America into thinking the far-right is middle of the road.
It has. As somewhat of a Twitter addict, I'm finding it much easier not to log on these days, because the experience and the conversations have really hollowed out. I'm also no longer seriously considering using Twitter for promoting any projects or anything of the like going forward.
Reddit has been more or less re-inventing itself for their asinine IPO aspirations, and in doing so it has moved to closed source code, redesigned their interface, adjusted content policies to court advertisers, and now they're finally going after the crowd of enthusiasts who depend on features that Reddit has failed and/or declined to implement.
This all reeks of venture capitalist sabotage and it's the very thing that ultimately killed off Digg.
Reddie relies more on genuine content and less personal brand (as you are subbed to subreddits and not public users, mostly)
This will have outsized implications for the 1% of users who actually post the content the other 99% come to see in a way that Twitter (and its 280-character comment limitation) does not.
Isn’t Reddit widely known for memes by the public?
They may be selling that ad space for pennies on the dollar... But they are managing to fill it.
UPDATE: Oh I see, they did the kill-the-API-to-kill-third-party-clients thing before too, long before the current brouhaha. OK, never mind.
I find tech/power-user crowds like that on HN tend to dramatically overestimate the proportion of a userbase they actually make up.
Just like it did Twitter.