Comment by Devasta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Devasta | Hacker News Reader

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Reddit started charging huge money for API access. Thing is, reddits leadership are wildly incompetent and those APIs were relied upon by the mods to actually handle the vast oceans of posts that go on each day.

Its left the mods with greatly increased workload as they now need to use the crappy tools Reddit gives them, and for some communities like the folks on /r/blind the site is totally unusable.

Most subreddits have ended the protests, and those that don't have had their mod teams forceably replaced, usually be people who are more interested in being mods than actually moderating.

Reddit had hundreds, if not a thousand people willing to work for free managing their site for them and they still screwed it up, just unbelievable stuff.

API access is still free for moderation and accessibility tools. It’s just third party clients with high API usage that were effectively killed with the pricing change.

For non-commercial accessibility tools. Because Reddit doesn’t know how to fix accessibility in their own app. A shitshow, either way you look at it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/14n9426/accessibil...

The last time the mods on /r/blind asked for a demo with screen curtain on, they were met with silence.

disappointing but not unexpected. These are just other "irrelevant power users" to reddit, but for the sake of pretending to care they at least try to keep up the appearance of caring.

And for those who go "the average redditor doesn't care": well, here is another example of "power user" you may not have considered. They certainly are the minority, can't disagree with that.

The problem is that knowing the rug can be yanked out anytime, the desire of people who helped write and maintain the tools to do so has somewhat fallen to zero.

That was a couple of months ago now. I left the site due to that, and just wondered if something else happened after.

Perhaps that's a good thing in some ways. The communities with only a very light-touch moderation to get rid of spam are often the most enjoyable, where you can speak relatively freely without the looming threat of some overbearing mod censoring and banning you because they don't like your opinion.

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