But they overestimated how locked in their customer base were and how much more resourced game developers were to challenge them on their shenanigans than third party Reddit app developers.
It's a conflicting feeling since I'm still pretty bummed out by the api changes, but also recognize that much of the power mods capabilities were fueled by it.
This is the key for Reddit - there are no good alternatives.
Specifically for entertainment. That subreddit about the book series you're reading, the show you're watching, the video game you play, and the sports team you cheer for is hard to replace.
>, I'd say people are leaving Reddit, but unfortunately I'm not sure if any of the community-run alternatives are as popular as Reddit is now (or was before the user exodus).
Well, I'm here on HN :). There is no perfect community driven alternative, but between HN, Tildes, and various Discords I get most of what I wanted. Also keeping an eye in the long term on certain forming sites.
But there are a few niche subjects I use reddit for so it hasn't been a complete migration. Once I find any community talking about mobile gaming scene I should be fully set.
lemmy.world is the instance I chose, and I'm having a fine time there. Things could be a bit more livelier, and I'm sure it'll happen with time.
This was a process that already started before the policy changes around API access though.
Unity has none of those things. It's a stone cold tool designed to make money for game developers and there are clear alternatives in Unreal and Godot. Now sure there are people who've based their entire career around knowing Unity, but those skills are reasonably transferrable.
They were unfortunately also caught completely unprepared at the time and fell flat on their face when it was time to scale up to accept Reddit's migratory mass. I'm still not sure if I actually have an account or not because the registration process was half broken. Time will tell how prepared Godot was, but at least they released the somewhat more stable 4.1 recently.
I'm not quite sure about that.
A lot of groups who defaulted to Reddit actually got off their ass and set up a Discourse or Discord. I consider Discord a huge step backward, but those who set up Discourse groups are now in a much better place.
So, a lot of the technical people who made Reddit the "go to" place for searching are now gone. As that half-life of the knowledge of those groups kicks in, the usefulness of Reddit is going to slide down.
Still am hoping for a true replacement one day. Keeping eyes on what communities popped up when the next surge inevitably happens. The real issue is grabbing the right power user who will generate a bunch of content to engage with, and that's hard to do.