Also the people who say “well I’m not using third party apps so who cares anyway”
The thing they should care about is how reddit has handled this situation. Imagine what nonsense they’ll come up with next if they’re willing to turf away some of the oldest and most dedicated users
Exactly this. I’ve used RIF since forever, so RIF is Reddit for me. Even if they take it all back and everything goes back to normal, there’s still a bad taste in my mouth. Reddit is clearly against the community, literally fighting it. Not even trying to find some sort of compromise or anything. So screw it, kbin seems pretty cozy so far, to be honest.
I actually used the newer official desktop site, and really didn’t mind it at all. What I minded was Reddit acting like their company was Reddit. No, you just provided the website and infrastructure. You were not Reddit. WE were Reddit. And we liked Reddit as it was, not what you are turning it into to make a quick buck on your IPO. We didn’t appreciate providing ALL the value and then being treated as if we weren’t important or to be listened to. I’m tired of good sites being whored out for mega-bucks and then transformed into another sub-par lowest common denominator that is a ghost of its former self. I’ll skip the wait and pain of watching that happen yet again, and leave now.
So yeah, I wasn’t a third party app user, but in the long run I’ll still be effected by everything corporate management is doubling down on right now.
You’re completely right from a user’s perspective. I think this post from Cory Doctorow helps explain what we’re seeing. He doesn’t talk about Reddit specifically, but it should be easy to infer the implications for Reddit from what he writes: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
Here’s the first paragraph from Cory’s post:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” Reddit is in step 4.
Yeah they don’t see the point, wich is the trajectory of the platform.
They are lying to everybody in order to push out of market the 3rd party apps, but that’s one side of it, they are also, effectively, forcing you as a user to use a worse app just for them to get more money by doing less.