cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19466667
Money, Mods, and Mayhem
The Turning Point
In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it’s a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.
The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn’t mince words: “Reddit’s API changes are not just unfair, they’re unsustainable for third-party apps.”
Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.
The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.
One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”
I can’t pinpoint when Reddit died in my eyes. But I can say the long road to where it is today started with Reddit Gold.
Reddit Gold was a minor change that didn’t do much of anything besides offer a way to collect money directly from the user base. But it was the start of monetizing the site and every decision by Reddit management after that point furthered that monetization at the expense of everything else.
I didn’t mind Reddit gold as a method of paying for upkeep on an ostensibly free site. If well-off Redditors wanted to chip in to help with maintenance resulting in fewer or less intrusive ads then that’s grand.
The point when they started losing me was when the Reddit front page modernised into the Instagram feed looking abomination it is today and when they shifted from Reddit gold to the silver diamond thing they have now. No I don’t want to make an avatar. No I don’t want to follow users or have them follow me.
It started as the last example of old social media like forums and got metric’d into this half-formed freak of a site that seems to actively resent the users that build and maintain their entire platform.
Hell, I chipped in for reddit gold. I’m not well off, I just used the platform loads and didn’t mind paying a little for something I enjoyed. Like so many others, my goodwill was pissed on, though, and I am just another paying customer that they lost. The API thing was the final nail in the coffin for me.
Spez and his executives do resent the users. He’s on record making statements which make it clear that he sees the user’s resistance to monetization as a roadblock between him and his money. The fact that people built all of the content on the entire site for free, doesn’t matter to him. He actively hates them for not behaving in a way that gets him more money.
Reddit Gold is a great example IMO.
If Reddit’s goal was to serve users, instead of profit, it might’ve still implemented Reddit Gold. A site doesn’t run for free, and having another source of income could help to serve users better.
However then the nature of Reddit Gold would be completely different:
- There wouldn’t be a “gilded” sorting, as it enables astroturfers to exchange money for visibility.
- There wouldn’t be microtransaction mechanics associated with it, such as packs of “X+Y coins” associated with broken values in real money (so you need to pull out a calculator to know which one has the cheapest price).
- Even if platinum might’ve appeared, silver wouldn’t. Because the userbase was already joking about a “Reddit silver” award; so creating a Reddit silver was basically “nice meme you have there, it’s now my source of profit, sucker”.
- It wouldn’t change every five minutes as they were trying to find the best way to capitalise on it. “Gold! Awards! Coins! Back to gold! Rewards system!”
- They would’ve asked the users on potential ways to finance the site without contradicting its values.
