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Goodbye, Reddit: How the Internet’s Front Page Is Eating Itself(joanwestenberg.com)

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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.”

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Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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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.
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