Exactly as the title says, do you guys think Reddit will buckle and at least be more reasonable or maybe even reverse their current decisions?
Edit: if not lemmy to the moon 🚀
No. They are trying to finalize an IPO. No amount of anything is going to stop them from this cash grab.
Short term, I agree with you. Long term, for me it’s a virtual certainty that Huffman is fired as CEO of Reddit within one year of an IPO. At that point, the community and content may have deteriorated so much that a new CEO sees value in re-opening the API and third-party apps, probably with some kind of revenue share/ad delivery aspect, and maybe with a (sensible) fee for the biggest users.
EDIT: having just discovered Manifold Markets (thanks @lixus98 !) I’ve created a market for this: https://manifold.markets/IE/will-steve-huffman-be-fired-or-resi
The IPO will catch on fire, burn up and fall over into the swamp. The last thing you need in the 11th hour of an IPO is bad press and protests.
The move overall smacks of desperation. The investors aren’t blind. Spez is openly calling out that they’re not profitable, on the eve of the IPO.
Honestly, all things considered in his rock solid stance I’m expecting more of a fire sale.
I don’t think they’ll cave in, and honestly I don’t care what they do.
People like us made reddit what it is, and we can make a home somewhere else one way or the other.
It’s time we take the internet as a whole back from the billionaires and their soulless venture capital firms anyway.
Make internet nerdy again, I always say.
Their MBAs already crunched the numbers and included users like us in the “acceptable loss” category
I’m not convinced it’ll completely back down but I suspect there is a chance they’ll lower the pricing structure to a more ‘reasonable’ amount.
If I put my tinfoil hat on I’d say this was the plan from the start;
- Announce something ludicrous
- Get the users a bit fired up
- Backtrack to what you’d always planned
- Play it all off like “See, we listen to you guys, aren’t we good?”
I think it depends on how successful the blackout is, because truthfully, most Reddit users probably don’t care about 3rd party apps, and just want to continue using Reddit, but if their favorite communities shut down indefinitely, I think there’s a chance.
But Spez also seems dead set on their plan, so only time will tell. But on the bright side, if it doesn’t we’ll see tons of new faces here
Agreed that most Reddit users don’t care about 3rd party apps. They are also more likely just to be lurkers and not interact with the content as much, besides up and downvoting.
So if a larger number of the power users leave, Reddit’s content could become more stale and just turn people off from going to the site.
Of course this is all very hypothetical and I don’t have stats to back any of this up. It’s just a hunch.
They might not care about the 3rd party apps themselves, but having massive functioning communities would be near impossible using only the official moderating tools. The quality of the website is going to diminish a lot. A lot of niche communities have only a handful of spare time moderators that benefit greatly from the 3rd party api. It’s not possible to say the exact scope of problems until the day comes, but by most accounts it’s going to be a massive hit.
I forgot the sub, but I saw one that did a poll and it was only around 20% of their users who used a third party app. It surprised me because for a long time there wasn’t even an official Reddit mobile app, so I figured most people would have settled on a third party app years ago. Plus they’re so much better.
Anyway, my hope is that Reddit is more vulnerable to a user revolt than most social media sites because the loud voices that do most of the posting are exactly the people who are most upset about what’s going on now. I certainly remember how a vocal group of users turned the tide against the Digg all those years ago.
don’t have stats to back any of this up
But look how fast Mr Trump’s network - truth? Truthier? - dried up. I forget why, but I’m assuming that after each hillbilly is done virtue-signaling then there’s little left to do but get off the site or plan a cou-- oh, now I remember.
Valid point, I wonder how the quality of posts will be if power users leave… and then you got the moderation site of things too. Will be interesting to see how it all turns out.
My guess is that it’ll still exist, but worse overall. Less content, less quality content, less engagement, more shitposts. It’ll live on as a shell of what it used to be.
I am a former redditor (and mostly lurker) who never used a third party app for Reddit. I still quit. Have hope.
When on pc I exclusively used the new reddit format (so not old.reddit) and was used to it. But on the phone it was only Apollo for years, and I mostly consumed reddit on my phone. I was considering ditching reddit mainly because of how they’ve now (most likely successfully) tried to muscle out 3rd party app developers in order to force mobile users on their own app; but now sifting through kbin here the conversations and the topics seem much more genuine than reddit as well. I think you kind of start to become desensitized to the bot network and hivemind with time, so it’s a nicely refreshing experience really.
If you post about your disdain for Reddit’s handling of the situation on a mainstream subreddit you get downvoted and spammed with “official app isn’t that bad” replies.
The sad truth is: only power users care about 3rd Party Apps and those make up for a very small percentage of the userbase.
Reddit doesn’t care about us.
The sad truth is: only power users care about 3rd Party Apps and those make up for a very small percentage of the userbase.
Maybe a small percentage of the overall userbase, *but *a huge percentage of the mods (who do most of the janitorial work that keeps the place mostly clean of spam and other miscreants so it’s usable) use those 3rd party apps.
I have over the years bought licenses for three different third party reddit apps, so yes it does matter to me. The same way it did when all five third party Twitter apps that I owned licenses for went dark.
I like to support apps that make my life easier, and I hate seeing ads.
Even then, I am really curious if someone at Reddit Inc crunched the numbers about the amount of power users that use 3rd party apps.
Or even the people who are maybe not power users but just people who are not lurkers.
For some reason and it is just a hunch, I feel that they are more or less desperate for the userbase that used 3rd party applications mainly.
I mean they say that is an “insignificant” amount that use 3rd party apps. If that was true then they would not go in “this” hard on the crackdown I assume.
Really, we don’t even need a full on reddit collapse to have success. What is needed is enough traffic for the fediverse so it can evolve and grow into something even better than reddit/twitter/etc are now. At least imo.
