Many still seem unhappy with the company’s plan.
During one of the recent discussions with reddit (I’ve no idea which one, it may be linked in /r/bestof but I try not to give them traffic), the mods asked reddit a whole series of questions about their plans for accessibility, things like: does anyone at reddit have accessibility certifications and what are they? has anyone there ever done accessibility programming? is anyone involved in the accessibility support disabled in any way? have they talked with any disabled people to see what kind of support or devices they need? what kinds of devices is reddit planning to support, and are they specifically covering this set? do they plan to program to certain standards? etc, etc, etc.
If reddit was actually committed to providing decent accessibility support, they’d have answers for most of the questions. Instead, they had absolutely no idea what any of those things meant. Absolutely none of the points that got raised were things that reddit had even considered as something that needed to be addressed. And that’s why everyone expects reddit’s “accessibility tools” to fail miserably. It’s not that they don’t have home field advantage, or they’re losing the game, or even that they’re just making their way into the field; reddit doesn’t even know what game they’re fucking playing, much less have they even left their home city to eventually get to the field.
It was interesting to me that when Reddit announced that RedReader was exempt because it was “accessibility focused” a bunch of disabled users were like “wut?”
There’s no such thing as an “accessibility focused” app, it either has the appropriate accessibility or it doesn’t. A shitload of disabled users were using something other than RedReader and are being deprived of their preferred tool.
The fact that Reddit sees themselves as the arbiters of what “accessibility” even means indicates to me that they aren’t remotely serious about accessibility.
too little, too late.
at this point there is no “walking it back” for many unless spez and a number of employees are removed and replaced. Even then, i dont think I can ever trust the org. At the end of the day thier objectives re:IPO put thier goals in direct contravention of what reddit is or was.
The site simply is no longer able to function as it was, and there is really no way to fix that. They may have simply handed thier business to meta without getting meta to buy them out.
A lot of users will stay, but some left. I hope they will be enough to replace the content machine Reddit with the fediverse.
Exactly. At this point I’m more invested in fediverse services. Between that and RSS feeds, they scratch 90% of the dopamine itch that Twitter and Reddit did. If the communities just continue to expand a little bit more at the rate they’re already going, I’ll have no desire to look back.
Right. Coming soon. For arbitrary values of soon. And definitely after the API cutoff.
I would not recommend holding your breath.
I’m a Star Citizen backer from the first Kickstarter. I’ve heard “Soon” before.
