After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access…
Excellent article - explained everything really well, gave credit to Reddit where it was due explaining why we all spent so much time there, and why we all left when we did.
I don’t see why there couldn’t be compromise: A free/low cost API, but 3rd party apps (3PA) have to show reddit’s ads in addition to the 3PA’s own ads, and are limited to data flow rates for “normal human users”. A higher cost higher flow API for 3PAs with ad filters and AI bot data vacuums.
I think it would be symbiotic to have both. A free api that serves ads and a paid api that doesn’t.
Then for the free tier, let the 3pa make a cut of that ad revenue.
You could then have an app like Apollo that gets paid if ads are shown or pays for no ads. The 3pa can pass that choice off to the user.
Non-user facing things like bots and data mining would need to use the paid app tier.
I really liked the article that I hadn’t read before on Enshittification by Cory Doctorow from January linked from the EFF article, which really well captures the inevitability of what’s happening to Reddit (and the value of the Fediverse):
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.
The thing here is that we haven’t really seen what the actual fallout from Reddit’s decision is going to be… and we probably won’t for a few months, at least (or until they do their IPO, whatever happens first).
What will be a better indicator is how many 3rd party app users end up switching to the official app on July 1, and if they don’t, how big of a dent they make in the volume and quality of contribution and moderation. Enough decline in contribution and moderation is going to result in less community engagement, but that’s something that will take a while to really be noticeable.
As far as the blackout, I think it’s a little disingenuous to say that a “two-day blackout” that lasted, checks notes, two days was a failure. Nobody realistically expected that the blackout would kill Reddit, or permanently cripple the site. Yeah, we hoped that’d bring Reddit to the table, willing to be more reasonable, which hasn’t really happened; but also, now there’s a whole community and team of moderators coordinating further actions, and new responses. The main goal of the blackout was to raise awareness of these issues, and I’m pretty sure that’s been raised.
Furthermore, the consequences of Reddit’s decisions and policies (not only this month, but for the last couple of years) are going to be felt in the following years, not days of weeks. While I love my 3rd party app of choice (RiF), and wouldn’t browse Reddit on the official, I’d still have old.reddit + RES + toolbox to keep me sane for a while; however, me and others are more concerned about the long-term consequences of Reddit going all-in on monetization-only decisions, that don’t consider the well-being of, or negative consequences to, the community. That’s why I’m 95% sure, at this point, that I’ll be deleting my Reddit account this month. Not because of RiF, or the official app, or the porn subreddits; but because I see this as a turning point of the admins of the site completely forgetting the principles of, as the EFF put it in the article, “free and open internet”, in order to please investors and chase a good IPO.