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.”
Best thing to ever happen on reddit is the guy that posted on askreddit how to set the site language back to English because he accidentally set it to Spanish… and everyone posted their replies only in Spanish.
That was peak reddit.
“Test Post, Please Ignore,” and that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera were high points for me.
This one: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cmwov/hey_reddit_what_tattoos_do_you_have/c0tpyls/
Make sure to click
[+][deleted] 14 years ago (156 children)to get even more.https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cq1q2/help_reddit_turned_spanish_and_i_cannot_undo_it/
a private frontend: https://safereddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cq1q2/help_reddit_turned_spanish_and_i_cannot_undo_it/
Thank you! God the official site is so bad.
yw :)
I remember Reddit helping to make a kid do his homework.