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.”
I think that this article is accurate and sensible.
There’s a point that I’d like to add, that the author doesn’t mention: user trust.
The main value of an online platform is the user trust, as it dictates the users’ willingness to help building it instead of vandalising it. In Reddit’s case it means people writing well-thought posts, moderating communities, reporting content, using the voting system, etc.
And user trust is violated every time that a platform takes user-hostile decisions. Like Reddit has been taking for almost a decade; with 2023’s APIcalypse being a big example of that, but only one among many.
And when user trust is violated, it’s almost impossible to come back. John Bull explains this well, with the Trust Thermocline; but the basic idea is that those violations pile up invisibly upon a certain point, when they suddenly become a big deal and the platform bleeds users like there’s no tomorrow. And once it reaches that point it’s practically impossible to come back.
So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.
Well put
I can’t pinpoint when Reddit died in my eyes. But I can say the long road to where it is today started with Reddit Gold.
Reddit Gold was a minor change that didn’t do much of anything besides offer a way to collect money directly from the user base. But it was the start of monetizing the site and every decision by Reddit management after that point furthered that monetization at the expense of everything else.
I can pinpoint the exact moment: When the admins actively gave t_d a full pass on anything they wanted to do in 2016.
That single act drove away more users than any previous exodus.
There were even earlier signs of Reddit caring more about profit than the best interests of the users.
2014: buying and crippling Alien Blue. Reddit could’ve built its own official app and users would have two to choose from; or it could have bought and improved Alien Blue. By doing neither, Reddit showed complete disdain towards user experience.
2015: Reddit fired Victoria Taylor. Except that Taylor did an essential job there, as she was a bridge between Reddit Inc. and mod teams; she was for example the one verifying people for Ask me Anything (back then it was a big deal).
You probably could find even more signs of that, if digging further. And while neither is as serious as the way that Reddit handled T_D, both already show that it was putting revenue over users.
Yeah that’s my main problem with the article, it argues “as if” it was all but inevitable. As if something could be done. As soon as you have for profit motivation of social media, it’s all but inevitable that enshittification ensues. That obscures the real problem.
You want a website that is run non-profit for users and somewhat democratically. But they shy away from that conclusion.
Also, I think the unaccountable moderators really are a problem. You end up with major subs like r/politics or /worldnews getting camped by people who just happened to get there first, and then being forever unaccountable for bias or stupidity. And then you get sitewide bans if you subvert the bans from the tinpot dictators camping on what should be community-led spaces.
Yeah. Worst offender is r/climatechange which is still moderated by a “both sides” climate skeptic. It’s practically aiding genocide / omnicide.
Unfortunately lemmy doesn’t have good solution to fracturing and default instances either.