You must log in or register to comment.
I actually want to see reddit kill 3rd party apps, this will provide a huge opportunity to Lemmy, and show how much power these Reddit Admins hold.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
—Shang Tsung
Reddit is determined to “go commercial”. It’ll be successful at first because there’s a wealth of good data in Reddit. However, those who contribute rather than just consume will drift away. The content becomes stale (who wants recommendations for great Bluetooth headsets from 2015?).
Cory Doctorow wrote an excellent article on how TikTok, Facebook, Amazon and more have become worse, and why. It was written in January before Reddit’s API announcement, but it applies to Reddit every bit as much as the others. It’s worth a read: Tiktok’s enshittification
That article is fantastic, read it when it was first posted and just read it again now. His closing lines hit home:
“…policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created…”
“The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom – our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.”
Holy enshittification batman. That’s an enlightening read. Thank you.
Also remember that reddit loves to choose what goes on front page, have the worst mods ever and shadow banning. Those things should not be tolerated. I don’t mind if reddit disappear, it is pretty toxic.
The worst mods can happen anywhere.
I want to see Reddit fail tbh. It was great at one point, but it won’t be great again. It’s time for the platform to shoot itself in the foot to allow better platforms such as Lemmy to grow.
The fact that they can kill third party apps is exactly why we need something else.
Let it burn I say
I see a lot of people saying let this happen. I acknowledge that reddit has also sort of lost their point but a lot of people have put countless hours into building stuff both on communities and as devs building apps like redreader and rif. I don’t want to see all of those people basically lose all their effort and work because a company decided to make money.
Thats a sunk cost fallacy though.
Reddit isnt going to get better and the admins/exec are just going to keep pushing policies like this because their primary motivation is to make money and they desperately want to hold a Reddit IPO.
The best options is for all those subs to export as much as they can to create a read only archive then head elsewhere where they control their own data.
Sure, as it’s evident from us interacting here I’ve been trying to move on the alternatives, though nothing has sprung upto replace niche subreddits that I used to browse.
Ultimately my point was not that what reddit was doing was right. It was that it is easy to take joy in a company that has let greed take over try to fail but in doing so don’t forget to have some empathy for countless volunteers who put in time and effort to build something worthwhile. It’s their stuff that’s being burnt too.
I take no pleasure in what the impact is going to be with numerous communities but I will admit that I’m gleefully rubbing my hands watching the admins make a complete pigs ear of yet another situation.
My comment was more about just how many times will people get shitted on by the admins (Ive commented elsewhere just some of the awful and horrific situations they have caused or failed to act upon) before they realise that the admins are going to repeatedly carry out the same kind of behaviours and it is not the best place for them?
I can’t imagine what a loss it will be if many of the niche communities die on reddit and aren’t reborn on other platforms. Right now it looks like some of my favourite ones are going that way.
Not sure what to prefer… open reddit API or reddit descending and people switching to open alternatives… It seems like there is a huge mods issue on reddit as well, which won’t be solved any time soon.
deleted by creator
