Reddit’s crisis is a warning for all social platforms: when you trade community for profits, everyone loses. Will Reddit fix its mes...

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.”

  • Beaver@lemmy.caEnglish
    451·
    2 months ago

    I’m trying to upvote as many Lemmy posts as I can find on the Reddit search function to hasten the demise of the pet project of Spez since the third party apps are up to snuff now!

    • MarkalAlvarez@lemmy.world
      15·
      2 months ago

      Let’s hope more people will join the fediverse so we can all stop feeding our data to these greedy companies.

      • tired_n_bored@lemmy.world
        6·
        2 months ago

        Tbh I doubt companies would stop scraping data. They wouldn’t care to respect the ToS (they never did) and feed in their AI models all the Lemmy posts and comments they can find. Still better than Reddit willfully selling these info

      • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
        2·
        2 months ago

        You don’t think once Lemmy hits mainstream, companies won’t start polluting Lemmy and harvest data here?

        • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          As Lemmy users we always have the freedom to jump ship to a different Lemmy instance if the admins of the ones we’re on decide to sell the site out and/or let the polluters take over, or we can even start up our own Lemmy instance (with blackjack, etc.)