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.”

  • Blaster M@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    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.

  • Nytefyre@kbin.melroy.org
    0·
    10 days ago

    And Spez’s response?

    “OMG! STOP GOING DARK OR I AND MY LEGION OF SLIME ADMINS WILL REMOVE YOU FROM POWAH!”

    And so he did which is why some subreddits came back from being dark. Some subreddits submitted to their own fates. Other subreddits reluctantly came back, proving the protest was just a mere farce that amounted to a nothingburger.

    And what did Spez do after the whole fiasco? Why, he punched Reddit into now being Public. Completing what people had long speculated that he’d do.

    And what did Spez do after that? He’s now rolling out the concept that Subreddits will be monetized.

    Spez has ultimately learned nothing from these incidents and expects it to get better, with that stupid shit eating grin on his face because he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
      0·
      10 days ago

      Spez has ultimately learned nothing

      He’s learned he can do this shit and make money. It may not be a perpetual money machine. But he now has enough and will milk it for all that’s left. That’s what he’s learned.

    • abbadon420@lemm.ee
      0·
      10 days ago

      And he’s getting rich off of it too. I mean, that’s his whole gain, right? Money! He’s given his soul for money. The whole community hates him, but at least he’s gotten rich now. I’m sure reddit’s annual founders parties must be a hoot.

      • Nytefyre@kbin.melroy.org
        0·
        10 days ago

        For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists, Reddit users seem to have a knack for taking it up dry than doing anything about their problems.

        I guess that is truly Reddit’s nature.

        • OutlierBlue@lemmy.caEnglish
          0·
          10 days ago

          For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists

          Those were the early days of Reddit. They’re long gone now that everyone has joined. Those so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists have now abandoned Reddit. It’s mostly just the sheep left there now.

          It’s the same story with Twitter.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        What does he care if a bunch of people that he thinks are losers hate him? He’s sitting on his private yacht, anchored just off his private country club, and eating lobster in the hot tub. He’s a major world player now. He doesn’t give a fuck what reddit users think of him.

    • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      Oh the irony getting removed by a mod here. Although its probably in the mod logs somewhere with an actual reason :)

      • laverabe@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        actually it’s not … An admin banned OP (troll account). Seems that no record of comment exists. Kinda a bug in the Lemmy software where logs of banned accounts aren’t stored, or at least I don’t know how to see them.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      What do you think he would learn? He got like $190 million dollars in compensation last year, broke the protest, and only lost a small fraction of users. He doesn’t view the site with the same love that we did. It’s just a business to him, and he’s just a soulless executive.

    • AtomicHotSauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts

      This is comedic gold. But the bad part? I envisioned it. Thanks a lot.

  • infinite_ass@leminal.space
    0·
    9 days ago

    Saturn devouring his son, with reddit snoovitars

    Somebody with midjourney skills needs to do that

    It’s got viral potency

      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
        0·
        9 days ago

        The remaining 1% is those humans still plugged into the matrix, they won’t be able to escape until the pipes get unclogged of all the Web 2.0 big tech floatsam still swimming around.

  • Alpha71@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    For a site that says it doesn’t care about reddit, there sure are alot of posts about it.

  • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 days ago

    Reddit certainly had issues prior to the 2023 API change, but that really was a pivotal moment for sure. Overnight we lost apps we loved and people who made the platform what it is abandoned it or worse - were forced out. Good content creators fled, resulting in a lot less quality content.

    And we all know how the mods Reddit appointed handled things. Now, I’m not saying they’re ALL nazi’s, but there’s folks running the show who would fit in perfectly with the ‘just following orders’ mindset…

    The platform needs to die, the stock needs to tank and the people involved need to be drummed out of the business entirely.

  • forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
    0·
    9 days ago

    Reddit’s strength has always been its community

    There’s something nobody talks about much when it comes to reddit. It’s that the internet has moved past community. It now revolves around monetized “influencers”. Nobody fosters community for the sake of it anymore.

    Reddit has outlived its time. It’s apparent they’ve been trying to evolve with the times but the platform isn’t fundamentally geared towards this coporatized era of the internet. They’ve been trying to pivot the platform into social media style. Users now have profiles with avatars, bio text, followers/subscribers. There’s now a social graph. The big picture with these things is they’re trying to make it into a corporatized social platform like all the rest.

    The problem isn’t reddit itself. It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.

    • niktemadur@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 days ago

      Maybe the problem is that they’re all trying to ge the same goddamned thing, like how there are 15 or more goddamned hamburger chains.

      “We want to be like facebook! Also like Youtube and twitter and tiktok! And like Instagram!”

      Maybe if they stuck to their speciality and strengths, pick a lane and stay in it, they would prosper. But no! God forbid!

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 days ago

      It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.

      It’s more like people aren’t geared to community, not the internet.

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
        0·
        9 days ago

        I very strongly disagree. It may appear that way, but community is simply less profitable than “influencers”, so communities aren’t invested in. Social media and even following influencers/content creators is an example of people looking for community, just not having healthy communities to pick from.

  • gencha@lemm.ee
    0·
    9 days ago

    I’m calling bullshit on any user count they release. The site was filled with bots even when I still used it. People kept complaining about “karma farmers” as if there were users who repost popular content. It has always been largely Reddit’s own bots too keep new users entertained and recycle popular content so that it reaches as many users as possible. They turned this up to 11 before going public.

    Now that they no longer provide an API, they are free to make up any fake metric they want to try to pump up their worthless stock.

    • NostraDavid@programming.dev
      0·
      9 days ago

      People kept complaining about “karma farmers”

      I remember the “Reddit is just you, me and /u/karmanaut” meme from 2008. He was the original “karma farmer”. It was a problem since the early days due to how they setup Reddit as a system. It just enforced his behaviour.

    • rekabis@lemmy.ca
      0·
      9 days ago

      One of the really popular subs - with hundreds of posts per day - cracked down on bots and nothing was posted for two days afterwards. Can’t recall which sub it was, It was WholesomeMemes. I caught wind of that a few days later and it was truly a ghost town. Even now they’ve only got something like 5% of their pre-bot-ban traffic back - about 4-6 posts a day.

    • Blaze@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      I’m very doubtful too. I look at “active users” stats, and for every sub at every time it never goes above a few hundreds.

      The millions subs numbers are bs

  • Beaver@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    9 days 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!

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 days ago

    What trips me out is that somehow they still have the video of the dude that somehow survived after blowing his own face off with a shotgun. It’s fucked up, sad and sickening.

    Honestly I would have just put him out of his misery if I had found him like that. And no, I will not be linking that video here or anywhere for that matter, it’s pure nightmare fuel.

      • over_clox@lemmy.world
        0·
        10 days ago

        The point is that once they went public, they said they were gonna be removing certain horrible communities, and the particular community that particular video is on would have been like at the top of the list if I was in charge of Reddit.

        But honestly I don’t give a flying fuck.

  • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    I remember when they kicked mods off their platform when the subreddits went private on the API retaliation. Now quite a few are on here. Meanwhile, some of those subreddits are still having issues moderating.

    Personally I think mods should be rotated once in a while by the community instead of giving power to them indefinitely on communities. But reddit really messed up there. Some mods are mods of hundreds of subreddits which is silly and unsustainable.

    • infinite_ass@leminal.space
      0·
      9 days ago

      Could moderation be handled democratically with votes and such? Create a system with central authority and you’ll just get people trying to be the central authority.

    • Altima NEO@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      It’s such a mess. I mean spez is an ass, but some of those career mods were just as bad. Moderating hundreds of subs because they enjoy the power. And you can tell that was the case when they’d harass random people because they did some little thing that upset them.

      • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        Yep. If they were periodically replaced, then the communities might have a better mod (or at least a less burnt out one).