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

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.”

  • ChocoboRocket@lemmy.world
    8·
    13 days ago

    I did the same but for Reddit is Fun (android), and I still haunt reddit via browser but I don’t sign in or interact.

    It’s getting to the point where all the good content is also on Lemmy, probably won’t take long for lemmy to become peak old reddit with medium sized communities of real people interacting, supporting, educating, and roasting.

    We’ll probably be at a significantly lower critical mass before the corpos start invading, but hopefully the community can do a great job of reporting each other.

    I’d much rather pay a subscription for a spam bot free environment than watch new lemmys pop up every 15-20 years as enshittification bites.

    • glimse@lemmy.world
      5·
      13 days ago

      It’s getting to the point where all the good content is also on Lemmy,

      Oh how I wish this was true… Unless you mean memes (which are reposted everywhere), lemmy has a fraction of the content. There’s huge niche communities over there and I still have to add “reddit” to my searches for technical issues.

      To be clear, that hasn’t convinced me to start using reddit again beyond that. Just being realistic about comparing the two

      • doctordevice@lemmy.ca
        2·
        13 days ago

        Yeah, any gaming discussion I have to search for reddit. And because of the stupid new deal with Google it means I have to do it via Chrome. And then constantly manually change the address to old.reddit so it doesn’t look like ad-riddled garbage.

        I would love to be able to replace that with Lemmy, but there isn’t enough community here for the kind of niche discussion you can still find on reddit.

        • SHOW_ME_YOUR_ASSHOLE@lemm.ee
          0·
          13 days ago

          There is a plugin for your browser that will automatically redirect you to old.reddit.com so that you don’t have to manually change the URL every time. I forget the name of the extension but it does exist and it’s very helpful.

          • doctordevice@lemmy.ca
            1·
            12 days ago

            Are you thinking Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES)? I used that on desktop and it is great. I never considered trying it for mobile, thanks for the suggestion!

    • Potatisen@lemmy.world
      01·
      13 days ago

      No service, no website, no app will remain the way it started. Lemmy will go to shit and a new thing will come along. Don’t be loyal.