Reddit

No. They are trying to finalize an IPO. No amount of anything is going to stop them from this cash grab.

I don't think they'll cave in, and honestly I don't care what they do.

People like us made reddit what it is, and we can make a home somewhere else one way or the other.

It's time we take the internet as a whole back from the billionaires and their soulless venture capital firms anyway.

Make internet nerdy again, I always say.

I think it depends on how successful the blackout is, because truthfully, most Reddit users probably don't care about 3rd party apps, and just want to continue using Reddit, but if their favorite communities shut down indefinitely, I think there's a chance.

But Spez also seems dead set on their plan, so only time will tell. But on the bright side, if it doesn't we'll see tons of new faces here

I'm not convinced it'll completely back down but I suspect there is a chance they'll lower the pricing structure to a more 'reasonable' amount.

If I put my tinfoil hat on I'd say this was the plan from the start;

• Announce something ludicrous
• Get the users a bit fired up
• Backtrack to what you'd always planned
• Play it all off like "See, we listen to you guys, aren't we good?"

Their MBAs already crunched the numbers and included users like us in the "acceptable use" category

Eh. The more bad decisions they make, the better it will be for the Fediverse. And with the way things are with corpos across the board, I prefer that at this point.

It doesn’t really matter. Spez burned all the bridges with the main 3PA devs. None of them will want to invest time and effort again for a company that treats them like this and could change its mind again on a whim.

The things that happened first with Twitter and now with Reddit, proved to me that it's pointless to put trust in closed-source. So even if they decide to revert changes (which they won't do), I lost my trust already. Why do I have to rely on them if alternatives are available?

Decentralization and FOSS are the solution. They have their problems. True, but they solve many BS in social media.

Honestly can't say I care at this point. I rather want Reddit to burn to the ground so that we get some real improvements on other platforms. From the admins to the mods to the users, the platform is just so rotten at this point that it takes most of the fun out of it.

Hell will freeze over before they change course. "It's all in the game." to quote one of my favourite series ever.

Reddit only really exists because of three things: 1) the company that pays the server bills; 2) the users who ADD content; 3) the moderators who curate their communities, fight spam, etc., etc. The demographics of 2) and 3) are HEAVILY skewed towards third-party apps, especially 3). By blocking third-party apps there will almost certainly be a significant decrease in content creation, and a definite decrease in the quality of moderation. Both of these will hurt Reddit, especially in the long-term. Spez has played his hand really poorly here, and has overestimated the switching costs to other platforms. I'm already feeling at home on Lemmy and kbin, if and hopefully when the communities get repopulated, it's going to be just fine.

Honestly I think the AMA showed that they are not backing down. Spez answered like 14 total questions on an AMA with 30k comments the last I checked. They don't seem to care, and I don't see there being a significant number of people actually leaving reddit either, the alternatives just don't fix the problems people are having with reddit. If you use a 3rd party app because it has more features, are you going to leave the platform for another platform that only has one 3rd party app?

Implicit in the question is the hope that Reddit will buckle so we can all happily go back there. However this whole debacle has opened people's eyes to a better, brighter future for the internet, where not all is controlled by large corporations. So even if Reddit does buckle, many will stick around at Lemmy. Not because Lemmy's content is better (it will be eventually, although now it remains a bit sparse) but because the whole ethos is superior.

I really doubt there’s anything the user base could do to change the company’s path. There are millions of people that will continue to use their product regardless of bad UI and even worse PR. It’s not what the average reddit user is concerned with. The lowest common denominator just wants an outlet to consume media, and Reddit can still deliver that.

My personal opinion on all of this - Reddit will continue to grow and change, and it will get worse and worse for longtime users who remember the earlier years. I’m happy to abandon ship now so that it’s no longer my problem at least.

Sorry for the downer reply lol

Only just a little, to try to get back valuable users without disappointing shareholders, probably with some vague and fake promise.

In any case, the AMA has caused a permanent trust damage for many users

Even if it collapses or not, the content on Reddit tends to be stale, threads are flooded with bots, or just two-word jokes.
On the other hand, Lemmy and the fediverse feel alive, despite having fewer users.

Even if reddit does cave, I think the communities here are going to grow and be better than reddit has become. Overtime it will probably be the same in many ways, but I like where Lemmy is right now. I won't switch back regardless.

It all comes down to whether or not the fediverse gets big enough to be a real threat to reddit. If so, reddit will suddenly become a lot more interested in improving their experience. I doubt they'll reverse course on the API, but we'll probably get some perfuse apologies and a real attempt to improve their app and website.

June 12th won't change their course. But I think there will be a much bigger mass migration starting on July 1, and that may be what starts to move the needle.

No. They will unperson any recalcitrant mods and drop in their own henchmen. 90% of Redditors won’t know what has happened and will just end up watching many more old videos of kittens falling over posted by bots as Reddit slowly follows Digg into irrelevancy.

The Reddit board will continue to focus on charging AI bros through the nose for access to our content until they all get bored and leave the wreckage with their pockets full of loot.

I think if they had been straight up with their intentions and gave 3rd party devs time to adjust, gave them jobs/roles to improve their application. Or literally express themselves in any other way about their plans. I really honestly think that people would have been less pissed. But they decided to be secretive and dishonest about their intentions. I feel like Spez is a sitting duck who will get plucked off the moment the company goes public regardless. The fact that Reddit as he has publicly stated is not profitable now and never has been is quite damning. Investors are not going to like that. And will not willingly invest into a company that will not make them money.

I don't see them backtracking regardless of what happens with spez but they could have been more honest from the forefront. It still would have sucked. People would have probably still moved on. But there would be less animosity towards the suits in charge right now.

Spez won't budge, because the people pulling his strings won't let him. Remember there is 100's of millions invested in reddit so far, and when those investors come calling for a return they're coming after the CEO. I completely believe he's too far gone into the VC world to be able to empathize with the protest and fight for the community over the $. But at the same time I believe he wouldn't have chosen a 30 day window voluntarily. He has a tech/programming background so he knows this is unreasonable. Someone else is driving him to do this, and I don't think he's A) handled it well nor B) is happy to be doing this. I bet he won't be CEO for long after the IPO, at least till his shares vest.

Reddit doesn't seem to make a lot of choices or take much action in its own good interest. I moderated a 25+ million subscriber sub there for a number of years. The minimal effort the admin put in to assist was laughable. The brigading against the sub, mod harassment, chronic abusers, the mediocre tools, it was just a poor experience. Four things stand out to me:

1. At one point this user harassed us via modmail over and over so we got his account suspended from all of reddit for 24 hours. This prompted them to create a throwaway, mail us, claim to be law enforcement and state that he was essentially going to hunt us down. The throwaway was banned, but the original account allowed to serve out its 24 hour suspension and then just carry on. We never got an answer on why nothing happened to that account. The decisions they made were mind boggling. We had a banned user make a new account, and it took a few months to realize that it was him. It's not like the account didn't cause trouble, it's just they were previously banned for making chronically bad posts to karma farm. Just really subtle, but not egregious rule breaking. They'd been contacted numerous times to not post low effort/low quality/inappropriate stuff and after numerous attempts to correct it, with no real come back from them, we banned them. After awhile, and many many removals of their submissions, I realized this new single purpose account was them, sent it in for a ban check, confirmed, only to find out an account which had been used for no more than chronic ban evasion (it posted in no other sub) was handed a 2 week suspension and then just allowed to carry on. It was very frustrating as a mod trying to address abuse when the admin didn't really seem to care.

2. I found this guy spamming hundreds of subs selling fake masks during the pandemic. I had to personally write 3 bots and chase him around Reddit for weeks to eventually shut him down because the admin were so slow and so inept at dealing with him they simply couldn't do anything. This guy was operating by leaving his posts up for around 15 minutes when he posted so the mods would never get reports and ban him unless they happened to be right there when he did it. He also had dozens of accounts and kept buying more. By the time the admin would show up to ban any of his accounts he'd stopped using them for days and was through several new accounts since. It really didn't take me long to write a bot to identify his posts with 100% accuracy (except for some archive bots that some people had that copied his posts), but they couldn't do a thing to stop him

3. Pushshift was both the bane of our existence and the biggest tool I used. Bots obviously used it to find old posts to karma farm off of. We used it to track abusers in detail, notify other subs when we saw something up, etc. Without the ability to see deleted posts and comments we would have missed quite a bit. It was really the one tool that made moderating effective.

4. The horrendous block tool. Which essentially boils down to 'I want the last word and I'm going to shut this discussion down entirely, even though I'm not a mod in this sub and have no business having that kind of control over a public discussion'. The best part was users who'd block someone, wait a bit, unblock, because you have to wait to reblock, then after that time passed, make another sniping comment and then immediately reblock. The old blocking method wasn't perfect, but the new one was a mess. Someone blocking you meant that if a third party entered an on-going discussion, replied to you to discuss something, you couldn't reply to them because the thread was downstream of someone who had blocked you.

This kind of behaviour just demonstrates a site that really doesn't give a crap about its users or the community they try to build and participate in.