Hey redfugees! I’m a little OOTL… I know reddit has been going downhill for a while, but how has it suddenly nosedived? What triggered it? It’s bewildering, and they’re losing countless users.
Hey redfugees! I’m a little OOTL… I know reddit has been going downhill for a while, but how has it suddenly nosedived? What triggered it? It’s bewildering, and they’re losing countless users.
Well there was the shift a couple years ago with Reddit seeking to dramatically increase ad revenue, so they banned the use of third party clients to force users through their monetization racket.
Along with that, they clamped down on the API preventing search engines or other applications from indexing data unless they paid reddit for it, ontop of selling user data to AI companies regardless of what the community thinks of that practice. (afaik, there’s no opt-out either)
And now, they’ve made a pretty big pivot in cracking down on free speach; banning users for so much as liking a comment that contains the word ‘Luigi’ (even if obviously video game related and nothing to do with politics).
I remember how downhill it went with the ad revenue it started to be more and more facebooky which can only be bad. Have they given any official statement on wtf is going on? And can you explain the API stuff I’m not savvy with it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy
https://gizmodo.com/reddit-is-cracking-down-on-luigi-mangione-content-2000576229
That’s great thanks
The whole API issue was really a changing point in how Reddit publicly treated its mods and power users.
Reddit was trying to pull power away from mods through passive decisions, but nothing had ever been done to outright harm the moderation experience until then. You could tell Spez didn’t understand that the decision would have such a major impact on the user experience, but didn’t seem to care.
After that, you could tell that the relationship of the admins to the users became a lot more contentious.