They did not provide a reason. There was no further dialog. I just got a system message telling me I was removed.
I was also silmultaniously shadow banned from Reddit and my posts and comments stopped showing up. I had created a post complaining about being removed as the moderator (the only moderator for over a decade) of a sub that I built from the ground up and donated literally thousands of volunteer hour to over the last 14 years. It had zero upvotes or downvotes or comments and was not visable as an anon user.
In the end, I decided to rip the bandaid off and killed my 16.5 year account. I was one of the early supporters of Reddit (user #7758) and had left Digg for good in May of 2007 after the AAC contraversy. They showed their authoritarian side in that moment and I knew Digg had reached their high water mark.
Reddit is at that moment now. They won’t be dead tomorrow. They won’t be dead next week. However, it will also never be the same, and it’s only downhill from here.
Much like Digg. Much like Myspace. I am sure there will be a blurb a few years from now as an addendum in some business journal how Reddit sold to a third party for an undisclosed sum and some Skittles…
The future is the Fediverse and I’m glad I was forced to remove my Reddit crutch and dive in full force.
It’s hard to articulate. Reddit is at its core only a platform. All it did was give users a place to create, curate, contribute, and connect to, with, and for communities. Reddit was our magic feather. We didn’t need them all along. All it did was tear down some mental blocks, so we could get started.
We wouldn’t even be that mad if Reddit was trying to be reasonable. They’re just being parasitic toward us, if we’re being honest with ourselves. They want us to do all the work, so they can make all the money from our work, and then they want to charge us money for the honor of having been monetized. And it’s not even that they’re just chasing multiple different monetization schemes in moderation so that everyone profits. They intend to be greedy fucks in every transaction. They want users to pay subscription fees for Reddit premium (which isn’t well priced, and therefore doesn’t sell many subscriptions). Furthermore, they want developers to pay outrageous API licensing fees (which aren’t well priced, and therefor almost all the developers are just shuttering). Not only that, they want to charge API fees toward AI training companies. My guess? Their prices are again too high, and the result will be that AI studios will just not pay for an official license and will do web scraping. It will require more work for them to get the scrapers to properly parse the threads, since what AI studios are interested in are threaded conversations right now. The AI studios will determine it is worth it to pay some engineers to do that rather than to pay the money Reddit wants (per my understanding, Reddit is charging the same money for AI studios as 3rd party apps).
So, where does that leave Reddit? Only with advertising revenue. They could lower the prices for their other services and make more money than that, but you would need to understand long-term cause and effect to do that, and u/spez has NOT demonstrated that kind of awareness. As evidence, note that advertisers are starting to reassess their contracts with Reddit (which by the way, their ads suck! You’ve collected all this demographic info about your users, but you can’t provide advertisements that draw any kind of interest!? And you think you can be of value to AI companies!? What the fuck are you doing!?). Reddit’s greed is losing them money.
AI companies will scrape reddit, doing it on old reddit is easier, so they will shut down old reddit.
Mark my words.
Yup. Any platforms deserve to get paid for their API. They’re not a charity. But what reddit is doing is absolutely ridiculous. They knew that the TPA devs wouldn’t be able to pay costs that high. They knew all along that it would shut down, most, if not all, of the TPA.