The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,
I’m not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn’t even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can’t tell you how many times now I’ve looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.
People are only using the 3rd party app line because it’s the most relatable argument. It’s much more than that. A ton of moderation tools and useful bots are going dark tomorrow thanks to the API policy change. Even if we all go back to Reddit, there’s no bringing back those tools. Reddit communities are going to slowly go to shit as spammers all realize that moderators aren’t as effective as they used to be. This was going to happen regardless of how the protests turned out. There’s no scenario where things get better for Reddit.
Imo, more emphasis should have been made on how spez treated Christian, the Apolla dev. It’s honestly disgusting. And not even any kind of apology or direct reply. Spez just went on to smear Christian’s name more with disinformation he fed to the press via interviews.
It definitely should have.
I’ve seen many threads recently filled with people taking spez’s side versus Christian. No idea how anyone could do that in good faith.
To anyone that hasn’t seen the mythbusting thread it was pretty damn shocking: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yxqq9S14NxbCQBDfO0lq3xYL8IWrGLSeE47u7X1sUVo/pub
It’ll be interesting to hear from the odd user that kept their accounts how things change in the coming weeks and months. It’s cool that so many websites made articles about it but it still felt very clickbait and polarized on even those sights. Users will know the truth and hopefully update us on the shitshow to come.
I am going to be on the site for the next user just to detail how much of shitshow it becomes. My current social media mix is going to be Discord/Squabbles/Kbine + Twitter for the people I follow that are still there.
The 3rd party app news is what flipped me, but the awareness of the shitshow to come, was what kept me flipped. I’m ‘flipping’ on most social media though. Ended Twitter last year, detaching from Facebook (and Insta) slowly, exploring Reddit alternatives, and longer term I’ll be looking at how to minimize my ties with Google.