This single sentence is the best summary I have seen yet of the way Reddit admins/corporate is treating moderators and supporters: "The beatings will continue until morale improves"
The harshness is intentional because Reddit is gearing up to aim themselves at a new audience. They know that they are going to lose a big chunk of their users - they want that. Those of us who were using third party apps were probably the least convertible in terms of profit.
The mentality is our way or the highway, and in this case they win no matter what because for every one of us they lose, they are going to gain 20x. They want those TikTok numbers, and this is how they plan to get there
and yet users will not complain, I heard people say "those who use old.reddit.com are just cranky senile people" or something like that, some of us prefer old.reddit.com even if we were nine when browsing on desktop
Reddit wanting to become TikTok doesn't make sense tho.
They said they don't want AI training companies to get their data for free and there's a reason why AI training is done on reddit, that's because it's not TikTok nor Facebook.
Apparently you can't train AI on shitpost memes and videos, you need conversations, how is becoming tiktok compatible with wanting to sell their data for AI training?
Yeah… But are they sure those using 3rd party apps aren’t the primary people making and moderating content? That is the part of this that doesn’t make sense to me, they’re cutting off what makes it easier to make the free content that is their product
You misunderstand what their product is at this point. Their primary product is advertising conversions by site users and visitors, with a minor secondary in user data - actual "content" is a distant third. By removing or restricting the means by which users can avoid interactions with the customer base, they drive traffic to the customer-sponsored content on the site. Yes, what they're doing will reduce organic traffic; that's the point. They would be very happy if every post visible to a user was a paid post.
Reddit is an advertising platform which allows user created content. I expect the majority of the Fediverse to go that way too within two years, regardless of Meta Threads. This is the Internet. This is what it is, what it was always going to be, and how it will be going forward.
Many sites have lost their core audience, and move towards a lowest common denominator, and died. But I’ve never heard of that helping them take off, can anyone think of any examples? Lowering quality won’t help.
Obviously Facebook took off once it dropped the 'college student' requirement and opened up to the general population. But once that first generation aged up, the younger generation didn't follow and Facebook became the place your grandma posts Biden conspiracy theories. Widening your target audience can get you an initial boost of users, but you end up competing with every other platform doing the same thing. Then some new platform opens up, all the cool kids go there, and the old platforms gradually get dumber, withers away, and dies.
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