The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. The article describes it as "the official end of the battle," which seems an overstatement to me, but it's the certainly the end of the initial phase.
Is it over? I mean, reddit definitely got what they wanted. Bootlicking power mods got control of more subreddits, bots are running rampant and pumping up the numbers, and the API change went through with a couple people willing to pay the exorbitant cost.
But the quality of content has dropped dramatically and I've seen a lot of people take notice. It's constant reposts, one popular post will hit like 5-10 subs at the same time. And it's mostly rate me shit and fake aita type posts. Reddit being boring will kill permanently, no protest needed.
Basically what they did was amplify the conditions that are causing the exodus from reddit , what we can do is promote the fediverse on discord and other social media sites . And their freefall into irrelevancy will continue.
I think Reddit likely lost a lot of users who were exclusively Reddit users and didn’t use other social media. That might not amount to that many people total, but it does mean advertisers lose one of the more important demographics Reddit had to offer (since they can target the others more efficiently on other platforms anyway). Hope it still hurts their bottom line.
I quit using it, but I was using a third party app that didn’t have ads. However, I still insist that there is a way for someone to buy accounts, votes, and even entire subreddits directly from Reddit. The way reddit and other websites turn a blind eye to how many fake accounts they have just doesn’t make sense to me.
I used to spend hours per day on Reddit. Now I visit once or twice a month, read-only. My subscription is canceled and all my posts/comments deleted. My "front page of the Internet" is now here.
Funny thing is that those of us who left aren’t there anymore to comment that we did leave… So anyone who is still there is probably looking at the others who stayed and saying “See?! The protest didn’t work because we are still here!”
Tbh, reddit did win. They’re set to become a highly commercialized social media platform, focused on maximizing engagement through generic content.
They may lose dedicated eccentrics looking for a welcoming place to geek out over shit in their niche community. They’ll also lose users who value long in-depth discussions with complete internet strangers.
But, Reddit doesn’t want our need those people. As long as they have the generic subs (like r/funny, r/pics) and the outrage groups (like r/aita, r/publicfreakout), they’ll keep getting views and sweet sweet ad money. And that’s all Reddit cares about.
Everything you described in the second paragraph is exactly why appending site:reddit.com is a thing, it's a source of genuine discussion of products and expertise. That is what gives Reddit its SEO power in search engines and if those communities go, Reddit doesn't have much to fall back on. Meme level fluff can be replicated anywhere.
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