There were years there when any watermark from another site would get OP lynched in the comments, and now Admin over there is sufficiently out of touch they're going to start doing it to their own content.
Bets are on that this is a stupid kneejerk test from Reddit, worried that post-migration community hubs are going to "profit from their content" the same way Reddit did to places like ifunny or 9gag during it's entire growth arc.
Or the opposite, cropping out someone's watermark or signature to pass something as original, even putting a new watermark over the old one. Can't wait to see redditors still holding out saying it's not a big deal and then find Reddit itself is doing the same thing.
I think that's where they're headed intentional or not, but probably intentional. I think they're trying to pivot their business model. If I had to guess what will happen going forward in broad strokes.
Strike will break one way or another (mod removal most likely)
Huge mod turnover
Moderation quality takes a nosedive with spam, thinly-veiled ads, porn, and trolling ending up more and more prevalent in regular subs
Confidence of power-users starts to evaporate once the post quality sucks and niche subs devolve to /pics and discussion turns into the Youtube comments section
Comments become heavily restricted by Admins to pump their upcoming IPO
NSFW content either gets eradicated or heavily restricted by admins to pump their upcoming IPO
Slow diaspora of power-users to nowhere/federated platforms/new centralized platforms/niche forums/discord
Vast majority that's left are Tiktok adjacent crowd scrolling though the site upvoting and downvoting (though that's being gamed even more than currently) with little meaningful discussion or community in subs anymore
so like 9gag.
Bonus-round predictions:
Google has to re-rank search results because Reddit isn't a treasure trove of niche knowledge and mostly-real user experiences anymore
AI firms scraping Reddit for LLM data will cease eventually and most likely start redirecting that to where the real discussion's are happening
/spez will have cashed out soon after the IPO, carrying buckets of money off into the sunset
New leadership and duty to make all the cash will finish strangling the holdout's of Old Reddit
Invasive ads and lack of anything resembling good content will make the site a shell of its former self.
I'll be surprised if this process takes another 5 years, but by year 10 I definitely think the downfall will be complete.
I think they’re working under the assumption that the majority of users don’t care enough to leave and that new mods and people will step up after the exodus. Their actions, however, paint a picture that it’s going worse for them than they planned, if they’re taking specific reforming actions to counter the backlash. Or spez has just gone full Elon.
People always talk about sites blocking ad-blockers, and I'm sure sites are trying to, but I've genuinely never been to a website where ublock origin failed to work. Like, even if there's a big banner over the screen you can't dismiss, just open the ublock zapper tool and block the banner
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I just checked reddit and it doesn't seem to have watermarks. I know for a while on mobile they added like the source/attribution of the subreddit at the bottom (but you could disable it). If they force watermarks on everything that'll just make me use the platform even less...
That's wild if true. If I took a picture, created art work, made a meme why would I want reddit taking credit for it. Not to mention a ton of content on reddit is just screenshots from twitter, tumblr, 4chan, etc. How do you get off slapping a watermark on content that originated on another platform. It's like all these websites that host user generated content eventually forget they are just a host for the content. They start thinking they are the content.
They started doing this a while ago but it was a tab at the bottom of the screen, similar to an iFunny watermark, and it could be toggled off. I think it was an official app thing?
I just downloaded (the deleted and left a 1 star review) the official app and downloaded an old image and a new image and a watermark didn't appear. Neither on the website
Yeah, they've been rolling out the worst anti-features to small sets of trial users, that's what's happening with the users blocked from accessing the website on mobile
It's not super new, they've been doing that for a while. It's pretty difficult to get a direct source to the image even if you dig into your browser's developer tools.
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