Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit's attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo's creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
I honestly think more subs need to do an indefinite shut down.
If it's only for 48 hours Reddit can just wait it out, and if not a lot of subs join in on the indefinite shut down they can just replace the mods for new ones.
However, in my opinion, the buggest change will come June 30th when 3rd party apps shut down since that's when users will actualy stop using Reddit.
Let's hope it's enough users to make a change. I myself will be deleting everything and my account on June 30th. Let's hope something changes.
An indefinite shutdown would not work - the moderators of the subs who perform them will be kicked out and be replaced by people who want to keep the subs in operation. Plus, it's a disservice to people who do use Reddit as a resource for work or otherwise. I think a 48 hour protest is reasonable, but beyond that, there's not a whole lot you can do.
While true, between this and the Twitter fallout I’m hoping more people are seeing the folly of making dependencies of centralised services that they do not own and have zero sway over management decisions of.
There were many people pleading with folk to stay on Twitter because of the communities they had built or the activist work they had been achieving.. but that was all built on a house of cards.
Now is the time to do the work to shift away from depending on platforms that don’t care about their users real needs & embrace a better way of being!
I appreciate I’m likely preaching to the choir here 😂
Decentralized is the future of the internet
Decentralised is also its past.
With some luck the “web 2.0” fad of siloed services will end up being a weird blip in it’s history!