Hmmm. Maybe it's intentional. A purge. Flush out the old crowd with their adblockers and their nonsense ideas about "free speech," and whoever stays -- out of ignorance or compliance -- is left with the ad-ridden hellscape that is the new interface and the official app.

I certainly never viewed it as a social media site. I joined it as a link aggregator and a way to find information on topics I thought were interesting, not make friends. It always seems odd to me when people refer to it as a social media site.

Additionally, it's not even that good of a venue.

I was talking to my friend about this and asked if he could point out a single improvement that reddit has made in the last decade that hadn't been about monetization, since I exclusively use old.reddit.com and third party apps, I certainly couldn't. We couldn't come up with anything...

Its a better analogy that Reddit pissed off the roadies, ushers, ticket takers, and other crew because they wanted 300% of the concession stand's gross take.

FTA:

(Disclosure: WIRED is a publication of Conde Nast, whose parent company, Advance Publications, has an ownership stake in Reddit.)

They mentioned "federated alternatives"

conde naste was reddit and wired's parent company and I believe still a major shareholder so probably why

The more this drags on, the less people think this is about money, and more about controlling the platform.

A real business person finds a common ground, sets terms everyone can at least pay forward. Because, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if I have $100 lemonade, if no one is able to buy it.

I really don’t understand why reddit doesn’t just charge end uses for API access. Heck chuck it in with premium or something. They can generate an API that you use in whatever client you wanted.

I’d happily pay Reddit for a key to then use in Apollo, but bizarrely this isn’t an option. It’s not like Reddit lacks the ability to charge end users, they already have premium after all.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that all the reporting I've seen so far has failed to capture all the nuance involved. Unfortunate, but not surprising, I suppose.

If reddit backpedals, even just for damage control, it will cement just how much power the users and mods have over that site. As it should.

I think that's precisely why spez is going to do everything he can not to backpedal.

I think it's sad. There is so much good information stored in the side bars, like for example /r/buildapc or /r/fitness, that I hope gets salvaged by the fediverse.

Plus our spaces here need indexing so we can find answers to obscure questions again.

The rich control the narrative.

Not to whitewash the take, but it's a bigger issue.

The idea of success and being big meaning nearly the same as being relevant are the true villains of the story here. Every business wants to go big, every businessperson wants to make more, every platform wants to aggregate more and more content, etc. The people making the most impactful decisions in companies are plagued with these ideas and lead their businesses in the opposite direction, while staying blind to the alternatives, no matter how small, because they believe that the fact that their users are fleeing to smaller places is a joke, a temporary inconvenience, or a failure.

But it's not, truly.

Kbin and Lemmy and Mastodon and Calckey are, indeed, smaller platforms than Reddit and Twitter are, with less content and fewer people, but the fact of the matter is that is a considerable amount of people that fled both Reddit and Twitter for good in favor of smaller, to some "less relevant" platforms. The effect is the same - less traffic for Reddit and Twitter, less influence from these two, less ad revenue.

I don't want to sound like I truly believe that CEOs and other exec-level people are stupid and make decisions based on ego and simple solutions (like looking at numbers and judging nothing but the numbers), but hell, it does feel like humanity, as a whole, is not perfectly capable of properly functioning at the scale we're trying to function at right now. Smaller companies are more sensible and have higher net profit margin, smaller communities are often safer and more welcoming (on top of being more manageable, too), smaller projects are easier to keep track of and deliver with more satisfying results, etc. Execs don't seem like the type of people to even consider these simple facts, instead opting for being the bigger fish with the bigger wallet and market share.

Maybe that's just me feeling increasingly less comfortable about anything that is sized to unmanageable degrees, thus just seeing things... but then again, that's the tendencies we've seen time and time again in this late stage capitalism, with synergy becoming the same good ol' monopoly, while the common folk begrudge another "mall", its policies, and their results.

Are you surprised? The status quo does not want a new competitor. Unfortunately for us, the easiest way to keep the fediverse down is to not even acknowledge it as an option.