What do we need to do to move forward?

Accept that much or most of reddit will look normal tomorrow. Reddit will proceed by projecting that everything is normal, whether true or not. Lemmy will continue to be an alternative with FOSS benefits and much smaller communities. Your own habits have to reflect what you want and there's no wrong answer.

I'm personally elated to find the smaller communities with higher-quality content. Thoughtful comments aren't buried under piles of karma-seeking horse-beating jokes.

At the same time, reddit continues to offer historical reference that won't be matched elsewhere anytime soon. I'm not going to rant as if the place has no value, or as if it can be replaced in a few weeks.

Lots to consider.

Are we defining failure by their standards, or ours?

When my favorite communities were wrecked by being moved to front page, default-for-new-users and flooded with low effort content that may as well have been bot spam, it failed me.

When they made an API policy that ostensibly allowed profitability (despite charging far beyond what they might make from ads on the official mobile app) and avoided training by AI (despite refusing to grandfather in known 3PA and offering to approve new ones), it failed me again.

If I'm soon unable to access the site via the old.reddit interface to avoid intrusive ads, it will fail me yet again.

I won't be surprised if others add more failures to this list.

Maybe reddit makes money hand-over-fist from these changes without me, you, nsfw content creators, licensing / API fees from all current popular 3PA apps, and whoever else. I'm not eager to characterize this as success because VC's get their money back.

There are sorts by hot and top, yes. I don't know the details of voting and/or replies that score comment order.

We waited for our images to load one line at a time and we were grateful, dammit!

There are actually some legit anti-spam reasons that reddit has been obfuscating vote counts and totals for a long time now. Even if this wasn't a known phenomenon, I don't think I'd trust the API call results anyway.

There's no accumulated karma score though. People should be less sensitive about downvotes and I'm hoping it will mitigate low effort karma-seeking content, at least somewhat.

Pffffft maybe you, but I don't have cognitive biases! Anchor pricing doesn't work on me either because, raises nose, I know all about it.

Reddit is already ashes of what it once was.

I think reddit peaked around the time it started changing which subs were front page (8-10 years ago now?). One place I was very active at the time moved from being a medium size, great community to being overwhelmed by people who had no sincere interest in the topic but were happy to karma removed.

The sub became larger than ever by capitalizing on the community that built it but its value about its topic evaporated. Reddit has been making similar moves ever since. Karma-removed dominates pretty much every non-niche sub now.

*The removed that caught the filter refers to the act of getting something in exchange for performing an act eyeroll

Reddit has announced they are making an API access exception for apps devoted to accessibility. They will have to do the same for moderation tools.

That's fair to point out, but it implies the only utility users provide to the site is ad impressions. I see a couple of reasons this is not the case.

Mods make up a tiny portion of users but are disproportionately 3rd party app users and rely on 3rd party tools. But if any meaningful portion of the mod community leaves? The remainder were going to have a much bigger job without the tools. To attempt the bigger job with a smaller workforce is a double-whammy. Their only option will be to focus on their favorite subs and elevate more members to mods. The inevitable result will be experienced mods being far outnumbered by new mods, all of whom will have to stick to tedious tasks for subs to not be overrun by spam and hate speech. It's hard not to predict the same result as what's happened to Twitter's content.

Now consider nsfw content, which has always made up a huge chunk of reddit's traffic. Moderation is even more difficult there to begin with and could easily melt down for the same reasons, even setting aside reddit's growing distaste for it. Reddit is largely young and male and while many users may have no interest in it, the combination of nsfw imgur links going dead, moderation challenges, and the likelihood of reddit cracking down on nsfw is a combination that may cause reddit to be less attractive for many of the young, male userbase to visit.

I think your point still has merit - reddit won't miss many of the users seeking alternatives. I would say reddit's casual "I didn't even know there were 3rd party apps / old.reddit.com" users are also likely to be turned off by the ultimate results of their changes.

What really stands out from reddit's statements is the conspicuous lack of disagreement about the alleged charges to 3rd party apps. They can keep trying to characterize it as fair but the factual numbers in the conversation make it plainly obvious that they are instituting a model that makes it impossible for existing 3rd party apps to survive.

There will either be an hour of downtime to migrate and grow or days of downtime to fizzle.

I love that there's an influx of volunteers, including SQL experts, to mitigate scaling issues for the entire fediverse but those improvements won't be ready in time. Things are overloading already and there's less than a week before things increase 1,000-fold, maybe more.