If you haven't been paying attention to the dumpsterfire that is Reddit's new changes, you are probably wondering why the larger pony subreddits are currently privated and closed off. Last week the CEO of Reddit came out and said that they'd start charging for usage of their API, similar to what Twitter is doing under Elon Musk. Like Twitter, the cost is essentially a death sentence for anyone using 3rd party apps (EQD included, where I have to do anything Twitter related by hand now that our compilers won't work with Twitter). The current Reddit app is a low-feature, ad filled piled of junk, so this turned out to effect a large part of the userbase.
In response to this, hundreds of large subreddits have gone dark for two days including /r/mylittlepony and /r/MLPLounge. The plan is to return on the 15th after they've spread awareness at this change.
Obviously, Reddit is a company and needs to make money, but Redditors who have budgeted out why this change was made (while comparing it to sites like Imgur) have come to the conclusion that this is simply a way to destroy 3rd party apps and get everyone using the in-house Reddit one, with a side hustle of monetizing companies like OpenAI using it to build their LLM's. The same style of API usage over on Imgur is pennies compared to the millions it would take to run with Reddits new nonsense.
It's no secret that Reddit is planning on going public with an IPO soon. This means they will be even more beholden to investors who will expect them to join every other public company out there in the never-ending cycle of endless growth. When you bring on public money, it means you plan to expand in some way. The goal shifts from simply existing and turning a profit to ballooning
into an entity that can make as much money as possible. This is pretty
much always anti-consumer in some way, which worries most users of the site who are already largely against anything corporation related.
Many question why this is even a thing at all. Reddit was basically perfection as far back as 10 years ago. Most changes as Reddit shifts from being a community driven site to a profitable business have been largely met with a negative response. The new UI was a downgrade (I still use old reddit outside mobile), there are very few, if any new features that make anything better, and they don't seem to have any solution at all for the rise in bots shilling content and inflating upvotes. I swear every year they do something silly that causes the community to say they are the next Digg; A site that Reddit essentially destroyed once Digg started going the corporate route.
Where will this lead in the end? Is Reddit too big to fail? Right now there really isn't a good alternative to it at all. Even at its absolute peak, Digg's userbase compared to what Reddit has now was basically microscopic. Even when it comes to searching for a solution to something, slapping "Reddit" on the end of the Google search will always give you better results than the Garbage SEO sites they serve up now days.
We will have to see what the leadership does in the next few days. They did an AMA that only pissed people off more a few days ago, so they are clearly listening. Will they just wait this out and let the hungry masses move on to something else in a week? Or will the protests continue afterward, maybe with a site-wide stopping of moderation entirely to really make the suits sweat when the free labor isn't available?
Either way, it will be fascinating to watch. If it does end up murdering the site, I'll be over here celebrating at my sudden surge in free time since I waste way too much time on it.
