Reddit’s crisis is a warning for all social platforms: when you trade community for profits, everyone loses. Will Reddit fix its mes...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19466667

Money, Mods, and Mayhem

The Turning Point

In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it’s a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.

The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn’t mince words: “Reddit’s API changes are not just unfair, they’re unsustainable for third-party apps.”

Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.

The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.

One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”

  • Blaster M@lemmy.worldEnglish
    127·
    12 days ago

    Best thing to ever happen on reddit is the guy that posted on askreddit how to set the site language back to English because he accidentally set it to Spanish… and everyone posted their replies only in Spanish.

    That was peak reddit.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    79·
    12 days ago

    I think that this article is accurate and sensible.

    There’s a point that I’d like to add, that the author doesn’t mention: user trust.

    The main value of an online platform is the user trust, as it dictates the users’ willingness to help building it instead of vandalising it. In Reddit’s case it means people writing well-thought posts, moderating communities, reporting content, using the voting system, etc.

    And user trust is violated every time that a platform takes user-hostile decisions. Like Reddit has been taking for almost a decade; with 2023’s APIcalypse being a big example of that, but only one among many.

    And when user trust is violated, it’s almost impossible to come back. John Bull explains this well, with the Trust Thermocline; but the basic idea is that those violations pile up invisibly upon a certain point, when they suddenly become a big deal and the platform bleeds users like there’s no tomorrow. And once it reaches that point it’s practically impossible to come back.

    So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.

    • Blaze@feddit.orgEnglish
      31·
      12 days ago

      So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.

      Well put

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          11 days ago

          And AI. AI is a wet dream to a company like Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. They can keep the appearance of an active and popular site indefinitely, stealing money from advertisers years before they catch on.

    • Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world
      14·
      12 days ago

      I can’t pinpoint when Reddit died in my eyes. But I can say the long road to where it is today started with Reddit Gold.

      Reddit Gold was a minor change that didn’t do much of anything besides offer a way to collect money directly from the user base. But it was the start of monetizing the site and every decision by Reddit management after that point furthered that monetization at the expense of everything else.

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
        15·
        12 days ago

        I can pinpoint the exact moment: When the admins actively gave t_d a full pass on anything they wanted to do in 2016.

        That single act drove away more users than any previous exodus.

        • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
          5·
          11 days ago

          There were even earlier signs of Reddit caring more about profit than the best interests of the users.

          2014: buying and crippling Alien Blue. Reddit could’ve built its own official app and users would have two to choose from; or it could have bought and improved Alien Blue. By doing neither, Reddit showed complete disdain towards user experience.

          2015: Reddit fired Victoria Taylor. Except that Taylor did an essential job there, as she was a bridge between Reddit Inc. and mod teams; she was for example the one verifying people for Ask me Anything (back then it was a big deal).

          You probably could find even more signs of that, if digging further. And while neither is as serious as the way that Reddit handled T_D, both already show that it was putting revenue over users.

        • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
          4·
          12 days ago

          There were a few around that same timer period. IIRC, that’s also about when the whole /r/jailbait controversy happened, and the site suddenly had a really bad reputation among non-users. Like before it had been seen as a weird site, but then it was suddenly seen as outright predatory. Users suddenly didn’t want to associate with the site. Then the t_d stuff happened, which just compounded the issue of users not wanting to associate with the site due to the bad reputation.

      • gerbler@lemmy.world
        15·
        12 days ago

        I didn’t mind Reddit gold as a method of paying for upkeep on an ostensibly free site. If well-off Redditors wanted to chip in to help with maintenance resulting in fewer or less intrusive ads then that’s grand.

        The point when they started losing me was when the Reddit front page modernised into the Instagram feed looking abomination it is today and when they shifted from Reddit gold to the silver diamond thing they have now. No I don’t want to make an avatar. No I don’t want to follow users or have them follow me.

        It started as the last example of old social media like forums and got metric’d into this half-formed freak of a site that seems to actively resent the users that build and maintain their entire platform.

        • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
          4·
          11 days ago

          Hell, I chipped in for reddit gold. I’m not well off, I just used the platform loads and didn’t mind paying a little for something I enjoyed. Like so many others, my goodwill was pissed on, though, and I am just another paying customer that they lost. The API thing was the final nail in the coffin for me.

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          11 days ago

          Spez and his executives do resent the users. He’s on record making statements which make it clear that he sees the user’s resistance to monetization as a roadblock between him and his money. The fact that people built all of the content on the entire site for free, doesn’t matter to him. He actively hates them for not behaving in a way that gets him more money.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        6·
        11 days ago

        Reddit Gold is a great example IMO.

        If Reddit’s goal was to serve users, instead of profit, it might’ve still implemented Reddit Gold. A site doesn’t run for free, and having another source of income could help to serve users better.

        However then the nature of Reddit Gold would be completely different:

        • There wouldn’t be a “gilded” sorting, as it enables astroturfers to exchange money for visibility.
        • There wouldn’t be microtransaction mechanics associated with it, such as packs of “X+Y coins” associated with broken values in real money (so you need to pull out a calculator to know which one has the cheapest price).
        • Even if platinum might’ve appeared, silver wouldn’t. Because the userbase was already joking about a “Reddit silver” award; so creating a Reddit silver was basically “nice meme you have there, it’s now my source of profit, sucker”.
        • It wouldn’t change every five minutes as they were trying to find the best way to capitalise on it. “Gold! Awards! Coins! Back to gold! Rewards system!”
        • They would’ve asked the users on potential ways to finance the site without contradicting its values.
    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      10 days ago

      Very well said, and it was the trust violation which finally pushed me off of Facebook and Reddit. Reddit as we know it is dead, it’s obvious to anyone who used to use it. But AI is here, and it’s going to continue pumping semi-believable posts and replies for years, making it look as if the site is still booming. But the posts are vapid, devoid of soul, and almost always written with an ulterior motive to sell something or some idea. The Dead Internet is here.

    • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
      6·
      11 days ago

      Yeah that’s my main problem with the article, it argues “as if” it was all but inevitable. As if something could be done. As soon as you have for profit motivation of social media, it’s all but inevitable that enshittification ensues. That obscures the real problem.

      You want a website that is run non-profit for users and somewhat democratically. But they shy away from that conclusion.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        7·
        11 days ago

        Reddit could’ve become a non-profit for users, financed by them. So the outcome was avoidable, at least years and years in the past.

        But for that Pigboy and kn0thing would need to give up the pretension of drinking champagne in an IPO. kn0thing gave up too late; Pigboy never did.

        A good “dividing line” where the outcome became fixed was the introduction of Reddit Gold.

      • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
        3·
        11 days ago

        Also, I think the unaccountable moderators really are a problem. You end up with major subs like r/politics or /worldnews getting camped by people who just happened to get there first, and then being forever unaccountable for bias or stupidity. And then you get sitewide bans if you subvert the bans from the tinpot dictators camping on what should be community-led spaces.

        • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
          4·
          11 days ago

          Yeah. Worst offender is r/climatechange which is still moderated by a “both sides” climate skeptic. It’s practically aiding genocide / omnicide.
          Unfortunately lemmy doesn’t have good solution to fracturing and default instances either.

  • gencha@lemm.ee
    41·
    11 days ago

    I’m calling bullshit on any user count they release. The site was filled with bots even when I still used it. People kept complaining about “karma farmers” as if there were users who repost popular content. It has always been largely Reddit’s own bots too keep new users entertained and recycle popular content so that it reaches as many users as possible. They turned this up to 11 before going public.

    Now that they no longer provide an API, they are free to make up any fake metric they want to try to pump up their worthless stock.

    • Blaze@feddit.orgEnglish
      7·
      11 days ago

      I’m very doubtful too. I look at “active users” stats, and for every sub at every time it never goes above a few hundreds.

      The millions subs numbers are bs

  • Don_Dickle@lemmy.world
    35·
    12 days ago

    Fuck reddit …fuck the mods who abuse their power. Fuck the bots. Fuck the corporate greed bs. The admins have always been cool to me until I was perma ban. But kind of seem like nice folks.

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 days ago

      Same. I used reddit since 2008. I’ve had accounts with multiple posts to /bestof, with over 100k karma get banned. The things I’ve been banned for have always been trivial “zero tolerance policy” violations that remind me of the zero tolerance, zero thought policies you used to (still do?) see in American high schools. At least when I was in school, my school had a zero-tolerance policy for violence. A bully could attack a victim and both of them would be suspended for fighting. The administrators didn’t want to bother figuring out who was at fault, so they just punished victim and perpetrator equally.

      On different accounts, I was banned from some of the largest subreddits that I had years of history of posting very high quality and well-regarded comments in. The biggest account I ever had was under the username “isleepinahammock.” You can still find links to now-deleted bestof posts through google. The things I’ve been banned from the big subreddits for include:

      1. On January 6th, as the capital was actively being breached, wondering aloud why this invasion wasn’t being responded to with soldiers and automatic weapons. (Historically how such mobs trying to overthrow governments are always dealt with. Later we learned that the reason those soldiers weren’t present was because Trump deliberately left the place unguarded.)

      2. As SCOTUS was considering its ruling on presidential immunity, stating that if SCOTUS rules the president has complete immunity and effectively be a dictator, Biden should simply drone strike Supreme Court justices until the ruling is reversed. (Later news articles and opinion pieces proposing this exact kind of thing were openly promoted to the top of r/politics.)

      3. Flippantly telling an overt bigot, commenting in one of the LGBT subreddits, to “go die in a fire.”

      4. Making pro-Palestinian comments in r/worldnews.

      Never did I ever threaten anyone. Never did I propose vigilante justice on anyone. Any mentions of violence were either obviously flippant remarks or suggestions of lawful and just use of government authority. But these comments violated the zero tolerance, zero thought policies of the major subreddits. I received bogus site site suspensions for these, which I ignored with alt accounts. Eventually I received a total IP ban for ban evasion.

      I realize that reddit likes to claim to have a neutral hand. They say that moderators should be able to operate their subs as they please. But these major community subs aren’t some niche community. If you want to create r/rightwingworldnews, go ahead, but the main worldnews section for the biggest discussion site on the net should not be run by a bunch of radical Israeli supremacists. r/politics, the main political discussion forum, should not apply a harsher standard to their commenters than they do the standards they apply to the very stories they feature. And there should be a meaningful appeals process to actually get access restored to individual subreddits and the site as a whole.

      If they actually cared about quality content, they would do this. But this takes care and thought. And if all you’re trying to do is juice ad revenue, your number one priority is to make the site as clean and sanitary as possible. If all you care about is maxing ad revenue, then having a zero-tolerance, zero-thought policy of “any mention of an act of violence in any context = ban,” makes sense. Even though in some cases, such a nation’s capital literally being stormed by an invading rebel army, violence IS the correct response.

      I don’t know if you saw images of what the capital looked like a few weeks after January 6th on Biden’s actual inauguration day, but the capital was a damn fortress. If those fuckers had tried to storm the capital again on that day, it would have been a blood bath. And you know what? I would absolutely support the military opening up machine guns on any violent mob trying to overthrow our democracy. The moment you choose violence, you deserve to be responded to in turn with violence. You do that? Well you’ve made your choice. I have no sympathy for you. And zero-tolerance, zero-thought moderation policies prevent us from talking about these harsh realities. Sometimes violence IS the answer. Sometimes democracy DOES need to be defended with force. But we cannot discuss these harsh realities on the main political page of the biggest discussion site on the net, just to keep the place clean for advertisers.

      Oh, and one more reason I was once banned from r/politics? Someone posted a doomer comment saying something to the effect of, “how can we possibly deal with MAGA terrorists? What if they lose the next election and just start an open rebellion? It’s hopeless! We might as well give up now.” I responded with the obvious and correct statement. Something to the effect of, “what do we do if armed revolutionaries enter open rebellion against the government? We shoot them. We send in the military and we shoot them. That is what you are SUPPOSED to do to people who take up arms against a just and legitimately elected government. It’s that whole ‘enemies foreign and domestic’ thing that soldiers swear to enforce.” I was literally banned for suggesting the very thing every US soldier swears an oath to do if necessary.

  • solsangraal@lemmy.zipEnglish
    31·
    12 days ago

    they’ll be fine. as evidenced by twitter, there is absolutely no amount of enshittification that will make some people leave

  • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    12 days ago

    I remember when they kicked mods off their platform when the subreddits went private on the API retaliation. Now quite a few are on here. Meanwhile, some of those subreddits are still having issues moderating.

    Personally I think mods should be rotated once in a while by the community instead of giving power to them indefinitely on communities. But reddit really messed up there. Some mods are mods of hundreds of subreddits which is silly and unsustainable.

    • Altima NEO@lemmy.zipEnglish
      9·
      12 days ago

      It’s such a mess. I mean spez is an ass, but some of those career mods were just as bad. Moderating hundreds of subs because they enjoy the power. And you can tell that was the case when they’d harass random people because they did some little thing that upset them.

      • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        12 days ago

        Yep. If they were periodically replaced, then the communities might have a better mod (or at least a less burnt out one).

  • Optional@lemmy.world
    14·
    12 days ago

    Will Reddit seize this opportunity? Or will it continue down its current path of self-destruction?

    HAHAhahahaha

  • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
    13·
    11 days ago

    Reddit certainly had issues prior to the 2023 API change, but that really was a pivotal moment for sure. Overnight we lost apps we loved and people who made the platform what it is abandoned it or worse - were forced out. Good content creators fled, resulting in a lot less quality content.

    And we all know how the mods Reddit appointed handled things. Now, I’m not saying they’re ALL nazi’s, but there’s folks running the show who would fit in perfectly with the ‘just following orders’ mindset…

    The platform needs to die, the stock needs to tank and the people involved need to be drummed out of the business entirely.

  • theonetruedroid@lemmy.world
    9·
    12 days ago

    I’m still running Sync for Reddit using a patch from Vanced. I don’t know why I even bother. That site has gone so far downhill from 10-15 years ago. People used to get flamed for not reading an article or using improper grammar. Comments were, more often than note, well thought out and articulate. Now, the site is a cesspool or memes and idiocracy.

    • Brokkr@lemmy.world
      9·
      12 days ago

      You want flaming for improper grammar, you have 2 flagrant violations in this post which absolutely does not detract from your message. You better continue going about your day not being bothered by this at all. Geez!

      (I’m sure I made mistakes here too, go ahead)

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
    5·
    12 days ago

    What trips me out is that somehow they still have the video of the dude that somehow survived after blowing his own face off with a shotgun. It’s fucked up, sad and sickening.

    Honestly I would have just put him out of his misery if I had found him like that. And no, I will not be linking that video here or anywhere for that matter, it’s pure nightmare fuel.

      • over_clox@lemmy.world
        6·
        12 days ago

        The point is that once they went public, they said they were gonna be removing certain horrible communities, and the particular community that particular video is on would have been like at the top of the list if I was in charge of Reddit.

        But honestly I don’t give a flying fuck.

  • Alpha71@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    11 days ago

    For a site that says it doesn’t care about reddit, there sure are alot of posts about it.