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Unpopular opinion but I bet Reddit survives this just fine. Those complaining probably aren’t clicking the ads and there are enough people who are addicted to R

Unpopular opinion but I bet Reddit survives this just fine. Those complaining probably aren’t clicking the ads and there are enough people who are addicted to Reddit to replace any mods who leave. The energy is better spent getting Reddit to improve their official app imho

parasti 3y ago
It seems a safe assumption that nobody is clicking the ads.
Beached 3y ago
I think Reddit will continue, but I see it getting worse. moderation with bots already sucks enough, I can't imagine how horrible reddit without bots will be.
gnulinux 3y ago
On a second thought, I completely agree with this. I think people have a lot of hope because reddit sucks but the reality is way too many people are addicted to reddit. I know because I struggle not to check reddit all the time. People will likely need a good replacement for reddit to go down.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Install the Leechblock browser extension. Begin with timeslotting Reddit and then just make it permanent. It is just muscle memory to go there. I did not miss it.
netfortius 3y ago
If the survival is of the Twitter type, then good luck with the IPO
raverbashing 3y ago
But the power users are the ones who feed the community (and do moderation, etc) On a second thought, maybe that's Reddit's idea, just turn it into a GPT generated and Astroturfing maelstrom and see what happens
jacurtis 3y ago
Reddit will survive just fine. But potentially consider this comment from the linked reddit post. It is heartbreaking. > I'm just so tired! That is all! I'm so tired of feeling left behind by people who aren't aware, and who don't care. The choices we have for social media really aren't much, and if they don't care about third party apps, what else are they going to throw away? Will we lose this place too? The decision has many side effects that Reddit is not acknowledging and it is important to recognize the importance that an API can have, particuarly on accessibility. Will reddit survive. Oh yeah, they will be absolutely fine. But their decision does negatively impact the world and that is the important story here.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  You don’t need an api to be accessible, hence why pressure should be put on Reddit to make their app and site accessible to begin with. I do feel for the poster, though.
  - over_bridge 3y ago
    I think its just frustrating to see the same pattern over and over. Start with a user centric experience, capture a large market, progressively worsen experience to make it more appealing to investors (they love bland and stale apparently), then the website dies a slow death and becomes hated by its former advocates. But hey its fine because the cycle is starting again and there's a shiny new thing focused on its users we can all move to.
    - oblio 3y ago
      https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
yakkityyak 3y ago
I’m not so sure. Non ad-clicking/viewing users still generate a lot of content. Official apps always struggle to balance shoving ads in your face and being an actually nice to use app.
shmatt 3y ago
No way these apps actually shut down An app like Apollo - which is so important Apple is featuring front and center at their biggest announcement of the decade, won't attempt to add some caching, poll less for push notifications, and/or charge $5/month, before shutting things down for good? All of these app developers are fear mongering, and hiding their true plans, im 100% sure of this At the minimum they could sell to someone else for many millions of dollars, and they'll do the things I described
- alpaca128 3y ago
  > An app like Apollo - which is so important Apple is featuring front and center Being featured by Apple doesn't pay the bills and Reddit obviously doesn't listen. > won't attempt to add some caching, poll less for push notifications The Apollo developer has repeatedly asked Reddit to offer a more efficient method of getting notifications that doesn't require polling. The app backend already uses caching and only a small fraction of the allowed request budget. Reddit doesn't care. > and/or charge $5/month $5/month are not enough, in case you didn't notice Reddit's new pricing is insane. Also according to the developer about 10% of users pay the monthly premium subscription. Make it mandatory and most users will be gone. > At the minimum they could sell to someone else for many millions of dollars, and they'll do the things I described Even if the things you described weren't already long implemented, they don't change the prices which are simply too high for third-party apps to survive.
- skinnymuch 3y ago
  That’s not how supply and demand work. Taxi medallions tanked in value. Similarly now that the value of any Reddit API based product has tanked…they won’t be worth the same. Not that many of the apps were ever going to be sold for many millions of dollars.
ShakataGaNai 3y ago
It will survive, but in what manner? Reddit is currently deeply integrated into the cultural zeitgeist. Much in the way that Digg used to be the discovery mechanism for the forefront of internet culture. Then v4 hit and everyone fled to reddit. Yes, Digg is still there but it's not the Digg of pre-2010. Twitter is still around post-Elon, but with a lot less relevance and lot fewer legitimate users. Reddit will still be here in a year, no matter what. But it may look very different than how it looks today.
- onionisafruit 3y ago
  Is Twitter less relevant? I'm not an active user, but I haven't seen a decrease in links to tweets over the past few months.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Yes. A large number of the people I followed who actually posted interesting content (as opposed to bots retweeting press releases) either greatly curtailed posting, or quit all together. I followed them out the door.
    - onionisafruit 3y ago
      I keep seeing people say this, and I expect to see a decrease in the number of tweets I see linked from the subreddits I follow. But the tweets keep coming. Maybe it's subject matter. I primarily see tweets in sports-related subreddits, so for all I know athletes and sports writers could be the only people still using twitter.
      - TylerE 3y ago
        Most of the sports accounts would fall under "Retweeting press releases". I'm talking about people I followed, many of whom were historians so would often publish original analysis, pictures they'd personally combed the archives for and digitized, that sort of thing. Very much NOT pop culture/politics/etc.
    - 3y ago
websap 3y ago
Yup, this is the Silicon Valley model. Burn and churn people.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
History serves you as correct. Though, I think the energy is more properly spent weaning off of Reddit and fostering a new community. I've seen feature requests from almost a decade ago being promised and there's not even a shred of progress on them. At that point, why not make it yourself? 100k people leaving reddit won't kill reddit, but 100k people can definitely form it's own active community. That many more people than most reddit alternatives as of now.
occz 3y ago
Time will tell. I'd bet that a sizable amount of people posting the content that actually drives engagement with the website cares about this change, and I think that there's not as many people excited to do unpaid labour in the form of modding as you may think.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deckard1 3y ago
Digg is still around. So is Slashdot. For some definition of "still around." > The energy is better spent getting Reddit to improve their official app imho The market forces of a site like Reddit (or most web sites, frankly) are fundamentally against accessibility. The mobile web site nags me constantly with a banner popup to install their native app. How does one even talk about accessibility in the presence of dark patterns that make a site inaccessible to even those without the need for a11y? If I'm being blunt, a11y is nothing more than a sledge hammer that devs use to bash other devs over the head with. A lot of "thou shall nots" with not a whole lot of actual user testing. Sprinkling aria attributes and "semantic" tags all over your DOM doesn't make your site accessible. Not when you're also putting in ads, carousels, and various other things that go completely against it.
- UberFly 3y ago
  Slashdot should be a harbinger to Reddit. Community can just leave. Reddit is happily shutting out very active partners instead of working with them.
digging 3y ago
It will survive, but the quality of conversation will continue to degrade. It will gain users, but they will be less productive and less engaged. But they will also see more ads.
zouhair 3y ago
How can Reddit survive without mods? Reddit will start hiring mods? Most of the content on Reddit is made by a minority of hardcore users, most of them are angry now. You could argue Digg is still alive right now, I won't call it that though.
iLoveOncall 3y ago
> Those complaining probably aren’t clicking the ads The ONLY real reason people are complaining is because using the official app means seing ads. All the arguments thrown around there are whataboutisms to try to justify the fact that they want to keep profiteering off of Reddit, that's it.
- addandsubtract 3y ago
  It's not about the ads. I wouldn't mind seeing ads in my third party app of choice if it kept reddit "free". The problem is, the official app is horrendous; unusably bad. It's equivalent to comparing the web redesign with old.reddit.
  - iLoveOncall 3y ago
    I use old.reddit.com but I also use the official app, I don't see anything wrong with it. I've asked multiple times already people to point out specific issues with the app and nobody did beside "iT's AwFuL".
    - pfg_ 3y ago
      Specific issues from when I used it for a bit to create image posts a year ago: - On my screen size, it was incredibly hard to navigate the profile. The profile header covered over half the screen - Notifications were often bugged - You can only have one thing open at once - no way to quickly toggle between two pages. Apollo at least has four buttons in the bottom you can use to go to seperate pages - It was extremely laggy - It sends notifications by default for random junk ("your post got one upvote!!!" "check out this trending subreddit;!!!") and at least once there was a server bug where it ignored me having turned those off and sent marketing notifications anyway The real issue for me is it just feels bad to use. Everything lags, it constantly loses my place, ... new.reddit was nice, I was using it back in the beta period. But it's so slow. It's barely usable. Opening a reddit thread from google if I'm not signed in shows like three comments and a bunch of random unrelated junk. Opening new reddit when I am signed in just feels slow. Every action pauses for a moment to do a bunch of react rerenders. I don't know if they've fixed it by now but back two years ago it was doing react rerenders of practically the whole page while moving the mouse. Using the mobile app feels similarly bad to using new.reddit
jjcon 3y ago
Unpopular opinion but Reddit died a long time ago - the world moved to discord for real community interactions and now all that is left is a 24/7 monetized outrage stream fed by bots, shills and has-beens.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Funny thing is that discord is also killing itself. They are not really listening to community. Just look at feedback that is given on their username changes. I wonder how will they kill themselves eventually. As surely that is coming too.
- skinnymuch 3y ago
  I’m in tons of discords. I finally moved most of them into folders I rarely check. I’ve never been able to get into Discord. Either servers are too active or too inactive. I’m bombarded with Discord invites etc because of the stuff I’m interested in so I know that’s where stuff is now too.
- novok 3y ago
  IMO discords insistence on constant relogins and phone numbers for most things makes it not work well for many, including those who cannot give phone numbers for privacy or other reasons. The forum format has a lot of advantages.

parasti 3y ago

It seems a safe assumption that nobody is clicking the ads.

Beached 3y ago

I think Reddit will continue, but I see it getting worse. moderation with bots already sucks enough, I can't imagine how horrible reddit without bots will be.

gnulinux 3y ago

On a second thought, I completely agree with this. I think people have a lot of hope because reddit sucks but the reality is way too many people are addicted to reddit. I know because I struggle not to check reddit all the time. People will likely need a good replacement for reddit to go down.

rightbyte 3y ago
Install the Leechblock browser extension. Begin with timeslotting Reddit and then just make it permanent. It is just muscle memory to go there. I did not miss it.

netfortius 3y ago

If the survival is of the Twitter type, then good luck with the IPO

raverbashing 3y ago

But the power users are the ones who feed the community (and do moderation, etc) On a second thought, maybe that's Reddit's idea, just turn it into a GPT generated and Astroturfing maelstrom and see what happens

jacurtis 3y ago

Reddit will survive just fine. But potentially consider this comment from the linked reddit post. It is heartbreaking. > I'm just so tired! That is all! I'm so tired of feeling left behind by people who aren't aware, and who don't care. The choices we have for social media really aren't much, and if they don't care about third party apps, what else are they going to throw away? Will we lose this place too? The decision has many side effects that Reddit is not acknowledging and it is important to recognize the importance that an API can have, particuarly on accessibility. Will reddit survive. Oh yeah, they will be absolutely fine. But their decision does negatively impact the world and that is the important story here.

endisneigh 3y ago
You don’t need an api to be accessible, hence why pressure should be put on Reddit to make their app and site accessible to begin with. I do feel for the poster, though.
- over_bridge 3y ago
  I think its just frustrating to see the same pattern over and over. Start with a user centric experience, capture a large market, progressively worsen experience to make it more appealing to investors (they love bland and stale apparently), then the website dies a slow death and becomes hated by its former advocates. But hey its fine because the cycle is starting again and there's a shiny new thing focused on its users we can all move to.
  - oblio 3y ago
    https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

yakkityyak 3y ago

I’m not so sure. Non ad-clicking/viewing users still generate a lot of content. Official apps always struggle to balance shoving ads in your face and being an actually nice to use app.

shmatt 3y ago

No way these apps actually shut down An app like Apollo - which is so important Apple is featuring front and center at their biggest announcement of the decade, won't attempt to add some caching, poll less for push notifications, and/or charge $5/month, before shutting things down for good? All of these app developers are fear mongering, and hiding their true plans, im 100% sure of this At the minimum they could sell to someone else for many millions of dollars, and they'll do the things I described

alpaca128 3y ago
> An app like Apollo - which is so important Apple is featuring front and center Being featured by Apple doesn't pay the bills and Reddit obviously doesn't listen. > won't attempt to add some caching, poll less for push notifications The Apollo developer has repeatedly asked Reddit to offer a more efficient method of getting notifications that doesn't require polling. The app backend already uses caching and only a small fraction of the allowed request budget. Reddit doesn't care. > and/or charge $5/month $5/month are not enough, in case you didn't notice Reddit's new pricing is insane. Also according to the developer about 10% of users pay the monthly premium subscription. Make it mandatory and most users will be gone. > At the minimum they could sell to someone else for many millions of dollars, and they'll do the things I described Even if the things you described weren't already long implemented, they don't change the prices which are simply too high for third-party apps to survive.
skinnymuch 3y ago
That’s not how supply and demand work. Taxi medallions tanked in value. Similarly now that the value of any Reddit API based product has tanked…they won’t be worth the same. Not that many of the apps were ever going to be sold for many millions of dollars.

ShakataGaNai 3y ago

It will survive, but in what manner? Reddit is currently deeply integrated into the cultural zeitgeist. Much in the way that Digg used to be the discovery mechanism for the forefront of internet culture. Then v4 hit and everyone fled to reddit. Yes, Digg is still there but it's not the Digg of pre-2010. Twitter is still around post-Elon, but with a lot less relevance and lot fewer legitimate users. Reddit will still be here in a year, no matter what. But it may look very different than how it looks today.

onionisafruit 3y ago
Is Twitter less relevant? I'm not an active user, but I haven't seen a decrease in links to tweets over the past few months.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Yes. A large number of the people I followed who actually posted interesting content (as opposed to bots retweeting press releases) either greatly curtailed posting, or quit all together. I followed them out the door.
  - onionisafruit 3y ago
    I keep seeing people say this, and I expect to see a decrease in the number of tweets I see linked from the subreddits I follow. But the tweets keep coming. Maybe it's subject matter. I primarily see tweets in sports-related subreddits, so for all I know athletes and sports writers could be the only people still using twitter.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Most of the sports accounts would fall under "Retweeting press releases". I'm talking about people I followed, many of whom were historians so would often publish original analysis, pictures they'd personally combed the archives for and digitized, that sort of thing. Very much NOT pop culture/politics/etc.
  - 3y ago

websap 3y ago

Yup, this is the Silicon Valley model. Burn and churn people.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

History serves you as correct. Though, I think the energy is more properly spent weaning off of Reddit and fostering a new community. I've seen feature requests from almost a decade ago being promised and there's not even a shred of progress on them. At that point, why not make it yourself? 100k people leaving reddit won't kill reddit, but 100k people can definitely form it's own active community. That many more people than most reddit alternatives as of now.

occz 3y ago

Time will tell. I'd bet that a sizable amount of people posting the content that actually drives engagement with the website cares about this change, and I think that there's not as many people excited to do unpaid labour in the form of modding as you may think.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deckard1 3y ago

Digg is still around. So is Slashdot. For some definition of "still around." > The energy is better spent getting Reddit to improve their official app imho The market forces of a site like Reddit (or most web sites, frankly) are fundamentally against accessibility. The mobile web site nags me constantly with a banner popup to install their native app. How does one even talk about accessibility in the presence of dark patterns that make a site inaccessible to even those without the need for a11y? If I'm being blunt, a11y is nothing more than a sledge hammer that devs use to bash other devs over the head with. A lot of "thou shall nots" with not a whole lot of actual user testing. Sprinkling aria attributes and "semantic" tags all over your DOM doesn't make your site accessible. Not when you're also putting in ads, carousels, and various other things that go completely against it.

UberFly 3y ago
Slashdot should be a harbinger to Reddit. Community can just leave. Reddit is happily shutting out very active partners instead of working with them.

digging 3y ago

It will survive, but the quality of conversation will continue to degrade. It will gain users, but they will be less productive and less engaged. But they will also see more ads.

zouhair 3y ago

How can Reddit survive without mods? Reddit will start hiring mods? Most of the content on Reddit is made by a minority of hardcore users, most of them are angry now. You could argue Digg is still alive right now, I won't call it that though.

iLoveOncall 3y ago

> Those complaining probably aren’t clicking the ads The ONLY real reason people are complaining is because using the official app means seing ads. All the arguments thrown around there are whataboutisms to try to justify the fact that they want to keep profiteering off of Reddit, that's it.

addandsubtract 3y ago
It's not about the ads. I wouldn't mind seeing ads in my third party app of choice if it kept reddit "free". The problem is, the official app is horrendous; unusably bad. It's equivalent to comparing the web redesign with old.reddit.
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  I use old.reddit.com but I also use the official app, I don't see anything wrong with it. I've asked multiple times already people to point out specific issues with the app and nobody did beside "iT's AwFuL".
  - pfg_ 3y ago
    Specific issues from when I used it for a bit to create image posts a year ago: - On my screen size, it was incredibly hard to navigate the profile. The profile header covered over half the screen - Notifications were often bugged - You can only have one thing open at once - no way to quickly toggle between two pages. Apollo at least has four buttons in the bottom you can use to go to seperate pages - It was extremely laggy - It sends notifications by default for random junk ("your post got one upvote!!!" "check out this trending subreddit;!!!") and at least once there was a server bug where it ignored me having turned those off and sent marketing notifications anyway The real issue for me is it just feels bad to use. Everything lags, it constantly loses my place, ... new.reddit was nice, I was using it back in the beta period. But it's so slow. It's barely usable. Opening a reddit thread from google if I'm not signed in shows like three comments and a bunch of random unrelated junk. Opening new reddit when I am signed in just feels slow. Every action pauses for a moment to do a bunch of react rerenders. I don't know if they've fixed it by now but back two years ago it was doing react rerenders of practically the whole page while moving the mouse. Using the mobile app feels similarly bad to using new.reddit

jjcon 3y ago

Unpopular opinion but Reddit died a long time ago - the world moved to discord for real community interactions and now all that is left is a 24/7 monetized outrage stream fed by bots, shills and has-beens.

Ekaros 3y ago
Funny thing is that discord is also killing itself. They are not really listening to community. Just look at feedback that is given on their username changes. I wonder how will they kill themselves eventually. As surely that is coming too.
skinnymuch 3y ago
I’m in tons of discords. I finally moved most of them into folders I rarely check. I’ve never been able to get into Discord. Either servers are too active or too inactive. I’m bombarded with Discord invites etc because of the stuff I’m interested in so I know that’s where stuff is now too.
novok 3y ago
IMO discords insistence on constant relogins and phone numbers for most things makes it not work well for many, including those who cannot give phone numbers for privacy or other reasons. The forum format has a lot of advantages.