Jingszo !

290 readers

41 users here now

Strange tales ,bizarre stories ,weird publications ,myths ,legends and folklore

Fact or Fiction ? You Decide

Mythology

Archaeology

Cryptozoology

Extraterrestrial Life

UFO's

The Cosmos

History

Paranormal

In fact anything amusing, curious ,interesting, weird ,strange or bizarre

Rules : Be nice and follow the rules

[](https://mastodon.world/about

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

236

Goodbye, Reddit: How the Internet’s Front Page Is Eating Itself (joanwestenberg.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I think a sustainable growth pattern that could help keep this from happening here is one where connected subnetworks of Lemmy servers grow up to a certain point and then eventually split into distinct networks.

There's a critical mass required before it's worth corporate and nation-state troll attention. If networks split off from each other before that mass is reached, then they might never get much attention.

Or if they split a bit after that mass is reached, maybe they waste a bunch of resources and never get a good return on that investment and then the critical mass goes up a bit because there's more risk involved. Plus seeing that shit might make people more receptive of the idea of a split because some still have the idea that more popular = better.

That said, I do see that splitting a network like that won't be easy to do in a way that doesn't hurt communities. I'm also not sure how to handle niche communities, other than pointing out that they existed before Reddit was a thing, they weren't just all concentrated on one website or platform.