I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
I said I’d leave when they did that, and I did. Been here ever since. I think a bunch of people did the same.
There’s a kinda sunk cost thingy to leaving Reddit, especially when you’ve been there like ten years and have loads of karma and awards and stuff. But really none of that means anything and it’s not hard to walk away from.
Subreddits that refused where to be taken over by reddit themselves, there was no way to win and remain there.
The only appropriate answer was to leave and many people did. What remains there is people who never cared and llm bot accounts to boost perceived value.
I’m over here now. I don’t care what happens there.
They had their 2 day shutdown in protest and then came back like nothing happened. Why would reddit bother listening to them?
I stayed on reddit for a year or so after and there was an extremely noticeable decline in quality. A load of massive subreddits completely died after the mods were booted off, and replaced with worse ones.
Well Reddit requires a login to view any content now, old reddit included
Prefer Lemmy
It served the same purpose every protest has for the last 2 decades, i.e. made the protesters feel so good about themselves for an hour.
Well we’re here, aren’t we?
This is what made me switch to Lemmy. The official app just wasn’t mature enough on Android at the time and I didn’t like the principle of it. So here I am 3 years later.
I mean…my handle here is proof enough what happened.
I used Narwhal, IIRC Reddit made it official and then killed it when they started their own app, I bought Apollo because good app and dev, then reddit killed that one too. Along with all the other BS they did, that was the final straw. Been here ever since.
Genuinely reddit got a wholelot worse because of this and multiple other actions.
The quality of user dropped as the content became social media. You were less likely to get informative comments or even informed comments.
A lot of users jumped ship to fedi or gave up altogether. These older users would have been part of the selling point.
Popular feeds. Difficulty accessing r/all. Algorithmic feeds.
I actually did make an acount and revaanced the app to finish out a project I was getting advice from reddit on. The app sucks. Old was perfect. The app was showing days old stories on major subreddits, defaulting to “best” or “hot” but giving shit.
I remember when Victoria got fucked over and that was the highlight of the over commercialisation.
Do not use the app it sucks so much.
Everyone is saying people folded, but what I recall happening was Reddit gave an ultimatum. “Open your subreddit back up or we will replace the mods”. And that’s exactly what they did. Then after killing third party apps they enshittified everything in the web/mobile web version too to try and force people to the app. They’ve even removed r/all recently.
Three things happened:
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RedReader did get a free api key for being accessible for screen readers. All the other third party apps got left in the dust.
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The people who were seriously mad came here. Lemmy was still a bit of a ghost town before these protests, and it was around this time that it gained enough traction to be a viable platform imo.
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The people that didn’t leave got waited out by reddit and went back.
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