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.”

  • forgotmylastusername
    421·
    3 months ago

    Reddit’s strength has always been its community

    There’s something nobody talks about much when it comes to reddit. It’s that the internet has moved past community. It now revolves around monetized “influencers”. Nobody fosters community for the sake of it anymore.

    Reddit has outlived its time. It’s apparent they’ve been trying to evolve with the times but the platform isn’t fundamentally geared towards this coporatized era of the internet. They’ve been trying to pivot the platform into social media style. Users now have profiles with avatars, bio text, followers/subscribers. There’s now a social graph. The big picture with these things is they’re trying to make it into a corporatized social platform like all the rest.

    The problem isn’t reddit itself. It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.

    • niktemadur@lemmy.world
      8·
      3 months ago

      Maybe the problem is that they’re all trying to be the same goddamned thing, like how there are 15 or more goddamned hamburger chains.

      “We want to be like facebook! Also like Youtube and twitter and tiktok! And like Instagram!”

      Maybe if they stuck to their speciality and strengths, pick a lane and stay in it, they would prosper. But no! God forbid!

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
      41·
      3 months ago

      It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.

      It’s more like people aren’t geared to community, not the internet.

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
        11·
        3 months ago

        I very strongly disagree. It may appear that way, but community is simply less profitable than “influencers”, so communities aren’t invested in. Social media and even following influencers/content creators is an example of people looking for community, just not having healthy communities to pick from.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 months ago

          That’s not the internets fault though. That’s a people fault.

          People aren’t willing to support the communities they want so they don’t get them as people find other ways to finance them.