The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
I think we all underestimate how much smaller the internet was back then. Flickr, the premier photo sharing site back in the day, was acquired by yahoo for $25MM. Kevin rose of digg was famously on the cover of business week touting a $60MM valuation. In todays big business tech era those are small numbers even factoring for inflation.
Basically back then users were counted in millions and if the let’s say 5-10K power users and a 100k randos moved on that could kill a service. Today Reddit is too big to fail. It would take tens of millions of users in a mass exodus to make a dent.
Look at Twitter right now, which is about the fastest case of enshittification of the modern era. The weird trolls filled the power vacuum that proper power users left and it’s still plugging along. If something like this eventually happens to Reddit it’ll be more like Facebook, a very slow decline but even in its shell state boasting hundreds of millions of users.
Wow, that cover photo gave me nostalgia, and I wasn’t even young in 2006. Already seems like a distant era.
I think Reddit and Twitter will just become garbage, zombie platforms like Yahoo - still around but basically irrelevant. We’ll see. I was an avid Redditor and quit about two months ago. Honestly I don’t miss it at all. It had already become garbage before the whole blow-up.
Facebook didn’t die because it also house businesses(pages, marketing, etc), influencer(which in turn support businesses), and there’s marketplace that work well enough to support the platform.
Even though i’ve left fb, i still keep the account, because my family still use it, and i will occasionally open the app and see their update(after scrolling past 10 sponsored post and 20 suggested post). The consequence of leaving fb is me drifting apart from my friend. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯