Yeah - even if they back pedal (as I still think is likely) it’s super clear at this point that reddit is just interested in milking it’s users for every cent until they can IPO.
Spez literally just said in the AMA “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.”
Yup - I was getting close to the point where I was going to delete my reddit in any case and make a new one - so that decision is easy.
Gonna watch the rest of this tranwreck of an AMA, then I’m out - account delete, Sync uninstalled
My bet is that they’ll announce that they’re still charging for the API, but at a “drastically” reduced price. As you say, I think it was their plan all along. That way they can still milk third party apps, all the while still being able to say “we listened to the community” by not destroying them outright
yeah this isn’t such a huge thing on it’s own (tough it is shitty), it’s this combined with the years of other steady decline in a thousand small ways. Most people on reddit have agreed for some time now that the site has gone to shit, but there haven’t really been viable alternatives or enough of a reason to pick up stakes and leave. Now there is, and hopefully enough people leave for good to Lemmy, Kbin, or others so that the change can stick
RemindMe was super useful
I’m sure the rise of Evangelism in the US doesn’t help
And that people are generally pretty stubborn about their social media these days. While the migration to Lemmy has been significant, it’s still a tiny proportion of reddit’s total users. Most people just want to see their feed and don’t care overly much about the specifics of how it’s run (even if they should) - and even those who do will often put up with a lot of BS to stay in their comfort zone.
Look at Twitter - you’ve still got tons of people who despise Elon and his changes to Twitter who are using the platform every day. It’s been half a year now with things only getting worse and these people are still clinging to the platform because it’s where they’re comfortable. If anything, Elon showed that you can give your community some serious abuse while still maintaining high user counts
People see that they have the highest user count and gravitate towards it. Most people don’t really get how federation works, so they worry about getting “stuck” on an instance with no one to talk to
And if enough folks do the “edit your comments” trick, reddit will just know to look for prior revisions when selling the data, unfortunately.
The best middle finger we can all manage is to just stop playing. Delete your account by all means to kill their user numbers, but the real impact will be in not contributing further