“We’ve known for over a decade that people come to Reddit to talk about the products they love – take r/BuyItForLife for example, a community of over 1.5 million redditors who have been sharing recommendations and advice about their lifelong, must-have purchases since 2011. These updates will uplevel the search-and-discover experience for both brands and our users by tapping into our differentiated value as a hub for actionable conversation”
My reaction upon reading this is that I think you’re expecting too much, I think reddit will be fine without me, you or everyone else leaving.
That’s okay though, the platform doesn’t need to fail for you to be happy moving on from it.
Are we defining failure by their standards, or ours?
When my favorite communities were wrecked by being moved to front page, default-for-new-users and flooded with low effort content that may as well have been bot spam, it failed me.
When they made an API policy that ostensibly allowed profitability (despite charging far beyond what they might make from ads on the official mobile app) and avoided training by AI (despite refusing to grandfather in known 3PA and offering to approve new ones), it failed me again.
If I’m soon unable to access the site via the old.reddit interface to avoid intrusive ads, it will fail me yet again.
I won’t be surprised if others add more failures to this list.
Maybe reddit makes money hand-over-fist from these changes without me, you, nsfw content creators, licensing / API fees from all current popular 3PA apps, and whoever else. I’m not eager to characterize this as success because VC’s get their money back.
It’s a stupid move from Reddit because all they needed to monetize 3rd party apps was to offer fair API pricing that the 3rd party devs could pass onto their users. Or alternatively tie 3rd party app API usage to having a Reddit premium account which directly brings the money to Reddit.
On a platform heavily built upon the content provided by users, what could happen is that the platform loses the people who were writing good content and retains the people posting fluff - low effort memes, links to clickbait articles etc. That’s going to eventually push away users who were looking for more than that.
On top of that if moderators leave, that leaves the platform open for a flood of spammers, scammers, bots etc which annoys the people still using it, eventually making more leave.
Pushing more ads is just another nail in that coffin.
3rd party apps don’t have the user tracking that the Reddit app has