I just saw this post over on r/modcoord which is basically a massive list of subreddits participating in the blackout protest. If I’m being honest I haven’t seen this much anger and coordinated frustration since the era right before the digg exodus.
Assuming more and more subreddits join in, it’s going to send a pretty massive message to the users who interact with a blacked out subreddit. Then I’m trying to imagine what happens if after a massive coordinated blackout, Reddit continue on the current trajectory. Is Lemmy even prepared to handle the amount of potential incoming traffic that API closure could lead to? It’s absolutely bonkers to me that the Reddit team might just stay the course…
The blackouts will make no difference to Reddit’s plans. The API charge will come in. The content creators and moderators will leave. The content will go stale. The smart shareholders will cash in early; the dumb ones will hang on for the prospect of a greater return which won’t materialise. Once the content is stale, the readers and lurkers will leave. Reddit will become a has-been, a memorable item of internet history like so many other sites.
Not just stale content. But with fewer mods, and the mods that do remain having fewer and less effective tools to do their job, there will be a lot more trolls and spam. The stale content is the lesser problem, really.
Hot take from me: They were planning to just add ads into the API, remove NSFW so that ad agencies don’t get mad and maybe put a more modest premium to access the API.
They spark the outrage then basically paint users and subreddits that supported the blackout as ‘heroes’ when the walk back the changes partially and exclaim “We did it Reddit!”. All when it would have been the plan from the get-go. The silence from their reasons behind this has me very suspicious of something like this.
This is the way it will go down.
It’s a shame.