Reddit will not reverse its decision in my opinion. Obviously, they are in financial trouble and need money, become profitable, else this whole story would not have taken place this way.
Tech companies have collected massive amounts of user data for years, in hope that this something like “digital gold”. Even though, that in time of collection, data was not yet very useful, advancing fields of big data and machine learning suggested future value of being in power of all this data. Up to a few years ago, personalized marketing was the main way to monetize this “digital gold”, but in times of advancing large LLMs, which are trained at least partially by data scraped from social media APIs, this may change. Economically even worse performing twitter announced a similar change to their API pricing earlier, now Reddit jumps into the same boat.
However, the API is also used by third party app developers, which interfere with the “traditional” way to monetize user data: personalized ads. This makes them a good scapegoat to draw attention away from the real new API customer audience: LLM corporations. With AI being so hyped, I guess this is where the financial guys smell the big money. And the image of being a shitty, ad-money hungry company is pretty common these days, but being an AI training center is not and therefore more risky.
At the end, there is a third category of very relevant current API users: mod tools and bots, which are pretty important for quality/moderation of content. It will be really interesting to see the long term consequences of this category not having restricted or no access to API anymore. If moderators back down, who will replace them? What happens to content quality? Will reduced content quality infer with the expereience of the average joe?
Let’s see! In some way, I just hope reddit fails, because I would like to see the fediverse grow more. Really love the idea!
Reddit is going to be fine. It will lose a few thousand conscientious, tech-oriented users. But with a lowing herd of millions who don’t care about anything more than internet points and scrolling, they’ll hardly be missed.
Today was the first day in a decade I didn’t check the front page. So I’ll also be fine.
Completely agree.
I’d rather focus on making the community here fluorish than concentrate on what happens ow will happen to reddit. We’ll be okay. We’ll have a smaller community but less toxic and with more discussions. I’m tired of the karma-centric environment in reddit, anyway.
Yeah I’m glad that karma isn’t something that’s displayed. In federated instances it wouldn’t make sense, anyway, since you’d have to check the original instance and that can so easily be faked.
I do agree but I also do think that the user base that’s been alienated contributed in a deeper way. I think a lot of the decisions that Reddit has taken has eroded what made them different than other sites. As they march toward IPO, it’s very clear that this will continue.
I agree completely and to be honest I have found a lot of joy here over the last week. It has been really nice to connect with people, see people have kind and interesting interactions, and share pieces of theirs lives across the internet.
It’s all just speculation on our part, and we’re definitely self selecting here on Lemmy, but anecdotally I know me and my friends I made on Reddit were on there specifically because it wasn’t like other social media. Now it is, and it actually has been for a while, I guess I was just in denial and seeing the alternatives jolted me awake.
Reddit will not be fine, but not in the way you may think. Everyone is focused on third party apps, but this is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Reddit’s draw was the community itself, and the community could exist because of the open nature of the platform. Besides stewardship of a thriving community, Reddit has nothing of real value to contribute compared to competing platforms.
It’s clear now that the incentives of capitalizing on the the value of the community now outweigh the incentives of stewarding the community, but that is a one-way ticket. After closing the nature of the platform (a byproduct of the change in business model or realisation of the investment that was the stewardship), the community will stop sustaining itself and Reddit will just be left with inertia, enough to coast for a while, but not enough to grow, compete or even sustainitself in the long term.