Reddit Was Fun

I'm not sure this is true. Social media is very temporary - even thought people feel a sense of permanence it is false. It's today's content people consume, today's users that matters. While there is a lot of interesting old content on reddit, the vast majority of people are there for the new.

So when a social media site goes into decline, it can be a rapid downward spiral. Digg has been mentioned here, but also MySpace was by far the biggest social media platform in its day - it imploded in less than a year or two when Facebook came alone. Tumblr was a big blogggin site until it started first forcing people to it's app, and then outright banned adult content - it imploded almost immediately and people moved on to Twitter and Reddit with that content.

Reddit mistake is they did not value what they had - users generating content, and users moderating themselves. Reddit is nothing more than a host, but they see the content as their property to monetise. Today is not the first step on their own decline, but it will certainly accelerate it.

I suspect the fediverse will be the long term solution. This first major wave of migration brings in the early adopters, including crucially people who are interested in coding and development which will benefit Kbin and Lemmy. Further waves of users will follow and find more mature established communities when they arrives. I expect the next big battle to be over adult content - advertisers are already nervous about it with it's use in protests, and the simplest solution is to ban it. Even if reddit reversed it's course on the API, I think the damage is done and the course is decline to irrelevance.

But Reddit biggest mistake around the API is not the API itself; you're right most users won't care. But it's big mistake is losing the users who care - they are the power users, the technically savvy users, the early adopters. Reddit big mistake is it has encouraged those people to leave and help develop it's competitor and alternative. That is why this has been so important and that is why I think reddit is probably not salvageable now.

Last time someone tried to compete with reddit it was single handed and closed - Vo.at. Now it's open source, collaborative and decentralised.