this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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That’s overestimating the number of users who are planning to jump ship for sure. We are the noisy ones because we have a lot to complain about right now. It probably more like 1-5% that are planning to leave Reddit indefinitely.
The key word though is “planning”. Because that 1-5% contains an outsized portion of the biggest moderators, content creators, and active users. After we jump ship, Reddit is going to have more spam and abuse (and learn the value of the free moderation they’ve been getting up til now), and less valuable content once you get through that. So Reddit might end up losing half its users as it becomes more useless, even if it’s only a small fraction that’s planning to leave right now.
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.
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
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.
What happens next is largely dependant on how big a portion of the people actually creating content and contributing jump ship.
People forget that there is a huge bias in online engagement towards whoever is unhappy with a thing. You see it in gaming subs all the time. People who like the game tend to... play the game, while people who have a bone to pick are the ones who put it down and vent their frustrations online.
Even if 80% of the comments about a game are negative, that 80% might all come from 15% of the player base who dislike it.
I fear the same thing is happening with Reddit. It's a very engaged 5% that's making up 90% of the comments. I really hope I'm either wrong about that, or the without they very engaged 5%, the rate and/or quality of the content drops enough that it starts impacting engagement levels of casual users who aren't as invested.
Except for Gollum of course
Yep I was a mod, but no more.