What are people’s thoughts on how Reddit is coming out of this so far? How bad have things been for Reddit? Do we know how much their traffic has dropped and would a drip in traffic even hurry them that much. Why don’t we see talk of a new blackout at the end of the month?
All I know is I’m reading this in a third party app called jerboa using an account in lemmy. Neither of which I’d even heard of a week ago.
Same here with both things. But actually I like it for now and really hope many people follow our path.
Same. Signal to noise ratio seems better imho.
Reddit Inc. itself lost really hard.
For Reddit Inc., the winning conditions are to get share prices up to the roof, so when the IPO happens the current shareholders leave with their pockets full of money. However, everything that is happening shows:
- That Reddit does not have multiple stable sources of income. The only main source of income will still be advertisement money.
- That advertisement money will run dry, as users are leaving the platform or outright boycotting it.
Both increase the risk and decrease the expected profit. Nobody is insane to invest in a company like this.
For the community it depends on your goals.
I count the situation as a big win; alternatives became more viable, Reddit as a platform will become less and less relevant, and the scummy company will lose lots of money.
If however you expected Reddit to play nice with its userbase (e.g. reverting API price changes), then count it as a loss.
I’m also struck by the incongruity that reddit makes something like 12c/user/month but their fair-actual-cost of the API calls needed to service that user are in the $2-3 range.
I suspect that’s a lie and that the API prices are profiteering, but that isn’t exactly inspiring me to invest in them :D
The API prices are exorbitant on purpose; they never expected third party app developers to pay for them, it’s just an attempt to prevent the same backslash as Twitter had for outright forbidding them. (It backfired, badly.)
The prices would probably go down over time, as they want to milk Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. using the API to retrieve data to train their large language models with.
Reddit isn’t going to televise the fall of Reddit and admins do not allow mentions of the blackout. Even so, most Subreddits are still rebelling or are black, and a lot have just moved away to Kbin, Lemmy and even discord. Reddit is not going put with a bang, but with a whimper. Users that are still there will slowly notice that most moderators and power users are gone, that more bots are present and that the quality is down, and will filter out.
Reddit is already dead. It just happened so fast that nobody got around to tell it.
Honestly, at this point, it doesn’t matter to me. After ~12 years of Reddit, I was looking for an excuse to leave, and they finally gave me one. Even if the Fediverse is never as popular as Reddit, it’s already enough that I don’t feel the need to go back.
Wait 2 weeks, about 20-30% of reddit users use a third party application, 1 July most of them are going to wake up and find they can’t, that’s when the shoe will really drop.
I don’t think those numbers are accurate at all, so you have any stats to back that up?
Third party apps are about 10% of total Android downloads. It is also theorized that the 10% are more likely to be power users than the Reddit average. 20% seems on the upper bounds of what I’d expect.
My source is a post I saw on Reddit a few weeks ago but can’t find now. I give the reliability of those numbers a 6 out of 10 confidence rating.
It can be win-win. Reddit owns their platform and they can implement whatever enshittified features they want. Ideally that acts as a filter to keep the worst element of reddit over on that side of the fence where they can be happily monetized.
Meanwhile the folks who prefer this more open-sourcey federated experience not owned by a Profit-Driven Company ™ are free to move here. Reddit owns their platform, but they do not own the community, and I’m looking forward to a userbase hopefully comprised of more thoughtful, intentional posters.
