Year-end recap from The Guardian.

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    166 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    In June, thousands of Reddit communities plunged into darkness – making their pages inaccessible to the public in a mass protest of corporate policy changes.

    With rumors of an imminent IPO swirling, the company is under pressure to make money – and CEO Huffman has acknowledged as much, stating at the time of the change: “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”

    Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota who has studied Reddit for years, echoed these sentiments.

    “It bothers me that social media companies are increasingly restricting our abilities as researchers who care deeply about these sites and who believe they can provide many benefits for people,” Chancellor said.

    Reddit’s corporate overlords were ultimately unmoved by the massive blackout, and most of the thousands of dark subreddits went back to normal after a few weeks.

    Users who have long been dedicated to the site, some of whom have spent countless unpaid hours working to make it better, are exhausted and resentful – and many have simply left.


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    • @ULS@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      Wait they all said it was doing nothing when it was happening… The dream doubters… The regs… The worthless.

      • @takeda@lemmy.world
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        176 months ago

        I feel it mostly affected long timers. The younger crowd doesn’t seem to care. I have a feeling that old.reddit.com will be going away very soon.

        The API change made me stop using Reddit on Mobile (I never installed their client, I also think I’m maybe on 3-4 subreddits now) and once they remove old, it will kill my use of their desktop and therefore Reddit completely.

        • @hightrix@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          You’re absolutely correct. And because of that, content quality has plummeted and if you read comments, they are on a downward trajectory.

          I’ll read comments here and think, “holy shit these people are stupid” and then I’ll go to Reddit and realize how much more stupid people can get. Comments on Reddit are the absolute bottom of the barrel. Way worse than YouTube has ever been.

        • @slaacaa@lemmy.world
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          56 months ago

          Yes, and it’s not even just about the age (though of course I think Gen Z has a higher tolerance for intrusive ads and shitty UX, as that’s all they have ever known anywhere) - I know a late thirties guy, who doesn’t understand what my problem is with reddit, as he only ever used the shitty mobile app, so has no comparison with other options.