Reddit’s crisis is a warning for all social platforms: when you trade community for profits, everyone loses. Will Reddit fix its mes...

Money, Mods, and Mayhem

The Turning Point

In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it’s a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.

The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn’t mince words: “Reddit’s API changes are not just unfair, they’re unsustainable for third-party apps.”

Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.

The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.

One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”

  • GingaNinga@lemmy.world
    106·
    3 months ago

    Apollo going down is the reason why I’m here on Lemmy. I loved that app as much as I hate ads and I refuse to compromise so I quit cold turkey and never looked back. I’ll do the same for youtube if they ever actually figure out how to combat ad blockers effectively for more than a few hours at a time.

      • the post of tom joad@sh.itjust.works
        8·
        3 months ago

        my daily driver as well. only thing i didnt like was it was somewhat tougher to follow long comment reply chains than other apps but it was never enough to get me to leave my RIF RIF is fun RIF is fun for Reddit.

        as an aside i raw-dog lemmy in browser, havent found an app i like just yet

        • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          3 months ago

          Voyager is the closest Lemmy app to RIF, in my opinion. Plus it’s open source and has zero ads.

        • frank
          5·
          3 months ago

          Same, RIF was amazing.

          I use Boost for Lemmy now. Definitely not the same as RIF, but it’s close enough. Fairly powerful and you can pay once for no ads

        • AhismaMiasma@lemm.ee
          4·
          3 months ago

          Are you me?

          I tried Jerboa, it was okay. But since August of last year I’ve been using Lemmy via Firefox and honestly, it’s fine. Perfectly cromulent.

        • Gork@lemm.ee
          3·
          3 months ago

          RIF is Fun for Reddit (lol at the recursive acronym) was so much better than the shitty official Reddit app. Not even a close comparison. It’s like a glove that fits perfectly vs. a wet sock.

    • ChocoboRocket@lemmy.world
      33·
      3 months ago

      I did the same but for Reddit is Fun (android), and I still haunt reddit via browser but I don’t sign in or interact.

      It’s getting to the point where all the good content is also on Lemmy, probably won’t take long for lemmy to become peak old reddit with medium sized communities of real people interacting, supporting, educating, and roasting.

      We’ll probably be at a significantly lower critical mass before the corpos start invading, but hopefully the community can do a great job of reporting each other.

      I’d much rather pay a subscription for a spam bot free environment than watch new lemmys pop up every 15-20 years as enshittification bites.

      • glimse@lemmy.world
        10·
        3 months ago

        It’s getting to the point where all the good content is also on Lemmy,

        Oh how I wish this was true… Unless you mean memes (which are reposted everywhere), lemmy has a fraction of the content. There’s huge niche communities over there and I still have to add “reddit” to my searches for technical issues.

        To be clear, that hasn’t convinced me to start using reddit again beyond that. Just being realistic about comparing the two

        • doctordevice@lemmy.ca
          4·
          3 months ago

          Yeah, any gaming discussion I have to search for reddit. And because of the stupid new deal with Google it means I have to do it via Chrome. And then constantly manually change the address to old.reddit so it doesn’t look like ad-riddled garbage.

          I would love to be able to replace that with Lemmy, but there isn’t enough community here for the kind of niche discussion you can still find on reddit.

          • SHOW_ME_YOUR_ASSHOLE@lemm.ee
            1·
            3 months ago

            There is a plugin for your browser that will automatically redirect you to old.reddit.com so that you don’t have to manually change the URL every time. I forget the name of the extension but it does exist and it’s very helpful.

            • doctordevice@lemmy.ca
              1·
              3 months ago

              Are you thinking Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES)? I used that on desktop and it is great. I never considered trying it for mobile, thanks for the suggestion!

        • ChocoboRocket@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 months ago

          Fair point, I’m definitely still using reddit searches for specific answers because the communities are still valuable sources of information.

          That being said, mainstream news and world events are definitely present on Lemmy, it’s not just a meme pile.

          Reddit/lemmy is the only social media I use, so maybe the meme situation isn’t even that great but it suits my needs!

          The tradeoff for Lemmy getting that community content reddit used to have (can still find it between the bots) is that it will attract attention from everywhere which results in enshittification

      • Potatisen@lemmy.world
        25·
        3 months ago

        No service, no website, no app will remain the way it started. Lemmy will go to shit and a new thing will come along. Don’t be loyal.

    • HeyJoe@lemmy.world
      5·
      3 months ago

      Same for me, except the app was Boost. I was very happy once it was released for Lemmy.

      I completely gave up with youtube apps. I just use Firefox on mobile and installed the add on ublock origin and haven’t had any ads since. Not the best viewing experience, but it gets the job done.