Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
The completely unblockable hegetsus ads were really what made me switch to Apollo from the official Reddit app. Then killing third party apps made me leave for good. Bravo, Reddit
They could have done so much. Force third party apps to use their ads or make a reddit premium subscription. Instead they decided to destroy all their free labor.
They didn’t have to force them, third party devs asked them to let them use their ads and Reddit told them no!
There was an appropriate balance of API fees, returning adds in the API calls, and charging subscription fees to remove ads that would have generated maximum profit by milking the ecosystem from multiple places without ever pissing off users bad enough to make them leave. Complain? Oh sure, users would have done that plenty. On reddit. Where it made reddit monet. Reddit instead elected to simply shit the bed.
That’s called idiocy
Greed comes for every company eventually.
I wish that was true.
Waiting for this to hit Nestle since their early times.
Greed comes for all companies eventually. That doesn’t mean they always fail, it just means they aren’t going to act ethically over potential profit. That can cause companies that are held afloat by a community to fail (like reddit). It has already happened to Nestlé. They crossed that line a long time ago, they just have better PR.
They were also smarter about it, slowly constricting tighter and tighter whereas with reddit it was more of a poorly executed throatpunch
It legitimately feels like the admins were trying to run off all the mods that cared. Still cant believe Spez did the AMA and thought it would smooth things over. They cant be that ignorant to how the community would respond…
Not to be a raging communist but capitalism really turns everything we like into shit.
See, he does get us…
I totally forgot about hegetsus until now.
We were having a good day.
We were ALL having a good day.
Those ads were pretty based tbh
What were the ads about?
They were just religious ads, that would say things like Jesus loved his neighbors #hegetsus. The biggest complaint I saw about them was at some point, that was literally the only ad you would see on reddit.