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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.”
It’s just another example of enshitification. I felt it was time to move on to the next thing and heard about lemmy. Hopefully federated stuff like this won’t fall prey to the same pattern.
I think Lemmy will be OK as long as users take care not to overcentralize.
When Lemmy dies someday it will be for a different pattern, like issues with bots or problems scaling the moderation capacity.
Ah, Usenet syndrome.
I think a sustainable growth pattern that could help keep this from happening here is one where connected subnetworks of Lemmy servers grow up to a certain point and then eventually split into distinct networks.
There’s a critical mass required before it’s worth corporate and nation-state troll attention. If networks split off from each other before that mass is reached, then they might never get much attention.
Or if they split a bit after that mass is reached, maybe they waste a bunch of resources and never get a good return on that investment and then the critical mass goes up a bit because there’s more risk involved. Plus seeing that shit might make people more receptive of the idea of a split because some still have the idea that more popular = better.
That said, I do see that splitting a network like that won’t be easy to do in a way that doesn’t hurt communities. I’m also not sure how to handle niche communities, other than pointing out that they existed before Reddit was a thing, they weren’t just all concentrated on one website or platform.
i suggest having multiple accounts in many instances especially since i see you are on .world.
if you don’t have one, do it now! :)
my guess (100% vibes-based) is .world might consume another couple comms and split off to its own thing. If i’m even right, how much that split affects lemmy depends on how many and how well we users are spread out over the other comms.
Why create accounts now? If .world splits off, you can just create an account on another instance at that point.
If you intend on creating any communities it would really be better to make them elsewhere, otherwise it doesn’t really matter.
Well i like jumping between instances constantly so i never feel a connection to any of them. I have an account in any instance defedded from another so i don’t miss the yummy content and get as many different perspectives flooding my brains busted dopamine receptors as i can, but that’s just me.
I kept about 5 running accounts at any given time on Reddit too, because i didn’t want to be a karma whore. Maybe i just like lots of accounts and i don’t even have a good reason.