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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.”
Yeah, that was my thought when many people were talking about how to make Lemmy more popular after the initial exodus. My thought was that Lemmy felt a lot more like the Reddit that first attracted me to the platform over a decade ago than Reddit itself had for years. I thought society had moved beyond being capable of what Reddit and older forums used to be.
I don’t know if it’s because of a subset of people that are awful but only follow crowds, if corporations do things that ruin things once they think they can make money from them, if it’s trolls (for their own entertainment or for sowing division with some kind of a sponsor), or some combination of all of those and others. But whatever it is, Lemmy doesn’t seem to have that yet. Even the instances that largely got defederated by most of the others were better than the Reddit experience while they were still here, and they didn’t stay here for long (plus they still exist, so those who are drawn to that kinda scene can still go there instead of needing to find somewhere else).
Not to mention the bigger the fediverse gets, the more expensive it will be to run servers, which increases the chance that they end up going for sale not because their admins don’t want them anymore but because they can’t afford them.