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.
r/AskReddit posts or day
https://i.imgur.com/sNJEHHQ.jpeg
What’s going on there? Really the api change did this?
Kind of. It wasn’t just the change itself, but also how it was done.
Reddit showed complete lack of care about its own userbase (specially blind people and moderators) and that it’s an extremely scummy company, even for company standards. It could’ve pulled the unreasonable API prices to kill off 3PA but it would need smarter people in charge of the decision than the ones who did it.
I’m no business expert, but the thing is I was a heavy user. Had they made the API changes reasonable and worked with the devs, I would have been happy to pay for the service i used so much (I already paid for the app, what’s a few more bucks a month?)
But them to charge such exorbitant fees, be dicks to users and creators, then treat those who were upset like the bad guy? That’s a spectacularly bad approach to business.
Had they made it part of the original Reddit Gold subscription, or worked that into a new subscription for roughly the same price (~$60 a year) I would have been all over that, no questions asked.
You would have kept most of the power users/mods/whatever and had them be a revenue stream in the process.
Instead they lost both the potential for earnings and the contributions they brought to the site. How stupid did they have to be?
Their official app is utter garbage, if it weren’t I may have stayed. People like me have decided that if the Reddit experience has to be so bad, it’s better not to be on reddit at all.
Imagine your favourite burger joint from now on only allowed you to enter from the back alley where it smells like piss and walls are mouldy - then once you get in all burgers have an added layer of spam and Nutella that you can’t opt out of.
Damn! If I remember right, that’s always been one of their most active subs.
They sold out their core product for a short term gain, and I hope it’s biting them in the ass now.
Their CEO saw what Musk was doing with X and thought “Brilliant! I have to try that!”
I’m not joking. Spez specifically credits Musk with giving him the idea.
And people think billionaires are smart
They’re not even good at business
That and spez was a total ass about the whole thing, lying to app devs & just being a fucking jerk.
He did an AMA & fucked that up with either answering no questions or copying & pasting canned responses to obvious plants.
Then the admins started forcefully removing & replacing mods who were protesting by making their subs private and not reverting them. So yeah, you can imagine how well that went over when the new mods had no prior mod experience and/or knew nothing about the topic of the sub they were now modding.
It was a shitshow all around.
It is probably that those who used third party apps were those more likely to try to get karma and engage with the site. The switch wasn’t worth it for the heavy users making posts, so posts fell.
Mobile apps are key.