In response to such critiques [concerning the decline of quality], Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.

My sides went into orbit. It’s a Reddit spokesperson acting like the worst of the Reddit userbase: being passive aggressive and using appeal to ignorance, at the same time.

I left Reddit forever because they were going out of their way to actively make the site worse for literally no other reason than corporate greed. Then they were unbelievably smug about it and insisted it was actually a good thing somehow. Then they tried to gloss over the whole thing by letting everyone play graffiti artist on a virtual wall for a few days, after which they pretended everything was normal again.

Fuck Reddit.

I feel like it’s unfortunate they didn’t highlight the open source options where the customer is not the product as their article closer, but rather of a quote about how Reddit could be such a better place. Seems to entirely miss the point.

I haven’t been back to Reddit since June. Am I missing anything?

Well I’m here now so that’s what matters.

…and how six months later, it all amounted to jack squat and Reddit is back to business as usual. Exactly how Reddit correctly figured outraged internet warriors would get all worked up for a while and then lose interest.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In June, thousands of Reddit communities plunged into darkness – making their pages inaccessible to the public in a mass protest of corporate policy changes.

With rumors of an imminent IPO swirling, the company is under pressure to make money – and CEO Huffman has acknowledged as much, stating at the time of the change: “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”

Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota who has studied Reddit for years, echoed these sentiments.

“It bothers me that social media companies are increasingly restricting our abilities as researchers who care deeply about these sites and who believe they can provide many benefits for people,” Chancellor said.

Reddit’s corporate overlords were ultimately unmoved by the massive blackout, and most of the thousands of dark subreddits went back to normal after a few weeks.

Users who have long been dedicated to the site, some of whom have spent countless unpaid hours working to make it better, are exhausted and resentful – and many have simply left.

The original article contains 1,685 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!