‘Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,’ Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.
11 years on reddit and seeing its long slow decline its just sad. A return to the basics was very necessary. Removing subs from r/all, messing with the voting, “new” reddit, a clamp down on content…it just kept getting worse and worse. As long as I could use RIF and old.reddit it was fine, but the writing is on the wall at this point.
While most of their users are used to the newer layout from other social media, my goal was always to see the most number of posts I could on a single page and have a clean ad-free experience. Lemmy seems to get this
The statement from r/watchredditdie really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
If true, that actually speaks volumes. Like what kind of guy removes a dead man, at some point revered, from the list of co-founders. What do you lose by not doing it? What did you win by doing it? I mean, the odds are you lost more than anything. Besides, he should have been your partner. Even if you did for the cash, what about all the moments you had with him? Was Aaron such a piece that you’d rather have him erased?
I seriously can’t get it.
Ego. Tremendously inflated ego, perhaps stoked by watching Musk and thinking “great idea, I can do that too!”…?
Aaron Swartz will always be the real spiritual founder of what Reddit was at its best for me. Huffman will be the fool that didn’t understand the ethos of it and drove it into the ground in his greed.
Whoa. I missed this tidbit of information. Aaron Swartz’s memory defiled by their actions just reaffirms my decision to leave.
It’s like Reddit forgot the Digg flood back in the day and is making the same poor choices Digg made that drew so many people to reddit a decade ago.
There was never serious competition to threaten Reddit before. Voat was the closest, but when legitimate redditfugees got there it was already full of a critical mass of Nazis (actual Nazis, not “everyone I don’t like is a Nazi”) and people who thought spamming slurs was peak free speech. Not exactly a solid foundation for popular new site.
Well said.
In that case, I think the reddit administration did a good job of excising the people it didn’t want, letting them take root elsewhere before the main mass went to check that place out, and letting that main mass come right back.
At the time, I thought it was a calculated and intelligent move on their part, fully intentional.
After what we’re seeing now, I think maybe they lucked out.
I guess it’s some sort of Hanlon’s Inverse Corollary: Never attribute to intelligence what can be adequately explained by dumb luck.
Those who forget history are doomed to get downvoted to oblivion.
It’s why I’m here, and I’m liking it so far
Same. Honestly I don’t even miss Reddit. Fuck that place
Yeah, only thing missing are the amount of people but that’s a problem that’s being fixed every passing day.
I’m actually having a lot of fun watching this place grow! It feels like a smaller community, but I’ve watched it expand so fast in the past week. Now that we’ve surpassed 100,000 people it feels like we’ve reached the point of it having enough mass that it can sustain itself. Once we reach a million I really think we’ll start getting more attention and at around 10 million we’ll be approaching terminal velocity. People on Reddit have been wanting a good alternative, but are just afraid of losing the large community vibe. It’s going to take time, but this week has felt like hope.
I just want enough people to have most popular/semi popular subs to have a decent number of conversation going. It doesn’t need to get AS populous as Reddit is right now.
deleted by creator
Yep. Which is why I’ve deleted my 7-year account with 26k karma.
I wonder how much we could get selling old accounts with karma like that? I mean it’s highly unethical, but they like ads and spam… (I’m kidding, they only like the ads and spam THEY push)
That’s the final move to help me change from reddit to Lemmy !
This sucks for reddit, but I think this will be good for the internet in the long run. This is hopefully gonna push people into the fediverse and reduce reliance on these megacorp data mining operations.
Important to note that this article went up before the subreddits went down.
Cool–we’re sticking with Lemmy.
Kbin has entered the chat
Lol I jest especially as Kbin and Lemmy play nice with each other too!
At this point even if Reddit keeps going on, there’s enough people on Mastodon, Lemmy, and Kbin that we can thrive as a new site with our own culture. Hacker News wasn’t made obsolete by Reddit or Digg’s existence for example.
Yep. I just don’t care anymore. I have all the community I possibly need right here. I can miss some niche communities but this is all I need for the time being.
As someone who’s been looking for a reddit alternative for a while and occasionally read Hacker News, I must say I really like it here on Lemmy. Similar simplicity of Hacker News, but with more diverse set of communities.
I guess my concern is some of the more niche communities won’t move over and I might end up browsing with teddit or libreddit for those select few. It won’t be as nice but such is life
I’m sure plenty of people will use both.
An example of this in the real world is how 4chan has lots of similar sites that are much smaller, but still thrive due to filling some niche that 4chan does not.
I’ll probably continue to use both although I will definitely being using Reddit a lot less if I am stuck with the official app. If Elon is really serious about getting rid of blocking, Twitter is dead to me though.
It should never be about profit. It’s always been about…
checks notes
Passion.
That’s Steve “I think the problem Digg had is that it was a company that was built to be a company, and you could feel it in the product. The way you could criticise Reddit is that we weren’t a company – we were all heart and no head for a long time. So I think it’d be really hard for me and for the team to kill Reddit in that way.” Huffman everyone.
Yep. I think the community that comes after Reddit needs to be under the umbrella of a nonprofit, whose mission in life is to keep the community alive, fundraise for resources, keep a moderation system in place to keep out difficult people, etc. Nonprofit because while a for-profit business is required by law to maximize profits for owners & shareholders, a nonprofit is required by law to do the beneficial thing for the community.
Words to live by!
Well, it was the kick in the ass I needed to get off of Reddit finally. Besides, I think at the end of the day I was only down to maybe 2-3 subs that I kept up with, the rest just got toxic as hell. So…hello to everyone on Lemmy, still learning how it works, but hopefully it’ll be a better mature community.
I think the trick will be working through some growing pains here while communities develop.
So far everything I’ve seen has been pretty positive though.
Welp, that means i ma more likely to stay here. I am interested to see where this will be going
Hey look that’s why I’m here now!
This is a good article, but is says nothing about his position on subreddits going dark.
and that’s why im here.
Steve Huffman is a cunt
