The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas
My assumption here is that Huffman may win the battle, but he might lose the war. Even if he manages to get the rampaging mods under control, how much damage will he do in the process?
r/pics will probably end up going NSFW, which gets another major sub to lose ad revenue. Can Reddit manage to get all these subs back on topic without pulling some fascist takeover of the mod teams? These malicious compliance subs aren’t explicitly breaking any rules, and taking action against them will just fan community outrage more.
They can obviously ban NSFW material, but that’ll force a migration far faster than any blackout ever could. Not to mention 3rd party apps going dark on July 1st, which might see a not insignificant drop off of mobile users.
Reddit has likely begun its slow descent, and u/spez’s best long term strategy would be to reverse course and keep the public API. Of course, he’ll never do that since that just communicates to any investors that you have no control over your community. Not sure how he digs his way out of this one.
The primary thing with r/pics and its users is that they are creating/posting SFW quality content for free. They are an established platform with an audience, and the tradeoff is that the platform can be used for ads by its owner. This is all fair.
The main outrage against the blackout is now coming from people who usually scroll, upvote, and consume content. Not content creators. They cannot fathom that their source of entertainment is inaccessible and just want people to stop ‘overreacting’ and get back to scrolling.
What happens when the platform is no longer reliable, because the owner decided to upset the people making sure the quality remains as established? Sure, someone else will fill the gap, but with these actions I’m sure a lot content creators have flocked to other places. Which leaves the bots, and the lurkers. No content is worse than low quality content.
I’m curious for what the future brings for Reddit. It feels like it will have a different trajectory compared to Twitter, where anything is content and quality doesn’t matter as much.
