The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit
The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit
When the user revolt ends—if it ever does—Reddit’s community won’t ever be the same.
![[WIRED] The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit](https://radiation.party/pictrs/image/df8777a3-aae4-4f08-aa70-993eae9e11ad.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)
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I think the older core of reddit has always viewed itself as a bottom-up community, rather than a social media platform. Reddit won't die for now, but this is a sobering wakeup call from that idea.
Reddit is no freehaven, it's now just another company, and slowly everyone on it will get squeezed into the businessmold...
Hmmm. Maybe it's intentional. A purge. Flush out the old crowd with their adblockers and their nonsense ideas about "free speech," and whoever stays -- out of ignorance or compliance -- is left with the ad-ridden hellscape that is the new interface and the official app.
I'd certainly agree that this is at least Huffman's internal thoughts about the whole thing at this point. Stabilize their large, more easily monetizable userbase, and get to the IPO asap. The only ones who "suffer" here are the users who give a shit, and the only remedy is to move on from reddit and create that content that matters, elsewhere.
I certainly never viewed it as a social media site. I joined it as a link aggregator and a way to find information on topics I thought were interesting, not make friends. It always seems odd to me when people refer to it as a social media site.
Everything that I liked about reddit was the fact that it was NOT social media. Everything they've done in the last decade (avatars and all that), I've religiously ignored.
Lol, I told my friend to join Lemmy and he immediately asked how to friend me. Pls no
Indeed. Reddit is knowb as the site where you talk with strangers on things you care about - whereas Facebook is talking with people you know about things you don't care about.
Reddit *still is * a bottom-up community, that's why all their monetization efforts never worked and there's so much backlash against the API changes. All of the content and value on the site is created by the users and mods. Reddit the company doesn't own that, and redditors take offense at management's attempts to take advantage of the users' free efforts for their own gain.
What Huffman and Reddit should have done was think long term and set up a Wikipedia-like entity that could have ensured the health and growth of the site while only taking a modest cut. Instead they tried to pump up the value and cash out with an IPO, and when that likely fails, they'll end up with nothing.