I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?

  • AnarchistArtificer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    14 days ago

    That’s a big part of why so many communities are full of bots and slop now. The bigger subreddits were already bad for that, but before I left Reddit (during the API protest), I at least was able to find quality discussions and posts in a bunch of smaller, more niche subreddits.

    Lemmy doesn’t have nearly as many of those kinds of communities, so I found myself visiting Reddit a few times after the API stuff. I was disappointed to learn that many of the communities I had frequented were nothing like I remembered, and many of them had completely different mod teams. Whether it’s the mods or just the people who cared enough to frequently post and comment, a lot of the good people on Reddit left during the API fiasco. Although I enjoy Lemmy far more than I did Reddit (due to the higher concentration of meaningful conversations), it sucks to see how much has been lost at Reddit

    • bobalot@lemmy.world
      3·
      9 days ago

      I still go back for a couple of niche communities like Unraid. You can certainly see fall in quality content and genuine user trends (remember the giant canvas, button, safe some guy was going to open, etc.?).

      The quality has certainly gone down.