Elon flushed 44B and made 96B just this half year.

The game isn't right somewhere.

FOSS does not have an inherent detriment versus corporate products. If enough people want to do it, development of FOSS can in principle move just as quick or quicker than corporate development (and more efficiently too).

The recent interest in Lemmy, largely thanks to Reddit's incompetence, means that not only is the core software moving very quickly but the app scene is growing quickly as well.

I wouldn't say it's a better product, but it is quicky moving in that direction.

I'm so happy user funded and user controlled is a viable market strategy.

Damn.

Is that 2,000 paid employees or does that include moderators?

Honestly if they’d worked with the Apollo dev and he’d turned around and proposed something reasonable like $2 a month to continue using it I’d still be on Reddit.

Treating Reddit users like shit, treating devs who have made their whole business about making Reddit better like shit, fucking with unpaid mods, and finally, this weird manifest destiny attitude that Reddit will succeed despite all of the above turned me to the Fediverse.

This precisely. It wasn’t about charging for the API. It was about charging an exorbitant amount for the API, giving devs a tiny amount of time to come up with a solution, and then belittling the user and moderator communities.

I don’t want to be a part of a website that treats its own community with so much disdain and spite.

100%, I was mad about the api changes but realistically I would have stayed

But seeing the interviews he gave was just too much. Especially when he was talking about monetizing people who say things on Reddit they wouldn't say to their therapist. Like, that group specifically you want to milk? Fuck spez

The API change did not affect me personally, I use old reddit anyway, but the reaction showed that he will run this site into the ground since he just does not really get it or is extremely greedy and does not care.

This is the business world in general. Consumers need to say to businesses in no uncertain terms that they cannot just do whatever they want and still remain profitable. Without users, there is no profit. Charging for the API would be completely acceptable and expected, but they decided to go the most cartoonishly villainous route possible. This is what a lot of companies are doing now. They have gotten far too used to the profits being free. We should teach them a lesson, collectively.

I'm 43. I lived a good amount of my life without the Internet and even more of my life without smart phones. Even after gaining reliable Internet access, I remember the times when the Internet was not just a few big companies. I just rediscovered one of the old forums I used to hang out on is still operating. They have an active IRC channel as well. Don't think we can't go back, big tech. It would be so easy to go back. Don't tempt me with a good time.

Came here to say the same, it's BS, all mods asked their communities, most with polls, other with closely monitoring feedback in the blackout announcement threads, no mod acted on their own, they were all supported by the overwhelming majority of their communities.

Yeah the risk has definitely already materialised. Reddit is forever changed even if it’s still alive.

Can you elaborate on this? Which landmarks have permanently fallen?

I legitimately would've paid for the reddit subscription if it meant keeping Reddit Sync. It's nonsense. They just wanted the apps out of the picture.

My Reddit use has declined 70% because I only access it from my computer or through Firefox for Android (which is damn near unusable).

Yes, I loved it when Christian Selig let Hoffman (fuck spez) know his lies were exposed because he (Christian) had recorded their conversation.. and provided proof. Would love a video of Hoffman's reaction.

The narratives you mention in your last para are completely true, that's what annoys me, IF they had engaged in good faith with users. As it is, it's like a shopping centre that's been free to enter saying "right, it's now €100 to enter and any underwear shops are closed to you unless you wear our uniform."

Just completely crazy prices for a poor service. No shit that's unworkable. Just be honest and say you want to bring those users in-house, just fucking say that rather than trying to gaslight everyone into believing that all these competent developers are all unreasonable arseholes who are screwing you, a multi-billion-dollar corporation over.

There was one comment that really gave me the 'holy shit, ick corporation' reaction... in an article about reddit's traffic going down, a reddit spokesperson said "we do not comment on incorrect statistics from third parties". Like please, calm down, you're not a lawyer for a politician on trial here.

I wish people would stop using imgur. It's entirely unnecessary for posting single images. Also, I use noscript and the number of external websites imgur loads scripts from tripled sometime last year, and now it doesn't even work to display a single image unless you enable who-knows-what sites (most sites, it's easy to tell which ones are necessary - for imgur, it isn't). Even worse it flashes the image and then it disappears without JS enabled for whatever domains it needs. So people using imgur is enabling all sorts of ad tech/privacy invasion companies to track whoever clicks on their photo, for no real reason.