tosh
New member
- Jun 20, 2023
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In the past weeks there's been an ongoing debate on the internet about Reddit's policy changes and the protests that ensued due to this.
In short, Reddit decided to put a price on their API access in line with what Twitter has done recently, and this resulted in most apps that use the API be non-sustainable. The owner/developer of one popular app (Apollo) used by many as a better alternative to the regular Reddit app - cited costs of $20 million per year with the new pricing structure.
Reddit's community reaction to this has been divided to date. Mods are largely united and against this, as are most of the tech content creators and news outlets.
There has been a good deal of users vocal against the protests saying that users are hostages to the mod's whims.
What are your thoughts on this?
Personally as a long-term reddit user I do feel like Reddit's decisions are bad in this and they need to take a step backwards - but I've also been witness to selfish moderation and ignoring of the users and community so I can't fault any users that feel like they should be unconcerned about this and that just want access to the subreddits like they normally would.
All in all - it's clear that there are many factors to this - including the fact that moderating communities isn't easy nor cheap - and the mods that have been doing this for free should have at least some say in this. Alternatively Reddit would have to replace these with paid moderators and that could prove costly to the platform.
There have also been reports of Reddit already replacing mods on some of the more popular subs which I don't really believe has been as black or white as the titles might suggest. From what I've seen it's mostly existing mods going against other mods but under suspicious circumstances - so overall more drama to muddy the waters.
In light of all this there has also been an influx of Reddit-like platforms gaining in popularity such as the fedaverse plaforms kbin social and lemmy. Much like with Twitter and Mastodon there seems to be a resurgence of the idea that an alternative to popular social giants is sorely needed.
Alas at the time of opening this thread there hasn't been a clear indicator of where this drama is headed - but we can certainly continue monitoring it and discuss it at length.
In short, Reddit decided to put a price on their API access in line with what Twitter has done recently, and this resulted in most apps that use the API be non-sustainable. The owner/developer of one popular app (Apollo) used by many as a better alternative to the regular Reddit app - cited costs of $20 million per year with the new pricing structure.
Reddit's community reaction to this has been divided to date. Mods are largely united and against this, as are most of the tech content creators and news outlets.
There has been a good deal of users vocal against the protests saying that users are hostages to the mod's whims.
What are your thoughts on this?
Personally as a long-term reddit user I do feel like Reddit's decisions are bad in this and they need to take a step backwards - but I've also been witness to selfish moderation and ignoring of the users and community so I can't fault any users that feel like they should be unconcerned about this and that just want access to the subreddits like they normally would.
All in all - it's clear that there are many factors to this - including the fact that moderating communities isn't easy nor cheap - and the mods that have been doing this for free should have at least some say in this. Alternatively Reddit would have to replace these with paid moderators and that could prove costly to the platform.
There have also been reports of Reddit already replacing mods on some of the more popular subs which I don't really believe has been as black or white as the titles might suggest. From what I've seen it's mostly existing mods going against other mods but under suspicious circumstances - so overall more drama to muddy the waters.
In light of all this there has also been an influx of Reddit-like platforms gaining in popularity such as the fedaverse plaforms kbin social and lemmy. Much like with Twitter and Mastodon there seems to be a resurgence of the idea that an alternative to popular social giants is sorely needed.
Alas at the time of opening this thread there hasn't been a clear indicator of where this drama is headed - but we can certainly continue monitoring it and discuss it at length.