The vast majority of an online community's content is produced by a small fraction of users. Most are just reading posts. Without user generated content Reddit has zero value. Reddit fighting its most active, invested users is not a smart move.
YouTube got away with lots of bad changes because many creators are getting paid to produce content and competing with YouTube is near impossible. But Reddit is one of many primarily text-based online communities and they are currently destroying the only things holding people on their platform. Aside from the userbase Reddit has no redeeming qualities that would make anyone hesitate to leave.
Is there a built-in assumption of incompetence at Reddit in your comment?
If you assume they know all what you said, and that they have dashboards showing breakdowns of submitters/commenters/voters by client, can you imagine a charitable explanation of what may motivate their current actions? Even if you do not like the reason, do you think it may be rational?
> can you imagine a charitable explanation of what may motivate their current actions?
IPO value. This entire scheme, is a last ditch attempt to maximise exit value for the founders. The actions all point in that direction, many fo which are borderline illegal.
Let's break it down. Reddit has had a metoric rise in the past 5 years, adding like 200 million mobile users to their official app. This started in 2018 when the first news of the IPO began. Reddit started heavily advertising.
They initially redesigned the web version, started giving a worse mobile experience and had a massive, intrusive banner that said "try the official app" on the mobile client. So we have a "friendlier" web experince and an aggresive app marketing push.
We now have more users than ever. Should we focus on efficiency, tools for mods etc? Nope, the entire product stack of reddit since 2019 has been releasing Monetasation tools. From badly hidden NFTs as profile pictures, to reddit awards paid with money, to ads hidden as actual content on the front page of the new web and mobile app.
So now we have record users, a new set of money making tools what else can we do to maximise exit value? We reduce 3rd party users, this way even if a fraction come to the app we still have new record user numbers. And we generate as much content as possible, preferably in areas that will be considered growth vectors in teh sale.
So reddit made a ridiculous API pricing plan, with 0 time to implement to essentially kill 3rd parties but not having to do it officially. Other less verifiable events that seem to be happening is that bots have increased, and some non english subs like the french and german communities are having new content generated by badly translating popular reddit posts with AI. This would benefit reddit as more content (even if by bots) is a higher exit price and communities that do not speak english using reddit more would also be seen as a positive by whoever would buy reddit. This is not attributable to reddit, bt if it was, it is straight up fraud. However the timing of the bot activity increasing and the non english subs seeing increased activity directly benefits the IPO plan therefore it is worth mentioning.
In other words, the charitable explanation is that this is the last hurrah in a 5 year plan to make the owners of reddit rich before they off load a website full of bots and angry users to whoever is silly enough to think they can fix this mess.
The existence of this HN thread and the situation we are discussing is a very clear sign of Reddit's incompetence. Regardless of what their motivation was they have fucked up the execution in a big way.
YouTube got away with lots of bad changes because many creators are getting paid to produce content and competing with YouTube is near impossible. But Reddit is one of many primarily text-based online communities and they are currently destroying the only things holding people on their platform. Aside from the userbase Reddit has no redeeming qualities that would make anyone hesitate to leave.