Indeed, how many of Reddit's 500 million users per month base actually use anything besides new Reddit and the official app? I'd say the vanishing minority.

Much of the complaints seem to come from moderators who rely on third-party apps for moderation. That seems reasonable and like a real problem. I wonder if Reddit could have bought one of the popular apps moderators use and make it official.

The latest news from Reddit is that they're allowing free API access for accessibility apps and moderator tools.

What's "moderator tools" in this context?? Mods use apps like Apollo and RIF to moderate their subreddits, and both of these apps are shutting down at the end of the month.

Kind of late now they are caught with their pants down before a black out. Pretty sure they are going to kill it again or put a barrier in there once they get the chance.

It doesn't really matter what they do. I guarantee by this time next week, Reddit will be back to normal.

And I think Reddit will be delighted to get rid of the "troublemakers".

the problem is that the "troublemakers" are the cool kids that make the site interesting, so it's a bit like gentrification kids out the cool folks that made the place interesting in a first bit

I don’t think the “troublemakers” are likely to be the people who make Reddit interesting. The troublemakers are the people who are complaining the loudest about Reddit, and the people who make the site interesting are the people who spend most of their time caring about other things besides Reddit.

In the PC world, the power users could graduate into developers and make apps to share with everyone. In the Reddit world, the power users are people who are interested in farming for karma, the people who stake out claims as moderators, the people who respond to tons of AITA / legaladvice / relationships posts.

When I hear someone ranting, pissed off, about the latest Windows or macOS update, or systemd, it’s often because they use computers to get work done, and having the tech stack change under your feet makes it hard to get work done. Broad sense of the word “work” here, when I say “get work done”.

Nobody’s getting work done on Reddit, it’s a time drain from other stuff we could be doing. (Like, not nobody nobody, just nobody.)

This is very short-sighted.

The best places on reddit are good dude to stringent moderation.

They are all going dark in response. This will remove all quality from Reddit and finally turn it fully into a meme and porn dump.

In recent years I have seen more and more people comment here that they search reddit rather than the web when they want to get decent results. I can absolutely imagine that this could end relatively soon, and whether a "meme and porn" version of reddit is really worth more than a "central platform of all niche forums for all topics" reddit remains to be seen.... The fact that there have been many "meme and porn" platforms that came and went in the past makes me question that...

The good places on Reddit, with tight moderation, are few and far between. I can think of r/AskHistorians, but there are not many like it (I can’t think of another, off the top of my head). Maybe you know of other examples?

askhistorians is an extreme example. They basically change the entire nature of the site through very visible moderation. But my understanding is that places like r/physics would be drowning in lazy memes as well. Take any subreddit you like and look at the posting guidelines. Chances are they are there in reaction to significant amounts of people acting contrary to them.

I see what you are talking about, but I don’t think it makes Reddit interesting. It’s kind of like having a bunch of different HOA boards, all fighting over how to mow the lawns or what colors to paint the houses in their respective communities.

The people who make Reddit interesting are, IMO, the content creators and the people who answer questions. The content creators are spending most of their time off-Reddit, working on projects. The people answering questions are browsing /new on a few subreddits, killing time, and watching a mostly unmoderated stream of posts.

The moderation rules for individual subreddits are usually annoying—things like karma minimums, minimum ages, and sometimes a bunch of weird rules about what you can post and how you can post it. Rules against self-promotion.

Additionally I'll point out that people who search reddit like that are some of the most valuable visitors on ads-based platform, as many of them are looking for shopping advice.

Reddit used to be interesting but ever since it became a TikTok / Instagram meme clone with r/all, there really is no need for these sorts of power users. Sure, some subs like r/AskHistorians will suffer but I doubt they'll entirely leave the site, there is no alternative.

Having less stringent and totalitarian moderation might bring different sort of userbase to more active. And not even affect the number of passive one. It's not like in general people care about quality on Internet...

if that's the case then why are they going after 3rd party apps? If they are a niche among the user base then the benefit of killing them is hardly worth losing moderators who've been doing work for free.

It's about controlling their user base in terms of how they use the service.

If those users weren't that important, Reddit wouldn't be needing to push through this change and capture the revenue from those users.

The issue with that is that by far most users are reading (coming from Google etc. - which is at threat by ChatGPT btw.) or just lurking. Only few comment, very few comment a lot. Those produce the content for the majority of users and are the ones using special apps.

Risk is that if they kick out the "creators" by making the apps unattractive they might lose a lot of content for the lurkers.

But they should have statistics to see how many are using apps and how many of the most hit posts are written by app users ... if they didn't run such an analysis: their bad.

I obviously have no data to back it up, but I too suspect that third party app users post, reply, vote, and otherwise interact a disproportionate amount. Not only are these users likely to have been big reddit users in the first place, but apps like Apollo are designed to put these interactions in the forefront of the experience and make them as smooth and frictionless as possible.

Contrast this to the official site/app, which are instead designed to keep you jumping from post to post without dwelling for too long, but are also designed to sell junk like NFT avatars.

Reddit might continue on with business as usual after the API rate change goes into effect, but I believe the average quality of content and comments (which was already trending lower) will fall through the floor. There's no incentive for invested users who put more thought and effort into their posts to stick around.

>They’ve reached their natural level of user base.

Perhaps in the US. There is another 96% of humanity left to go so a little bit of additional growth should be feasible

They've already reached that 96%. Reddit has, and always had, international audience. At this point, anyone who knows a bit of English and is the kind of person to use a site like that, is on it (+/- government blocks, of course). Whatever space for growth Reddit has left, it's not geographical.

Almost half of Reddit is American. It’s not nearly as international or globally representative as you think.

Measured as?

A simple google search will bring up dozens of sites & a variety methods so take your pick. They all say Reddit is 40-50% American