However, the deleterious effect on Reddit's overall culture cannot be understated. The people who were most driven away by the API changes were power users, and Reddit has become far more bland and repetitive as a result (to anyone familiar with the tenor of Reddit it may seem hard to believe that it could lower the bar any further, but I assure you, it has). The difference in trending subreddits from immediately before the blackout to immediately after was dramatic; whereas before you could expect the site-wide trending posts to have the nutritional content of cardboard (with the occasional gem from e.g. AskHistorians), it has been replaced with a flood of celebrity drama, ragebait from "unpopular opinion" clones, and ragebait creative writing exercises via dozens of similar "am I the asshole" clones. This is normalizing somewhat as the clones compete with each other and coalesce (Reddit's algorithm tries to limit trending posts to one per subreddit), but it's still a regression.
That said, it's still not the worst that Reddit has ever been; that title still belongs to back to 2016 when TheDonald popularized how to game the trending algorithm via brigading their own stickied posts. But I'm using Reddit less and less as they keep making the experience even worse, especially on mobile, which is more hostile to the Oldreddit interface than ever. After the IPO I expect them to jettison Oldreddit entirely, at which point the site will be beyond useless for anyone who actually wants to use it as a place to read comments rather than as a poor TikTok imitation.
Perhaps that actually benefits Reddit though? More engagement even if it is mostly dimwits responding in earnest to troll posts.
People throwing tantrums in public and making clowns of themselves has always been funny.
That post is itself ragebait. They are just trolling.
On the whole though the Reddit won - all the serious protestors left and the remainder (majority) folded
In my experience that solves the issue. It’s not the most mobile friendly but workable and my go-to regardless.
I also haven't really seen any of the major (Reddit mods are not spread out, a very small group control the majority of large subreddits) mod just quit. Anyone who edited their content "so reddit doesnt profit" just gave the internal Reddit DB more value to sell to the LLM companies
Reddit moderation, like Facebook Group moderation, works for free because people are bored and love the power grab. There are SO MANY Facebook Groups with over 100,000 and 1,000,000 users, their mods work endlessly 24/7 to stop spam and make sure everything is kosher. They've never once asked Zuckerberg for cash, the ego boost is just too big to give up
In return, quality has fallen off a cliff. Moderation on some of the most popular subs is scarce, so all the popular ones have started to coalesce into a 'blob' of sameness. Discussions are poor as well, and misinformation is rife.
For the niche subreddits, often dedicated to one topic, where there isn't a lot of traffic, not that much has changed. There's still a decent amount of engagement. It might be that some quality has fallen off there, but it's the "new normal".
All the more poignant in light of the recent announcement that they were going to sell access to their "content" to train someone's AI. Good luck with that.
To be honest, I only looked at a few niche subforums, but on them the daily posts have halved.
But maybe it's also how those sites now gather the data.
Do you know more about this?
Have the predictions come true? Presumably all those changes were to juice numbers pre IPO. In hindsight, did it work?