Comment by rwmj
11 days ago
Reddit is already lost. I was talking to the mods in a large political subreddit and they said after Reddit started charging for API access, all the tools they used to keep on top of the trolls and bots stopped working, and the quality of the whole subreddit declined visibly and dramatically.
> Reddit is already lost. I was talking to the mods in a large political subreddit and they said after Reddit started charging for API access, all the tools they used to keep on top of the trolls and bots stopped working, and the quality of the whole subreddit declined visibly and dramatically.
The whole point of the API access change was to charge AI model-makers. I'd be ironic if the API change made destroyed their product and made their data unsellable.
Yes, everyone warned Spez about that at the time. He didn’t care, he wanted that IPO.
Recently, they came around looking to recruit me. I told them fire Spez or fuck off. (17 year Reddit user here)
I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit, used to, I decided to leave and never come back after the API debacle, it was a long time coming though.
I think if the business model had been thought in the sense of the communities and involving mods and users in, it would have been genius, a lot of smaller companies would kill to have people genuinely recommending their products/tools that are hidden behind the biggest wall of them all...
Alas they completely ignored this as a viable avenue and went for the quick buck.
But this won't last and at some point people are going to move on from mass scraping, either because they already got what they want or because garbage goes in garbage comes out or because most of the content will be bot generated and require too much filtering to be useful.
Of course this is the opinion and rambling of a moderately educated individual and I might be totally wrong.
Change can often be for the best, pretty sure it wasn't in this case...
It's not just the mods, it's also the culture of the website that changed.
Agreed. There still are resistant subs, but the main culture moved in a worse direction. That is subjective of course, but it isn't just reddit trying to "clean house" that makes everything a little more sterile and boring. It also become even more intolerant of "wrong" opinions. That has always been the case to a degree, but it got seriously worse.
Some subreddit got purged over the years, some for the best, some for the worse, I couldn't find where in the new UI you could find moderator names.
Aaron is probably turning once again in his grave...