I don’t think it’s wrong for Spez to charge for API access, but the rates he’s vowing to charge are excessive and clearly designed to nuke third-party apps from their ecosystem.

As for how I’d make money from Reddit in his shoes, I’d:

1. Add more features for Reddit Premium, like being able to view more than 1,000 items on the front page, video uploads in comments, or enhanced search functionality.
2. Add OnlyFans-style subscriptions or revenue sharing for partnered subreddits/users, with a 90% to 10% cut between content creators and Reddit.
3. Bring back RPAN as a full time streaming platform to compete with the likes of Twitch/Kick.

They could easily do that by:

1. Threatening to site-wide ban moderators who keep their subreddits dark (on the basis that they’re disrupting the regular function of the website.)
2. Actually banning them if they follow through on another blackout.
3. Doing a bit of overtime to moderate /r/redditrequest, on the condition that people don’t request subs that already have more than two million subscribers.

I’ve been a lot more active on Beehaw over the past few days than on Reddit. Tried to get into Kbin but the servers have been remarkably unstable and I don’t like the fact that you can only view 25 comments at once.

I think a lot of subreddits will fold. Your typical reddit moderator is hungry for power and having that power taken away from them is probably more terrifying to them than losing Apollo/RIF/BaconReader/Sync/Relay.

https://wegotthiscovered.com/social-media/reddit-reportedly-removing-moderators-and-forcing-subreddits-to-reopen-to-break-protest/

As somebody who isn’t even a Star Trek fan, I still think a flood of trekkies is infinitely cooler than a flood of white supremacists which have killed similar platforms.

Apparently the head mod of /r/Tumblr has already been forcibly demodded. A bit weird that Tumblr of all places has been the starting point.

The News and Worldnews subreddits prove there are people still willing to lick Spez’s boots.

To be fair, he isn’t wrong.

I cannot see another blackout happening. I think a sizeable chunk of Reddit’s moderators would go back if it otherwise meant losing power and influence on one of the largest social media sites.

Of course a lengthier or indefinite blackout of most of Reddit’s communities would cause major disruption.

It was getting really bad.

Imagine having nearly 80 followers on Reddit and nearly all of them being OnlyFans spam bots.

If there’s something I’ve learned about fascists, or the right-wing in general, it’s that they can’t be reasoned with. It’s like a cult where people are brainwashed.

IIRC it wasn’t within days but rather months after Spez took over Reddit and started banning content that promoted racial/religious hatred. Voat nearly died from lack-of-users after Ellen Pao was ousted and everybody pretty much abandoned the site.

Another thing that I recall was Stormfront (a white supremacist/nazi forum) having their hosting provider pull the plug on their service, which may have sparked some of their users to seek refuge on Voat.

There was another Reddit clone that existed two years ago called Ruqqus. It was a decent community, until Voat shut down and all of their bigoted users flocked to it…

I think Spez is gambling on the apathy of his website’s core audience and on moderators being unwilling to indefinitely lock their subreddits. Relatively few communities have vowed to close their doors indefinitely (/r/videos and /r/iphone are the only two big ones I’m aware of) and I also think a lot of major ones are unwilling to escalate their protests beyond the original planned 48 hour blackout.

At this point I predict that Reddit will survive this, even if they’re going to lose a sizeable chunk of their user base by eliminating third-party apps. There are a sizeable number of moderators that are still willing to work with Reddit and they can definitely replace those who shut off their subreddits.

Digg v4 happened because a better alternative already existed in the form of Reddit. At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, while many of its users joked that they were just a vessel for regurgitated content that was posted on Reddit the day before. The damage had already been done, to the point where users jumped ship in droves the moment Kevin Rose dropped the disastrous overhaul of Digg…

Rarely does internet slacktivism work, and there are still some scabs willing to jump the picket line and keep their subs operating as normal. Some of us remember the days of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott when everyone vowed to boycott the game over having no dedicated servers, then went out, purchased it en masse and made Activision Blizzard break sales records.

Whether Reddit make drastic improvements to the official Reddit app remains to be seen. If I’ve learned anything it’s that Reddit’s admins are snakes and you cannot trust them.

The only good that’s come from this is that Lemmy and Tildes finally have active user bases. Never have I felt a sense of community from a Reddit alternative since the early days of Voat (long before it was commandeered by white supremacists.)

I don’t see Lemmy replacing Reddit, since the fediverse is complicated by nature and Lemmy has similar issues to Mastodon, where the discoverability of content outside of your main instance is practically fucking nonexistent.