I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
If an API disruption and selling all the data to chatgpt in order to train the AI is not enough to make people leave or make a bigger protest then i don’t know what is. What can reddit do in order to create an outrage big enough to make people leave or to boycott the platform?
I can’t think of anything Reddit could do aside from turning off the site that would make a significant dent in the traffic. Take Twitter as an example. It’s now run by a sieg-heiling Nazi that promotes his AI that will help users make child porn(paying customers only) and customizes the algorithms to hide any content that doesn’t promote the agenda of the world’s richest person and people still use it although there are at this point a multitude of competing platforms.
I’m confident Reddit will continue to be heavily populated for the foreseeable future.
The issue is that most people aren’t aware that their data is being sold, or they just don’t care at all. And by 2023, most people on Reddit were using the official app, not 3rd party apps (according to the subreddit stats of the subreddits I used to moderate). So for most people, the 2023 API change wouldn’t have affected them at all. It only would’ve affected older users and some moderators.
It would have to be a disruption that would affect:
Not only do you need to do all 3, you need to do it simultaneously in order for the users to rebel. So Reddit nowadays have chosen to implement negative changes in smaller parts. AKA boiling the frog alive.
If you walk down any street, most people are wearing clothes made by children in sweatshops.
In general, people don’t really care about abstract ethical concerns even ones affecting them until it actually harms them or someone they know.