I was on Reddit for 7 years and until this Huffman guy pulled this shit, I hadn’t even thought about Reddit as a money making entity really. He made it clear they’re after money, but they don’t actually create anything. We create the content, we moderate it, and Huffman wants to make money off our free work. I had never ever thought of it that way until this API thing and that’s a huge fuck up on Huffman’s part, he made a regular user like me stop to think and realize that Reddit was all along, just out to get my content and data so they can make money off it.
And sadly now the best Google search results for anything niche are bound to be Reddit threads.
That says a lot and more than one thing at the same time. Already mentioned was how reddit essentially replaced forums. But the other is just how bad Google search has gotten. I’ve noticed a decline over the years. The reddit blackout caused another dip. A lot of sites have done SEO to rank high on Google, but they fill their site with garbage content that’s meant to appease Google’s ranking algorithm. I’m starting to question how long Google stays relevant.
And that’s why we gotta keep posting about our niche interests on the fediverse, so collectively fediverse instances start having fresher and more up to date search results. It’ll kinda be like going back in time where you got results from many different specialized forums when searching for info. But cooler.
It’s okay. Personally I won’t feel guilty for searching on google and adding “reddit” to it. They are trying to become like tiktok anyway, with video/shorts content to endlessly browse and show more ads that way.
If you want you can still do searches with “reddit” on desktop and turn on adblocker.
I think the capitalism paved the way to help us experience these social medias, so it wasn’t a total loss reddit has all our stuff even if we don’t approve of it anymore. Now we just gotta build something new that won’t as easily go through “enshittification”
For now.
…stop to think and realize that Reddit was all along, just out to get my content and data so they can make money off it.
‘Monetize it’ is the word they use.
I really only have one thing to say at this point: popcorn tastes good. 🍿
Love the avatar, Doc.
AMC popcorn?
Whichever you like. I’m using the kind that comes in a disposable pan and puffs up when you cook it on the stove.
Huffman defended business decisions made by the company to charge third-party apps saying the API wasn’t designed to support these clients.
Then what exactly is it for?
We’re happy to have API clients, crawlers, scrapers, and browser extensions
Seems you were happy with third party apps and products for quite a while.
