There’s Always Going to Be Another Reddit

Today, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest of controversial changes to Reddit's API that puts numerous popular third-party apps out of commission, many of which have proven vital for the site's many communities to function. Here's my two cents.

I've been a Reddit user for the better part of nine years, originally to join the communities of the games I frequently played such as Elite Dangerous or Command & Conquer, but it's also been an extremely useful problem-solving resource. I've quickly found and received a lot of high-quality information off Reddit, and I've tried to return the favor where I could. It's the sort of information I'd previously have to dumpster dive through sparsely populated internet forums to obtain. I probably would've never been able to run my blog - this one or the old one as effectively, were it not for Reddit.

Now all of that looks set to collapse since Reddit's higher-ups seem are more concerned with chasing profits than the interests of their user base. Were this a circumstance of just continuing to keep the doors open, I could totally understand. Running a free API model for website the size of Reddit is totally unsustainable and as far as I know, their only revenue comes off advertising. However, it's the way they've conducted themselves and the excuses they've made up to this point that's elicited so much justified furor, not just strictly about how outrageous the new API pricing is.

I won't dive into much detail myself about this, but after talks between Reddit and Apollo's developer Christian Selig discussing the changes to the API, Reddit's CEO Steve "Spez" Huffman falsely accused Selig of trying to blackmail the company (you can Christian's whole post on the situation here). Which, even without knowing ins and outs the entire story, is a hilarious (and frankly, libelous) accusation to make because Reddit holds ALL the cards in this situation.

Not only does Spez's conduct makes him and his company look like a bunch lying assholes, it also makes it look like they're flat out trying to kill the third-party apps in favor of funneling their users into channels that they have full control over (which if you use a third-party Reddit app, you know that's because the official Reddit app is shit), and less because they're losing money to large language model (LLM) developers scraping the site for training data.

All this might sound a little familiar to some of you old timers out there. Remember Digg? The formerly popular Reddit rival/predecessor that effectively committed suicide because it destroyed it's site, and the goodwill of it's users in an attempt to cater to advertisers? Yeah, it's like Reddit is actively trying to model it's demise after Digg as well.

Though it doesn't really stop at comparisons to Digg either. If anything, the entire state of the internet's most popular sites has been trundling down this path for quite some time. An almost inevitable progression where a once good platform screws over it's users for advertisers, and then screws over the advertisers for themselves. You might know it as "enshittification". Look at Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Google - shoveling users crap they don't want and didn't ask to see, while turning once fair exposure for sellers and content creators alike into a dog-eat-dog favoritism contest of who's willing to throw away the most money. 

It's easy to feel an overwhelming sense of dread looking at the future of the entire internet in the wake of Reddit turning it's back on it's users. Some have even called it a glimpse into the web's dystopian future, where once widely abundant and free information is now hidden away behind closed doors; the communities of which no longer have a public space to call home, free from corporate overseers expecting profits in return for their existence.

That said, if there's one thing I know about the people of the internet; they don't give up easily. They're not afraid to work around problems the web's overlords throw at them and if nothing else, light a match on their way out the door to greener pastures. If Reddit as we know it well and truly dies, there's going to be something to supersede it in the same way that that Reddit superseded Digg and the numerous unlocalized forums that preceded it.

And if it doesn't already exist, it's going to get created.

There are in fact some attempts already out there to create open-source news aggregator sites akin to Reddit such as Kbin or Lemmy, but only time will tell what alternative - if it's even one of those two, gains mainstream popularity. It will probably take years before that becomes obvious, in the same way that it takes years for one platform to dethrone another in terms of popularity - especially now with how massively ingrained in day-to-day life they've have become.

So Reddit may die. That's fine. I'm sure a lot of us could all use the break from doom-scrolling it's front page all the time. That said, I'll lament the loss of it's treasure trove of information and the many great online communities (well, most of them) built within it, but I'm confident that in time it'll all come back in some form. Will that place make the same mistakes a decade or so later? Who knows, but until that time comes, things will at least feel normal again. Just maybe without Snoo's smiling face plastered everywhere.