Money, Mods, and Mayhem
The Turning Point
In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it’s a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.
The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn’t mince words: “Reddit’s API changes are not just unfair, they’re unsustainable for third-party apps.”
Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.
The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.
One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”
This is pure copium. Reddit is doing just fine.
Reddit’s quality has gone down. Seems that’s no indication the business is going anywhere.
Eh, reddit could do great and i couldn’t care less. I just care that the federation is healthy
Cool story. I was referring to the article title being insane and inaccurate.
I still hop back in semi frequently, it’s definitely changed. Feels faker, past its peak with OC content and OC memes being a defining influence on the internet. But yeah, it still has a shitload of regular users.
Kind of reminds me of how digg felt after the redesign.