I think they’re all part of the same issue - Reddit only cares about it’s IPO and financial status, not it’s users or communities. This will get worse when they IPO as Reddit will then care about the share price and nothing else.
We saw this with other Social media - look at Tumblr; it imploded as it started banning NSFW content because of bizarre moralising by Verizon when it took over Yahoo (and Yahoo already had been restricting content since it bought Tumblr). Twitter is imploding since it came under the whims of a billionaire egomaniac owner. Facebook has been in a long slow decline as it focuses on advertising above all else.
Reddit is going the same way. It has already started censorship - it closed lots of communities already in the past few years. This wasn’t too controversial as it generally went for the obviously “extreme” communities or communities without any moderation which were therefore high risk. But it’ll get more controversial as it moves towards its IPO - it’ll do whatever maximises it’s share price, and in the US in particular that also comes with a lot of reactivity to the general media. It’ll just need one controversy for it to start banning other communities, and the NSFW communiteis are the obvious first targets. But also targetting communities based on being “hateful” or “trolling” - the problem is the how “bad” something is is largely in the eye of the beholder. Once you go down the road of banning anything you don’t agree with you end up in censorship hell.
For most users issues around censorship, 3rd party access to APIs, and even privacy mean little as they don’t feel the impact. But Reddit is on an inexorable path of decline and users will start moving as community quality falls (moderators working for free for their love of the community only is a huge asset; users will leave communities when they become filled with rubbish or trolling users), and faster when content they want gets banned.
Social media is littered with failed sites that either failed to move with the times or went off the rails ignoring users: MySpace, Tumblr, Digg, Twitter. Reddit is next up.
I think they’re all part of the same issue - Reddit only cares about it’s IPO and financial status, not it’s users or communities. This will get worse when they IPO as Reddit will then care about the share price and nothing else.
We saw this with other Social media - look at Tumblr; it imploded as it started banning NSFW content because of bizarre moralising by Verizon when it took over Yahoo (and Yahoo already had been restricting content since it bought Tumblr). Twitter is imploding since it came under the whims of a billionaire egomaniac owner. Facebook has been in a long slow decline as it focuses on advertising above all else.
Reddit is going the same way. It has already started censorship - it closed lots of communities already in the past few years. This wasn’t too controversial as it generally went for the obviously “extreme” communities or communities without any moderation which were therefore high risk. But it’ll get more controversial as it moves towards its IPO - it’ll do whatever maximises it’s share price, and in the US in particular that also comes with a lot of reactivity to the general media. It’ll just need one controversy for it to start banning other communities, and the NSFW communiteis are the obvious first targets. But also targetting communities based on being “hateful” or “trolling” - the problem is the how “bad” something is is largely in the eye of the beholder. Once you go down the road of banning anything you don’t agree with you end up in censorship hell.
For most users issues around censorship, 3rd party access to APIs, and even privacy mean little as they don’t feel the impact. But Reddit is on an inexorable path of decline and users will start moving as community quality falls (moderators working for free for their love of the community only is a huge asset; users will leave communities when they become filled with rubbish or trolling users), and faster when content they want gets banned.
Social media is littered with failed sites that either failed to move with the times or went off the rails ignoring users: MySpace, Tumblr, Digg, Twitter. Reddit is next up.