Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial.
I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite.
It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion.
The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from.
I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later.
I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content.
That IPO of theirs is going so well.
I do understand. The problem is, I’m hearing that Reddit is testing the idea of forcing people to log in. At that point, SEO becomes worthless as the spiders can’t crawl the data to even suggest it to you in the first place.
The fact of the matter is, Reddit is bloated in staff and expenses. They are already monetizing everyone’s content with awards and ads from users using their site and app. Now they are double-dipping with the API used by many to submit content.
The chose to bite the hands that feed them so many of us decided to stop serving them food, including the leftovers.
Hopefully Elon’s little tantrum over the weekend has scared them enough not to do it. But I doubt it has