I'm also only one datapoint but I won't use Reddit from 30th on. I guess all these big cooperation and some users are overestimating the power of their platform. I (and I know some other people from my inner circle that are not "in tech") left these platforms before and never looked back.
It was the same with Facebook: You want me to use my real name? I'm gone. Never used Facebook again. Specifically in Germany (where I would argue the population values privacy more than in other nations) that was a deal breaker for a lot of them when they started enforcing that policy.
(This example is not about a platform but more of an example of quitting a product because of "bad" behavior) Mobile games getting more and more P2W and have a half-life of ~1 year? Yeah, count me out. Especially with that example I know a lot more people that said "fuck that" and won't touch mobile games with a ten foot pole anymore.
And honestly it will be the same with Reddit. It's not like it's essential. I'll be good without it and I would guess many more people too. The two examples I gave made my life better (less screen time) and the Reddit move will do the same.
As for how it'll play out for the majority of people: I guess we'll see. But looking at Reddits latest track record of bad decisions I would argue it won't be the last one and there is a lot of potential to create a new Digg moment.
I was part of the Digg -> Reddit exodus at the time, I loved Digg until they destroyed it, had a Reddit account for long but never really used it.
Now with Reddit trying to shutdown Apollo and other 3rd party clients with this pricing move I can see myself never using Reddit, their official client sucks a lot (it's unfortunate they bought Alien Blue just to kill it, which gave Apollo the chance to rise from those ashes), if Apollo dies... I will simply not use Reddit as much, the only other way I can use Reddit right now is through old.reddit.com, that sucks on mobile browsers without RES.
It seems I will soon experience a repeat of Digg with Reddit, slowly use it less and less because the experience is broken until the moment I forget it exists.
Maybe this will just be it for Reddit. I know if the app I use (Reddit Is Fun) goes away, as it is planning to do, I won't use Reddit on my phone any more and by extension, I will rarely use it at all. No big drama or boycott from me. It is just another community circling the drain via planned obsolescence.
The decisions that reddit has taken were not affecting me for now. The new ui was horrible for my use case (text subreddits and focusing on the debate) so I was a old.reddit user.
But the way the direction is going, and some experiences in some subs have made me take a decision, and my 12+ year account is no more.
It won't matter, and probably reddit will survive, be it as strong as it is now or in a diminished state. But I'm tired of this kind of directives in these kinds of companies.
I hope that leaving that, and not having Instagram or Facebook on the phone, might give me a little push on being more productive. Wish me luck.
Reddit is actively driving away their core users. This is a disaster for any product, regardless of where the potential lies. Until they are no longer your core users, you still need them.
On the other hand, this does remind me of all the pleas and hate that Facebook got about their permissive privacy policies. As much bad publicity that resulted, Facebook is still the king of social media.
Any service that achieves a certain level of network effect will inevitably use that position against its users, knowing very few of them will change their behavior and abandon the network.
The biggest networks have become too big to be disrupted on a short enough time scale that execs worry about. I don't know if a Digg to Reddit type migration is possible anymore. But Reddit and Twitter are well into their phase where we know we don't like using them anymore. We've just established these patterns and no one serves them well anymore. It will take a decade for these services to really die, but the die is cast.
Between Twitter, Reddit, and now Uber it seems like the pretense of preserving a good user experience has suddenly been found to be unnecessary.
I deleted my 12-yr old Reddit account this past weekend. I, too, went through the Digg redesign debacle which prompted my complete shift from Digg to Reddit so many years.
What I have learned is there always is an alternative and clinging to a platform that is headed in the opposite direction you are going is not worth it. I’ll miss Reddit in the short term, but I’m done with it and have moved on.
Anecdotally, a lot of people are deleting their accounts and quitting Reddit. I myself am archiving all my data, editing all my comments to something useless, and deleting my account.
I agree completely. I've used Reddit since at least 2008. I quit Facebook over what they did to WhatsApp and will never use another Meta product. Reddit is getting dangerously close.
It's very clear there is not an adult at reddit who can tell the people in power NO.
If they are then so are my days on reddit. The whole API debacle is already pretty rough for them. I can't imagine removing old.reddit could possibly be a good decision for them now. I have an account but only i choose when to use that account. If reddit removes choice, I'll remove reddit.
It's really striking though that all of this hate for these terrible dark patterns invariably ends in a statement like, 'leaving would honestly improve my life'. These companies have become so ingrained and good at attention economy that most people feel like it makes their lives worse, and yet also cannot stop. I have a feeling this whole social media ship could go the way of the opium wars is we don't change course soon
I just don't think I'll use Reddit anymore. It was a nice place to catch up with my interests but the only way in which I used it was via Apollo. The one thing that made Reddit unique compared to all its competitors was its developer community and they have deliberately torpedoed it.
All good things have to end but this was avoidable.
Totally agree. I was ready to pay for Reddit access in some shape or form but after my favorite client (Apollo) shutdown, understandably, and after I saw how Reddit treated the developer and the community I decided it was time to leave.
It was/is incredibly hard to do so, it was a near-daily habit for well over a decade but there has to be a line somewhere and Reddit barreled right past it and never looked back.
I used to be a hard core Reddit user for probably 10 years. I havent used it in maybe 2 years; I have no interest. People like me are probably showing up in their user data and the writing is on the wall internally. Thats when you go public to dump the bag.
Their biggest mistake maybe?...controversy and discussion sells and they essentially banned that subreddit by subreddit. People dont like platforms with information gaps.
I've been on Reddit since 2009, and never cared about any of that stuff or claimed I was going to leave Reddit over it. I absolutely am leaving Reddit over this.
I am keeping my account, because I might need it to promote my business (it still has utility in that area and I am pragmatic, I am not going to not do something that could help my business for ideological reasons), but I will no longer be using it on a daily basis or contributing comments/posts unless they back away from this.
That's what killing a social media is, people leaving.
Which is realistically not going to happen.
The average user doesnt care, yeah reddit is geeky but all they want is money.
I'm still quite a fairly active user on reddit going on a decade now. If they started implementing this on a wide scale then I'd like to think I'd stop using it completely. I've gone on a few hiatus during some of the controversies regarding the degradation of the communities and values that they original founders represented, think like 2014 during that debacle with the office move, or the "good cop, bad cop" that was taking place with Pao and her restrictions on what some communities viewed as free speech. As more corporate interests and perhaps even governments take notice of reddit's community impact, I'm sure that more restrictions will be implemented and content watered down until it's hardly any different than facebook. At that point I will hopefully have found and fully moved on to a better place.
- losing it’s most passionate advocates and users;
How many users left? It also might be filtering some of the more obnoxious users. Once a brand hits a critical mass that doesn't always matter. Think of everyone valve and facebook "alienated" over the years. Did it matter at all?
Reddit quite literally wants it's users to be "alienated" like other social media sites, because it goes with the territory of making money.
It's not like the reddit utopian dreams are still alive. Don't moderate, and you get racists, molesters, etc., and they tell everyone to drink the poison... what's the point anymore?
- driving whole communities to its competitors (federated and discord specifically);
Are these anywhere close to viable options? I haven't heard of federated, and discord is pretty bad for organizing public forums. It excels at group chat, not news discussions with very large groups.
- just utterly shredding managements credibility with their users;
I'm shocked it had any left to begin with. I suppose these are teh "noob users"? If you started ~2008-2012, none of this is surprising at all, and you have limited respect remaining for the platform... this was clear after the redesign, at the very latest.
- and inspiring a generation of entrepreneurs to engage in building platforms to supplant replace them that definitely would not otherwise exist.
How many new social media platforms have you seen of late? I wouldn't be surprised either way, but don't count on it.
- So much winning. Gold star for everyone involved. Case study on how to manage community forthcoming.
Case study that you should not try to be the good guy. These types of unpopular decisions should be made earlier. Reddit lost out on a lot of money by delaying the inevitable. Now it's very likely that it will take a greater reputational hit, because it didn't give up it's college fantasies quickly enough.
We all know the least successful companies are the ones that make these unpopular decisions... you know like: Apple, Facebook, Valve, insta, twitter, etc., etc. Wouldn't want to be like those losers!
That is the day I will quit reddit and never look back. 6 months ago I rarely used old.reddit.com, but now I run into more and more dark patterns all the time. They tried to TikTok my feed and it was an awful experience. I frequently default to it now instead of using it only when I get sick of the dark patterns.
Reddit got popular because Digg screwed up their comment threading. It's sad to see reddit is starting to make anti-user mistakes like digg. Maybe they think they can force it because there isn't a competent competitor.
The problem with all of these sites is they start to service the lowest common denominator in the name of next quarters profits. As their websites become more hostile to the educated, the quality of content drops and profit goes up, but the golden goose is slowly being strangled.
Reddit was fantastic around the time of digg because the average user appeared to be college educated or greater. Celebrities like Randall Monroe were submitting high quality content. It was common for a literal expert to write a well thought out post. Now it's an "Americas funniest home videos" feed of fart jokes with your liberal aunt and conservative uncle having an argument in the background.
It seems so clear to me that billionaires mean we can't have nice things. Twitter and Reddit both promoted a "truth to power" free speech ideology, and now billionaires are coercing these companies into becoming cess pits that reflect the worst parts of humanity. Power doesn't like to be threatened so they will destroy the weapon.
I still can't decide if these companies are being destroyed because they promote a "no more billionaires" ideology, or if it is simply capitalistic greed and the search for next quarters profits.
It's really sad to watch Reddit being slowly destroyed like that, one user-hostile feature after the other. All of it for short term gains. For me the threshold to leave will be when old.reddit.com will not be available anymore. At that point it'll be pretty easy. I already spend a lot less time on the website than before.
It was the same with Facebook: You want me to use my real name? I'm gone. Never used Facebook again. Specifically in Germany (where I would argue the population values privacy more than in other nations) that was a deal breaker for a lot of them when they started enforcing that policy.
(This example is not about a platform but more of an example of quitting a product because of "bad" behavior) Mobile games getting more and more P2W and have a half-life of ~1 year? Yeah, count me out. Especially with that example I know a lot more people that said "fuck that" and won't touch mobile games with a ten foot pole anymore.
And honestly it will be the same with Reddit. It's not like it's essential. I'll be good without it and I would guess many more people too. The two examples I gave made my life better (less screen time) and the Reddit move will do the same.
As for how it'll play out for the majority of people: I guess we'll see. But looking at Reddits latest track record of bad decisions I would argue it won't be the last one and there is a lot of potential to create a new Digg moment.
reply