Who would have thought that two of the biggest sites on the intarwebs would attempt to self-destruct at the same time?
Reddit, in the ramp-up to their IPO, has decided to charge extortionary rates for API access by 3rd-party apps, and given developers precious little time (30 days) to figure out what to do. They’ve also tried to throw the developer of Apollo under the bus but didn’t take into account that he might be recording the calls, and have evidence that directly contracts the company’s public statements. Most of those 3rd party apps will shut down at the end of the month, and I’m seeing a lot of Redditors saying that they’re going to nuke their accounts because the website and official app are garbage. Many tools used by moderation teams will also be broken by the API charges/cutoff, which means it’s likely that reddit will become an even bigger cesspool. A number of the top subreddits are going dark for 48 hours next week in protest of this move.
Make some popcorn, the CEO’s AMA is gonna get spicy. At least until his lackeys swoop in and clean things up. Or maybe he’ll edit the comments himself
Nefarious things are going on at Stack Exchange as well. The site has, for many years, published a dump of their database on a regular basis, posting it to Archive.org. That has stopped happening. A former employee (he was part of the layoffs that happened a month or two ago) has posted in that thread (I have met him, we’ve traveled in similar circles, and have no reason to not believe him):
The job that uploads the data dump to Archive.org was disabled on 28 March, and marked to not be re-enabled without approval of senior leadership.
Another person whom I’ve met and spoken with online who also works for Stack Exchange said recently that they’re leaving as well and “sometimes you know it’s time.”
They’re also killing off free API access and pivoting to start charging some for access to the data. Leaving many to ask “wait, what about all that content I’ve been contributing to the site for the last decade that I thought would remain free?”
Add to this at least 1125 moderators going on strike due to policy changes and cloak-and-dagger stuff going on.
It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that both of these sites are being driven to anti-user changes by money, money, and more money. Yes, we all implicitly knew we were the product and not the customer, but it’s become incredibly obvious and very quickly that we’re viewed as eyeballs and metadata to feed into advertising algorithms and data collection schemes and literally nothing more.