alt Hacker NewsThis is the second death of reddit, the penultimate one. But it stems directly from the first death in ~2015 when they accepted the massive venture capital investment and then had to try to monetize the facebook refugees which meant clearing out all the business appropriate "undesirables" including firing many beloved long time corporate employee, and switching to model where people and corporations posted to their profiles (like facebook) instead of subreddits set up by the existing userbase. It hasn't been reddit since. And they're making that very clear as of yesterday.
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I always considered the massive digg.com revolt to be the "beginning of the end". It was between Reddit and Kuro5hin in those days. Who was going be the next "Slashdot"? It's the same story over and over though. Site reaches critical mass, it needs to afford hosting, infra, salaries.... what do they do? Monetize.
iirc they removed “fat people hate”, a variety of subreddits named after racial slurs (including literally /r/<n-word>s) and a subreddit for “well it’s not technically porn” of children
new Reddit remains awful both design and implementation wise but the content they cleaned up wasn’t a big loss, and there’s still plenty of “non-desirable” content (so many porn subreddits, to start) on there
I thought the 2023 API lockdown was a very significant point. That's the first time they tried to block the site from being mirrored.
I've been on there too long, it feels like they died several times over:
* CEO changes
* Creation of new / infinite scrolling UI (and app)
* Restricting content (banning racist subreddits, hiding NSFW from /all)
* Removing popular "AMA" mod (AMA subreddit is kinda dead now, it used to be a huge event)
* introduction of paid APIs / "fuck spez" campaign
I'm sure there's many more but my point is it's "died" many times over yet still it exists; the drama passed, the baseline remains.