Originally written 2023-06-09. Revised 2023-06-11.
I’m writing this because I’ve used reddit for about a decade now, having registered in 2013. I have some strong opinions about the direction it’s gone in recent years and I think that the current crisis should really have been expected and is a long time coming.
(If you’re already filled in on the background details and generally agree with the sentiment, skip to the “Proposition” section.)
On 18 April 2023, reddit announced that they would be making some substantial changes to their API. It wasn’t exactly clear from this announcement what the impacts would be, but it became clear on the 31 May, when the developer of the popular 3rd party iOS reddit client Apollo announced that he had a call with a contact at reddit to discuss how the API pricing changes would impact his app. I’ll just paste the excerpt:
I’ll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.
Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.
I’m deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that the price would be A) reasonable and based in reality, and B) they would not operate like Twitter. Twitter’s pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit’s is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.
Needless to say, this was devastating.
On 8 June 2023, there was waves of announcements from the developers of every major 3rd-party client that they would be shutting down on 30 June, the day before the API changes are scheduled to go into effect.
There were also announcements from BaconReader, Relay, Infinity, and other clients that the API changes would be affecting their users as well, of course. The Apollo link there was especially illuminating since it covers a lot of the communication Christian had with reddit over the course of the last week and a half, including a recording of a call to keep the record straight. It very much seems like reddit is acting in bad faith here and that the changes are very specifically to kill off and discredit 3rd-party apps.
The announcements even made it onto TechCrunch.
The necessity of these kinds of third party tools can’t be understated. They’re absolutely essential for the platforms unpaid, volunteer moderators to do their work in many cases. The 1st-party reddit app is pretty widely disliked. It’s slow, it’s clunky, it’s riddled with spyware, and its moderator features are really lackluster. They say they’re working on improved mod tools, but why can’t they just let people use the tools they developed themselves?
One example being the automation efforts by /r/AskHistorians.
Some people can argue that these 3rd party apps deserve what they’re getting because reddit gets to dictate the terms that people use their service. They say that when starting their businesses (which is honestly even a stretch of the term, Apollo’s developer only incorporated in order to handle the very small fees (~$10/yr) to support some basic infrastructure and continued development) these developers accepted a “platform risk”.
But what people are really outraged about here is the break in the social contract that had formed between reddit the company and reddit users. The reddit API had been stable for years and millions of people had come to rely on it indirectly to access the site. For many years there simply wasn’t a 1st-party reddit app for mobile devices. So numerous independent developers, without any initial expectation of profit, decided to spend their own time building apps, bots, and other tools that interact with the reddit API. These developers supported the reddit ecosystem, and reddit gets to benefit strategically from it by making it easier to onboard users and provide a more enriching experience, effectively for free. It is reasonable for reddit to be able to charge for high volume API access, but the prices they’re stating do not reflect a fair value for the service provided, as discussed in the earlier quote.
I’d compare it much more to the Carterfone. The Carterfone triggered a case where the FCC ultimately decided that, actually, it was valid for people to use their own 3rd-party equipment to interact with a closed network (in this case, the AT&T telephone newtork) as opposed to renting it from the operator, so long as it wasn’t designed to compromise/damage the network, and it was the responsibility of the network operator to provide standards and information to ensure that this equipment could be made safely. This decision opened up the telephone network to all kinds of use cases that were just impractical before, like dial-up internet communication.
By this logic, I see it as similarly frustrating that we should be expected to use the 1st-party reddit app(s). Nobody can control which web browser you use to access the web (although some try), so why should we be expected to do the same for social platforms? Platforms should be expected or even in some cases required to build well-documented APIs for people to use.
Another possible argument reddit raises is that people using 3rd-party clients impacts their ad revenue, since interacting via the API does not allow for reddit to inject the same kinds of ads as they would on the web interface or their 1st-party app. I don’t think this is a good argument. If your business model is dependent on forcing people to pay attention to things they’d prefer not to, then you should find a different business model. Which they have, with reddit premium subscriptions, selling activity, and bulk data access deals.
A lot of blame is being put directly onto Steve Huffman (aka “spez”). And he does deserve blame. But putting all of the blame on him is shortsighted. People don’t make decisions in isolation, people are a product of their environment. We have to consider the systems that people operate in and think about what forces influence us.
Reddit was founded in 2005 with seed funding from Y Combinator, a startup incubator with a long legacy. It grew pretty fast, but an early turning point was selling ownership of the company to Condé Nast in 2006 in exchange for a large amount of early funding. A powerful early figure within reddit was Aaron Swartz (rip), who had a great vision for the site in promoting free sharing of knowledge and communication, hacktivism, and numerous other good values, but after the acquisition he left (was forced out?) in 2007. You could kinda say at this point reddit’s fate was already sealed, but it wasn’t widely understood how the startup world worked. Social media platforms were still new and exciting it wasn’t clear what the end game would look like.
An interesting phenomenon that seems to have started happening around 2010 are large internet platforms, social media included, that are exciting and popular when they’re young, but do a bait and switch once they become large and often due to establishing a strong network effect it can become difficult for users to separate themselves from the platform and move to another without cutting off ties. It’s happened numerous times.
Others have already done a lot of the work here in identifying why this keeps happening to platforms we (used to) love. Cory Doctorow wrote an article earlier this year about the phenomenon and how it occurred to TikTok. (self-published article link)
One important quote from this article that summarizes the entire issue:
This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
What a commenter in the discussion for the Doctorow article on Hacker News identified is that Steam seems to be, on its whole, an exception to the Enshittification cycle.
Personally I think the author doesn’t realize that Steam is an exception to this theory. It’s a private company that’s majority owned by a relatively idealistic founder. It’s also not really a social media company in the traditional sense, and it doesn’t really live and die on advertisements.
The key part here is that Steam isn’t subjected to the normal forces of capital markets that most startups are. The leadership at Valve (owner of the Steam platform), in particular Gabe Newell being the majority shareholder, can elect to forego maximizing his own profits from ownership of the company. Why does he choose to do this? We can speculate, but it’s possible his time working at Microsoft may have influenced his positions, and some kind of dedication to making good games as opposed to maximizing profit. Not all industries can permit this kind of behavior. A game company or a social media platform is a very different kind of organization from, say, a supermarket chain. Valve does have controversies surrounding it, but it’s a far cry from most publicly-traded companies which go out of their way with shady business practices, screwing over consumers and absusing laws to assert control over their intellectual property. Compare them and how they go about business to, for example, EA. But enough about that, let’s bring it back to reddit.
It’s not really a secret that reddit has been gearing up for an initial public offering (IPO) for some years. What I think may have changed the game recently is the US raising interest rates over the last year or so, causing capital to pull back rapidly. Their shareholders (which include Fidelity, Tencent, and some others) want to know that their money is being put to use properly and can actually provide a return. This was always in the cards, but the macroeconomic changes probably just accelerated it. The way that reddit’s leadership has decided to answer this is, as many startups aim to, is by going public and issuing stock on public markets. That means that they have to shore up revenue and cut costs, as they have been doing with these new API rules going into effect and cutting 5% of its workforce.
We know this is the direction they’re going in because they’ve told us: one two
Once this happens, there is no path for reddit to turn around and start being nice to its users again. As described in the Doctorow article above, they’ve spent as much time as their investors would allow being nice to the users, now it’s time to actually start making them money.
CEOs of all companies have fiduciary duty to their shareholders. This deprives them of some capacity for independent action. They cannot do anything well-intentioned if it damages shareholder value We cannot entirely place the blame on Steve Huffman for the direction that reddit has been going in recently, since he’s a conduit for the will and interest of reddit’s board and shareholders who (unlike Gabe Newell) make it their whole business to maximize profits.
This will always happen as long as social media is designed around the startup growth model. We must find an alternative.
Many people have proposed alternative sites to reddit. What I consider under this umbrellas is the core concept of threads being based around a post (either a link, text, or both) with comments forming a tree of replies. Secondarily, the organization of threads into discussion boards like subreddits, typically with their own community moderators.
I’ve already linked one here, Hacker News. HN is a bit of a weird niche, run as a small discussion forum by Y Combinator.
There’s also Lobeste.rs, which is a similar vibe and scale as HN, and works on a basis that you have to be invited to be able to post, or have an application manually vouched for.
There’s a few others that I’m stealing from this post on /r/RedditAlternatives:
These are all neat projects that should be considered. I haven’t thoroughly investigated them myself, but they are clean and each have their own merits.
But what these all have in common is that they’re platforms. The risk here is that success is dangerous. If any of these sites becomes successful if a Digg-like exodus from reddit and leads to rapid organic growth, then it’s painting itself as a target for VCs. We can trust that the people operating these platforms won’t sell out, but the risk will always exist, even if they’re economically sustainable without outside investment. Any day a VC might decide to make an offer they can’t refuse. If we jump ship to a VC-backed startup then it’s going to be a situation of meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
This has happened before in differing forms throughout history. Whenever there’s a strong system of social ties keeping a community together, finance capital tends to end up to inserting itself into the environment and disrupting it. One obvious comparison being the enclosure of the Scottish clan system by the English.
Whatever ends up being the successor to reddit has to find some way to avoid this fate. We must have a new model if we want to avoid having exactly the same situation happen again in another 10-15 years.
Alternative models for social media have been around for a while. The concept I’m referring to actually goes back far, very far.
Usenet was conceived of in 1979 as a way for users to share posts (or “news”) between each other, relying on a wide network of independently operated servers that exchanged data opportunistically over the weak dial-up links of the day. While most users had home servers, their posts were replicated across the network. Usenet fell out of favor in the late 90s as broadband internet access started to become more popular and web-based forums that supported more features started to become more popular for discussions.
The modern conception of the “federated universe”, or “Fediverse”, started in 2008, with identi.ca. It was never particularly widely used, but a newer iteration came onto the scene with Mastodon, which you may have already heard about as a result of the current Twitter drama and slow disapora. Anyone can download the software, for free, and start their own “instance” of it. These instances host user accounts, and user posts are shared between instances freely. Instance owners can set their own content moderation policies, similar to how moderators of subreddits do, but with more freedom on how to implement them. You can think of your instance like an email provider, but operated by trusted community members, and with more transparency into operations.
Some kind of decentralization and interoperability between instances I consider to be essential because it makes it less likely for users to concentrate in a single place without a way to break apart the network effect, so instead of instances competing for users, the value of the network as a whole become stronger when any one instance does. Federation is a model that can and does function similarly to what people are already used to with centralized platforms like reddit, and so the friction to migrate users should be modest.
It’s not clear to me what exactly about Mastodon made it reach a critical mass of users, but its undeniable at this point that it’s going well. It’s well beyond the point of being just the core developer(s) and their close friends, it’s an ecosystem greater than itself. Implementing a microblogging system like Twitter is simple and it’s a model that people are already comfortable with. There’s similar software packages like Pleroma that can freely interoperate with Mastodon instances. All of these software packages have the same kinds of APIs to exchange posts with different servers running compatible software, similar to how Usenet worked. Today, there’s thousands of different Mastodon instances, with a total number of registrations somewhere in the range of 1.5 million.
It’s not all sunshine and roses. There has been troubles with the Fediverse. Some of them are technical, some of them are more cultural.
These are growing pains that many movements have had to deal with, and I believe that they can be addressed if the people pushing these projects forward are dedicated enough and willing to work together.
The software powering Mastodon instances is free and open source, published under a strong copyleft license that helps eliminate the risk of capture by bad actors that wish to extract value from the network. There is a nonprofit owned by the founder of the project, Eugen Rochko, and serves as a custodian of the software. The actual ActivityPub protocol that defines the APIs between servers is managed by the W3C, the consortium that manages many web standards. While there is a flagship Mastodon instance, mastodon.social, Eugen himself has stated he sees it like an “airport”. By default, people are often directed to join there, then after interacting people on other instances for a while, they can make a new account on another instance with a culture based more around their interests. There’s also sites like joinmastodon.org, which help users find instances upfront based on their interests. Development of the software is funded via Patreon donations, which is also what a lot of instances use for sustaining themselves.
Mastodon is still very much immature, but it has a lot of potential and it has cleared many of the early bars that would be in the way of success.
So how does this relate back to reddit? There’s a couple of attempts to implement a reddit clone on top of the same ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon uses.
The two that I’m aware of right now are Kbin and Lemmy. Right now the ecosystems around these are very small, but there are already a number of instances. Especially given the last week or two, I expect that some dedicated subset of people will feel strongly enough to refocus their development efforts on these projects. They will have to go through many of the same growing pains that Mastodon did and still does, but we kinda understand how this works now. I don’t have a tremendous amount to say about these at feature level, because they’re reddit clones, if you’re reading this you should already have a good idea of what they do. The main difference is that users with accounts on instances can subscribe to forums (term I’m going to use instead of subreddits) on other instances from their own instance making the boundaries between instances thin.
Another possible concern with Lemmy is that the lead developer and owner of the flagship instance (lemmy.ml) has some concerning politics that make me start to believe in horseshoe theory. I don’t think this is an existential issue for the software, since anyone can fork it and do their own thing with it. It doesn’t seem like the developer’s politics have had a strong impact on the software as it stands today, but I don’t know how that could change in the future. After all, we do still read and build on HP Lovecraft’s work. Fortunately, since it is free and open source just as Mastodon is, if the direction the original developer(s) want to take the software in is at odds with the community, they can fork it or any older version and take its own direction. There are forks of Mastodon, like glitch-social, ecko, Megalodon, which are all of course compatible with upstream Mastodon instances, as would a fork of Lemmy be with upstream instances and Kbin instances.
I really can’t say what the best direction to take between these two projects is. Lemmy has a head start but the reputation issues might be a problem if the community can’t assert its own direction over its founder. I am fully in favor of establishing an independent fork if the community decides the ideal path to take. Kbin may have a slightly differentset or have a more accessible UI but it’s more of a departure from reddit and is based on PHP, which may be an issue in the long run, but that might be fine.
I’ve also seen someone build a Lemmy API proxy that has the same API as reddit, so it’s possible (forks of) the 3rd-party clients that reddit today could be easily retooled to just plug into these. The fact that these projects almost technically have fully-featured clients on Android and iOS, that are already installed on many thousands or millions of devices could be a secret weapon that makes adoption of these new protocols easy. It may become a standard part of any instance to run a reddit-like API proxy to support these retooled apps.
Update: I have been informed that RedReader is planning to support use of Lemmy instances in parallel, and possibly others. (official announcement)
If you want second opinions, here’s two articles I found in the process of writing this article:
I think we have a good opportunity for people to come together here for organized action. Moderators of popular subreddits have a level of legitimacy here that could be leveraged in order to unify people, if they so chose. I am not a moderator of any active subreddit so I don’t really have the grounds to tell moderators what they ought to do, but I have operated other kinds of internet communities and I’ve studied these kinds of crises in online communities and the diaspora that tends to follow, so I feel that somebody might find these prescriptions valuable.
The moderators should settle on one or two software packages to invest their time in, probably either Kbin or Lemmy, and launch a set of instances based around general topics, and serve as administrators. It would be self-defeating to fit everyone on a single instance, but people do tend to cluster around particular subreddits, which makes the federated model natural and federation makes the boundaries between instances pretty thin anyways.
The endgame that I would like to see is for the moderation teams of major subreddits to form nonprofit cooperatives to operate instances and aid in funding development of the software ecosystem. A common criticism of the Fediverse today is that people who run instances (since the vast majority are run by individual people) can just decide to randomly shut down your instance and you’d be screwed and without a data backup. This has basically never happened, on the rare occasion that an instance does shut down, the administrators almost always give substantial advance notice, but having a formal legal cooperative structure would ameliorate these concerns and provide stronger continuity of service. The right bylaw structure can aid in this goal and reduce risk of hostile takeover, and prevent cases like what happened to Freenode outright.
By being owned by moderators means that a charismatic VC would have to get buy-in from a supermajority of partners in order to make the shift from nonprofit and community-owned towards a for-profit model that takes outside investment capital, as well as dealing with the tax/legal hurdles that would be involved with that.
This should be a more common legal framework for operating Fediverse instances. It should extend to more than just reddit clones. I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know how this should be set up, but I know it’s possible to do at scale.
Something to explore could be a dues-based membership structure, like a social club. If you’re a dues-paying member you could have some legally binding vote on the direction of your community. I would expect it to be some kind of bicameral structure to avoid situations of tyranny of the majority, but it could be a way for nominate new moderators/admins and recall them like delegates. This would make these more like 501(c)(7) organizations instead of the typical 501(c)(3) type of nonprofit, to put it into US tax code concepts. It would also reduce risk of rogue administrators/moderators (a common critique) from
This HN comment identifies a phenomenon in-line with this idea, since people active in a social space over long periods of time feel ownership of the space:
Plus, in my experience , users will bitterly resist any changes at all because the site doesn’t belong to management, it belongs to them. It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge.
Here’s the groupings that I see might make sense, roughly in the order I think they should be started:
(Someone should make a git repository with a machine-readable mapping of subreddits to alternatives.)
It would make sense to split this up by language too, since something reddit kinda struggles with is being too Anglo-centric. I don’t think it would make sense to have dedicated political instances, since Fedi is already fairly politically charged and it might, unfortunately, lead to too much discord that it breaks down the instance.
There is still a “market” for independent forums to operate and be self sustainable, there still exists forums running on phpBB or something similar, for specific topics like cars, bodybuilding, trainspotting, etc. These are the kinds of forums that reddit (and more recently, Discord) kinda killed, but we can bring them back with more modern software architecture and the right motivation. If we’re successful, we could use a similar approach to this to supplant Discord, too, if there is ever a suitable stack to do it with.
Instead of building a moat using a network effect out of the userbase, we should build a shield by using a network effect in the form of standards and implementations. This makes it harder for a would-be captor as they would have to compete on multiple fronts simultaneously.
There’s so many good ideas that just haven’t been explored yet.
Here’s few I came up with:
I don’t see how these could be reliably blocked without really cranking down on API access, since they wouldn’t necessarily require very many API calls and could be done by scraping the 1st-party web interface.
Something that I would like to re-emphasize about free and open source software is that the people who build the software actually use it and anyone is able to make improvements that we can all benefit from. There are issues with current implementations of these ideas, but people are aware of them. And as the ecosystem becomes more popular, more people will step up to improve things. On another corporate-owned social media platform it wouldn’t work like this and you’d be subject to whatever agenda they have.
There are good things about how the internet used to work, and there are good things about how it works now. We can’t return to the past, but we can learn from it and can try to make the future better.
There are actually still going to be ways to use the APIs for free that have been announced. It’s not clear to me exactly if this is a rollback of the initial plans or what the scope of it is.
100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication and 10 queries per minute if you are not using OAuth authentication.
Today, over 90% of apps fall into this category and can continue to access the Data API for free.
[…]
- Accessibility - We want everyone to be able to use Reddit. As a result, non-commercial, accessibility-focused apps and tools will continue to have free access. We’re working with apps like RedReader and Dystopia and a few others to ensure they can continue to access the Data API.
This still rules out apps like all the ones listed in the introduction section, although it may allow some special tooling. How exceptions for nonprofits and accessibility apps will work hasn’t been announced yet. There’s no explanation where that 90% number comes from and it certainly doesn’t refer to users.
A few years ago, reddit completely changed its user interface to unify it with the 1st-party app, which was new at the time. It was pretty widely disliked along with the app, for many of the same reasons, because it was literally the same codebase (being a big bloated React.js app).
Reddit knew this would be controversial, so provided the “old” interface at old.reddit.com, but never clarified if this would be here to stay permanently. It’s easier to block ads on this older version, it doesn’t have as many capabilities for user tracking, new features are typically only being added to the new version, and some particulars with the updated markdown rendering are broken on the old version. So it seems from their actions that they definitely see it as being a second-class citizen and we certainly can’t rely on it. The new UI is also far less accessible for users that need assistive technologies (see /r/blind’s thread on it).
Many users have stated that if “old reddit” is ever removed and 3rd-party apps are still impractical to use that they will simply stop using reddit for good.
To put it simply, an application programming interface (API) is any kind of specification for developers to use to write software that interacts with some other software system. Typically, this takes the form of a service running on the internet that developers can make calls out to to interact with.
In reddit’s case, the API provided methods to interact with the platform programmatically in the same ways that a user would through the web interface:
These functions are called and returned data in a machine-readable format (JSON), which make it trivial for developers to integrate them into other systems.
But often, if a platform company has a 1st-party app that users are expected to use, even if they have a public API, they may also have private undocumented APIs that only they themselves have the knowledge to use. They do this for various reasons, it’s almost expected that this happens. You can file the justification under “competitive advantage” or “platform control” or something, but it still frustrates developers who want to work with a platform to effectively do free labor for them.
Some may argue that open APIs open the doors for abuse, but this is a weak argument. Reddit has the capacity for throttling excessive API usage spam and already has robust spam prevention mechanisms. Scraping the site to train LLMs as others have already suggested is already doable through the web interfaces, and the site is so huge that AI companies like OpenAI and DeepMind are better off signing bulk data deals. This would mutually beneficial to both compared to going through the API which would be much slower and doesn’t deal with bulk data as well.
There are a few projects that are trying to build fully distributed p2p social platforms. Jack Dorsey from Twitter history funded the development of Bluesky. There’s a number of crypto-based projects that are trying it out as well. Nostr is a protocol that many have put forward to build Twitter-like clones on top of, and it stands to reason that a reddit clone could be built as well. They have some valid criticisms of the Fediverse model of federated servers, but most of the issues put forward are solvable either though technical means or more established social organization like I’ve described above.
The other issues with these protocols is that the approach is a much larger departure from what users are already familiar with with standard websites. For something like social media, most users will have their eyes glaze over as soon as you start talking about private keys. It should not be possible to have catastrophic and irrevocable account takeover, and these protocols really don’t have any answers to that kind of account yet, without involving more kinds of blockchain words. The kinds of technical properties you get from involving blockchains are really really overkill when you already have some kind of social ecosystem to operate in.
Also, many of the crypto-based “web3” projects also have VC funding, just as reddit did. They often are much less decentralized as they claim to be, or in practice are simply impractical to be decentralized. They have plans to eliminate these central services that they operate, but given that they’re VC funded the will never take actions that are entirely in service of the users since they have to make an ROI. If it’s not through some directly extractive means of charging for services, it’ll be by issuing some illegal crypto token.
Maybe there will be a successful project one in 5-10 years, but the time for action is now.
Another common critique of Fediverse protocols is around data privacy. Since posts are shared with other instances, when you delete a post, a message is sent out to the other servers directing them to delete it. But it is possible that nefarious people can run forks of the software that simple disregards these deletion messages.
This has happened once or twice, but if they do it publicly then administrators typically quickly “de-federate” from that instance, and refuse to forward new posts to them. Most software also supports a “local-only” privacy setting, where their posts are public but only to local registered users on their own instance, and won’t be relayed to others. I don’t know if this functionality exists in Kbin or Lemmy yet, but it should be easy to implement. As I described before, with community ownership of instances, it can be harder for operators to lie to us about what’s actually being deleted.
But standard reasoning should apply. Public posts on reddit absolutely get archived by people, both individuals, corporations, and governments. There’s no reason to assume that becuase you deleted it from reddit that all copies of it don’t still exist.
Another common question is about DM privacy. DMs are not end-to-end encrypted. But neither are they on reddit or Twitter either. Administrators can in theory see the contents of messages, but only by poking around manually in the database. There are some people working on an end-to-end encryption proposal, but if you actually really need privacy you should be using a dedicated messenger for that like Signal, Matrix, or some others.
(Section added starting 2023-06-18.)
There’s been a whole lot of discussion and people coming to many of the same conclusions as I have independently of me.
One thing that was posted on Hacker News is this Reddit Migration Directory. There was another one similar to this but I can’t find it now.
This is just a slice of subreddits, but it is quite a few already. It’s not quite as diffused as I had originally envisioned and there’s some fighting about federation policies, but it’s a start. Someone pointed out that the groups of people outraged by these changes may be a vocal minority (hard to say for sure since only reddit themselves have these statistics), but they do constitute much of the content creators on the site, the people that initiate and participate in discussions that drive the engagement reddit uses to make money through ad impressions. If these users migrate (many of whom are), then the content that reddit relies on will starve.
There’s also been some accusations that reddit may be undeleting user posts. It’s unclear if this is intentional or is a side effect of private subreddits impacting how user self-deletion works, or is some other database sync bug. It would not be out-of-character at this point for it to be intentional, and if so then this could constitute a massive GDPR violation. We’ll have to see.
Will the last person to leave reddit please turn out the lights?
I’m using the lowercase r here when writing “reddit” because that’s how it used to be written, back in the old days.