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This meme made me actually check the front page of Reddit.
It seems that my predictions were right - the amount of content didn't drop much, but its overall quality and diversity are rock bottom.
I feel like the API debacle made me realize I had Stockholm syndrome. I look back and realize I would write and delete comments because I would be sure I’d have another redditor debating or nitpicking something unimportant, a lot of interactions were just antagonistic. Even a good amount of content was kind of boilerplate, a formula of what was going to get the most upvotes.
If i never see a post about people complaining about karma or other meaningless internet points again, it’ll be too soon!
I look back and realize I would write and delete comments because I would be sure I’d have another redditor debating or nitpicking something unimportant, a lot of interactions were just antagonistic.
I hear ya - I did the exact same. I felt the urge to contribute, to write something thoughtful, but I knew that, once I said something, most replies would boil down to "ackshyually", "I dun unrurrstand", whining, bossing me around, distorting what I said, so goes on. The orange mail icon made me immediately think "oh great here comes some moron...", and my blocklist had ~500 users - mind you that I actively avoided larger subs, so 500 blocks from smaller subs.
It tells you a lot when even 4chan - known for its rude and obnoxious users - is abler to hold a decent conversation than Reddit.
Although to be frank what did it for me wasn't the API debacle, I knew it for a long time. It's just that most alternatives were either too slow or too specific to settle in. (Including Lemmy. This place was slow. Like, real slow.)
And, before the API debacle, there was still something worth seeing. Like a pearl thrown in the mud, you know? Past the API debacle, the pearl is gone.
If i never see a post about people complaining about karma or other meaningless internet points again, it’ll be too soon!
Amen.
It has been a slow decline, but since they didn't disable old reddit and 3rd party readers it was able to limp along.
Then they woke up and chose violence.
Guess that's enough for the advertisers to be happy? ... Unless they've gone and deployed bots to maintain engagement since I haven't really gone back to look at reddit. Used it borderline exclusively on the phone so... Yyyyup
If my predictions are correct, advertisers will only be happy in the short term; in the long term they'll leave too.
User engagement depends a fair bit on the quality and diversity of the content in a platform. And there's still enough content there to make your typical user happy; however that "old" content will become stale, repetitive, and boring. This wouldn't be a problem for Reddit, if it didn't manage to piss off the portion of its userbase that was the most prone to bring new content into the platform.
As a net result, user engagement will slowly go down. And since user engagement is directly related to the willingness of an advertiser to buy ad space in a platform, the advertisers themselves will be less willing to pay for ad space in Reddit. They'll leave unless Reddit makes the ad spaces in the platform dirt cheap, but by doing so it'll get less ad revenue. And if it tries to compensate this loss of ad revenue by creating more ad spaces, then it's further encouraging users to leave the platform, worsening the problem in the long run.