I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
I left during the strike and haven’t been back since, abandoned my 10 year account. Been here ever since. Gotta admit I miss some of subs that pertained to my hobbies. They were initially small with little activity until Covid, then they all blew up. Lemmy is okay but it’ll take years to get enough members for niche communities to function.
BTW what “even worse decisions” are you referring to?
Letting ChatGPT train on all the reddit content without users approving, changing the UI for the worse, not letting you browse reddit or old reddit without an account (you can still browse if you have ublock origin, worked for me), making the reddit app more similar to instagram and tiktok, and making decisions that help the bots while blocking actual users.
Well one was they made it worse recently is now you can’t use old.reddit.com unless you are logged in
After 2023 I stopped commenting or logging in to reddit, and after the recent forced log in change I stopped going altogether. I’d like to see more activity in the niche communities here, but after stopping reddit-lurking I’ve been much more active writing here. I hope in the long run we’ll get there.
Back then I had Sync for Reddit, then left during the same strike and found out Sync for Lemmy existed and the switch was painless lol. But yes agree on there needing to be more members.