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?
Reddit is not the same place it was in 2011. The average user in 2023 did not care or even know about the API changes, the vast majority were already using it on the official app.
So from the viewpoint of an average user there was maybe some news about reddit making some kind of change, then some confusion as a bunch of subreddits were unavailable, then after a couple days it went away and it was back to business as usual. And that was that.
I bet they don’t even know what time the narwhal bacons
Yea but why they didn’t protest again when reddit made the site and app worse for every user?
Because the people that really cared have left. A bunch are here now.
Frogs in pots… And the reddit communities that people liked were still active once the protest was bashes down. Reddit nixed and replaced every mod that continued protesting in their subs.
Yea, I don’t see reddit losing a lot of users or making any good decisions. Most likely reddit will continue to make terrible decisions for users and the users will get used to it and the loop continues. That’s what I like about Lemmy, by design if fixes a lot of problems that reddit has.
Because “they”, i.e. everyone who cared was gone by then. Didn’t you read all the responses you got?
Most of them stayed because they where already using the main reddit app so it wasn’t something that hurt them and didn’t care that much about the API, but with these updates it affects every user and made the experience worse for everyone.
Pure speculation on your part. I would claim the opposite and say most meaningful contributions to reddit came from PCs, not mobile phones. And those people preferred old.reddit.com to begin with.
There just weren’t enough people who cared. Reddit is just another app to most people. If most any app on my phone made changes for a slightly worse experience, at most I would be a little annoyed and move on.