2023-06-12

Leaving Reddit

I've always had mixed feelings about Reddit. One the one hand, it has always felt like a hold over from the older, weirder and less commercial times of the internet. On the other hand, it is a company and publishing on a company's product always has its risks. I've always tried to minimize the amount of work that I put into something that, ultimately, isn't under my control as there is always the possibility that they will do something shitty.

Apparently, Reddit's time to shit on the community is now. I won't detail the entire saga, instead I'll simply link to the Apollo Developer's announcement of shutting down Apollo. Reddit has seemed rather ambivalent towards its users. They have been pushing in directions that many people don't agree with. These are things like the "new" Reddit and pushing people from the web browser into the official app. Up until now, these have mostly been annoyances as you can get around them in some way. old.reddit.com still exists, instead of using the terrible official Reddit app, you could use an alternative, like Apollo. This ambivalence has now ended and is now replaced with hostility. With Apollo's departure, I am also departing Reddit.

The thing that has always seemed off about the way that Reddit has communicated this is they've indicated both that this is an insignificant part of their user base and that the opportunity cost of these people using a platform where they can't serve ads is enormous (see the breakdown in the Apollo thread). These points seem contradictory, how can they both be true simultaneously? The other thing, which has been pointed out continuously, is how completely unaware Reddit seems. Inherently, every social network depends on people's contributions to it. Of the big social networks, Reddit relies on their users more heavily than anyone else. Users are responsible for both content and nearly all moderation (I would say all but, Reddit does sometimes get involved with things). It seems incredibly unwise to poke these people in the eye.

This all feels incredibly unfortunate. Reddit is the last corporate that I have any investment in (emotionally, not monetarily). The loss of me, is wholly insignificant. My contributions to Reddit have been minimal. The collective of people that they've alienated is not so insignificant. Time will tell if Reddit is right that they'll be unharmed by doing this. It seems incredibly unlikely, to me, that it will turn out that way.

While I feel this loss on a personal level, I also feel like the internet as a whole is losing a valuable resource. Fairly frequently, Reddit has an answer to some obscure thing that I am looking for. This is likely, in part, due to their previous status as a holdover to a previous internet time. I see fairly frequent recommendations from people to append site:reddit.com to searches in order to get good results. On multiple occasions, I have used this trick to find things that I wouldn't have been able to find otherwise. Much can be said about whether the internet at large made a good decision by putting all of this work into a company's product but, it happened. None of that is to say that all of Reddit is great. An overwhelming majority of content on Reddit, isn't useful (which is perfectly fine).

Reddit can likely coast for a while, given all of their historical content, even with the ongoing blackout. I think it is important to send a message. My initial plan was to replace all of my contributions to Reddit with place holder content indicating my protest, should Reddit somehow meet my personal and totally reasonable demands, I could use the api to restore it. It didn't quite go as planned. The tool that I was using, Power Delete Suite doesn't appear to have worked properly. While it seemed to indicate that it had edited all of my contributions, it did not. Some of them were edited, most of them were not. Given how unlikely it is that they'll ever turn into the kind of place that I'd be willing to return to, I decided to just delete them instead. I first archived everything (again, it wasn't much) using reddit-user-to-sqlite. I then removed everything with Shreddit, specifically this fork. I've also removed Reddit from my search results, which is something that Kagi makes very simple.

I would highly suggest that you do the same. It is important to send a message. That message is something along the lines of "you don't get to earn money on people's content while shitting on them". While this is a fairly extreme measure, I believe that it is necessary. I also feel bad that this will mean that somethings will no longer be findable on search engines. Some of which may not be available anywhere else (other than archives of Reddit). This is a truly unfortunate consequence of the risk that we collectively took on when pouring so much work into Reddit. I believe that now is the time that we need to pull the only real lever that we have, removing our content. While the blackout will certainly hurt in the short term, the shutdown subreddits will either have their moderators changed out for people willing to work with them or whole new subreddits will appear in place of the old ones. Removing the existing content will make for a much longer term impact.

My Personal Demands

Finally, these are my totally reasonable requirements for me to return to Reddit:

  1. Give up on IPO, restructure into a Non-Profit in service of the community
  2. Reverse course and listen to the community
  3. Complete replacement of the executive team

See, these are all perfectly reasonable requests. It would take hardly any effort for them to accomplish this. Yeah, this is never going to happen so, I won't be returning.

So what is next? I'll probably spin up a Lemmy or Kbin instance. I'm really not interested in letting anyone else control my work.

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