Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
I still think the admin team will forcefully takeover and reopen the big subs, but I think that’ll be like pouring gasoline on that dumpster fire.
I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going to happen too.
They’ll kick dissident mods out, install their own, and just reopen the subs like nothing happened. There’s precedent of that happening I believe (although for much more reasonable reasons, like mods going rogue for stupid or anti-free speech stuff).
And it’s going to be an absolute shitshow. I feel sad, but I also kind of love it. You reap what you sow, I guess.
Call me paranoid, but imo, Reddit might just install ML based mods. I’ve seen quite some progress from these tools recently and they might pull it off.
What that will do to the emergent culture of each sub will be a big unknown.
Yeah the only reason I still go to Reddit is to watch the chaos. Great entertainment
Someone on the fediverse (might be here?) asked “Do you want Lemmy to succeed or do you just want reddit to burn?”
I’ve landed on “both, for independant reasons.” Its been high time reddit’s corporate greed gets checked, and what a better way to go than an icarus flight?
The last paragraph, I feel exactly the same. I miss reddit, but I don’t think there’s going back after this. It has to go.
But here’s the thing: are you going to miss Reddit or the communities that they allowed you to partake in?
Because there’s no reason to miss the former - and you’ll miss the latter either way because a lot of people are going to just stop using Reddit after the changes come into effect anyway, so the community will certainly change.
I think that this move made most of us lose something. Which is certainly sad, but we’ll lose it either way, so might as well get rid of the platform they hurt us, right?
It’s definitely the communities. Although I definitely get lost doom scrolling lol.
Well, there’s hope for doom scrolling on the fediverse yet my friend! I did it quite successfully last night between reading bits of the AMA dumpster fire!
Haha good good. I’ve definitely been able to spend some time on here so that’s super positive.
With the APIocolypse refugees coming in daily, things are looking good for a half hour sat on the toilet, even though you finished right away, and nearly falling over when you get up because your legs are asleep…scrolling.
Lol. I may or may not know what you mean