Absolutely wild that they looked at what happened at Twitter, identified all the things that triggered the several periods of mass migration to Mastodon (shutting off api access, policy changes, shutting down conversation about alternatives) and decided to speed run it. Next thing is trying to directly monetise people by giving them a red tick or something.
Probably depends on how you define success with these things. The valuation of the company is down a significant amount since it was purchased and recent reports had ad revenue also down a significant amount too. Whether the owner cares about those things is probably up for debate, and evidence would suggest he might be looking for something other than money out of it, like influence, or just a play thing. I'm not sure the owners of Reddit are motivated by the same things, I think they just want to be richer. Time will tell I guess, it's difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and intentional acts from the outside.
I mean, there's an argument to be made that reddit was going down this path long before Twitter, what with their hosting and perhaps even promotion of r/t_d
Reddit is shifting from user-focused to investor-focused and AI-focused. It doesn't matter what users think. They have done their job. They can all literally quit the site today, and it still doesn't sink Reddit's plans. Reddit has no reason to care what any user thinks anymore. Those days are over.
My assumption all along is that the new API pricing thing was in preparation for a backpedal where they implement a paid tier for users that includes third party app access
Very plausible, but they can screw off with that psychological game bullshit. I am tired of everything being about profits these days. I want the early 2000s internet back!
Centralization needs to die, and community collaboration needs to take its place so stuff like that stops happening.
A single entity made a single decision, killing countless devs years of work in an instant.