What are people’s thoughts on how Reddit is coming out of this so far? How bad have things been for Reddit? Do we know how much their traffic has dropped and would a drip in traffic even hurry them that much. Why don’t we see talk of a new blackout at the end of the month?
Honestly, at this point, it doesn’t matter to me. After ~12 years of Reddit, I was looking for an excuse to leave, and they finally gave me one. Even if the Fediverse is never as popular as Reddit, it’s already enough that I don’t feel the need to go back.
All I know is I’m reading this in a third party app called jerboa using an account in lemmy. Neither of which I’d even heard of a week ago.
Reddit Inc. itself lost really hard.
For Reddit Inc., the winning conditions are to get share prices up to the roof, so when the IPO happens the current shareholders leave with their pockets full of money. However, everything that is happening shows:
- That Reddit does not have multiple stable sources of income. The only main source of income will still be advertisement money.
- That advertisement money will run dry, as users are leaving the platform or outright boycotting it.
Both increase the risk and decrease the expected profit. Nobody is insane to invest in a company like this.
For the community it depends on your goals.
I count the situation as a big win; alternatives became more viable, Reddit as a platform will become less and less relevant, and the scummy company will lose lots of money.
If however you expected Reddit to play nice with its userbase (e.g. reverting API price changes), then count it as a loss.
Wait 2 weeks, about 20-30% of reddit users use a third party application, 1 July most of them are going to wake up and find they can’t, that’s when the shoe will really drop.
