Well put! Indeed, people that are sure that they will see Reddit collapse soon are wrong due to the points you mention.

I love the “great experiment” vibe of this place. It’s right now truly up to all of us, whether it’s posting, commenting, voting, coding, hosting or informing people, we all can contribute to this big giant middle finger to this inevitable enshittification that happens to every free social media platform in the name of endless growth and profit.

Yeah maybe I’m cynical but i’m sure Reddit, either before or after the reaction to the API pricing, has done the math and have come to the conclusion that even if they alienate a large portion of mods and all users of 3rd party apps, these changes still are advantageous to them in the long term.

To be honest I think people who are anticipating Reddit grinding to a halt if a lot of mods leave are overly optimistic. Yes, a lot of dedicated mods are leaving which means the quality of moderating and the communities will go down. But there’s no shortage of suckers willing to step up.

At worst, Reddit faces a few rocky months of bad moderation and a small exodus of users (I’d be surprised if more than 10% of users leave for alternatives permanently). The outrage will blow over and a large userbase and moderator pool will remain. And being able to monetise all their users to the fullest extent possible is worth that trade-off to Reddit.

It’s a greedy, scummy move but not as boneheaded as a lot of people are portraying this as. I can totally see some analytics/consulting firm advising this to Reddit

Apparently they don’t store an edit history for each comment. So if you delete it, the comment still exists on their servers marked as deleted. So technically they could decide to “undelete” everything.

But if you edit the comment, they lose the ability to restore it. Many tools offer the ability to edit your comments to gibberish before deleting them.

it’s probably the best option to edit it to a short message explaining why you deleted it and where you moved to. This provides more context than simply deleting them.

I don’t know, it felt kind of mixed to me. I definitely had some feeling of mourning as I was deleting 11 1/2 years of my personal content. The same feeling you might have throwing out childhood toys, or more accurately like old diaries. Nevertheless, I felt strongly that it was the right thing to do to delete all my comments. They’re backup up but it’s all in JSON so I don’t think I’ll revisit it again.