I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
The answer is in your post. They were forced to reopen. It wasn’t just a threat; mods got replaced. A lot of people left, but they just accepted the loss of traffic and moved on.
At this point, anyone still there has just accepted that the site is dying and are riding it out until old stops working.
I don’t think reddit is dying, it just enshittifies even more and somehow growing.
I can’t quite find the source, but I remember seeing a plot of the estimated fraction of posts and comments on reddit that were produced by bots (not estimated by reddit themselves of course). The conclusion from that blog post was essentially that, at this point, reddit is mostly bots interacting with each other, with some humans sprinkled in. Of course, this doesn’t matter to reddit as long as they can convince the world that they have plenty of users they can show ads to. Companies buying ad space largely don’t do the research needed to find out that they’re paying for their ads to be shown to bots, so they keep buying, reddit keeps making money, and everyone is happy.
Yes, I said many times that there are a lot of bots and reddit knows and supports them because it creates traffic. Many post are recycled with nearly the same titles and the comments are generic and obviously made by bots.
IIRC Reddit closed their API to everyone they didn’t explicitly allowed to use it, meaning independent research isn’t easy.
Requesting paid access for research purposes would probably get you there though. After all, they need to sell access to posts and comments through some API to make money off all that data.