The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
To be fair, it’s been like that for a while. Just look at /r/videos. #11 sub on reddit. 30 million subscribers.
Right now:
I strongly suspect reddit is lying about the true numbers. If you factor in repost bots, porn bots, and bots which increasingly repost comments from previous posts or comments from off site, reddit often feels abandoned.
Subreddits like /r/videos? Everyone left for tiktok.
Just look elsewhere on the site. Supposedly they have 500 million regular users, but if that’s the case why is no one upvoting or commenting on anything? And it’s summer, so the kids have far more free time.
But of course they’re not upvoting or commenting, they’re all on tiktok or wherever. Reddit has become a legacy social media.
Obviously, the fediverse is even more niche, but we’re not pretending to be incredibly popular and don’t need to boost our numbers for a looming IPO.
Agreed - I think that the trend was in play already. The protests tapped into it and definitely accelerated it, but the decline in the quality of posting and commentary has been steadily increasing since 2015. I personally mark the sudden popularity of The_Donald as the point at which the community started to die - the influx of Russian trolls, bots, and their 4chan goon squads was the beginning of the end for intelligent discussion on the site in my opinion.