Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits

I don't have a lot of fondness for companies which offer a free product until it becomes entrenched, then take it away. I think of how MS and Adobe both turned a blind eye toward piracy until everything else had been killed off, then they went hard on piracy.

That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value". It's also comical to hear moderators say that when the users of their subreddit could make the same claim trumping the moderator.

Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.

Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it. I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.

Every subreddit is just a click away from moving, though. I see some doing it. But a lot of those subreddits enjoy the influx of users that reddit brings them (until they don't, of course).

> Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value".

Is it wrong to claim that, though?

Social media sites are a dime a dozen. Countless social media sites came and went. In each and every single example, moderation and community curating was key to success and the root cause of failure. Take for example Voat, which was a better Reddit than Reddit itself but made it it's point to have questionable moderation practices. How did that panned out?

> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api.

I'm sorry, what? No. Do you actually have any idea what's going on, at all?

All subreddits have been having polls to drive their decisions and make them at a community level. We are seeing mods enact community decisions to close the communication channel they created and maintain as a community. They are taking these stances in protest of a draconian measure made in bad faith by people who were reportedly caught lying their asses off repeatedly. Is this not outright hostile to communities?

There has been speculation that some of the popular subreddits such as /r/programming has been resorting to dumping AI-generated content to artificially generate Traffic to counter the protest. Suddenly Reddit admins have the right to intervene in subreddits when I'm the past they refused to do anything to counter hate speech and abuse.

This has everything to do with API policies, but Reddit's CEO has been repeatedly shooting himself in the foot in a really stupid and avoidable way, and in the process is being outright hostile to the community that generates the traffic he hopes to monetize.