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).

If we are talking about "value" as Reddit the company sees it, moderators provide 99.9% of that.

Remember, their value as they see it (now that it's on an IPO trajectory) is in having a sanitized version of the reddit from 12 years ago or so. And it's far too large of a job for the admins (and has some legal landmines buried all over the place if they did attempt it).

Finding new mods who will do the work for free is possible, but substituting in the shills will cause too much bad press (and risks the same problems 1 year from now, 3 years, 5 years as the new mods figure out how they've been swindled).

If we're talking about the value as users see it, mod provide exactly 0.0% of it, and Reddit the company probably provides about -20% or so. It's always been in the discussions and comments, which are the only real content. More to the point it's only those comments that are made by the people who bristle at busybodies trying to herd them along into the worst sort of saccharinely polite discourse.