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).

The point of this post is that the contributors to this subreddit are one person. And has been for going on ten years.

The moderator team is one person. And has been or going on ten years.

Much of the readership is ... one person, who refers back to older posts to link elsewhere. (Though I'll admit that according to Reddit's stats, surprisingly more than that.)

That the subreddit had already been largely on hiatus for the past three years, because of preexisting frustrations with Reddit's leadership and direction. The subject of much of the front page of the subreddit.

Archive snapshot from this past February (there's been no change to content since then): <https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>

That the moderator and contributor had long voiced concerns over precisely the issue of Reddit seizing control of subreddits, and a lack of any ongoing right over a subreddit, no matter how personal and how long it had been:

Quoting from "No, this subreddit is not fully dead yet, but ...":

<quote>

Years before "profile pages" became a thing, several people started what were effectively personal subreddits. /r/TalesByToxlab[1] is a classic instance, and also an exemplar of the conflicts arising. This is not my sub, and I'm not nominating it, to be ABSOLUTELY clear.

TBT was a personal space where one person shared their personal stories, some from real life, some fictional.

And I say "was", because /u/toxlab[2] died three years ago. A fact which large sites need to deal with.

(A ways back I'd computed that a site at the scale of Google+, with a nominal 3 billion profiles, saw on the order of 10k newly dead accounts every day. Reddit operates at about 1/10 that scale. Do the math.)

Should TBT be recycled back into the pool? It was never a "community site". What any modmail or logs, which might reveal personal messages and communications? I get these myself from time to time via several subs.

Reddit's stance has long been that subreddits are community, not personal, resources. For large and leading subs, this may well be appropriate. For small efforts, it almost certainly is not.

That concern is a chief one I've had with Reddit since beginning a few experiments of my own. I wrote on various aspects of Reddit which raise flags[3] five years ago. And this weighs heavily (though other factors contribute) in my decision to move my principle posting activity elsewhere[4], specifically to a blog whose features, content, and presentation are far more under my control.

I don't want my subs to become zombies or be allocated to others. When they're done, they should die, and be buried, their electrons recycled. And I suspect I'm not the only one.

</quote>

<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this...>

Links:

1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

2. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

3. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

4. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

This is no longer about arguably large and "community" subreddits which might arguably have some thin line of reasoning to legitimise Reddit's corporate claim to them, but small group and individual efforts, with private data and communications potentially being handed over to third parties. Issues I'd raised years ago, now proving to have been quite prescient concerns. One-person subreddits.

And in this case, that one person happens to be me.