Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit's attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo's creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
This is great to hear! Unfortunately the reddit exodus will likely splinter a bunch of niche communities, but it will definitely be for the best. I'm all down for the "de-consolidation" of the internet!
The tricky thing will be the small niche communities that are already hosted on Reddit. For example, there is a group of us dorks who are really into home automation with HomeKit. I'd hate for that small group to splinter into smaller groups that are so small that they're no longer a good source of collective knowledge.
I don't really have a great solve for that problem, but as someone who does experience and service design by trade, I've found this to be a fun puzzle to marinate on over the past few weeks.
Yeah that is a really tricky thing, even if those communities decide to go "we're moving to ______", they will inevitably be leaving behind a lot of their userbase, and be giving up a large amount of SEO and discoverability. The large number of users is what gave reddit its value, so I can only hope that groups that might disperse find a central place again. I definitely don't envy the position this leaves moderators in rn.
My big fear is that a lot of niche communities might move to discord, which will really hurt discoverability. One of my favorite things about reddit is that if I am listening to a new band that I like, there's a good chance I can find a subreddit named after them with plenty of fans who are happy to discuss their music.
Being locked behind a discord server is even worse, because it is very difficult to preserve the messages and posts made there.
Absolutely - discord is probably one of the worst choices to host a "discussion board" type page for those reasons. They are well on the path of enshittification too with all the bloaty unnecessary features they've added over the years.
The over reliance on Discord has made me give up participating in some reddit communities, too. It sucks to start a discussion only to be told by regulars That its frequently discussed in the Discord and I should look there.
No. Discord is IRC 2.0, not forums for preserving convos like reddit and lemmy.
They made a forum feature. Heck I've used slack at work as a sort of community knowledge base. Discord does have some features thread conversations for topics.
The forum feature feels half-baked when you have to click through bots to even access the knowledgebase. IDK. I'm old school and from an era of the internet where chat interfaces where chat interfaces and forums were kept separate. I don't appreciate the threading in Discord because it makes past conversations harder to follow, not easier for me.
When I was part of a group searching for alternatives to GoodReads, one of the problems I had a hell of a hard time explaining to some users was the "walled garden" effect. They just couldn't understand why having posts be invisible to search engines and forcing non-members to sign up in order to see posts was the kiss of death when it came to potential growth.
Agreed. I love Discord for having a hub for friends groups or gaming groups or whatever, it's nice to have everything in one place, but when you want a discoverable forum, discord is not the place. It's a communications hub, not social media.