this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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As someone who runs a small buisness and has paid for ads online. Why the hell would I want an ad on a platform where half of its users are planning to jump ship?
That’s overestimating the number of users who are planning to jump ship for sure. We are the noisy ones because we have a lot to complain about right now. It probably more like 1-5% that are planning to leave Reddit indefinitely.
The key word though is “planning”. Because that 1-5% contains an outsized portion of the biggest moderators, content creators, and active users. After we jump ship, Reddit is going to have more spam and abuse (and learn the value of the free moderation they’ve been getting up til now), and less valuable content once you get through that. So Reddit might end up losing half its users as it becomes more useless, even if it’s only a small fraction that’s planning to leave right now.
My reaction upon reading this is that I think you're expecting too much, I think reddit will be fine without me, you or everyone else leaving.
That's okay though, the platform doesn't need to fail for you to be happy moving on from it.
It's a stupid move from Reddit because all they needed to monetize 3rd party apps was to offer fair API pricing that the 3rd party devs could pass onto their users. Or alternatively tie 3rd party app API usage to having a Reddit premium account which directly brings the money to Reddit.
On a platform heavily built upon the content provided by users, what could happen is that the platform loses the people who were writing good content and retains the people posting fluff - low effort memes, links to clickbait articles etc. That's going to eventually push away users who were looking for more than that.
On top of that if moderators leave, that leaves the platform open for a flood of spammers, scammers, bots etc which annoys the people still using it, eventually making more leave.
Pushing more ads is just another nail in that coffin.