That article is fantastic, read it when it was first posted and just read it again now. His closing lines hit home:

"...policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created..."

"The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom – our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect."

Holy enshittification batman. That's an enlightening read. Thank you.

That article was absolutely brutal. This is what happens when you put all of your eggs in one basket. Incidentally, many youtubers have been suffering from the phenomenon too. When a company grows big enough, this sort of thing seems to happen every time.

The worst mods can happen anywhere.

Seems a lot of the political subreddits are giant echo chambers filled with groupthink.

Let it burn I say

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

—Shang Tsung

So much more longterm possibilities

I wrote this on another instance but will paste it here as adds to your first paragraph

and the original founders would have never allowed Reddit to get to this point.

Unfortunately, at least one of the original founders has allowed, quite possibly even driven this policy. Steve Huffman is still very much at the helm and what he has exposed of himself in interviews, he doesn’t sound like a very nice person (re: post apocalypse, he sees himself being on top and having slaves)

It’s great that subs and users are organising to fight this but maybe Reddit should be allowed to carry out this change and metaphorically shoot itself in the face? This is just the latest in a long horrifying series of policies that the admins have pushed through, actions they have failed to take, or when they finally did, it was long after the horse had bolted.

Remember the jailbait (and worse) subs that they allowed for so long (and were rumoured to have participated in) and when they finally did something after Anderson Cooper shone a light under that dark, seedy rock, they picked their sacrificial lamb and blamed it all on him? Remember the secret santa parallel site someone set up that Reddit then forcibly absorbed and let wilt? Remember how they dealt with Victoria who arranged all the celebrity IAMA’s? Remember how they brought in Ellen Pao (with her own set of issues) to deal with horrific amount of far right and misogynist subs that were actively calling for peoples and groups deaths, and then threw her under the bus once they got what they needed? Remember how they were banning people and deleting posts when it was revealed that 5 mod accounts were basically controlling the top 100 subs? Remember how they appointed to the admins a person who was found to be grooming teens and was supportive of their father who was convicted of serious sexual assault of a child?

The list is never-ending…

The sad fact of the matter is that centralised social medias one driving factor is money. They acquire that via data points collection from engagement. They dont care what kind of engagement as long as theres plenty of it and hateful content drives engagement.

There is no sense of community among the admins and execs of Reddit. It is entirely from the users.

The original founders allowed this to happen, if they didn’t drive this. Many similar times previously, and undoubtedly, many more times to come.

Maybe Reddit, just like every other centralised, corporate owned social media sites time is over?

I just dont believe its something worth fighting for, despite how commendable the actions of all those subs is.

Old.Reddit with Reddit Enhancement Suite for years to make the site usable

Hello, dear friend 🤝

I'm still there for the obscure subreddits and for users that are there not because of 'engagement' but for the love of it.

@Warped @bitman09 right there with you.
I really started to notice it when they just ignored for months the hate subreddit theDonald, right before the 2016 election.
It was a year after they started banning subreddits for hate speech, but not this one. Not after the election was done and dealt with, after thousands of reports to admins, news articles, printscreens of hate speech, because money...

Thats a sunk cost fallacy though.

Reddit isnt going to get better and the admins/exec are just going to keep pushing policies like this because their primary motivation is to make money and they desperately want to hold a Reddit IPO.

The best options is for all those subs to export as much as they can to create a read only archive then head elsewhere where they control their own data.

Imho they should start migrating. Maybe not now or immediately, but gradually. Reddit has shown its hand. I don't think they'll go back to their roots in the foreseeable future.

The risk of this happening is part of the deal when you play inside someone else's walled garden. The same applies to devs of 3rd party apps.