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of reddit The long-awaited IPO is getting closer, promising to be the biggest social media IPO since Pinterest. but in the company S-1 filingReddit has failed to fully address the complexities arising from changes to its developer platform and API pricingDue to which there were protests everywhere at the end of last year, there was darkness in the communities, Site stability issues, and traffic declined as moderators and Reddit users alike protested how the company was driving popular third-party apps out of business with its inflated API fees. Nor does it address the potential fallout from those protests — that Reddit itself may one day face competition from the growing movement to decentralize social media.
The change in Reddit’s API pricing was a part of the company’s broader plan to close down its collection of user-generated content, which has been used to train AI models. On that front, Reddit’s IPO prospectus promises a growing business, given that it’s already Earned 203 million dollars so far From licensing your data to other companies. (Google is said to have contributed at least $60 million to that effort A report from Reuters (About Reddit’s AI licensing deal with the tech giant.)
However, the money-hungry move was beneficial to Reddit’s bottom line. critical response Among Reddit’s community. When they discovered that their favorite third-party Reddit apps – like Apollo, narwhal, and others – were soon to fall victim to Reddit’s fee change, with community members and moderators organizing wide-scale protests. Popular subreddits (Reddit’s name for its online communities) including r/aww, r/video, r/futurology, r/LifeHacks, r/bestof, and dozens of others, pressured Reddit management to reconsider their actions. For closed last June.
Moderator also write open letters It tries to explain that the closures and changes of these apps will have an adverse impact on the way they manage their communities, noting that the apps will be offering “better mod tools, customization, streamlined interfaces, and other quality of life improvements.” “, the official Reddit app did not.
When Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s power doubled on reddit statusEven taking a dig at the developer of one of the more popular apps, Apollo, the moderator decided extend their blackout,
Later, when Reddit rebooted its online event, r/place, which offers a giant, digital canvas on its site that people can collaboratively paint on, Redditors used this incident to continue their protestWriting “Fuck Spaz” – a reference to Huffman’s Reddit username – all over the canvas, including an area that began to resemble a giant black hole.
Reddit ultimately won the battle. The protest subsided, Apps went out of businessAnd Reddit’s traffic came back.
In its IPO prospectus, Reddit only mentions its developer platform as a means to enhance its site – by building bots and creating features that “shape their communities.”
“We believe our developer platform has the potential to be a driver for community-driven innovation and deepen connections between users and communities; Empowering users to continuously create, improve and grow; And ultimately strengthen our communities at scale,” Reddit’s S-1 says.
Of course, it doesn’t talk about how it alienated a group of developers or how doing so caused its site to go into chaos for a while.
The reality is that Reddit’s moves to disrupt the business of developers, anger users, and now sell Redditor user data to train AI systems have left a deep mark on the company at a time when the Internet itself is in a reboot of sorts. Is going through.
The web, cluttered with SEO-optimized pages and junk ads, has seen its users turn to alternative means of getting information, such as AI chatbots – as Reddit’s S-1 indicates – various Google Hack to return pages from your site, for example, by adding the keyword “Reddit” to the search query.
But another change is also happening on the social web, which could eventually impact Reddit and other centrally managed platforms.
After Twitter (now called X) Changed its API fees to exclude third-party developersSimilar to Reddit, many of its users fled to new, decentralized social networking platforms Mastodon And Blue Sky, A few weeks later, the latter has reached 5 million users opening my doors for the public, and is Federation now launched (Meaning anyone can run their own server). Meanwhile, Mastodon, and the broader network of apps connected to the “Fediverse,” as the decentralized social web is called, 17.2 million users in total,
The impetus for this growth is related to consumer demand for networks that are no longer under the control of any one corporate entity and its various whims – or, following the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, of an unregulated billionaire.
Small efforts are also underway to provide decentralized alternatives to Reddit.
Although it is still early days, projects like Lemmy, cabin, raddi.net, ether, lemon reader, and others are gaining momentum. Just as some Twitter users moved away to join decentralized alternatives, Reddit users could do the same once they became viable options.
Reddit does not acknowledge this in the risk factors in its S-1, however, beyond claiming that it is possible that “influential Redditors” or “certain demographics” may conclude that “an alternative product or service may meet their needs.” better fulfills the And Redditors may choose to engage with “other products, services or activities as an alternative to ours.”
Of course, it’s like saying, ,Sure, we may have a competitor someday!, it doesn’t go in Widespread movement around decentralization of social media – a force so strong that even social networking giant Meta has opted to create its own latest app, Threads, on it. To integrate with ActivityPubDecentralized social networking protocol used by Mastodon, Pixelfed, PearTube, and other “federated” apps.
If Meta fears the power of decentralized social networks to join the movement, surely Reddit is not immune?
Additionally, Reddit has downplayed the possibility of community unrest as a result of its management decisions, saying only that “there may be disruption to the normal operation of our communities, including as a result of the actions or inactions of our volunteer moderators.” “
Reddit moderators lead a movement to shut down their communities in protest Their communities marked as NSFW, which does not allow ads, forcing Reddit to remove protesting moderators. Seeing their demands ignored and overstated may ultimately lead them to find new homes on decentralized social media, where they will retain control over their communities and user data.
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