Yeah - even if they back pedal (as I still think is likely) it's super clear at this point that reddit is just interested in milking it's users for every cent until they can IPO.
Spez literally just said in the AMA "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive."
Very glad I looked at the URL before clicking through lol
My bet is that they'll announce that they're still charging for the API, but at a "drastically" reduced price. As you say, I think it was their plan all along. That way they can still milk third party apps, all the while still being able to say "we listened to the community" by not destroying them outright
yeah this isn't such a huge thing on it's own (tough it is shitty), it's this combined with the years of other steady decline in a thousand small ways. Most people on reddit have agreed for some time now that the site has gone to shit, but there haven't really been viable alternatives or enough of a reason to pick up stakes and leave. Now there is, and hopefully enough people leave for good to Lemmy, Kbin, or others so that the change can stick
This is something that needs to happen more - The whole point of the fediverse is that you don't need any high population instances. Look at the situation with lemmy.ml - they're hitting major infra issues as a result of their high user count, but they're still accepting new users (as far as I can tell). Just close the doors and post a list of reccomended other instances with similar focuses.
You can still access all the same content, regardless of your instance, or even platform
Currently commenting this from kbin - honestly I love it, much more flexible than Lemmy, you can still use all Lemmy content and you can access Mastadon through it!
And that people are generally pretty stubborn about their social media these days. While the migration to Lemmy has been significant, it's still a tiny proportion of reddit's total users. Most people just want to see their feed and don't care overly much about the specifics of how it's run (even if they should) - and even those who do will often put up with a lot of BS to stay in their comfort zone.
Look at Twitter - you've still got tons of people who despise Elon and his changes to Twitter who are using the platform every day. It's been half a year now with things only getting worse and these people are still clinging to the platform because it's where they're comfortable. If anything, Elon showed that you can give your community some serious abuse while still maintaining high user counts
People see that they have the highest user count and gravitate towards it. Most people don't really get how federation works, so they worry about getting "stuck" on an instance with no one to talk to
I mean, you can just look at spez's profile to see what he's repsonded to. That's where I've been looking.
As for the awards thing, for some reason reddit has always done that. I'd bet 99% of the gold spez has gotten over the years was given in anger, which makes no sense to me, but it's something they always do