This is the second death of reddit, the penultimate one. But it stems directly from the first death in ~2015 when they accepted the massive venture capital investment and then had to try to monetize the facebook refugees which meant clearing out all the business appropriate "undesirables" including firing many beloved long time corporate employee, and switching to model where people and corporations posted to their profiles (like facebook) instead of subreddits set up by the existing userbase. It hasn't been reddit since. And they're making that very clear as of yesterday.
I always considered the massive digg.com revolt to be the "beginning of the end". It was between Reddit and Kuro5hin in those days. Who was going be the next "Slashdot"? It's the same story over and over though. Site reaches critical mass, it needs to afford hosting, infra, salaries.... what do they do? Monetize.
iirc they removed “fat people hate”, a variety of subreddits named after racial slurs (including literally /r/<n-word>s) and a subreddit for “well it’s not technically porn” of children
new Reddit remains awful both design and implementation wise but the content they cleaned up wasn’t a big loss, and there’s still plenty of “non-desirable” content (so many porn subreddits, to start) on there
That actually happened much later. I am talking about examples like r/gundeals being removed, lots of accounts asking about it then getting banned, etc. Please don't try to imply that "undesirables" means just actually offensive or illegal behavior, though there was that on reddit too. Much like what the environment of a public bar would be: informal and varied.
It is not controversial to say that the corporate environment style social rules implemented in ~2015 went far beyond gnerally offensive content to the point where it was obviously catering to whims of the advertisers demanding they not be beside content their target demographics would just not like (ie, for political reasons or whatever).
June 10 2015
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/10/reddit-ba...
> The move frustrated some commenters on the initial post. “Why is /r/fatpeoplehate banned, but /r/coontown get to exist?” asked redditor CrackheadControl. “That’s bullshit.” “Because the admins are fat, not black,” replied The_Wizard_of_Wang.
I think we can all agree that the above, and other mentioned subreddits were genuinely undesirable, no quotations needed. I was clear that wasn't what I was talking about. Your practice of just parroting these nasty people and their words doesn't actually address my point at all. Which was that it went far beyond just the nasty people to groups that weren't nasty and just made some advertisers uncomfortable.
It seems like you just want to point out nasty terrible people to stop conversation of if it was justification for doing bad things to everyone. That's a popular sentiment these days but it is wrong. Just because one group of people (or subreddits) in those punished by the authorities is actually nasty doesn't meant that all group of people punished by the authorities are.
I've been on there too long, it feels like they died several times over:
* CEO changes
* Creation of new / infinite scrolling UI (and app)
* Restricting content (banning racist subreddits, hiding NSFW from /all)
* Removing popular "AMA" mod (AMA subreddit is kinda dead now, it used to be a huge event)
* introduction of paid APIs / "fuck spez" campaign
I'm sure there's many more but my point is it's "died" many times over yet still it exists; the drama passed, the baseline remains.
* influx of Indian users on US-based residential proxies causing the 'popular in US' feed to be nothing but nonstop Indian-based clones of popular subreddits (indianteenagers and various others)
* influx of group-specific-hate subreddits being allowed to exist freely (it's OK to hate men, but not women, from what I'm seeing on Reddit)
> * Removing popular "AMA" mod (AMA subreddit is kinda dead now, it used to be a huge event)
The huge organized celebrity AMAs already felt like a death of reddit on their own.
> the baseline remains
Did it though?
I thought the 2023 API lockdown was a very significant point. That's the first time they tried to block the site from being mirrored.