It can go one of a few ways.
-
Apart from the few subs that remain offline, it’ll basically be back to normal. Those that do remain offline indefinitely just get forcibly reopened or recreated by admins, especially huge subreddits like /r/videos. Smaller ones just get redicted to /r/topicnew or some other creative name.
-
A lot of subreddits and more importantly moderators and users leave the site permanently. In order for this to happen however, there’d have to be a consensus alternative, which there isn’t ATM. Otherwise, these communities are pretty much lost forever unless the mods put a message to go to X alternative service in the “subreddit is private” banner. Tbh, I don’t think people are gonna stomach losing years of their lives in an instant so they’ll just re create subreddits unless the mods provide an alternative.
No matter what though, they’re not backing down on the effective removal of the API (still leaving the sneaky clause “you can pay us if you want but it’ll be a king’s ransom” for AI, even though they can just trawl the web manually lol). They’ll probably announce some crappy customization features to hoodwink those who don’t know what an API is and lie to them and say it’s “API v2” or whatever.
I just honestly don’t know how it’s going to shake out and I’m scared im going to lose these communities. I don’t give a single solitary fuck about Reddit the company anymore, and I never did really. I just hope all of the subreddits find a new home and don’t just shrug their shoulders and say “welp, guess that’s it guys”.
As a few people have said already, I think it’ll slowly become more crap and alternatives will slowly bring in people who get sick of it.
They’re hoping for IPO and once that’s done, they’ll be much less forgiving when it comes to cash grabs. I can imagine them doing things like getting rid of old.reddit, not allowing the hiding of suggested posts, ads which are very targeted and intrusive.
I saw an article on the official Reddit Inc website talking about the use context in advertising, where advertiser’s can change their ad based on the context of the thread. It doesn’t say how they’re implementing this but I could imagine a situation where they put ads directly into threads. Either way you’ll start to see ads using wording which mimics the subreddits you’re in or the comments you write.
I have the feeling the reddits decisions are just going to get worse as long as they can get away with it.
Yeah, honestly whether or not they back down or some solution is reached regarding the current situation, they will not stop aggressively monetizing users. A lot of veteran users will leave, some will stay or come back eventually, but I think pretty much every veteran user will be gone permanently if they get rid of old Reddit.
Yeah for sure. One thing I was thinking is that old.reddit and lots of the third party apps don’t include new features Reddit put out (I think the API didn’t include stuff like chat etc.) So they also could not want third party apps cause it might get in the way of people adopting new features (power users using apps that didn’t have those features).