Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
I commend the shutdown but if things get out of hand reddit admins will take over the popular subs. They won’t let a prime sub get shut down by mods.
I think there may not be enough competent volunteer mods to take it over. They could replace them with paid reddit employees like other big platforms but that’s gonna cost them more than the 20mil a year they apparently think 3rd party apps are costing them.
At this point in time, reddit cares about numbers, not competency. It doesn’t matter If a sub (or the entire site) degrades over time, as long as IPO numbers are maximized so they can cash in.
How soon is the IPO? New mods on the biggest subreddits would make those subs horrible for a long time while they figure out how to moderate it properly. Even when mods do their regular work, regular folks can get very heated about mod behaviour. Can you imagine that happening across all major subreddits, all at once?
It doesn’t have a hard date yet and they will likely wait till the economy is generally better, likely when the nasdaq hits a new high so they can float for the highest price per share
In case Reddit admins will take over those big subs. I wonder what would happen if users just flood them with spam and inappropriate content.
Totally. They already aren’t turning a profit. In their minds they have to protect the advertising revenue at all cost.