Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
You’ve all at least heard of reddit, right? It’s like the 4chan you’re able to talk about in public without ending up on a list.
People of a certain age know well that Reddit was preceded in this role by Digg- a website that was cool when it was underground, but then got taken over by morons who insisted on profiting off it to an extreme degree, thus ruining it. Well Reddit appears to be doing [hang on a second here, let me find it in my notes] the EXACT SAME THING.
Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman, who goes by spez on the site, is widely disliked, and has been basically since he took over. He’s also widely distrusted, as he’s been proven to go in with admin powers and change the comments made by other people. Now he’s suddenly trying to charge extortionate prices for access to the API, and has given 3rd party toolmakers 30 days to pay up or be cut off.
These 3rd party tools, which include Apollo, Sync, and rif, among others, cannot possibly afford the advertised $20 million per year that spez is demanding. Why would he be doing this? Surely it’s not because he’s nakedly positioning the company for an IPO and just a week ago Fidelity cut their valuation of Reddit by 41%? Surely not that!
Currently Reddit does have one advantage- there’s no obvious successor right now for people to flock to, but if you read reddit… they’re ready to flock. Get your shit together fast, LEMMY.