I’ve never been sentimental about a social media site but it’s sad for me to see reddit so clearly killing itself. Pushshift is already banned and Apollo is soon to follow. Reddit will either pivot fully to a mainstream audience or die out. It’s just sad for me to see it doing it to itself.
I don’t mourn Reddit, but I am sad that it’s another example of the commoditization and corporatization of the modern internet.
Hopefully federated networks, P2P protocols, and FOSS software/frameworks are able to provide a robust and healthy web going forward into the future. The era of the free general internet is over, has probably been for a long time honestly. Now if massive companies want to stay afloat in that space, they will need to make huge profits. Everything as you are seeing nowadays, is being monetized and centralized.
Maybe this truly is late stage Capitalism and the collapse of it all is on the horizon, idk. But as long as I have an internet connection and things I am interested in doing on there, I will be trying to resist the corpos.
Long live the free and open internet!
(PS, power to the users, and I can and do contribute to the products and services I use from these wonderful people in our communities <3)