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Comment by pyeri | Hacker News Reader

It grew organically to the best of my knowledge. But the extent and addiction of various mods' dependency on these third party apps was something that came as a surprise to me. Didn't knew they actually depended so much more for moderation tools on these 3rd parties than the official reddit platform itself.

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I had been under the impression it was relatively common knowledge that the reason Reddit had been keeping both the API and old.reddit alive was that power users - both moderators and the most prolific content submitters - disproportionately used those interfaces and were considered too valuable to alienate. I have been surprised not to see much discussion about what, if anything, changed about that situation leading up to the current kerfluffle. Have enough power users been moving over to new.reddit and the official apps? Or has Reddit's calculus as to the importance of that segment of the user base shifted?

They want to IPO and that means bringing everybody onto an experience they can control- in terms of ads, showing awards and any other features.

They also found out that GPT 2.0 was trained on reddit links and that other companies were using their API to train their generative AIs. There would have still been pushback with the API lockdown, but it wouldn't have been nearly as large if they'd updated the official app to include better mod tools, features to help those with disabilities, and a better user experience first.

archives of most of the site's content are already available elsewhere on the internet, I don't see why anyone would be using the reddit api to get that data, if they knew what they were doing.

Someone must have been the first to suggest it

Sometimes, the time and situation has an energy of its own. It didn't matter whether Leibniz invented calculus or Netwton did, someone had to do it at that time (as a matter of fact, they both did independently in their respective countries).

If I had to guess it would be on some private mod chat like discord or something, and probably more than one subreddit mod group decided independently since it's a known way to protest. I am curious too, but it grew so quickly that establishing the origin would be difficult

Sure maybe by a few milliseconds, but I guarantee "boycott" jumped into thousands of people's heads the immediate moment they read about the pricing changes.

It's pretty common for subreddits to do the blackout thing for various causes (eg. net neutrality) and has been for years.

This was the largest one I’ve seen by a very long shot. The last one was when Reddit hired someone who worked with her father despite knowing he was a sexual predator who had been charged with over 20 crimes and censored people who used her name in comments to criticize her, which didn’t last very long and ended pretty quickly with Reddit firing her.

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