If you want API access, ask your representative and put it in a law!
Also, Reddit may be a private company, but their content is generated by their users and most of the labor is done by volunteer mods. If they want to leverage their network effect to extract money while ignoring those facts, they can get fucked. If they'd honestly been pursuing profitability in a non-idiotic and community respecting way (better ad targeting to subreddits? Build an integrated Patron alternative to support creators?) that would be one thing, but they've squandered their VC on nonsense like NFTs while making the whole site worse. I hope they implode, but expect they will just slowly decay.
I guess I use the site less anyway these days but it'll be kinda fun to watch this play out.
If power users move to some more reasonable decentralized platform, this problem disappears.
Let them bring out new people, heck i'd rather jump ship and technically i already have but these new people should know they are and will be spending time and energy and paying reddit to give them the privilege to moderate reddit while reddit earns money. Till now, reddit earning from donations, awards was for survival of the site while all the mods volunteered to keep it a nice place. No one was making money, everyone was working as a community and people were keeping reddit alive by donations.
now, reddit gets to earn while we (or someone else) gets to work for their benefit. nice.
its like they took the concept of gig workers and paid them nothing. heck, the gig workers are being made to pay to do the work. great business
That would imply that current mods are irreplaceable which is not the case
TIL this is apparently an universal thing. The new account with 14 points of karma makes me suspicious. But, heh, we have a "don't assume astro-turfing" rule.
These Moderators have been working for free for years, IMHO they can do whatever they want. And yes, I'm annoyed by it since I cannot do half of my searches, because I append "reddit" at the end of half of my google searches. But I cannot blame moderators for fighting for what they think is right, with the little power they have.
Sorry reddit search does not work for you. But moderators did that, not Reddit! There is 2 TB reddit dump on internet, there are services that provide search over that.
Either way, and given the subject matter is a "community", this is a sure way to win a battle but losing the war.
> If you want API access, ask your representative and put it in a law!
Are you seriously saying the private companies should be legally compelled to provide api access?