Ask HN: What, if anything, were the consequences to Reddit for the API shutdown? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What, if anything, were the consequences to Reddit for the API shutdown?

5 pointsvoisin6 comments

I was a huge Apollo user and once Reddit locked down the API, I simply stopped using Reddit. Wondering if there are any public, objective metrics for whether the API changes had a meaningful impact?

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Also quite curious about this. Subjectively it certainly hasn’t felt like “the front page of the internet” to me for quite a long time, but suspect that’s just me getting old as well as a reduced tolerance for enshitification. I was always more of a lurker but used to check it multiple times per day & considered it a great source of amusement, up-to-date news, information & opinions on a whole host of topics… Over time though, the more features they added, the less usable the site felt, (even verging on anti-user at times). Combined with feeling like I was getting less value out of the content & it just stopped being a place I’d regularly go to, then eventually a place I’d actively avoid. For a while, I came back after discovering “teddit.net” but to a much lesser degree & now that doesn’t work any more of course. Then eventually, last week I needed to do some user research for a new game & was prompted to go looking for relevant subreddits, but most of the ones I found all seemed really dead? To be fair, I was focusing on a particular niche (and it’s possible that the niche itself is less popular now too) but it felt like in the past those sorts of places would have been busier… Of course this is all totally subjective. Was a strange experience though, not quite sure how to describe it… like revisiting a once favourite town but finding the streets empty, all the shops replaced by generic chains & all you old friends having moved out long ago?

I don't have any objective metrics, but I've been using Reddit almost daily for 13 years. The front page content quality fell off a cliff after the API shutdown. Or, rather, it is now very apparently appealing to a different demographic than what I feel I represent.

I see stuff like "rate my photo" "am I ugly" and "am I the asshole?" dominating the front page. It's incredibly vain and lacks meaningful insight.

The only reason I still use Reddit is out of habit. I am closing the tab faster, and feeling worse about my time spent, with each passing day.

Prior to the blackout I was relatively bullish on Reddit's IPO because I felt they had a lot of room still to squeeze their userbase, but now I am not so sure. I don't know what problem I am looking to have Reddit solve for me anymore.

I am very thankful for HackerNews. :)

I used to also be on Reddit all the time. But these days it seems that a lot of the popular posts and communities are incredibly self-involved.

IMO, pretty much nothing because redditors had 0 power in that situation and they were kidding themselves if they thought they did.

I personally spend a lot less time on reddit now. I was doing that before the whole API thing happened, lol.

The consequence is that I stopped using it - I will also not give them any money in the invent of and IPO when before I would have strongly considered it. Have been using it since it was vaporware and digg was the thing. Anecdotally in my circles of friends everyone migrated to lemmy or some sort of rss reader. Yes, we may not be the users reddit is targetting nowadays but once the techies move on reddit is going to be a shadow of its former self.

Presumably they're still on-track for an IPO, although the timeline is unclear. It's hard to tell what the overall impact was, metric-wise. They're probably focused on cutting out the unprofitable users, and their API changes are probably 'mission accomplished' in that sense.

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