Reddit

To me the main reason for the protest is not 3rd party apps themselves, but the fact that when these are gone, they will have full control on user data (both personal and posts) and how its presented. Even if you just look at cat pictures, they can then potentially do stuff like feeding you with whatever post or idea they want/ get paid to promote. E.g. Youtube now sorts comments in the most convenient way to make you feel good and watch more videos when you scroll down, stuff like this it's scary to me...

People on reddit say the blackout is pointless, but it brought awareness to reddit's shitty behavior towards its community. Of course the 2 day protest would not bring down reddit, but it showed they don't care about the community concerns by not changing their stance at all. Why would I continue using that site then? These recent events have made me feel like not using reddit anymore so I won't.

I don't care.

A lot of it is due to some lack of information, and a lot of news outlets only telling part of the story.

I was seeing stuff on CNBC, Reuters, and Louis Rossman and stuff on youtube talking about the protests, and everyone one of them leaves out critical information. Some people see it as moderators being upset about losing tools, others see it as third party app developers being upset about having to pay a fee to reddit. But they leave out that moderators are volunteers and arent paid to moderate, and would have to pay to be able to do so from a third party app. Or that reddit is asking for a ridiculous amount of money in less than a month for app developers to access their APIs. Overall theyll talk about a few points but miss on others.

It creates a lack of a sense of urgency or meaning to all this. "Regular people" think no one wants to pay reddit and get stuff for free, or that mods are power tripping.

But theres still 15 days before apps shut down and then people may change their tune once they cant access reddit using their favorite app of choice.

I do think the blackouts are pointless, but I absolutely do not support Reddit Inc. in any way.

What the moderators should do instead of blackouts, is to stop moderating and let all the major subreddits be overrun by spam and hatespeech. Good luck with your IPO and with finding advertisers after that. That would have been a much more effective way to communicate how valuable the volunteers at Reddit are.