Leave it to a social media company run by overt leftists to infuriate its base with a double whammy of moves that change access to data and how it’s worked for years, thus sending its prospects even lower. That company would be Reddit, which just threw its users into a furious frenzy by announcing that it would be deleting all messages from before 2023.
Reddit announced that new policy in June, saying that it was doing so to help it with its goal of “empowering communities,” whatever that means. It said, “In our continued pursuit of empowering communities, we are transitioning to a new chat infrastructure, shared in our previous updates here and here. In an effort to have a smooth and quick transition to this new infrastructure, we will migrate chat messages sent from January 1, 2023 onward. This change will be effective starting June 30th.To continue having the best experience using chat on mobile, including creating and sending new chats, update the Reddit mobile app to the latest version from the iOS App store or Android Play store.”
Predictably, that change, among others, infuriated the remaining Reddit user base. One, for example, said, “In this edition of changelog: more bullshit nobody wants or asked for. Third party apps people want still being killed off. Admins still pretending like everything is normal after removing whole mod teams and making up rules on the fly to suit their CEO. Official app still garbage.”
Another commenter said, “Nero is fiddling while Rome burns. Talk about tone-deaf.” Then another commenter added, “Yeah, no, respectfully… F*** you. You know what your users want. Nobody asked for this s***. We asked something very specific and easy tho.“
Engadget, commenting on part of the reason why Reddit users are so upset,
reported, “
Users still aren’t thrilled, however. While Reddit disclosed the cutoff in a changelog, it didn’t notify community members directly. That left some to discover the company’s plans only after their message logs disappeared, preventing them from backing up their histories on their own terms.“The other major change Reddit made recently that infuriated its userbase was restrict its API (Application Programming Interface), which in turn made it near-impossible for third-party apps that made the forum site more usable to survive. That led to a days-long blackout of many Reddit communities, as the moderators of them were furious about the API access change.
The Reddit CEO didn’t back down, however,
telling NPR, “
It’s a small group that’s very upset, and there’s no way around that. We made a business decision that upset them. But I think the greater Reddit community just wants to participate with their fellow community members.“
He added in an interview with the Verge that the blackout had no effect on his decision making,
saying, “
We’ve had blackouts in previous times where there’s a little more room for movement. But the core of this one is the API pricing change. That’s our business decision. And we’re not undoing that business decision. And we were clear about that going into this, which is was one of the reasons why I think our users probably are annoyed at this blackout, because there wasn’t anything to gain.“Featured image credit: By Web Summit – CG1_7885, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73888943
