What does everything think about what's going on over at Reddit? Is this the death knell, are we seeing Digg 2.0 in real time? Or will social media addiction overcome all resistance?

For those out of the loop, Reddit announced changes to their API access 1-2 months back, which were to become effective June 19th. Rate limitations, costs to utilize, and limiting NSFW content are the major changes.

In May, they killed Pushshift API access, which is what drives sites like Unddit, Reveddit, and more. Pushshift may or may not be coming back with new terms, we'll see.

Most recently, the largest 3rd party developer app (Apollo, for iOS) had a conversation with Reddit about what their costs would be. It comes with a price tag of $20,000,000 USD per year. That is not a typo, it's 20 million. Reddit assured developers that the costs would be reasonable, and instead, went down the Twitter path.

Since all 3rd party apps use the API and will have ridiculously inflated costs, they are shutting their apps down as of July 1st, the hard cutoff date. I've been feeding my drama-llama for the past few days, and the concerns are:

• Most users are willing to give money to app developers to continue, but very few are "whales". Even if they weren't offended by Reddit's behavior towards developers, they simply can't afford $10-$20 per month to support the ridiculous $20M price tag.

• Limiting NSFW content in the API means no porn, and we know Redditors can't just NOT consume porn. The horror! I joke, but in their defense, it IS limiting half (if not more) of the content available on Reddit.

• Many many MANY mods use 3rd party apps to work on their phone. It's been a long time since I used the Reddit app, but when our sub was still there, the mod tools were laughable and ineffective, and the app was filled with ads and suggested/promoted content instead of my home page. It was terrible, and I can only imagine it's gotten worse. If mods can't mod on their phones, then they're chained to their desktop/laptop PCs to function properly. That introduces delays in timely management, and some mods don't even have a desktop/laptop to fall back on.

Mods are now coordinating a sitewide sub blackout in protest. The protest will begin on June 12th. Regular users of 3rd party apps are all threatening to leave Reddit entirely on July 1st, and are already signing up at other sites like Lemmy, Tildes, etc.