Its been some time since xitter, reddit, and other sites began paywalling their API, causing third party integrations and apps to collapse.
I’m wondering, did any of these sites end up with paying customers for the API? Are there examples of third parties paying to continue their services? These sites sacrificed massive amounts of community and developer good will to privatize the internet - how did it work out for them long term?
I don’t think it was sheer numbers of users that made 3rd party apps a big deal, but who was using them. Someone would need to actually do some research to confirm or refute it, but my experience was that they were disproportionately favored by power users, i.e. the really prolific posters and commenters that you would come to know and recognize after spending a bit of time in certain subs. If enough of those people decided they couldn’t be convinced to use the mobile site or official app, you’d probably have some small amount of previous lurkers step up their posting a bit, and bots.
From what everyone says when they mention the current state of the site, it mostly sounds like it’s bots just spamming reposts and arguing with each other with recycled comments originally posted by other users.
Been on Reddit for 15 years. Can confirm it’s pretty much a bot hellscape now.
Years ago I noticed the quality of front page posts drop in terms of their basic spelling and grammar. You never used to see typos in what hit the front page because mods actually cared about the quality of what was being posted to their subreddits.
That’s far past gone now in all the top subs. Mostly because the mods there have all been compromised as shills that get paid to gatekeep selected content from bot controlled posters. Now all they care about is volume rather than quality.
That’s why most of the default subreddits and most of what hits the front page is the same regurgitated content with dick-riding commentary that doesn’t discuss much aside from just agreeing with the upvoted group-think of the post itself.
Overall quality in all the top 100 subreddits has declined exponentially in just 5 years, as the mods now heavily favor bot accounts posting more, rather than community members posting gold less often. So the best members of most communities just left, as there was no reason to contribute content that wasn’t going to be seen against a flood of mod approved click bait.
Reddit is now a soulless faceless husk shambling around as if it’s content is from a real community of people, and not a corpo filtered humonculous.
Engagement there, the good kind. Is now rare at best, if at all. And even worse - I’ve found dozens of sites that will just let you buy upvotes and accounts, so making it to the front page just takes some clever marketing spend.
It’s sad to see such a colorful community of people from around the world get invaded and slowly taken over by a body-snatcher like corporate mimic - but that’s the best compliment I can give to what’s left of Reddit.