I read The Verge’s latest interview with Steve Huffman here and it seems as though the Reddit blackout is having little to no effect. It also seems as though the communities at large don’t really care and will probably just use the official app or don’t really know there are 3rd party ones. So it seems this will pass and be mostly forgotten about.
What are your thoughts?
Zero impact on Reddit.
Reddit has 52 million daily active users and approximately 430 million users who use it once a month. In comparison, Lemmy has a mere 143k users and kbin has about 33k users. Reddit hasn’t noticed that anyone left, and it never will.
Reddit will consolidate its platform and fully implement its ad business. 99.9% of users will stick around because they don’t care that much about 3rd party apps. Reddit will then have a big revenue stream from ads, allowing it to achieve profitability and do an IPO, which will bring in another boatload of money. At that point Reddit has plenty of cash to invest in improving its in-house app, mod tools, spam filters, etc.
It won’t improve them though. It will further restrict what is accepted as the shareholders won’t want piracy or jailbreaking or posts critical of products or organized campaigns such as strikes or talk of unions that hurt their bottom line.
Reddit is going to the highest bidder.
Yep, this is the most realistic take. They did give lemmy/kbin a boost that will be home to a bunch of users, but it’s not winner take all. Both will now exist. People won’t leave reddit until they are personally affected. Most people didn’t care about 3rd party apps, and once the blackout is over, regular users won’t care unless reddit attacks them directly.