No. My time is worth more than 10k and I'd rather spend it doing stuff I like to do.

Most people won't gel with the free version though as it uses ASCII.

The challenge will be finding an actual traditional conservative instance that isn't also a pro-Nazi fascist shithole.

People are paid to work on it tho.

Paying people doesn't necessarily translate to what you might want from it.

Interesting read.

The likes of Spez were just not that intelligent enough to figure out how to make Reddit pay before the VCs called in the investments. Not that it's an easy problem to solve, but if you're going to take on money like Reddit did you sure as hell needed a better plan then leaving it up to later to figure out. Amazon had a plan clearly, Reddit did not.

Also, what Reddit is now doing mimics a little of what Facebook did too, the enshitification of your feeds (just look at the app). They're just hoping Reddit is as addictive as Facebook is and you'll stick around regardless. I wonder if they recent;y hired some new advisers that told them to make these recent changes too?

With interest rates going up it's costing more and more to have borrowed money sitting in the likes of Reddit hoping for a nice payday one day.

Notice how Reddit haven't engaged in any positive damage control at all? It's just been hit pieces against devs, an AMA with completely canned responses and unprecedented wide-spread hostile action against it's content creators/power users/mods?

Reddit is in full-blown sell out mode right now and nothing but money matters anymore. It's all down hill from here.

Reddit won't die in a big catastrophic Digg moment, that was a rare event that doesn't usually happen so blatantly.

However, Reddit has reached its high water mark though, I absolutely agree. It'll slowly continue to bleed good, contributing power users like yourself in favor of becoming an algorithm-run mass-appeal corporate shit hole just like Facebook. It is very sad to see moderators like yourself being treated so poorly though and I hope you stick around here at least somewhat even if it's just for your own sanity.

I think it was a success no matter how mainstream news outlets or Reddit want to spin it.

The mods of subreddits very cleverly pointed out that the direction Reddit is heading in stinks and even all the masses who don't care about it still got the message though being inconvenienced by not having access to their favorite echo chamber for a few days. Just look at all the comments on "should we open up" posts from pissed off mouth breathers basically demanding they return things to normal.

At the end of the day, of cause Reddit was going to force mods to open up their subs or remove them. The mods never really had any power in the situation anyway and the precedent of Reddit just taking over subs was already well established. If Lemmy or Kbin was another 5+ years in development with a couple of much larger communities already well established then the exodus might have approached Digg levels again, but the lack of easy mainstream alternatives means that Reddit was always going to get its way eventually.

Personally, I'd never even heard of Lemmy, Kbin etc until recent events and thought it was limited to only Mastodon which never really interested me.

The amount of software development recent events have inspired around the Fediverse seems to be just the kick it needed to have a bright future too.

I don't know if you've seen the official phone app for Reddit but its an even worse version of that. There's no "hot" etc of your subscribed subs, rather it's now a firehose of whatever the algorithm thinks will piss you off enough to interact more with it.

You see this happening on Reddit now when anyone mentions the Fediverse at all. Plenty of replies comparing it to NFTs and other junk from dipshits who will come flocking over to this especially if the stuff Meta is doing takes off.