Social Media Deathwatch II - Mark writes:

When a site tells you they don’t want you using it, except by their captured clients, you should stop using it. All they want is to control you and put ads in your eyeballs, until you explode.

…

Reddit came out of Digg being fed into a woodchipper just because Kevin Rose wanted a little bit of money…

Don’t use closed networks owned by someone else.

The enshittification of Reddit is now complete.

Christian Selig, developer of the best Reddit client, Apollo, is shutting it down after he failed to comply with Reddit’s mafia-style multi-million dollar shakedown effort. Instead of paying the protection money, he is closing Apollo down.

Remember all those cool tips about adding reddit to the end of your search term to find real results? That’s probably not going to be reliable much longer, because I think this is the first—and last—step to Reddit becoming an unmoderated cess pool of spam, devoid of helpful humans contributing good content.

This is a cycle that any venture capital-backed firm seems unable to fight against. The interest of community and users is sacrificed at the altar of money; those high priests seemingly unable to see that it is the community being sacrificed that generates the potential to make money in the first place.

I’ve enjoyed Reddit. Maybe we need to reboot Usenet?