Just add usenet on the front end there.

Haha, you just reminded me of this cartoon:

The active mod team of r/videos (nearly 27M subscribers) has agreed that their shutdown will now be permanent. https://reddit.com/r/videos/comments/145vns0/the_future_of_rvideos/

In a tildes post (I’m riding a lot of horses right now) one of the mods said:

I know this is likely a symbolic gesture because I’m fairly confident reddit will just kick us out and bring the subreddit back up, but after being on the mod team for over a decade its going to be interesting to see how things even function if they decide to take that route.

[Edit: just seen that’s there’s a top level post on this too]

I think this reply by spez has been badly overlooked:

“the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront”.

What he means here is that earlier this year the board realised they were sitting on a massive gold mine, and their single focus right now is to exploit that as ruthlessly as possible. Jacking up the prices to access Reddit data to eye-watering levels is intended to fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.

The fact that they have put no thought or care into managing the damage that this does to third party apps and to their own reputation with the Reddit user base tells me something else too. Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?

Do they even care if Reddit goes to shit in the future? Maybe not, especially now we are beginning to realise how easy it is for careful bots to poison the conversations with AI-generated replies.