The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,
I’m not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn’t even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can’t tell you how many times now I’ve looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.
So I haven’t been on Reddit since the blackout, so I don’t know what the sentiment there is. I used the official app, so you can’t accuse me of not being sympathetic for the cause.
But I have been creating content for years, many of which contained helpful solutions for IT problems in niche areas I took interest in. Now all this content is unhelpful because the sub is private or the original question context was deleted. This really bums me out that all this energy and effort has gone to waste.
The ‘npm left-pad incident’ is a case where a developer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of open source library which many other libraries were dependent on.
There is something to be said about abandoning and moving on without burning the bridges in the process, rendering not only your content as useless, but other people’s as well