I would have agreed with you if it had just been the API changes, but the recent behaviour from admins is extremely alienating. All they needed to do to fix this situation is strike a deal with app developers and say sorry. The protest would have been over in a day and things would have largely gone back to normal.

Instead, they dug in their heels and behaved like insecure little tyrants. They lie, they force mods out of their subs, they undelete comments, etc. There’s no trust left between admins and community, and in the long run that’s going to kill the website.

The thing that makes reddit great is the user created content. That content is provided by a tiny minority, while the vast majority just consumes.

Most of the people creating the content care about the platform, and they will leave if they are alienated enough. That’s not even mentioning the thousands of hours of unpaid mod work. You might find some power-hungry replacements for the bigger subs, but the quality of mods will decrease, which will make the community worse in the long run.

If they continue on this path, reddit will end up like 9gag. There’ll be content, but very little of it will be original, and it won’t be all that interesting for targeted advertising like it currently is.

It won’t disappear, but it certainly won’t be a multi-billion dollar company.

We’re not some kind of cult setting rules for how people should live. If you need a car, buy a car, if you want to own some kind of ridiculous lifted truck, you can do that, but I’ll reserve the right to make fun of you and think you’re an asshole.

Owning a car if you need one is not in itself a problem. “fuckcars” isn’t about blindly hating cars, it’s about being aware that cars are inefficient, dangerous, and bad for people’s health. It’s about raising awareness about how car-centric and car-dependent society has become, despite there being better ways to structure transportation.

My little conspiracy theory on this: I wouldn’t be surprised if every intelligence agency in Europe knew how did it, but no one is going to tell, and we’re not going to find out for years.

An attack on critical infrastructure like this is essentially an act of war, and nobody in Europe wants to escalate this conflict any more by admitting they know who’s responsible.

If it was Ukraine, it would result in public outcry, and we’d basically be forced to cease any military support. If it was Russia, it’s an act of war and there’d be public pressure in the other direction, maybe even enough to make us officially declare war. If it was the US, there’d be pressure for at the very least some pretty severe diplomatic consequences.

Nobody in European governments wants any of those results right now. Everybody is content to just leave it be and an article like this pointing blame at one of the three every couple of months is the only thing we’ll hear on it until it gets declassified in 50 years when it doesn’t matter anymore.