Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
Yeah I like HN but it’s too niche for what this place and others are trying to be. I’ve used it a while but I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to people outside of the tech industry or at least broader STEM interest even though other things are discussed there from time to time.
As somebody who’s generally interested in science and technology, HN also sufferers from terminal libertarian VC-brain. It’s a club for wannabe founders of unicorn tech companies who view themselves as enlightened ubermench. This doesn’t always bubble to the surface, but at times of controversy it is quite glaring. Most recently, when the founder of CashApp got murdered they were practically calling to liquidate the homeless, even though the incident - predictably - was the result of a personal dispute with somebody he knew.
Even if the subject matter scratches an itch, the community is not for me.
Yeah that’s a good point, I don’t love its politics either and I’m a fair bit to the left of most of its posters. I usually see it in the spirit of ‘you can entertain an idea without agreeing with it’ and trying to avoid staying in a place where people largely agree with me but you’re right a lot of the reactions to the murder were really grim and showed some unpleasant qualities in parts of the userbase.
On the other hand a lot of the less political content is really high quality there and on technical topics the signal/noise ratio is better than most places on the internet. I guess any site with user generated content will always be a case of ‘how much crap do I want to sift through to find a diamond?’ and a lot of the ways HN is bad can be equally applied to a lot of Reddit as well in my opinion. It’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea though and that’s fair enough.
Edit: spelling (do we do that here?)