The whole thing. Were at stage 4 enshitification.
- They offered a convient and free place to chat
- This erased most online forums and community chat websites as a "better" alternative
- They sold their users and their content for profit
- They force the viewers to KYC to view content now, rabidly control the conversation, and stuff ads down your throat
- They coerce you into installing the app on your smartphone so the cycle can continue
They successfully centralized online discussion, so they could profit from it, but also control it...
The control is minimal. They basically closed some subs when mainstream media rallied against them for hosting certain sub cultures.
Control is subjective. To the degree you accept that there should be terms and conditions to speech. To go further, i also mean control over the platform and how people access it. Closing off api access charging a zillion dollars to use it externally, then blocking privacy enhancing tools requiring logins etc. You must follow their terms and conditions in order to chat with communities online.
It's not reddit that's broken and has been from the beginning. They succeeded in a capture technique. They should have always charged for their API access, they should have always required authentication and logging. But they only did it once the majority of online community discussion moved to reddit.
To be clear there have been more events that cause reddit to tighten controls on speech. Wall street bets temporary lock is the first on that comes to mind. To say that anyone's online speech is regulated by a single companies terms and conditions _is_ control. When people hosted forums and other community boards, did they have rules, yeah of course, we still see that with mastodon now, but to say that is the same control is not an honest review.
> The control is minimal
It must appear thus, so that the most important ideas being censored are hidden by the mundane and everyday.
Oddly, it did not ask for mine and it took me to places I did not expect to see (explicit content). It was a nightmare for me. The search and filter did not help. I have seen things I couldn't unsee and I wish I've never seen it. But lesson learned!😔
People that use privacy tools, like a VPN, a privacy browser and/or ad-blocking browser extensions reddit outright blocks users unless you sign in with an account. And since many states in the US started blocking porn websites, many have turned to reddit... pretty gross right? Same could be said for twitter and Instagram in my experience.
thankfully I deleted my acct in twitter and insta. Pondering whether to delete my reddit or not. 🤔
