I’m reading this as a play to allow communities to have their own paid for areas and Reddit takes a cut in exchange for hosting this.

I recall a while back they were looking at a way to financially compensate major contributors and moderators, so possibly this idea is being revisited in a way.

Right now though, most people contribute to communities to share their knowledge or creativity and to connect with others- and monetisation might be there in the background but isn’t a first class feature of the platform. It makes business sense to make this play, even though it’ll make the site worse.

To conclude: Reddit becomes an only fans competitor. Calling it now.

Well I had hoped, naiively that Reddit would respect the developer community that had helped make their website so popular. A community of developers provided apps and services for them for the simple price of a free API. I thought the APIpocolypse might happen, but I thought reddit was special somehow and they would see how beautiful and vibrant that community was and not damage it for fear of damaging the soul of the website. Yeah, that was pretty fucking naiive.

Ah well, I’ll put my energy into Lemmy and Fediverse projects instead.

I don’t know what happened but in the last half hour the website has become highly responsive again. Thank you admins for your hard work.

Furthermore friends, please sort by new where possible to help give new posts visibility when you interact with them.

It is definitely slower than usual. It’s not just you. The site is clearly under very heavy load.

More people = more problems I am certain but this is a social network and without people it will fail. We must all make an effort to be the change that we want to see in the world.

I don’t foresee a problem in the immediate future aside from higher server load, but in terms of culture, only people who believe in a new social network will be willing to join.

In 5 years however when this is a great place to be, a large number of people will join who don’t respect the legacy. The departure from Digg to Reddit felt like this too, I hope that the federation aspect will ensure this is longer lived.