api apocalypse
When Reddit ditches third-party apps in 2023, they don’t just lose Apollo and RIF — they also lose the power users who actually made the platform worth visiting. People who operated for free, who wrote detailed answers, who managed specific communities.
What is left? A sea of low-effort screenshots, angry outbursts, and “AI told me this” posts.
The API changes weren’t about costs. They were about control. Reddit wanted to own the entire user experience, monetization be damned. Third-party apps made Reddit usable — and that was the problem.
IPO changed everything
Since going public, Reddit’s priorities shifted from “valuable discussions” to “engagement metrics that rock Wall Street.”
The algorithm now optimizes for:
- Outrage (keeps people scrolling)
- Repeating Questions (Easy Engagement)
- Controversial Hot Take (triggers comments)
- Rage Bait (maximum time on site)
quality? depth? Expertise? They do not appear in quarterly reports.
homogenization problem
Visit r/technology, r/science, or r/worldnews. The top comments are always:
1. A pun
2. “This is why we can’t have nice things”
3. Someone who clearly didn’t read the article
4. A bot is reposting the top comment from 3 years ago
Every subreddit feels this way now. Reddit took away what made each community unique.
bot infection
Bot Activity (Orthodox)
This bot:
- farm work to sell accounts
- advance political narratives
- Manipulate product recommendations
- Generate AI Slope for Engagement
Reddit doesn’t do anything because bots = MAU = high ratings.
unpaid labor for billions of people
Reddit’s entire moderation system relies on volunteers working for free while the company has annual revenues of $800M+.
As mods protested the API changes, Reddit threatened to remove them. The message was clear: You are replaceable. Your years of community building mean nothing.
The search is still incomplete
Why does everyone add “reddit” to their Google searches? Because Reddit’s own search is extremely bad – and has been for 15+ years.
written: They deliberately keep it broken. If internal search works, users won’t need to go through Google, and Reddit will lose all that sweet referral traffic data they sell to AI companies.
Your data, their profits
API changes kill third-party apps
$60M/year deal with Google for AI training data
IPO at $6.4B valuation
Users who wrote the content? Nothing was found.
Your contribution is now training data. You are not the customer – you are the product being sold twice.
option available
The irony is that the solution already exists: small, focused communities. Discord Server, Lemmy Instance, Niche Forum, Mastodon.
But we are stuck in a collective action problem. Everyone is on Reddit because everyone else is on Reddit.
Decision
Reddit in 2025 is a zombie platform – technically alive, but soul died somewhere between the IPO and the API massacre. It survives on inertia, not value.
real question
The question isn’t whether Reddit will decline or not. The question is whether the next generation of users will even bother to come forward, or instead they will just ask ChatGPT.
Has Reddit declined, or are we becoming nostalgic for an Internet that never really existed?
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