this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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No matter how I look at it, this will only hurt their user base. Where are they going to get new users? I'm no tech billionaire, but I struggle to see how this benefits the site in the long term. Even if they revert later, the damage will already be done and the site will lose any relevance it once may have had.
I'm not interested in Reddit per se, just curious why they'd think this is a good idea.
They are probably betting on Google still displaying reddit at the top of every search so that normies keep coming in. They seem to have ignored that Google searches now just give you a stitched answer of bullshit Gemini put together so that normies don't ever click on reddit links.
This is the image of corporations shooting themselves in the foot while passing the same gun around π€£
Userbase doesn't matter this much this days. What matters is raw data, the best data the better. Random people from the internet bring shitty data, data of logged in users is better.
And if the userbase drops, they can add more bots, who cares, line goes up.
The thing with reddit, and why it used to be so much better than other corporate media, is that they've always under-monetized their users. Facebook and such earned at least an order of magnitude more per user.
If reddit loses half of its user base and doesn't gain a single user, but 10x's their revenue per user, well, they're still making 5x more money.
10 x 0 = 0
Unfortunately that's not how it works. Once you have a sufficiently large userbase, the network effects are enough to sustain them. A ton of people use facebook still and that has been a logged-in experience forever. Same with instagram.
You don't have to be signed into Instagram at least to view things someone has shared with you. It'll nag every now and then but it doesn't stop you.
For me it stopped me plenty of times.
Yeah, plus, I have all Meta shit blocked in all my VLANs, which doesn't help either.
I just use this on my phone with a VPN to download whatever it is, see it, and then delete it:
https://github.com/naicolas-dev/socialmedia-downloader
Has worked every single time. I think it works for TikTok, but that is something I'm not even willing to try.
Thatβs the thing with money and companies. The only thing that is important is gains in the current quarter. Nothing else matters