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It's a little late, but I'm gonna talk a bit about the Reddit-Pushshift drama.
Needless to say, users who moderate subreddits were less than pleased, to say the least as it is a massive blow to critical mod tools like BotDefense and access to a comprehensive list of historical posts and comments filtered by subreddit, user, date, etc. It's also a blow to users who used to rely on it for academic projects to seek out precise information using certain keywords in the right subreddits. One of the comments from that post:
I realise this isn't exactly "culture war" material directly, but I believe it's relevant if a massive website like reddit with an enormous left coded user base takes a hit due to terribly received decisions like this one. We might see more and more jumping ship if this remains a one-way trend.
It's really telling how TheMotte had to move offsite due to increasing hostility with reddit and in the past year or so there was too much nonsense showing up on my feed through ads and "popular on reddit" that I have zero interest in. It seems they're just actively trying to boost engagement with currently trending posts and chat. The reddit admin claims it is to protect privacy and sites like these and removeddit violate the principle. But even with that in mind, it doesn't look like most people are buying it.
Is it that hard to make money? They have a huge userbase for advertisements. Surely they get money from various organizations to circulate narratives. If I wanted to spread propaganda in the English-speaking world, I'd head straight to reddit, facebook, twitter. Even though moderators have power over subreddits, the admins control what posts get popular and what doesn't. There was considerable suppression of T_D for a while, till they left as well. Reddit seems like valuable territory to hold.
On Facebook and Instagram, 100% of users are “logged in”. That means Meta likely has their date of birth, sex and name. Users who post content (a substantial proportion of Facebook and Instagram users) share their picture, location tags on the places they’ve been and - in most cases - their whole list of real-life friends and social connections (as friends/followers) with Meta.
On Reddit, most users aren’t logged in. Most users who are logged in never post or comment. They certainly don’t share their real face, age or in most cases gender directly with Reddit. The issue on Reddit is therefore a hybrid of Twitter’s issue with lurkers (which implemented an extremely harsh login wall that even Elon Musk has maintained, so even scrolling down on someone’s Twitter forces an unblockable pop up demanding sign-in), and anonymous forums’ issues with anonymity.
You can predict that an account that follows a college subreddit, the NFL subreddit, the Tinder subreddit and some videogame subreddits is a young, single, college-age male, but that’s nowhere close to the data that Meta has on that person’s account.
Reddit is trying to do what Instagram and TikTok did, and what Twitter is trying to do, by attempting to force all regular users into making an account even if they just want to scroll through this week’s top fifty cat gifs or the latest ice hockey news. Third party apps often provide a very high quality signed-out user experience that Reddit wants to kill, plus they often reduce or remove ads and reduce or remove the additional feature (like avatars) that Reddit uses to try to encourage users to make accounts and engage more with personalizing their profile (and so being more likely to add further data points to be sold to advertisers).
Just an aside, but I think that has actually been removed now. I don't have a twitter account and I haven't seen the login wall in months.
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