by adding to it you’ve created some tiny bit of content

It’s sort of hard to visualize the split between collective and individual. If a prolific user decides to stop using reddit, reddit maybe becomes 0.001% worse. It doesn’t sound like a lot on its own, but when millions do it… it becomes significant.

A little becomes a lot. If a significant chunk of reddit just decided to stop using the site, reddit would lose a lot of money.

Remember when reddit traffic was down like 3% a couple weeks ago? Let’s say traffic to reddit and the money reddit gets from advertisers are strongly correlated. So if traffic drops 50%, they get 50% less money from ads.

It’s probably not exactly the same, especially during a short time span like a week, but just for the sake of discussion.

With an annual revenue of $350 million in 2021, they avered $29 million a month and $7 million a week. What’s 3% of $7 million? About $210k

$210k is not much for a company like reddit, but it’s a significant amount of money. Now imagine we increase the traffic drop by a factor of 3 and increase the length of time down up to a month. We’re talking $1.6 million.

That hurts. And it could start a downwards spiral. Prolific users leave and there’s less content so there’s less reason for users to come back. Which causes less content and so on

Unfortunately, I think the majority of redditors have probably moved on from the whole API affair. We still see “fuck spez” like for example in the /r/place but unless reddit creates another scandal in the near future they should be able to recover from this.

We simply don’t have the numbers to hurt reddit so I say go ahead and use /r/place without guilt if you want to